Archives for March 2021

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — In the desert northeast of Las Vegas, residents living along the Nevada-Arizona border would gather on their front porches for bomb parties or ride horses into the fields to watch as the U.S. government conducted atomic tests during a Cold War-era race to build up the nation’s nuclear arsenal.

About 100 of those tests were aboveground, and U.S. Rep. Greg Stanton of Arizona testified during a congressional subcommittee hearing Wednesday that residents at the time marveled at the massive orange mushroom clouds billowing in the distance.

“They had no idea. They were never told that they were being exposed to dangerous cancer-causing radiation,” Stanton said. “As a direct result of the radiation exposure from these tests, thousands of Arizonans have suffered from cancer, entire families have suffered from cancer and far too many have died.”

He and others testified as part of a renewed push for compensation from the U.S. government following uranium mining and nuclear testing carried out during the Cold War.

Lawmakers from several Western states, advocacy groups and residents have been urging Congress to expand a payout program for years, and advocates say the latest push takes on added weight because the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act is set to expire next year. Wednesday’s hearing was the first on the issue since 2018, advocates said.

In New Mexico, about 40,000 people lived within a 50-mile (80-kilometer) radius of a military range where the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated as part of World War II’s top-secret Manhattan Project, said Tina Cordova, co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium.

The advocacy group has been trying for years to bring awareness to the lingering effects of nuclear fallout surrounding the Trinity Site. She told the committee that the bomb, being the first, was inefficient and sent a fireball of plutonium into the atmosphere.

“For days, radioactive ash fell from the sky and settled on everything — the soil, in the water, in the air, on the plants and on the skin of every living thing. It was a public health disaster of grand proportions,” Cordova testified.

The rural residents who lived off the land were never told about the test or warned about the potential dangers, she said.

Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez testified about the environmental and health effects of decades of uranium mining on tribal land. He said more than 30 million tons of ore were extracted from Navajo lands to support U.S. nuclear activities, with many Navajos working in the mines without knowledge of the dangers.

He also pointed to a massive spill in 1979 that spewed radioactive tailings and wastewater onto tribal lands in the Church Rock area in western New Mexico.

A multibillion-dollar defense spending package approved last year included an apology to New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and other states affected by radiation from nuclear testing over the decades, but no action was taken on legislation that sought to change and broaden the compensation program.

U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, who sponsored the bill to expand the program when he was in the House, recalled how a Navajo woman previously asked lawmakers whether they were waiting for the people who were exposed to radiation to die so the problem would go away.

“It’s just not right,” Luján said, pointing to those on the Navajo Nation as well as people downwind in New Mexico, Idaho, Colorado, Montana, Nevada, Utah and Guam who are not eligible for payouts. “These people deserve justice.”

The compensation program covers workers who became sick as a result of the radiation hazards of their jobs and some of those who lived downwind of the Nevada Test Site, where the federal government conducted several hundred nuclear explosive tests over four decades. Excluded are residents near the Trinity Site in New Mexico, others who were downwind in Nevada and Arizona, miners who worked in the industry after 1971, veterans who cleaned up radioactive waste in the Marshall Islands and others.

The program has paid out nearly $2.5 billion on more than 37,000 claims since 1990. If Congress doesn’t doesn’t renew the program, no more claims can be filed after July 2022.

Congressional analysts and others could not answer the committee’s questions about the potential number of new claims that could be filed if eligibility were expanded.

U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson, a Democrat from Georgia, said payouts so far amounted to a pittance when compared to the half-billion dollars the country expects to spend on maintaining its nuclear arsenal over the next decade.

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BOULDER, Colo. (AP) — Some were gunned down while picking up groceries, others while putting in a day’s work at a Colorado supermarket. Another was a police officer who raced in to try to rescue them from an attack that left 10 dead.

Portraits of the lives lost were coming into view as the suspect in Monday’s killings waits behind bars for a court appearance Thursday.

Ranging in age from 20 to 65, those who lost their lives at the King Soopers store in Boulder include a clothing shop owner, a coffee-machine repair person, a boutique worker, a man looking forward to a new grandchild, a magazine photographer, an actress who also became a Medicare agent and others going about their days at a busy shopping plaza.

They are Denny Stong, 20; Neven Stanisic, 23; Rikki Olds, 25; Tralona Bartkowiak, 49; police Officer Eric Talley, 51; Suzanne Fountain, 59; Teri Leiker, 51; Kevin Mahoney, 61; Lynn Murray, 62; and Jodi Waters, 65.

Leiker, Olds and Stong worked at the supermarket.

DENNY STONG

He was off the clock when he stopped in to shop at the grocery store and ended up in the line of fire, said co-worker Emily Giffen, who was on a smoke break when shots initially erupted outside the store.

Stong, whose mother also works at the store, was studying to become a pilot, Giffen said. In the meantime, he was a “goofball” who provided comic relief when his co-workers needed it.

“If you needed to laugh, he would always tell me these horrible dad jokes,” Giffen said. “He was a really well-rounded person and really a lot, a lot that he was still going to do.”

JODI WATERS

Before the coronavirus pandemic, she worked at a downtown Boulder boutique called Island Farm.

The store staff was like a family, and Waters helped it feel like home, they said.

“She immediately took me under her wing, treating me like her own daughter,” said Madeline Soultz, 23, a former sales associate whose family lives far away.

Store manager Lily Rood, 26, said Waters, who had two daughters and a son, was “a mother to all the girls here.”

Island Farm opened its doors Tuesday to customers, friends and loved ones who came to reminisce about Waters — her penchant for collecting heart-shaped leaves on hikes, her animal-print decor at home, her get-togethers with co-workers over margaritas and the advice she gave.

“You could go to her with any problem,” Soultz said. Waters wasn’t shy about letting people know if they made mistakes, but “she knew your potential, even if you didn’t know it.”

Boutique owner Jen Haney added, “The world got dimmer without her.”

NEVEN STANISIC

He had finished a job — fixing a coffee machine at the Starbucks in King Soopers — and was in his car, getting ready to go to another assignment, when the gunman opened fire in the parking lot, said Father Radovan Petrovic, the parish priest at the Stanisic family’s church.

Born in the Denver area to a Serbian refugee couple from Bosnia, Stanisic lived in suburban Lakewood. After graduating in 2016 from Alameda International Jr./Sr. High School, he went to work with his father at a company that maintains commercial coffee and juice machines, said Petrovic, of St. John the Baptist Serbian Orthodox Church.

Stanisic was an “all-around good person, quiet boy, very well mannered — respectful of others and older people — and hardworking person,” the priest said.

Stanisic’s parents came to the U.S. in 1998 after losing everything they had in their war-torn homeland, where conflict followed the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. Over 100,000 people were killed, and more than 2 million were driven from their homes.

“They survived the war and came here to start to have a new life, a better life. And then to have this happen to them — it’s mind-blowing,” Petrovic said.

TRALONA BARTKOWIAK

Just this September, she helped her friend Sarah Lewis endure her grief after losing a loved one to a shooting in September, Lewis said.

“I would not have gotten through it without her. She is the one who I cried to every day about it, and she just listened, and when so many other people couldn’t listen to me cry anymore,” Lewis said. “She was the kindest, sweetest, most generous, just warm-hearted friend.”

When the two celebrated Lewis’ birthday last week, Bartkowiak was delighted to see her friend doing better.

“I couldn’t have done it without her,” Lewis said, choking back sobs, “and so I am like, ’What do we do now?’”

She had been looking ahead to planning a bachelor and bachelorette party for her friend, who got engaged on Christmas Day, she said.

A memorial filled with candles and flowers kept growing outside Umba, the clothing and accessories shop that Bartkowiak — who went by Lonna — ran with her sister on Boulder’s popular Pearl Street Mall.

“You would go in her store and put something on, and she would make you feel like such a goddess, no matter what it was,” said Stefanie Clarke. She recalled chatting with Bartkowiak a couple of weeks ago about how eager they were to go to concerts and festivals after a year of coronavirus cancellations.

“I know she was just as excited as any of us to put on her dancing pants and get back to it,” Clarke said, fighting tears.

Lewis, who sells jewelry online, said Bartkowiak let many local artists sell their pieces in her shop.

Tricia Hunter, a manager at the Savory Spice store next door, said Bartkowiak was dedicated to her business and worked hard, but “I rarely saw her in a bad mood.”

“She was a very free spirit, kind to everyone, always smiling, always happy,” said Hunter, who went to Umba to borrow shipping boxes and saw Bartkowiak on Sunday. Her death the next day was a shock.

“It is pretty heartbreaking that somebody is just running to the store to get something, and a gunman is there shooting people, and you get killed,” she said.

TERI LEIKER

A longtime King Soopers employee, she was a “spitfire” who felt free to yell “hello” across the store when colleagues came in to work, Giffen said.

“She wore her emotions on her sleeve, and whatever she felt was what she felt, and you could never shame her for it,” Giffen said. She said Leiker was dating a co-worker and that the two complemented each other.

Leiker loved to watch the University of Colorado marching band perform in a kickoff celebration called the Pearl Street Stampede on Friday nights before home football games on the Boulder campus, band director Matt Dockendorf told The Denver Post.

“She was there even before we started gathering, which is half an hour before the stampede started,” Dockendorf said. “She was just a staple. She was kind of a personal cheerleader for the band.”

SUZANNE FOUNTAIN

She was an actress and mother who later won loyal clients as a Medicare agent, doing extensive research to find the right supplemental coverage for older adults signing up for the federal health insurance program, said her life partner, Phi Bernier.

“She never skimped, she never did something because it was easier,” he said.

Fountain trained at the Circle in the Square Theatre School in New York, and the two first met while they were playing lead roles in “The Glass Menagerie” about 30 years ago, Bernier said. They dated for a time and then reconnected after Fountain came to see him in a play in 2013.

Up until the pandemic, Fountain was also the manager of eTown, a nonprofit live music venue in Boulder.

“Suzanne was a bright light to all she met, and we were proud to have her represent eTown in our community as she welcomed people into our space hundreds and hundreds of times,” the organization said in a Facebook post.

Fountain won praise for her acting from both reviewers and those who worked with her.

“She was absolutely lovely, a natural, someone you simply didn’t forget,” Brian Miller, who worked with her on a show, told The Denver Post.

A Boulder Daily Camera review said her 2002 performance as a nurse in “Wit,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a woman dealing with cancer, brought “a simple but crucial compassion to the play.”

KEVIN MAHONEY

He “represents all things Love,” his daughter Erika Mahoney said in a poignant tweet that featured a wedding photo and drew wide attention on social media.

“I’m so thankful he could walk me down the aisle last summer,” added Mahoney, who is the news director at a California public radio station.

She told NPR in an interview that aired Wednesday that the pandemic had almost forced her to reschedule the wedding, which she and her husband decided to hold in a small backyard ceremony with their families.

Erika Mahoney said her father had tried to hold back his tears “in big life moments for me, like when he took me to the airport for college, but really, it’s just his softness shining through,” she said. “I admire my dad so much, and that’s why I picked that photo, because I’m looking up at him.”

She also tweeted that she’s pregnant and knows her father “wants me to be strong for his granddaughter.”

Erika Mahoney said her father was shopping at Kings Sooper when he was killed. As news of his death became public, she said, friends texted her that he was like a father to them as well.

“One death trickles to so many people and to an entire community and beyond,” she said. “In this case, 10 lives were lost, and I think about my daughter and that my dad will never be able to hold her, but I know on some level, he will be there and he was so excited — and I’m going to tell her that he loves her so much.”

ERIC TALLEY

He joined the police force in Boulder in 2010 with a background that included a master’s degree in computer communications, his father said.

“At age 40, he decided he wanted to serve his community,” Homer “Shay” Talley, 74, told The Associated Press from his ranch in central Texas. “He left his desk job. He just wanted to serve, and that’s what he did. He just enjoyed the police family.”

Eric Talley was the first to arrive after a call about shots being fired and someone carrying a rifle, Boulder Police Chief Maris Herold said.

Talley was “by all accounts, one of the outstanding officers” in the department, Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty said.

Talley’s father said his son — who had seven children, ages 7 to 20 — was a devoted father who “knew the Lord.”

“When everyone else in the parking lot was running away, he ran toward it,” Shay Talley said.

“We know where he is,” he added. “He loved his family more the anything. He wasn’t afraid of dying. He was afraid of putting them through it.”

Talley grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he was “the most liked person in our class,” said elementary school classmate Kerry O’Bryant, who started a fundraiser for Talley’s children.

“He wasn’t necessarily Mr. Jock or Mr. Popularity or whatever, but everybody liked Eric. There was nobody who didn’t,” O’Bryant told the Albuquerque Journal.

“If there was anyone who was potentially going to be able to go in and defuse a bad situation, it was him — because he was such a lovable person,” O’Bryant said.

LYNN MURRAY

She was shopping at King Soopers, where a friend’s daughter had seen her. Word made it to her husband, John Mackenzie, who drove to the store and started texting his wife.

After getting no answer in about five minutes, “I just fell over in my chair,” he said, choking up.

Murray had a long career taking photos for magazines including Cosmopolitan and Vogue, Mackenzie said.

“She charmed the pants off me” when they met at a photography studio in New York City years ago, he said. Computer backgammon games soon evolved into a relationship and eventually, two children.

“She’s the kindest person I ever knew, hands down. She had an aura about her that was the coolest freakin’ thing you’d ever want to know. She was just a cool chick,” Mackenzie said.

“She had it all together — she really did,” he said, and offered a message:

“Don’t live in fear. My wife, none of the victims, would ever want you to live in fear. They’d want you to be bolder and live bolder. That’s what this place is.”

RIKKI OLDS

She had a big laugh and an effervescent personality, the kind of person who cheered everyone up and didn’t sweat what anyone thought of her tattoos or ever-changing hair color, her family and friends said.

“Rikki lived life on her own terms,” uncle Robert Olds said, calling her a “strong, independent young woman” who encouraged the idea of “being your own person.”

As a preschooler, she’d tag along with him and his sons to baseball tournaments and ask to go to McDonald’s afterward. As she grew up, she played softball and developed a love for camping, hiking and other outdoor activities.

“She was just a very kind and loving, bubbly person who lit up the room when she walked in,” said her grandmother, Jeanette Olds.

Rikki Olds originally wanted to be a nurse, but her plans changed, her family said. A front-end manager at King Soopers, Olds aspired to work her way up to store manager.

No matter what she did, she wanted to help people and be nurturing, her uncle said.

“There’s a hole in our family that won’t be filled,” Robert Olds said.

Co-workers said Olds was the go-to person when someone needed to vent, laugh or share a little gossip.

“She was just the funkiest, silliest, most wonderful person,” said Giffen, who remembered talking with Olds about a customer complaint Monday.

“I said, like, ‘Hang in there, girl,’” Giffen recalled. “‘It’s groceries. Nobody dies over groceries.’”

___

Peltz reported from New York and Hollingsworth from Mission, Kansas. Associated Press writers Corey Williams in West Bloomfield, Michigan; Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Thalia Beaty in New York contributed. Nieberg is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden has tapped Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the White House effort to tackle the migration challenge at the U.S. southern border and work with Central American nations to address root causes of the problem.

Biden made the announcement as he and Harris met at the White House on Wednesday with Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandra Mayorkas and other immigration advisers to discuss the increase in migrants, including many unaccompanied minors, arriving at the border in recent weeks.

In delegating the matter to Harris, Biden is seeking to replicate a dynamic that played out when he served as President Barack Obama’s vice president. Obama turned to Biden in his first term to lead the White House effort to draw down U.S. troops in Iraq and oversee implementation of stimulus in response to the Great Recession.

“When she speaks, she speaks for me,” Biden said, noting her past work as California’s attorney general makes her specially equipped to lead the administration’s response.

Biden, who has faced stiff criticism from Republicans over the increased flow of migrants, is hoping to show Americans he’s taking the situation at the border seriously. He also wants to prevent the growing humanitarian and political challenge from overshadowing his administration’s ambitious legislative agenda.

But the high-profile assignment for Harris, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 and is expected to run for the White House again in the future, could be politically fraught.

“Needless to say, the work will not be easy,” Harris said. “But it is important work.”

Harris is tasked with overseeing diplomatic efforts to deal with issues spurring migration in the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, as well as pressing them to strengthen enforcement on their own borders, administration officials said. She’s also tasked with developing and implementing a long-term strategy that gets at the root causes of migration from those countries.

Biden suggested President Donald Trump’s decision to cut $450 million funding in 2019 to the region was partly to blame for the situation.

Among the other reasons for the current increase: the thousands of Central American migrants already stuck at the border for months and the persistent scourge of gang violence afflicting the Northern Triangle countries.

Still, the numbers of both unaccompanied minors and families encountered at the border are lower than they were at various points during the Trump administration, including in spring 2019.

For Harris, the assignment gives her the first big opportunity to step to the front of the stage on a matter of enormous consequence for the administration. As the first Black woman elected vice president, Harris arrived on the job as a trailblazer. It has remained opaque how Biden would utilize her.

The move echoes not only Obama’s decision to deputize Biden but also Trump naming Vice President Mike Pence to lead his coronavirus task force and President Bill Clinton handing Vice President Al Gore environmental and technology portfolios early in his presidency.

It’s been a mixed bag for vice presidents in recent history who have been made the point person on delicate matters, said Joel Goldstein, the author of “The White House Vice Presidency: The Path to Significance, Mondale to Biden.”

Pence’s efforts on the coronavirus were stymied by Trump’s hijacking of the task force’s daily briefings early in the pandemic. Dick Cheney, who had been charged with leading George W. Bush’s search for a vice president only to take the spot himself, carved out what was seen by many critics as a shadow presidency in which he had an outsized influence on shaping Bush’s national security policies.

And Gore faced headwinds from Republicans in Congress who were reluctant to give him a win ahead of his unsuccessful 2000 run for the White House.

“Some of the risk versus reward depends to some extent on the vice president’s relationship with the president,” Goldstein said. “Whether or not the president had their back. Whether the president’s going to allow you to be in a position to accomplish things and be perceived to accomplish things.”

Biden made the announcement as a delegation of White House officials and members of Congress was traveled to the southern border on Wednesday to tour a facility in Carrizo Springs, Texas, where more than 750 migrant teenagers are being held.

The Biden administration has in recent weeks moved to open more than 10,000 new beds across the Southwest in convention centers and former oilfield camps. It notified Congress on Wednesday that it will open a new 3,000-person facility in San Antonio and a 1,400-person site at the San Diego convention center. HHS is also opening a second site in Carrizo Springs and received approval from the Defense Department Wednesday to begin housing teenagers at military bases in San Antonio and El Paso, Texas.

While acknowledging a “big problem” with the rising numbers of migrants, Rep. Norma Torres, D-Calif., one of five lawmakers to tour the facility Wednesday, credited the Biden administration with treating young migrants far more humanely than the Trump administration.

In an interview after the tour, Torres described children accommodated four to a room, and said she saw no signs of overcrowding. The young people attend school, have access to health care and are given weekly COVID-19 tests. Lawmakers were told 1 in 10 children are testing positive for the virus, but none at the facility had been hospitalized, she said.

“When I look at those kids, I see myself,” said Torres, an immigrant from Guatemala who arrived in the U.S. with her family as a child.

The White House faced criticism for limiting media access to Wednesday’s tour, keeping it to just one TV crew. It has still not allowed media to enter Border Patrol facilities where large numbers of children are detained or HHS sites that it rapidly opened under pressure. The Carrizo Springs facility was established in 2019 during the Trump administration and re-opened in February.

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who is leading a separate delegation of GOP senators to the border later this week, decried the lack of press access as a “muzzling” of the media by the Democratic administration.

“Joe Biden doesn’t want you to see,” Cruz told reporters at the Capitol.

___

Merchant reported from Houston and Lemire from New York. Associated Press writer Josh Boak in Washington contributed to this report.

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