Facing Out: The Week’s Most Interesting News

March 1, 2025

Winter loosened its grip in the Northeast long enough to yield some spectacular morning scenery at Tomhannock Reservoir in Pittstown, N.Y. John Bulmer

Dear Colleagues and Friends:

We begin this week with a tip of the cap to some spectacular American athletes.

We’ll start with 19-year-old soccer sensation Claire Hutton of Bethlehem, N.Y., who made her United States women’s national team debut in the second match of the four-nations SheBelieves Cup, starting at midfield and playing 70 minutes in a 2-1 victory over Australia in Glendale, Ariz. She didn’t play in the opener or in the finale, a 2-1 loss Wednesday to Japan.

Two icons of their sport also made headlines, one by achieving an unprecedented milestone, the other by bringing an end to an unprecedented career.

Mikaela Shiffrin made history on Sunday by becoming the first athlete in Alpine skiing to win 100 World Cup races, a feat she achieved three months after a traumatic crash that punctured her abdomen. A two-time Olympic champion, she set the record for World Cup victories with her 87^th two years ago. “She doesn't just want to win; she blows the competition away,” Austrian skier Annemarie Moser-Pröll, who has won 62 World Cup titles, told FIS World Cup. “One thing is certain for me; Mikaela is and will remain the best ever.”

Another legend in the conversation for greatest ever in her sport, Diana Taurasi, announced her retirement at 42 after 20 seasons in the WNBA, all with the Phoenix Mercury. She starred on three national championship winners at the University of Connecticut, three WNBA champions and a ridiculous six U.S. Olympic gold medalists, in addition to being a 10-time all-WNBA first-team selection, five-time league scoring champion and two-time WNBA Finals MVP.  Whew.

And while she may never gain the status of Shiffrin or Taurasi, we would be remiss to not acknowledge the incredible achievement of Sophie Power, also 42, a British endurance athlete who recently broke the record the record for distance covered by a woman on a treadmill in 48 hours — 226.8 miles. Last year, she became the fastest female to cross Ireland on foot.

AIR SCARES: What the heck is going on with air safety these days? First a passenger jet collided with a military helicopter over Reagan National Airport, followed days later by the crash of a small plane in Philadelphia. Then another passenger jet flipped on landing in Toronto. This week, two other tragedies were narrowly averted — one at Reagan National — when commercial jets performed go-around maneuvers to avoid collisions. But at least no one on those flights, that we know of, was forced to sit next to a dead body for four hours, as happened this week on a flight from Melbourne, Australia, to Qatar.

FINAL DESTINATIONS: People looking for a comfortable place to end their lives are finding final accommodations in Vermont and Oregon. After legalizing medically assisted dying, some states imposed residency requirements. But Oregon and Vermont lifted the requirement and, as of last June, at least 26 people had traveled to Vermont to die, accounting for nearly a quarter of the reported assisted deaths there since May 2023. Homeowners offer patients and their families greater comfort and privacy than could be found in a hotel. They host people who have met strict eligibility criteria, including having less than six months to live. Only a doctor in Vermont can make that determination, and a second consulting doctor has to confirm it.

Cheers to the coming spring, even if it’s not quite time to put away the cold-weather gear. Nancie Battaglia

TO YOUR HEALTH: Emergency room doctors told The New York Times about some of the common, typically avoidable, behaviors they wish people would stop, including wearing Crocs in the winter, petting dogs they don’t know and riding bikes without a helmet. It’s safe to say that, if asked to weigh in on the debate between which is safer to consume, marijuana or alcohol, they would unanimously answer “none of the above.”

DEC LEADER: Amanda Lefton of Albany is Gov. Kathy Hochul’s choice to lead the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. Lefton most recently served as the Biden Administration’s Director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management within the Department of the Interior. She succeeds Acting Commissioner Sean Mahar. Lefton previously served as the DEC’s First Assistant Secretary for Energy and Environment, where she led the state’s environmental and climate initiatives. Gerry Delaney, executive director of the Adirondack Park Local Government Review Board, said he got to know Lefton during her career with The Nature Conservancy and with the governor’s office and called her an “excellent choice” to lead the DEC.

HELP WANTED: New York Gov. Kathy Hochul needs a new No. 2. Long assumed to be leaving the Hochul orbit, Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado made it official this week, saying he has no desire to be her running mate in next year’s election. The opening comes at a time when plenty of prominent politicians are seeking jobs. Delgado is a possible candidate for governor, as is Hochul and U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres of the Bronx. Eric Adams, the indicted mayor of New York who’s been given a political lifeline by President Trump, is seeking to keep his job, while former Gov. Andrew Cuomo is back on his feet and racking up endorsements to replace Adams before he’s even entered the race. Waiting in the wings are several speculated Republican candidates for governor, including U.S. Rep. Mike Lawler, former U.S. Rep. Marc Molinaro, former Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino, Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon and Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman.

POLAR OPPOSITES: Three decades ago, The Wall Street Journal reports, households making about $250,000 a year accounted for just over a third of all spending in the U.S. Now, they account for just under half.  Meanwhile, 25% of New York City residents report they don’t have enough money for housing and food, and many say they cannot afford to go to the doctor, underscoring an affordability crisis that will be front and center in upcoming city and state elections.

STAY-AT-WORK DADS: An analysis of paid parental leave programs in New York, New Jersey and California found that only one-third of men take advantage of the benefit in New York, foregoing as much as $1.6 billion that they are eligible to claim. “There’s still cultural norms that tell us that caregiving work is for women,” Reshma Saujani, chief executive officer of the advocacy group Moms First, told Bloomberg. “There’s still stigma that penalizes men for caregiving and actually taking leave. And the third thing is really affordability because you know that you’re only going to get a partial wage replacement should you take it.”

PROTECTING AND SERVING: Police in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., helped save the life of Sly, a 22-year-old horse who plunged through the ice of a pond on his owner’s family farm. A team consisting of two police officers, two local firefighters, the owner’s grandfather and two of his employees eventually pulled Sly to safety.

BRAVO: The Glens Falls-based Adirondack Theater Festival’s Miriam Weisfeld will retain her job and also become the next producing artistic director of Capital Repertory Theatre in Albany in a collaboration that promises to strengthen the arts scene from one end of New York’s Capital Region to the other.

TRAFFIC TIEUP: Federal transportation officials have given the Metropolitan Transportation Authority of New York City a deadline of March 21 to cease the city’s controversial congestion pricing program, an edict MTA promptly said it would ignore.

PRISON BREAK: New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a deal to end an illegal strike by the state’s prison guards, who are required to return to work by today to avoid disciplinary action. Once upon a time, government workers paid a steeper price for illegal actions.

ENOUGH, ALREADY: Luigi Mangione, who’s jailed while awaiting trial for executing health care executive Brian Thompson, is asking his demented fans to stop sending him so many photos, with his legal team noting that each one is screened by law enforcement and “kindly” requesting that people “send no more than five photos at a time.”

PAINFUL RANT: The Daily Show host Jon Stewart was in the midst of a pointed monologue highlighting governmental spending that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was overlooking — “How about we just take $3 billion in subsidies we give to oil and gas companies that already turned billions in profits?” — when he theatrically smashed a mug he had brought onto the set, slicing his fingers in the process.

HIDDEN HISTORY: When you think of a city’s underground, it’s typically in the context of counterculture or rejection of mainstream norms and values. Seattle certainly has plenty of that, but it also literally has an underground city that continues to attract curious tourists.

COLLEGE MOVES: Oxford-trained philosopher Elizabeth Kiss will become the first female president in the 230-year history of Union College in Schenectady, N.Y. And Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y., announced a $70 million donation, the largest in its history, from a former Goldman Sachs partner and Hobart graduate.

DOWN IT GOES: Officials in the seaside town of Wellfleet, Mass., no longer have to worry about a multimillion-dollar home tumbling into Cape Cod Bay and endangering its oyster beds — the home was demolished this week, with only its slab and chimney left.

EUGENE ALLEN HACKMAN was born in California and grew up in Danville, Ill., where his dad was a pressman for the local paper and his mom was a waitress. After his father abandoned the family, young Gene got into trouble with the law. He lied about his age to enlist in the Marine Corps in 1946, serving in China, Hawaii and Japan and at one point working as a disc jockey for his unit’s radio station. After his discharge, he studied journalism at the University of Illinois for six months and then went to New York to learn about television production. He studied acting, first in New York and then at the Pasadena Playhouse in California, where he met a lifelong friend, Dustin Hoffman, when they were kicked out of school for lack of talent. As a struggling actor in New York, he drove a truck, jerked sodas and sold shoes before landing a role in an off-Broadway hit “Any Wednesday.”  In a six-decade career, he appeared in more than 100 movies and television shows, was nominated for five Oscars and won two, as well as two British Academy Film Awards and four Golden Globes. Hackman, his 65-year-old wife, Betsy Arakawa, and one of their dogs were found dead in their Santa Fe home. Foul play was not suspected. He was 95.

ROBERTA FLACK won a scholarship at 15 to Howard University in pursuit of a dream of becoming a classical concert pianist. Her teachers discouraged her from trying to break into the largely white world of classical music, so she became a teacher and performed in clubs at night, both as a pianist for other vocalists and as a singer herself. Fellow musicians helped her land a first contract with Atlantic Records. When Clint Eastwood used her version of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” in his 1971 movie Play Misty for Me, her worldwide popularity soared. In 2022, she announced that she had ALS, but the following year she released The Green Piano: How Little Me Found Music. The writer and folklorist Julius Lester once observed in a Rolling Stone review, “More than any singer I know, she can take a quiet, slow song (and most of hers are) and infuse it with a brooding intensity that is, at times, almost unbearable.” She was 88.

CLINT HILL was in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, riding on the sideboard of a Secret Service vehicle trailing the president’s limousine when President John F. Kennedy came under fire. Secret Service agent Hill raced to climb aboard the limousine’s trunk in time to keep Jacqueline Kennedy from falling off the back. Though he long tormented himself over his inability to shield the president, he received the highest award bestowed by the Secret Service for his “extraordinary courage and heroic effort in the face of maximum danger.” He continued to protect Mrs. Kennedy, Caroline and the Kennedys’ son, John Jr., for one year after the president’s assassination. He was later in charge of protection for Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford. He was 93.

MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG was 8 when she began playing Nona Mecklenberg on Nickelodeon’s The Adventures of Pete & Pete in the mid-1990s, before starring in the title role in the film adaptation of Harriet the Spy and in Inspector Gadget, where she shared the screen with Matthew Broderick. In 2000, she joined the cast of the hit show Buffy the Vampire Slayer as the younger sister of the show’s lead, played by Sarah Michelle Gellar. She went on to recurring roles in Six Feet Under, Weeds and Gossip Girl, playing the scheming Georgina Sparks and receiving a Teen Choice Award in 2012. Blake Lively, her Gossip Girl co-star, wrote in tribute, “The world lost a deeply sensitive and good person in Michelle. May her work and her huge heart be remembered by those who were lucky enough to experience her fire.” She was 39.

“I am at the point where it has become really hard to have an intellectual debate with any of these people because the level of stupidity that they are displaying every single day is frankly, embarrassing.”
— U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, in an interview with the media outlet Zeteo

“There are a lot of folks in politics who wake up every single day thinking about everything but the damn people. They’re thinking about holding onto power. They’re thinking about whoever’s putting money in their pockets in the donor class and they’re thinking about special interest groups, some type of lobby who has access to their power. They’re thinking about party, and who’s in charge in the party. Who’s going to do what? No one’s thinking about the damn people.”
— New York Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado

CREATIVE DESTRUCTION: Apple said it is working to fix a bug in some iPhones’ speech-to-text feature that briefly suggests the word “Trump” when the user speaks the word “racist.”  A few days earlier, pranksters gained access to internal television monitors at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and displayed an AI-generated video of President Trump massaging and kissing Elon Musk’s feet behind the caption “Long Live the Real King.”

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Principal Authors: Mark Behan and Bill Callen.

Contributors: Ryan Moore, Jim Murphy, Kristy Miller, Nancie Battaglia and John Bulmer.

FACING OUT is what we do. We help companies, organizations and individuals work effectively with their most important external audiences – their customers, their shareholders, their communities, the government and the news media.  www.behancommunications.com

Facing Out features news and other nuggets that caught our eye, and that we thought might be of value to you, our friends and business associates. Some items are good news about our clients and friends, others are stories that we hope will leave you a bit more informed or entertained than you were five minutes ago. As always, we welcome your ideas and feedback. 

Let’s make it a conversation: mark.behan@behancom.com