Facing Out: The Week’s Most Interesting News

May 11, 2024

Photo of a rabbit.Is there a surer sign of spring than bunnies in the yard? Since ancient times, the bunnies of the field have been symbols of springtime renewal. (Sally Behan)

Dear Colleagues and Friends:

This weekend it’s all about Moms and those who lovingly serve as Moms. For all of your love and sacrifice, for all the times we failed to say thank you, for all the sleepless nights, cross words, side eyes and back talk, for all the good advice untaken, for the times we fed our vegetables to the dog and failed to clean our rooms, what we really meant was: We love you.

Annie Lane writes a nationally syndicated advice column inspired by another Ann — Ann Landers, the national treasure of a columnist whose work appeared in hundreds of newspapers across the country for 56 years, and, in our experience, was routinely taped to refrigerators by moms. (Ann Landers was actually the pen name for the authors of the advice column, Ruth Crowley and her successor, Esther Lederer.) Recently, Annie Lane reprinted a letter about Moms from an old Ann Landers column. We loved it:

“Mom and Dad were watching TV when Mom said: ‘I'm tired, and it's getting late. I think I'll go to bed.’

“She went to the kitchen to make sandwiches for the next day's lunches, rinsed the popcorn bowls, took meat out of the freezer for supper the following evening, checked the cereal box levels, filled the sugar container, put spoons and bowls on the table and set up the coffee pot for brewing the next morning. She then put some wet clothes into the dryer, sewed on a loose button, picked up the newspapers strewn on the floor and the game pieces left on the table and put the telephone book back into the drawer. She watered the plants, emptied a wastebasket, hung up a towel to dry, wrote a note to the teacher and counted out some cash for the kids' field trip. She signed a birthday card for a friend, addressed and stamped the envelope and wrote a quick reminder for the grocery store. She put some water into the dog's dish and put the cat outside, and then made sure the doors were locked.

“Mom washed her face, put on moisturizer and brushed and flossed her teeth. Her husband called, ‘I thought you were going to bed.’ ‘I'm on my way,’ she replied. She looked in on each of the children, turned out a bedside lamp, hung up a shirt, threw some dirty socks in the hamper and had a brief conversation with the older one who was up doing homework. In her own room, she set the alarm, laid out clothes for the next day, straightened up the shoe rack and added three chores to her list of things to do tomorrow.

“About that time, her husband turned off the TV and announced to no one in particular, ‘I'm going to bed,’ and he did.”

Annie added, in a smart PS, that many Dads do much the same thing these days.

BOUNDLESS LOVE: Margaret Isdale and her husband Robert decided in 1978 to welcome a teenage girl into their home for foster care. Now almost 40 years later, they are receiving a lifetime achievement award, because they have fostered 150 children and teenagers, including a boy who needed a kidney removed and a child who came to them with no possessions but pajamas.

ANGELS, BY THE THOUSANDS: Sunday, a record turnout of more than 1,200 runners and walkers are expected to participate in the 12th Kelly’s Angels Mother-Lovin’ 5K Run/Walk at Saratoga Spa State Park in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Kelly’s Angels is the all-volunteer Capital Region charity founded by NewsChannel 13’s Mark Mulholland that helps kids and families facing life’s worst challenges. Last year, Anthony Zazzaro, 16, of Stillwater, won the race, which he had run in honor of his mom Diane, who was there to hug him at the finish line. She died of cancer three days later. On Sunday, Anthony will be back, to run in honor of his mom once again.

JFK IOU: John F. Kennedy’s 1957 agreement to repay his father a $50,000 loan for the purchase of a home in Hyannisport, Mass., is on the auction block. The one-page, typed note, still stapled into its original blue legal folder, sets forth JFK’s promise to repay his father within five years for the purchase of 111 Irving Ave. in Hyannisport, the home that would become known as “the Summer White House” during Kennedy's presidency. In other Kennedy news, the current presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is said to have testified in a deposition that he has a dead worm in his head.

DOWN WITH ALLERGIES: It's not news to anyone who suffers seasonal allergies that the coughing, sneezing and wheezing can get you down. But could seasonal allergies be associated with anxiety and depression? The New York Times reports there’s a growing body of research that shows an association between hay fever and mood disorders. The relationship “really is underrecognized, not only in the general population but even among health care practitioners,” Dr. David A. Gudis of New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center told The New York Times. Given that millions of Americans suffer from seasonal allergies, it’s an important link for both doctors and patients to understand.

THE DANGER OF TICKS: Three-year-old Cali Neri loved to play outside her home in Saranac Lake, N.Y., with her parents and her younger brother. “When I think about Cali, I think about the outdoors,” her mother, Kelsey, told the Adirondack Explorer. But all that is in the past now. Cali was bitten by a tick and contracted Powassan virus, which led to encephalitis. She was robbed of her speech, coordination, and her dimpled smile. Cali is home from the hospital now and, while she still suffers with prolonged altered consciousness, she is making progress. She can now talk to her family through an eye gaze communication machine.

Photo of a sign about a turkey with a foot injury who has been lurking close to a busy road.In Wilton, N.Y., outside Saratoga Springs, a turkey with a foot injury has been lurking close to a busy road and motorists and friends have been concerned about her safety. Fear not. She is being monitored by North Country Wild Care, a local nonprofit with volunteers who take care of injured and orphaned wildlife. (Leigh Hornbeck)

BAD APPLE: Apple is apologizing after a rare marketing misstep involving its new iPad Pro. An ad for the device, titled “Crush,” shows an industrial press crushing a wide array of creative tools and inviting consumers to replace those tools with their iPad, managing to capture everyone’s fears about artificial intelligence. Actor Hugh Grant posted on X: “The destruction of the human experience. Courtesy of Silicon Valley.”

SCOUTING’S NEW NAME: The 115-year-old Boy Scouts of America will change the name of the organization to Scouting America next February. The organization said the new name is meant to help everyone, including boys and girls, feel welcome. “(F)or us this is a straightforward evolution and the next natural step in ensuring all American youth feel welcomed and recognized in an organization that is meant to serve all Americans,” Roger A. Krone, president and chief executive officer, told reporters this week. Girls were first able to join the Cub Scouts in 2018. The following year, the organization welcomed older girls, 11 to 17 years old, to its flagship program Scouts BSA.  

THIS IS GETTING OLD: A Harvard geneticist, David Sinclair, who says he’s found a way to reverse aging in monkeys and dogs and is now working on a way to do the same for people, is running into an age-old problem: Pushback from his peers. Sinclair uses his social media accounts to assert that his work is pushing nearer to a fountain of youth. When he claimed recently that a gene therapy invented in his Harvard lab and being developed by a company he co-founded had reversed aging and restored vision in monkeys, he said: “Next up: age reversal in humans.” His peers denounced him as a snake oil salesman and his findings as wildly overstated. “My lab’s ideas and findings are typically ahead of the curve, which is why some peers might feel the research is overstated at the time,” Sinclair told The Wall Street Journal.

IT’S HARD WORK: Belgium has become the first country in the world to approve a labor law establishing employment contracts for sex workers. The law entitles sex workers to health insurance, pensions, unemployment and family benefits, holidays, and maternity leave. If a prostitute refuses a client more than 10 times over six months, a pimp can trigger an intervention by a government mediator. “This law is a world first. I cannot stress enough how important this is,” said a spokesman for the union for sex workers in Belgium.

GROCERY GAMES: How might we correctly guess your creditworthiness? We’d follow you around the grocery store. Researchers at the Kellogg Institute of Management at Northwestern University report that individuals who exercised discipline — shopping at predictable times, following a budget, and purchasing sale items — also demonstrated consistency in making credit-card payments on time. People who had defaulted behaved more erratically at the store, visiting at unpredictable times and seeking a variety of brands and items. Some of us are in big trouble.

01_Nuggets.jpgMORE WATER FOR SKIING: New York just recorded its warmest winter on record, and the Adirondack Region is not being spared. Changing winter weather patterns and greater temperature swings have constricted the ability of ski centers to make snow for skiing, so Whiteface Mountain in Wilmington is considering building its own reservoir to store water pumped from the Ausable River.

TOP COLLEGE TOWN: Saratoga Springs, N.Y. makes USA Today’s list of best small college towns in America. The list was created by an expert panel and voted on by readers. The Spa City ranked 10th on a list that included Oxford, Miss., and Williamsburg, Va.

GOING SWIMMINGLY: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that 94% of fish species in U.S. oceanic and gulf waters are not being overfished, an all-time high and evidence that the $8 billion-a-year U.S. seafood industry is more sustainable than ever.

CHOLERA’S BACK:  Cholera is resurging around the world, and the global stockpile of the oral cholera vaccine has dwindled after the Indian drug manufacturer that produced about 15 percent of the world’s supply stopped making it last year. Demand is so great that as soon as doses are produced, they must immediately ship to one of the world’s current cholera hot spots, largely in Africa and Asia.

HOW GREEN? Act 250, the sweeping 50-year-old Vermont land-use law, is being modernized. Proposed changes would loosen development red tape in existing development centers to encourage needed housing growth and extend protections in to-be-determined ecologically sensitive areas.

02_Lives.jpgHERBERT HUNT was the geologist among the Hunt Brothers. His brother Bunker was a paunchy billionaire who flew economy and owned hundreds of thoroughbred horses. His brother Lamar helped create the American Football League, founded the Kansas City Chiefs, and coined the name Super Bowl. Herbert ran the numbers and mowed his own lawn. Together, they bought so much silver they found themselves at the center of the biggest commodities-trading scandal of the 20th century. They started buying silver in the early 1970s when the price hovered around $1.50 an ounce. In 1980, when it was trading around $50 and they controlled more than 100 million ounces, they had profits in the billions. But before the end of that year, the silver market collapsed, and the Hunts were selling everything: horses, coins, land and even lawnmowers. By the end of the decade, they were bankrupt, the subjects of federal investigations, banned from trading commodities and the inspiration for an Eddie Murphy movie, “Trading Places.” Herbert Hunt was 95.

ANNE INNIS DAGG was mesmerized by giraffes from the age of 4, when she first visited Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo. She became a giraffologist, the first Western scientist to study giraffes in the wild, and among the first to systematically study the behavior of any species in its natural habitat. She made unexpected discoveries — for example, that giraffes made noise and sometimes engaged in same-sex relationships — and published an obscure book, “The Giraffe: Its Biology, Behavior and Ecology” in 1976. She was 91.

BARBARA STAUFFACHER SOLOMON was headed for a career in art from an early age. She became a ground-shaking graphic designer who astonished clients and communities with supersize, geometric letters and shapes, often with red and black graphics and lots of white space, always with cleaned-lined, sans serif Helvetica lettering. When she got bored, she went back to school to be a landscape architect, but ran into gender-based discrimination. When she won a competition to redesign a section of the Tuileries in Paris along with Louis Benech, a French horticulturist, and Pascal Cribier, a French landscape architect, the French government decided it did not want an American woman on the winning team and barred her from participating in its execution. She was 95.

03_Almost Final Words.jpg“Look, I’m not mad at you. I understand. I want you to know I love you.”
—    Pastor Glen Germany, who was delivering a sermon on walking in the ways of God when a  young man walked up to the pulpit, raised a gun toward Germany’s face and pulled the trigger. The gun jammed. No one was hurt. 

04_signoff.jpgSIGN OF THE TIMES: A 34-year-old woman lived for about a year inside a sign on the façade of a grocery store in Michigan, powering a computer, printer and coffee maker with an extension cord plugged into an outlet on the store’s roof. “I honestly don’t know how she was getting up there,” a police officer told The Associated Press. She left without incident.

05_Bottom.jpgSome of the linked material in Facing Out requires a subscription to read.

Principal Author: Mark Behan

Sincere thanks to our contributors: Ryan Moore, Bill Callen, Leigh Hornbeck, John Brodt, Kristy Miller, Tara Hutchins, Claire P. Tuttle and Sally Behan.

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 conversationmark.behan@behancom.com

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