Taco Bell begins selling beer, wine and booze at Chicago location

Aamer Madhani

USA TODAY

CHICAGO — Taco Bell is ready to pour you a drink.

The official grand opening of the first booze-selling Taco Bell isn't until Sept. 22, but company officials opened their doors — and liquor cabinet — to customers on Tuesday for a "soft opening" of the fast-food chain's new location in the city's Wicker Park neighborhood.

Taco Bell, which has earned a reputation over the years as a good place to get a bite after a night of drinking, announced plans in June to experiment with selling beer, wine, sangria and spiked frozen drinks at the new Chicago location as it looks to gain a foothold in urban markets. A second location that will sell only beer and wine near San Francisco's AT&T Park is slated to open later this month, the company says.

The fast-food chain, owned by Yum Brands (YUM), boasts more than 6,000 outlets, mostly located in suburban areas. That model has worked well for the company, which gets roughly 70% of its sales from its drive-thru windows.

But the company knows that its Millennial customers increasingly are attracted to urban areas, where real estate is pricey. Company officials think that selling a stiffer drink might pad the receipts — the typical Taco Bell receipt is in the $7 range — and in turn help make their urbanization push more doable.

"To put in a drive-thru you need land," Neil Borkan, the Taco Bell franchisee who will operate the Chicago test location told USA TODAY. "Can you imagine buying an acre of land in a neighborhood like Wicker Park? You couldn't afford it. As real estate becomes more and more expensive, this kind of concept makes more sense."

Taco Bell is treading carefully into booze. While quick-service rival Starbucks (SBUX) recently announced it would accelerate its push of its beer and wine program and has applied for liquor licenses for hundreds of stores across the USA in recent months, Taco Bell spokesman Rob Poetsch said the company could potentially open 10 locations selling hard drinks next year.

Poetsch said the company currently is only looking at selling alcohol at new stores that will be branded as "Taco Bell Cantina." The cantina locations also will serve dine-in customers their food in plastic baskets (much like fast-casual Mexican restaurant Chipotle) and the menu will include new appetizer items (chicken tenders, rolled chicken tacos, mini quesadillas).

The featured items on the drinks menu include the Mountain Dew Baja Blast, Cantina Punch and Cantina Margarita freezes, which can be spiked with 1 ounce of Captain Morgan white rum, Ketel One vodka or Don Julio tequila. The rum- and vodka-spiked drinks sell for $6.19 plus tax, while the tequila-laced freeze will set customers back $7.19.

(The Cantina Punch and Cantina Margarita are new flavors. The company opted not to sell some other flavors, such as the Strawberry Starburst Freeze, that are available in most Taco Bell locations to keep marketing of candy items and alcohol separate, Borkan said.)

The menu also includes beer from Dos Equis and New Belgium Brewing, which will sell for $4 per draft. After much debate, Taco Bell brand manager Katie Gardiner and Borkan picked wines from two California wine makers, Steelhead Vineyards and Stack Wine.

Taco Bell following a well-worn boozy path in fast-food industry

'Evenings' at Starbucks: Coffee shop to sell wine, craft beer, small plates

Both wineries use innovative packaging that is helpful in a kitchen where space is tight. The Steelhead single-serving bottles of chardonnay and merlot are fitted with a small, plastic cup.

Taco Bell will sell Pinot Grigio and cabernet sauvignon varietals of Stack Wine, which got on Taco Bell officials' radar after being featured on the television show Shark Tank. Stack Wine comes in individually sealed, one-serving containers from which drinkers only need peel off a lid to get to their wine.

"We just really liked that it has portion control and the stemware is built in, and it feels like something no one else is doing in the wine industry," Gardiner said of Stack Wine.

Ahead of the opening of the Chicago location, Borkan agreed to hire a security guard for weekend nights to assuage concerns from some neighbors that his Taco Bell will become a center of drunken shenanigans and underage drinkers.

A Chicago Target store could serve liquor when it opens in October

Employees, who went through a four-hour alcohol training course, have been instructed to card each customer who orders alcohol. The restaurant also agreed to stop selling booze at 10 p.m. on weekdays and midnight on weekends.

In addition to the hard drinks, Taco Bell wants its urban locations to have a unique feel. The new Chicago restaurant is set in a 100-year-old building and features an open kitchen that gives customers a view of nearly every corner. The company also commissioned a Chicago graffiti artist who goes by the name Revise CMW to paint a giant installation along one of the walls.

The artist, whose real name is Won Kim, said he initially was apprehensive about doing work for the giant fast-food chain, but was pleasantly surprised when they told him they didn't want his piece to include any overt reference to their brand.

"At first, I was a little resistant to agreeing to work for this big corporation, but I knew if I didn't do it, they'd find some 21-year-old to take the job," said Kim, 35, who also is a chef. "At the end of the month, I got to pay the rent, too."

Olympics 2022 updates, recap: Skier Nina O'Brien hurt in scary crash

USA TODAY Sports

NOTE: Here's a look back at Monday's results in Beijing. For updates from everything going on Tuesday, check out our live blog.

Team USA earned its first figure skating medal of the 2022 Beijing Olympics thanks to a clutch performance from its ice dancers.

The U.S. took home the silver in the team figure skating competition after Madison Chock and Evan Bates turned in a season-best score in the ice dancing free program.

The news was not so good for skiing star Mikaela Shiffrin. The defending Olympic champion will not repeat in the women's giant slalom.

Shiffrin's first of five potential events in Beijing ended in disappointment Monday when she wiped out on her opening run.

(Looking for coverage from Sunday's events? Here's everything you need to know.)

TV SCHEDULE: How and what to watch each day of the Beijing Olympics

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WINTER OLYMPICS 2022: Answering 10 major questions for the Beijing Games

Star US figure skater out individual event after testing positive for COVID-19

Vincent Zhou, 21, the nation's No. 2 male figure skater behind Nathan Chen, tested positive for COVID-19 Sunday and will be unable to compete in Tuesday's individual event. Zhou skated for the U.S. in the team event, winning silver, and was scheduled to compete individually on Tuesday, in the short program.

"It seems pretty unreal that of all the people, it would happen to myself," Zhou said in an emotional, 5-minute long video shared on social media Monday announcing that he will not be competing Tuesday. "That's not just because I am still processing this turn of events, but also because I have been doing everything in my power to stay free of COVID since the start of the pandemic. I have taken all the precautions I can and I have isolated myself so much that the loneliness can be crushing at times."

-- Analis Bailey

Disappointing night at short track for US

Andrew Heo emerged as the best chance for an American medal in short track speed skating in the two events at Capital Indoor Stadium on Monday.

But the 20-year-old didn’t have enough juice to make the “A” final, despite putting together a pair of consistent times to make the “B” final in the men’s 1,000 meter. Heo went 1:24.03 to go into semifinal after a slower 1:24.6 quarterfinal time. He then bursted too early and came in last of the final (1:36.14).

On the women’s side (500 meters), neither of the United States’ two skaters made it out of the quarterfinals. Maame Biney came in third in the second heat with a time of 46.009. Meanwhile, teammate Kristen Santos was penalized in the fourth quarterfinal as she fell and took an opposing skater with her into the wall.

The men’s “A” final was not without drama, as the race was called halfway through due to metal parts on the track. After a brief cleanup and ice manicure, the race restarted, with China’s Rei Ziewei and Hungary’s Shaolin Sandor Liu battling it out for gold. Liu appeared to eke out the photo finish, but after a replay, Liu was assessed a yellow card for committing two penalties. That disqualified him and gave Rei gold in front of a delighted home crowd.

Italy’s Arianna Fontana won the women’s 500 prior to that.

-- Chris Bumbaca

While you were sleeping

From a historic moment to a devastating crash, the Beijing Games have not lacked excitement since it began.

Here are the top stories you missed while you were asleep:

17-year-old Chinese snowboarder claims slopestyle silver, shares podium with his idol

ZHANGJIAKOU, China – Mark McMorris remembered the little kid he would see on his visits to China, the one who idolized him and who clearly loved snowboarding.

After the Olympic slopestyle final, McMorris just had to look across the podium to find him.

China’s Su Yiming fulfilled a dream and drew the attention of throngs of media, fans, workers and volunteers at Genting Snow Park. The 17-year-old phenom claimed silver, beating his idol in an Olympic final.

McMorris won bronze for a third consecutive Games, while his Canadian teammate Max Parrot won gold.

“I’m seeing this little kid, he’s always around, and he loves snowboarding more than anything and idolized me and then boom, this fall he’s just like so damn good,” said McMorris, who has been making trips to China to compete for Burton, one of his sponsors, since 2010.

“He became a man, and he definitely has some height now and he’s strong and he’s riding at an incredible level. I’m super proud of him because he is a true snowboarder. He loves the sport. I’m honored to share the podium with him, and his future’s really bright.”

Su finished first in qualifying and drew the most attention here. His massive second run included two triple corks, including one on the final jump with three off-axis flips and five spins that he had never done before.

By the time he lined up on the podium with his idol, dozens of workers stood atop the jump where he made his mark to watch.

“This moment is indeed amazing for me because when I was very young I had this dream to compete in my hometown, in my country, to attend the Olympic Games,” Su said. “I'm extremely happy to achieve this medal in my hometown and also compete and stand on the podium with my idol from my childhood. I really felt overwhelmed.”

— Rachel Axon

US speedskater and flag-bearer Brittany Bowe comes up empty in women's 1500 meters

BEIJING — It was a disappointing day for the Americans at the National Speed Skating Oval, but a historic one for an Olympic speedskating legend.

Ireen Wüst of the Netherlands won gold at 1500 meters Monday, claiming an individual medal at the Winter Games for a whopping fifth consecutive time. Her first medal of the streak came at the 2006 Olympics in Turin, Italy.

Wüst also broke the Olympic record, to boot. She crossed the line in 1:53.28.

American Brittany Bowe, who carried the U.S. flag at the opening ceremony alongside curler John Shuster, had been expected to contend for a medal at this distance but finished well off the pace. She finished nearly a full second off the podium, in 10th place, with a time of 1:55.81.

Bowe will next race in the 500 on Sunday and the 1000, her signature event, on Feb. 17.

— Tom Schad

US skier Nina O'Brien hurt in scary crash in giant slalom

BEIJING — Nina O’Brien, the top U.S. woman in the giant slalom after Mikaela Shiffrin went out, crashed just ahead of the finish line Monday and appeared to seriously injure her left leg.

O’Brien was taken off the course on a stretcher, but U.S. Ski & Snowboard said on Twitter that she was “alert and responsive.”

“She was worried about delaying the race,” the organization said. “And also she wanted to know how fast she was skiing.”

O’Brien had one gate left in the second run and was going at top speed when she lost her balance. Her legs flew wide and she tumbled past the last gate and into the finish area. O’Brien immediately clutched at her left leg, and still photographs showed her ankle going the opposite direction of how it should.

— Nancy Armour

American men fail to medal in snowboard slopestyle

ZHANGJIAKOU, China — There would be no repeat gold for Team USA's men’s snowboard slopestyle team. There would be no medal, even.

Four years after Red Gerard pulled off a surprising Olympic win, the 21-year-old finished just off the podium here at the Beijing Olympics.

Gerard, 21, was a surprise gold medalist in Pyeongchang four years ago – even to himself. He has since embraced the competition scene and came to Beijing gunning for a medal.

He sat in third until Canadian Mark McMorris landed a big run to bump Gerard and take bronze himself. Canadian Max Parrot, who won silver in slopestyle four years ago, claimed gold, while 17-year-old Chinese phenom Su Yiming took silver.

Americans had won the gold in both previous contests since slopestyle was added in 2014, with Sage Kotsenburg claiming it in the debut and Gerard winning in 2018.

“Fourth never feels good. One off from being cool,” Gerard said. “I haven’t really fully put it together yet. I’m just happy that I landed a run, and I was really happy with the run, probably the best run I’ve ever done.”

Gerard used a unique line to put himself in contention.

On his first run, he landed 1620s on the first and third jumps. But in the rail section, he did a trick off the roof of the guard tower feature and on the second jump he used the quarter pipe to launch himself into double cork 1080.

He flubbed a trick in the rail section on his third run, leaving him to wait to see if his score would hold. But McMorris put down a run with three triple corks on the jumps to give himself a bronze medal for a third consecutive Games.

Americans Chris Corning and Sean Fitzsimons finished sixth and 12th, respectively.

— Rachel Axon

Olympic downhill skiing drought continues for US men

BEIJING — The U.S. men’s drought in the Olympic downhill continues.

Ryan Cochran-Siegle was the top American finisher Monday, finishing in 14th place, 82 seconds behind Olympic gold medalist Beat Feuz of Switzerland. Bryce Bennett, the top U.S. man in the downhill this season, was 19th while Travis Ganong was 20th.

It’s the second consecutive Olympics that the U.S. men have failed to have anyone finish in the top 10.

Johan Clarey of France won the silver and Matthias Mayer, the 2014 Olympic champion, took the bronze in the race, which was rescheduled from Sunday because of high winds.

“I can’t think of anything more beautiful than flying home with a gold medal around my neck,” said Feuz, who four years ago was the bronze medalist in the downhill and silver medalist in the super-G.

Only two American men have won the Olympic downhill, and Tommy Moe was the last to do it, at the 1994 Games in Lillehammer. Bode Miller was the last U.S. man to win a medal in downhill, a bronze in 2006.

-- Nancy Armour

Players wear masks for Canada vs. ROC women's hockey game

Even during an Olympics with extreme COVID-19 protocols, it was a bizarre look for Canadian and Russian women’s hockey players. Both teams took the ice Monday wearing KN95 masks underneath their hockey masks.

The start of the preliminary group game was delayed by more than an hour because the Canadian team did not receive a report on Russia’s COVID testing status and didn’t want to take the ice until that happened, according to Toronto Sun reporter Rob Longley.

The Associated Press reported that the IOC told the IIHF, the international hockey federation, that players were required to wear masks due to “safety and security reasons.”

The Russians returned for the third period without their masks, however. The Canadians kept theirs on.

-- Roxanna Scott

US figure skating silver medalist tests positive for COVID-19

BEIJING — A prominent U.S. figure skater has tested positive for COVID-19, and at the worst possible time.

U.S. Figure Skating announced Monday that Vincent Zhou, who is scheduled to skate the men's short program Tuesday, tested positive on Sunday. It is now unclear whether he will be able to compete.

"Under the guidance of the USOPC medical staff, Zhou is undergoing additional testing to confirm his status," the national governing body said in a statement. "If the results are negative, Zhou will be able to compete in the men’s short program, which begins Tuesday. At this time, we ask you respect his privacy as we await the results."

The news of the positive test comes at a devastating time for Zhou, who skated the long program for Team USA in the team competition on Sunday morning.

With the draw already having been completed, it is unlikely that the U.S. would be able to have an alternate skate in Zhou's place. Nathan Chen and Jason Brown are the other American men in the field.

— Tom Schad

Russian woman makes figure skating history

BEIJING — In the final event of the team figure skating competition, Russian skater Kamila Valieva landed a trick that no woman had ever achieved on Olympic ice.

Then she did it again in the same program.

Valieva, 15, became the first woman to land a quadruple jump at the Winter Games, making four rotations in mid-air. She also became the first woman to land two of them in the same program, kicking off her program with a quad salchow before later landing a quad toe.

That she fell on a third quad attempt later in the program proved to be a mere footnote.

Valieva's performance capped a dominant gold-medal-winning performance by the Russian Olympic Committee in the team event. Valieva is also one of three Russian wunderkinds who will be vying for podium spots in the women's individual competition, and there is a chance they could sweep the podium.

— Tom Schad

USA wins silver in team figure skating event behind stellar ice dance

BEIJING — After the first day of the team figure skating competition at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Team USA was dreaming of gold.

Instead, it squeaked out a silver.

Buoyed by a strong final performance from the ice dance team of Madison Chock and Evan Bates on Monday, the Americans edged Japan to win their first silver medal in the team figure skating event. They won bronze in both 2018 and 2014.

The Russian Olympic Committee, which entered as the favorite, won gold in dominant fashion.

"We're celebrating silver," Bates said. "Winning a silver medal at the Olympic Games is an incredible achievement, and the fact that we all get a silver medal, the whole team -- I'm so happy. I'm so happy."

The U.S. and Japan were tied in the standings with 48 team points entering the final two events of the competition -- the free dance and women's long program. But Chock and Bates, the captains of the U.S. team, turned in a stellar performance to finish first in their event, and Karen Chen did enough in a redemptive long program to hang on.

— Tom Schad

Chinese American sensation makes Olympic debut

BEIJING – There is no bigger star in China at these Olympics than Eileen Gu, the 18-year old freestyle skier from San Francisco who is headed to Stanford after these Olympics.

Despite her American roots, Gu chose in 2019 to compete for China, the country where her mother grew up and where she has become a fashion model and a breakthrough star.

Given the hype surrounding her debut at the Beijing Games, Gu admitted there was some pressure to perform well Monday in the first Big Air competition for skiing ever at the Olympics. After two of her three runs, though, Gu’s place in the final was uncertain. After her ski fell off on the second jump, her only choice was to produce a clean run or be eliminated from the competition.

“I would not feel satisfied if I didn’t make finals,” she said. “I was just focusing on the trick itself. I wasn’t thinking about there are people who want to watch me or that there was this pressure on me. It’s a right 9 (or jump with 2 ½ rotations). I’ve been doing right 9s since I was 14, and I know I can do that trick so I was just kind of talking to myself in that way.”

Gu pulled it off, securing her place in what will be a widely-watched final here on Tuesday at the Big Air Shougang.

Among the four-woman American contingent, only Darian Stevens qualified for the final after landing a left 900-degree trick on her third try after finding trouble on her second jump.

“I was obviously feeling the heat,” said Stevens, a native of Missoula, Mont. “I had a really good first jump I was very happy with and had a little bit of a speed issue on the second one so there was a lot of pressure riding on that third jump but I was really happy to land it.

— Dan Wolken

NBC's Mike Tirico to depart Beijing early

NBC prime-time Olympic host Mike Tirico will have a shorter stay in Beijing than originally planned.

Tirico's final show from Beijing will be Monday night. He will fly from China to NBC Sports headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut, to host Wednesday's and Thursday's shows before heading to Los Angeles on Friday to anchor Olympic and Super Bowl coverage through Sunday.

Tirico will then head back to Stamford for the final week of Olympic coverage. The Games conclude on Feb. 20.

Maria Taylor, who signed with NBC on the eve of last summer's Tokyo Olympics, will host Tuesday night's show while Tirico is flying back.

Tirico was originally scheduled to stay in Beijing through Thursday before going to Los Angeles. NBC officials, though, have reiterated that his schedule was subject to change based on COVID-19 and other factors.

This is the first year that the Olympics and Super Bowl are taking place at the same time. Four years ago, Tirico missed the Super Bowl as he was preparing for his first Olympics as prime-time host in Pyeongchang.

NBC has its announcers and hosts working out of its Connecticut headquarters. It has a limited group of reporters on the ground in China. NBC News' Craig Melvin is still in Beijing and will host “prime plus coverage” (which is late night in New York but prime time in Los Angeles) over the weekend.

— Associated Press

Ice dancers score season best to put U.S. in silver medal position

BEIJING —The U.S. is all but assured of winning silver in the team figure skating competition after a clutch performance from Madison Chock and Evan Bates in the free dance.

Chock and Bates won their event with a season-best score of 129.07, widening the gap between the Americans (58) and Japan (54), which is in third place. There is one event remaining, with Karen Chen set to skate in the women's free skate.

Teams are awarded points based on their finish in each event, with 10 points to the winner, nine to the runner-up and so on.

The U.S. had been squarely in silver-medal position entering Monday, but a last-place finish from Alexa Knierim and Brandon Frazier in the pairs' long program allowed Japan to knot the score.

The Russian Olympic Committee has all but locked up the gold, while the other two finalists, Canada and China, only had remote chances of medaling entering Monday.

The Americans have won bronze medals in the team event at each of the past two Olympics.

— Tom Schad

Shiffrin wipes out in first run of giant slalom

YANQING, China — Mikaela Shiffrin's first chance for a gold medal was over almost as soon as it began.

Expected to contend for multiple medals at the Beijing Olympics, several of them gold, Shiffrin lost an edge on the fifth gate of the first run of the women’s giant slalom and skied out. It’s the first time she’s failed to finish a GS race since January 2018.

"It's a huge disappointment. Not even counting the medals," Shiffrin said afterward. "The easiest thing to say is I skied a couple of good turns and skied one turn a bit wrong and really paid the hardest of consequences for that."

Shiffrin has said she hopes to do all five individual events at the Beijing Olympics. Her next race will come Wednesday, in the slalom. She won gold there in 2018, making her the youngest champion in that event.

-- Nancy Armour

Report: Peng Shuai meets with IOC president, says she 'never disappeared'

BEIJING – Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai told a French newspaper that her long-planned dinner with International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach has already occurred.

In a story published Monday by L'Equipe, Peng said the two met for dinner Saturday. She also once again denied having accused anyone of sexual assault, after alleging in a social-media post in November that she had been assaulted by Zhang Gaoli, a former high-ranking Chinese government official.

Peng's post was later scrubbed from Chinese social media, and she disappeared from public view for several weeks. She also disagreed with that characterization.

"I never disappeared, everyone could see me," Peng told L'Equipe.

Activists have expressed concern that Peng's movements and statements have been monitored or influenced by the Chinese government in the wake of her allegation.

IOC spokesperson Mark Adams confirmed that Bach and Peng had dinner Saturday night. When asked Sunday about the dinner, he said he had no update.

-- Tom Schad

Moguls skier Kai Owens couldn't see out of one eye after crash in practice

ZHANGJIAKOU, China – Cupping, dry needling, ice, pressure and some kind of brush for her face -- all day, every day, every hour, for the last several days. This was Kai Owens’ entire existence.

With a lot of persistence and medical treatment, the Chinese-born, American raised freeskier was able to compete in the Beijing Winter Olympics Sunday night, finishing in 10th place in the women's moguls. Australia’s Jakara Anthony led the field with a gold medal performance of 83.09. American Jaelin Kauf won the silver with a score of 80.28, and Anastasiia Smirnova of Russia took bronze.

Her ability to get to this night came down to the wire. Owens, 17, missed the opening qualifying round several days earlier, last Tuesday night, when her eye was swollen shut from a crash during a practice run on the same day. Owens, who also had a concussion earlier in the season, was held out by coaches.

“The first day I couldn’t even move my arm,” said Owens. “I was in a sling because of my rotator cuff. And then I couldn’t see out of my eye.”

By Sunday night, her eye was still visibly injured, but remarkably healed given how bad it was a few days earlier.

“I’m just so thankful to be here,” said Owens. “I owe a huge ‘thanks’ to our Team USA staff, U.S. ski and snowboard staff. They helped get me out here tonight.”

-- Lori Nickel

Mikaela Shiffrin to make her debut at 2022 Beijing Games in giant slalom

BEIJING — In what could be the first of five races at the Beijing Olympics, and perhaps as many medals, Mikaela Shiffrin competes Monday in the giant slalom. She is the reigning Olympic champion in GS and is currently third in the World Cup standings, with two wins and a second-place finish in five races this season.

The GS will be followed Wednesday by the slalom, where she became the youngest Olympic champion in the event in 2014. Shiffrin also has a silver, from the Alpine combined in Pyeongchang.

Shiffrin won the season-opening GS race in October in Soelden, Austria. But she didn’t race GS again until December – she won one race and finished second in the other – and her training time throughout the season has been limited.

In fact, she said Friday that she has spent more time training GS since coming to Beijing than she has the rest of the season.

"That’s not ideal," she said.

Despite that, Shiffrin said she feels she’s in a "pretty good place," both in GS and overall.

"There’s a lot of potential there," she said. "What are the odds on a day where all the variables are controlled? My odds aren’t bad. I’m just going to have to see where the chips fall."

— Nancy Armour

Opinion: Are Olympic uniforms tainted by forced labor?

BEIJING – Everywhere you turn at these Olympic Games, friendly staff members and volunteers are impeccably dressed in uniforms depicting white snow peaks and blue Chinese skies. As the competitions get underway in full force, we will see hundreds of technical officials wearing similarly attractive grey and white gear with red accents on their sleeves.

But it’s the logo over the right breast that your eyes should be drawn to.

The nondescript symbol, which looks vaguely like the silhouette of an impala’s head or perhaps a pickaxe, represents Anta Sports, a Chinese sporting goods giant that endorses several NBA players, including Klay Thompson and Gordon Hayward. It is also the parent company of a subsidiary that owns legacy American brands like Wilson and Louisville Slugger. The founder of Lululemon, Canadian billionaire Chip Wilson, is heavily invested in the company.

In China, the world’s second-largest economy, Anta is a very big deal. It’s also at the center of arguably the biggest political controversy surrounding these Olympics involving alleged genocide and human rights abuses in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of northwest China.

— Dan Wolken

The unlikely pipeline at the heart of the U.S. speedskating team

Ocala, Florida, is a town of about 60,000 people located between Gainesville and Orlando. Palm trees dot downtown. Temperatures last week touched 80 degrees.

It's not the kind of place you'd expect to produce Winter Olympians.

But in a strange twist – and with the almost inadvertent help of a Florida grandmother – that is exactly what's happened.

Three of the top U.S. speedskaters at the 2022 Winter Olympics – Brittany Bowe, Erin Jackson and Joey Mantia – all hail from Ocala, which does not even have a year-round ice rink. All three are legitimate medal contenders. And all three started out as inline skaters on a team that is now called Ocala Speed, coached by the same woman, Renee Hildebrand.

— Tom Schad

Opinion: US figure skaters falter on jumps, but still guaranteed a medal at Winter Olympics

BEIJING – After Day 1 of the Olympic figure skating team competition, U.S. athletes talked about skating with intensity and building momentum for an improbable gold-medal run against the Russians.

On Day 2, the conversation turned, sharply. Thoughts of momentum were replaced by concerns about “picking each other up.” High-fives and fist bumps were gone. Hugs and kind words showed up in their place.

That’s because, given the chance to rise to the occasion, both Karen Chen and Vincent Zhou turned in flat, lackluster performances, leaving the United States likely settling for the team silver medal and wondering what might have been had Chen and Zhou been able to skate cleanly – or how things would have been different had U.S. Figure Skating officials chosen other skaters in their place.

— Christine Brennan

Why this Iowa town is thriving when so many aren't

Kevin Hardy

The Des Moines Register

FAIRFIELD, Iowa — Take a walk around this town's bustling square and you'll see an array of businesses that would rival some shopping malls.

On one corner sits a coffee shop that roasts its beans in house. Down the block is a store specializing in sustainable children's clothing and toys. Along another strip is a women's boutique, a Verizon store and a nutrition company.

The town's retail center also is home to a salon, a consignment store, a furniture store and an art gallery. Just off the square is a pet spa, a natural remedy store and a photography studio.

For those looking for a bite to eat: a Thai restaurant, an Indian cafe, an Italian spot and a joint peddling pizza and steak.

More worker-owned businesses are sprouting

In fact, local officials count only one vacancy in the storefronts that line shady Central Park. It's just one more sign of success in this town of 9,500 in a state where most small cities and rural areas are seeing residents leave.

Since 1969, census data show Iowa's metropolitan areas have gained nearly a half million people while smaller cities and rural places have lost more than 171,000 residents.

But Fairfield has prospered, particularly in recent years. Between 2010 and 2015, the city saw a 4% population gain — a rate that rivaled the growth of some of Iowa's much larger metro areas.

This southeast Iowa city is known as a magnet for practitioners of Transcendental Meditation at Maharishi University of Management, who have flocked here since the 1970s. Fairfield was able to capitalize on that unique niche, building a surprisingly metropolitan quality of life.

While Fairfield has 1,000 fewer jobs than it had 15 years ago, state figures show employers have rebounded in the past five years, adding nearly 700 jobs between 2010 and 2015.

During that time, Fairfield went from 714 employers to 751, according to Iowa Workforce Development.

"We have a great quality-of-life culture and an entrepreneurial culture," Mayor Ed Malloy said. "And we see it is allowing more young people to put down roots in this community."

The town has no shortage of Iowa small-city staples such as Casey's General Store and Pizza Ranch though Fairfield is better known for its funky coffee houses, shops and restaurants. Locals claim the city is home to more restaurants per capita than San Francisco.

Yet the place that Oprah Winfrey dubbed "America's most unusual town" is more than just quirky. It's one of the few nonmetropolitan areas in Iowa posting strong population growth, according to U.S. Census figures.

Starting a small business by reimagining your life

And around town, evidence abounds that Fairfield has done what so many small cities in the Midwest struggle to achieve: attract and retain people.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi introduced Transcendental Meditation, or TM, to India in the 1950s.

But he brought his technique and "consciousness-based education" to Iowa in 1974, when Maharishi International University moved from Santa Barbara, Calif., to the 1 million empty square feet vacated by Parsons College here. The university later changed its name to Maharishi University of Management.

While some in the community resisted the influx of meditators, locals say most of those tensions were alleviated years ago.

"As time has gone on, everybody’s meshed seamlessly," local designer Linda Pettit said.

Pettit, who with her husband owns Finishing Touch interior design, has watched Fairfield thrive in the past 32 years from her storefront on the town square. She ticks off quality-of-life improvements such as a new pool and new recreation center.

She boasts about the many restaurants. And she tells of all the new and unusual businesses that have opened.

“We have a very vibrant community," she said. "I think a lot of small towns don’t have the diversity that we do.”

Pettit hears about layoffs at plants in Ottumwa, 25 miles to the west. She knows how Iowa farmers are struggling with low commodity prices.

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But she said that isn't Fairfield's storyline.

Her business works on residential and commercial projects. But she's noticed a slant toward more commercial projects in recent years, as new businesses pop up and old ones invest in upgrades.

"It's a great place to have a business," she said.

Through the years, many Transcendental Meditation practitioners and others who visited Fairfield decided to stay.

Once here, they had to find a way to make a living. Some Fairfield residents drive to Ottumwa or Iowa City for work, but many have started small businesses in Fairfield, which has been called "Silicorn Valley" for its mixture of tech startups and entrepreneurial ventures.

The town's median household income was $34,859 as of the 2010 census, according to the Fairfield Economic Development Association. That's in the bottom third of Iowa municipalities.

"People moved here, and they had to figure out how to stay here," said David Navarrete, spokesman for Sky Factory.

Bill Witherspoon, an artist who moved to Fairfield for its TM community, founded the 38-employee company in 2002.

A serial entrepreneur, he formed Sky Factory as a means of supporting his family. It creates window and ceiling panels that recreate outdoor views like those of a blue sky or a beachfront.

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Sky Factory's biggest clients are health-care providers because research shows even a simulated view of the outdoors can boost moods for those trapped indoors.

"I think there's definitely an entrepreneurial spirit here, and I think a lot of that comes from the university," said Witherspoon's son, Skye Witherspoon, now the company's chief executive.

Fairfield also is home to a surprising array of manufacturing.

Creative Edge makes intricate flooring for some of the world's best known hotels, casinos, hospitals and universities. Bovard Studios makes and restores stained glass windows for churches across the country. And a host of businesses manufacture agricultural parts, iron castings, polyethylene piping and laundromat washers and dryers.

So many things are made in Fairfield that the Iowa Economic Development Authority will host an export conference here in the fall.

Fairfield's biggest employers have grown in recent years, too.

Cambridge Investment Research now employs about 700 and boasts more than $70 billion in assets under its management.

Like many small cities, some employers in Fairfield report trouble recruiting and hiring, especially with Iowa's unemployment rate remaining below 4%.

Lori Schaefer-Wheaton, president of the 170-employee Agri-Industrial Plastics, said hiring is a struggle. She has 20 openings, a number that has held fairly constant in the past two years.

Fairfield is an anomaly among small Iowa cities but she thinks its recent population growth is largely related to the university.

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"That kind of population growth might show up on our census," she said. "But I don’t think it changes the dynamics of the workforce in our town."

Fairfield out performs many similarly sized cities, said economist Dave Swenson of Iowa State University. But some signals are mixed: While some measures show recent job growth, other data actually point to employment losses.

"They seem to be demonstrating both demographic and economic growth that stands out," he said. "The big question is this a short term growth or is it sustainable?"

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Meghan Dowd came to Fairfield as child when her parents migrated here because of the Transcendental Meditation community. She moved away for college then ended up working in television in California.

Then she visited her mom here and realized it was going through a renaissance with monthly art walks, a new events center and lots of cool coffee shops and restaurants. She moved back in 2009 and started Shaktea, a maker of kombucha, a trendy fermented drink.

In Fairfield, she said she can do just about anything she could in a metropolitan area. Plus, it's much cheaper to buy a home or start a business.

Her children attend a Waldorf-inspired preschool. And after yearning for a yoga studio, she just opened her own.

"A lot of people moved here, the kids grew up here, but then the kids wanted to go out into the world and experience different things," Dowd said. "I think that happened and some of that is kind of boomeranging back to Fairfield."

Jesse Narducci followed a similar path. He returned home to Fairfield a few years ago after living in Colorado and California for more than a decade.

He opened Jefferson County Ciderworks just outside of town. He brews hard apple cider and runs a taproom featuring hard-to-find craft brews.

Narducci said many of Iowa's smaller towns are undesirable places to live because they lack quality places to grab a meal or a drink out — not Fairfield.

"You don’t have to drive to Iowa City to have a good ale or a good meal," he said. "I don't really leave that often. … I’m trying to create my own little paradise out here."

Follow Kevin Hardy on Twitter: @kevinmhardy

Fact check: Hospitals staff near max capacity, but COVID-19 isn't ...

The claim: 'It's not unusual for hospitals to sit at max or near max capacity on any given day'

Spurred by the highly contagious delta variant, coronavirus infections and deaths are increasing across the country. In states like Texas and Florida, which lead the country in daily average hospitalizations, hospitals are swamped with unvaccinated patients.

But on social media, some say packed hospitals are just business as usual.

"It's not unusual for hospitals to sit at max or near max capacity on any given day," reads text in an Aug. 2 Facebook post. "The media would like you to think this is a new thing, but it's not. They are lying to you to create fear and uncertainty."

The post, a screenshot of an Aug. 2 tweet, comes from Erin Marie Olszewski, a nurse based in Tampa, Florida. She has previously shared false information about Florida's coronavirus numbers and promoted hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19. (In actuality, randomized control studies have found no evidence to suggest hydroxychloroquine saved lives.)

In this post, which garnered several thousands interactions between the two platforms, Olszewski has somewhat of a point about how hospitals typically coordinate staffing. But the claim misses key context about how the coronavirus pandemic has strained hospitals.

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Doctors, hospital associations and public health experts told USA TODAY it's not uncommon for hospitals to staff beds at or near maximum capacity to conserve resources. However, Olszewski is wrong to make it seem like the recent influx of COVID-19 hospitalizations is typical. The surge has strained hospitals already hard-hit by the pandemic.

"It is true that hospitals are often overcrowded (in) both ICUs and ERs," Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, told USA TODAY in an email. "The difference is that they don’t have patients in the hallways waiting for ICU beds in the volume that we have today because of COVID."

USA TODAY reached out to Olszewski for comment.

Hospitalizations rise due to COVID-19

Data show that, over the past few weeks, rising COVID-19 infections have put a renewed strain on hospitals. Several states are seeing their highest hospitalization rates since the coronavirus pandemic began.

Take Olszewski's home state of Florida, for example, which has the highest daily average and per capita hospitalization rate in the country.

Data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services shows that, as of Aug. 6, about 84% of inpatient beds in the state were occupied, 23% of which were for COVID-19 patients. Intensive care units were even more full, with 89% of beds in use, 42% of which were COVID-19 patients.

According to the Florida Hospital Association, as of Aug. 3, COVID-19 hospitalizations were at 113% of the state's peak in July 2020. Some hospitals are struggling to keep up with the rising demand for beds; 60% expected critical staffing shortages within a week, according to the hospital association.

“Current hospitalizations and the growth rate continue to be extremely troubling,” Mary Mayhew, president and CEO of the association, said in a press release.

Hospitals across the state are seeing record numbers of COVID-19 patients, despite the fact that vaccines are widely available. About 49% of Floridians have been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, in line with the national average.

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The situation in Florida is similar to that in other states with rising hospitalization rates, according to federal data and news reports. Arkansas, Nevada and Louisiana have also recently reported record spikes in COVID-19 hospitalizations.

Those spikes put pressure on hospitals.

"In parts of the country where COVID-19 patients make up a high percentage of the occupancy rate, there are implications for everyone who needs care," Thomas Jordan, a spokesperson for the American Hospital Association, told USA TODAY in an email. "Caring for COVID-19 patients is resource-intensive."

What counts as 'max capacity'

Doctors, hospital associations and public health experts say it's not uncommon for hospitals to be running at or near maximum capacity. But before the COVID-19 pandemic, that was by design.

The reason why has to do with how hospitals allocate their resources.

"Capacity is measured at least two ways," Robert Myrtle, a professor emeritus who studies health services administration at the University of Southern California, said in an email. "First is how many beds the hospital is licensed to operate. The second is the beds the hospital is staffing based upon their estimated capacity."

Federal guidelines stipulate hospitals should report staffed inpatient and ICU beds to the Department of Health and Human Services. That means a hospital may have more physical beds than it's reporting, but those beds aren't available for patients because there aren't health care providers to tend to them.

"Ventilators don't run themselves – you need respiratory therapists, you need doctors, you need nurses, you need staff," Dr. Jahan Fahimi, medical director of the University of California-San Francisco's adult emergency department, said in an interview. "It takes a huge team in order to make a bed in a hospital functional."

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Hospitals typically adjust staffing to match the demand for services, Fahimi and public health experts told USA TODAY. If demand is low, a hospital may close off some rooms or entire wings to conserve resources. If demand is high, a hospital may reopen those spaces and assign staff to them.

"They design it that way for budgetary purposes," Marc Lotter, senior vice president of communications, marketing and education at the Florida Hospital Association, said in an email. "It’s very expensive to staff a bed – especially ICU – so hospitals don’t waste resources staffing beds that aren’t likely to be used. As patient cases rise, they expand capacity and staff beds as needed."

Based on the reported number of staffed beds, it may seem like hospitals are always running at or close to maximum capacity. But experts say Olszewski's post leaves out important nuance about the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"There have always been long waits in ERs across the country because there's just a lot of demand for emergency care," Fahimi said. "But what we're seeing now is in many ways unlike anything that we've ever seen."

'More than simply having enough beds'

The pressure that rising COVID-19 infections put on hospitals goes beyond bed occupancy, doctors and public health experts say. It has to do with hospitals' capacity to scale up their treatment of COVID-19 patients.

"These patients are much, much sicker and require much more respiratory support," Benjamin said. "We also don’t, in the normal course of business, have to set up intensive care beds in holding rooms, tents and operating rooms. During the peak of the pandemic, we were doing that, and many hospitals are on the brink of doing this again."

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Last year, some hospitals entered crisis-care mode when the demand for COVID-19 care surpassed available staff. In several states, hospitals paused elective surgeries to keep up with that demand. Others weighed how to allocate a limited number of ventilators to a growing number of COVID-19 patients.

Doctors and public health experts worry that may soon become a reality in the pandemic's fourth wave.

"In the past, if you showed up with a sprained ankle, you may have had to wait a couple of hours," Fahimi said. "Now you show up with COVID and need oxygen, and you're in line with other people who have COVID and need oxygen."

Then there's the question of staffing.

"During COVID, demand exceeded the number of staffed beds, so to the extent possible we increased the number of staffed beds," Myrtle said. "But certain service areas, such as ICU, have required staffing ratios that are higher than are required by law or labor contract for general patient populations. So the real limiting factor was the availability of nurses, and we have a nursing shortage (and an aging one as well)."

That shortage, which also includes primary care and specialty physicians, is partially due to burnout from the pandemic.

In December, when the U.S. started breaking coronavirus hospitalization records, the nurse-to-patient ratio went from the recommended 1-to-1 to 1-to-4. The stress of juggling multiple COVID-19 patients at once, often for long hours, has driven some to quit the profession. Hospitals across the country have started offering big sign-on bonuses to get more nurses in the door.

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"The limitations on hospital capacity are more than simply having enough beds," Jordan said. "After many months of dealing with the pandemic, our doctors, nurses and other staff are exhausted. Some have chosen to leave direct patient care work in favor of other jobs. This limits hospitals’ ability to open additional beds to care for surges in patients."

Our rating: Missing context

Based on our research, we rate MISSING CONTEXT the claim that "it's not unusual for hospitals to sit at max or near max capacity on any given day." It's true that hospitals typically staff at or near their maximum capacity of staffed beds in order to save resources. But prior to the coronavirus pandemic, that was by design – not out of necessity. The post misses key context about how COVID-19 has strained hospitals in terms of bed space, resources and staffing.

Our fact-check sources:

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Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

Tunnel Fire near Flagstaff burns over 20,000 acres, is 3% contained

The Tunnel Fire burning 14 miles northeast of Flagstaff burned just under 21,000 acres as of Friday night as strong and shifting winds remained a major concern, according to fire officials.

The Coconino National Forest said on Friday that fire crews continued their efforts to build a line around the now 20,924-acre fire, while indulging high winds and welcoming "unusual precipitation in the form of scattered rain and sporadic snow showers."

The fire, burning across U.S. 89, was reported shortly before 4:30 p.m. Sunday and has reached 3% containment overnight into Friday, according to Jerolyn Byrne, a fire information officer for the Tunnel Fire.

The cause is unknown and under investigation.

Northern Arizona University President José Luis Cruz Rivera announced Friday morning that the university will provide immediate assistance with housing, meals, or emergency funds for all Lumberjacks, according to a tweet by the university.

The Coconino County Sheriff’s Office reported Thursday night that about 109 properties were impacted by the fire, including 30 burned residences and 24 properties with destroyed outbuildings, forest officials said.

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On Thursday, Gov. Doug Ducey declared a state of emergency to assist communities impacted by the fire. More than 750 households have been evacuated, according to a statement released by his office.

The declaration of emergency will make $200,000 from the general fund available to the Director of the Arizona Division of Emergency Management Allen Clark.

About 371 fire personnel were working the fire as of Friday morning.

The Coconino County Board of Supervisors declared a state of emergency on Tuesday, which allows them to spend emergency funds and request support from the state of Arizona.

According to the Arizona Department of Transportation, U.S. 89 remains closed in both directions between mileposts 425 and 445 north of Flagstaff with no estimated time of reopening.

Tunnel Fire live updates: Latest news as explosive fire burns near Flagstaff

Where is the Tunnel Fire burning?

The fire is burning northeast of Flagstaff across U.S. 89, to the east of San Francisco Mountain, the northwest of the tourist attraction Hundred Dollar Hill, the west of Black Bottom Crater and south of the Deadman Mesa mountain peak.

Tunnel Fire has covered a northwest portion of Black Bill Park and is burning in the Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument. The fire also has reached Black Mountain.

Fleishman said the western portion of the Tunnel Fire is burning through a part of the scar of Schultz Fire, which burned over 15,000 acres of forest and was the largest wildfire in Arizona in 2010. The fuels that the Schultz Fire left are more likely helping to spread new fires.

"Now it's burning through trees that have been dead for 10 years, and a lot of them have fallen on the ground and it's more open, so there's more grass," Fleishman said.

Evacuations for Tunnel Fire

According to the Coconino County Situational Awareness Viewer, the following areas have to evacuate:

North of Campbell Avenue, west of U.S. 89.

North of Campbell Avenue, east of U.S. 89.

Moon Crater.

The areas that should prepare for possible evacuation orders are:

South of Campbell Avenue, west of U.S. 89.

South of Campbell Avenue, east of U.S. 89.

Antelope Hills.

Areas east of existing evacuation areas near Moon Crater, north of Leupp Road and south of Stone House Wash.

Areas in a "GO" zone will remain in evacuation status until April 24 because of the change in wind direction and the high risk in the area.

There is a chance that U.S. 89 may reopen before the weekend depending on weather conditions, the U.S. Forest Service said Thursday night.

People who have evacuated their homes due to the Tunnel Fire are asked to contact the call center at 928-679-8525. According to Coconino County, they are experiencing a high call volume but will respond to all voicemails.

Those unsure about an evacuation notice or who feel it might be a scam can call law enforcement agencies to confirm evacuation stages. The Coconino County Sheriff's Office asked to call its nonemergency number at 928-774-4523 and the Flagstaff Police Department at 928-774-4114.

Shelter information; assistance for NAU students

NAU assistance

NAU President Cruz Rivera announced Friday morning that the university will provide immediate assistance with housing, meals, or emergency funds for all Lumberjacks, according to a tweet by the university.

"In the last 24 hours alone, I've had direct conversations with three members of our university community whose lives have been deeply affected by the fire and have learned of many others who are living minute-by-minute in fear of what may be in store for them and their loved ones. As we head into the weekend, I want to call all lumberjacks to action," Cruz Rivera said.

All students need to do is email president@nau.edu with information. NAU's leadership team is on standby to assist any students in need.

"In the past several days, most of us have followed the relentless burning fire of the Tunnel Fire with great interest and much concern, standing by ready to help and jumping in to do so when called upon," Cruz Rivera said.

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Shelters for Tunnel Fire

A Red Cross Shelter has been opened at Sinagua Middle School at 3950 E. Butler Ave. in Flagstaff for those evacuated from areas affected by the Tunnel Fire, according to Coconino County. Animals are not allowed into the evacuation center.

A community meeting is planned for Saturday at 2 p.m. at Sinagua Middle School to provide updates regarding fire conditions, potential flood risks and evacuation statuses.

Representatives from the county, Sheriff's Office, U.S. Forest Service, National Weather Service, and Tunnel Fire Type 1 Incident Management Team will be present to provide information and answer questions.

The meeting will also be streamed on the Coconino County Facebook page.

Household animals can be taken to the Coconino Humane Association at 3501 E. Butler Ave. in Flagstaff, and horses, goats, sheep, pigs and chickens can be taken to the Fort Tuthill County Stables. The stables are self-service, so people are responsible for feeding and watering. Coconino County advised taking cages for smaller livestock.

Coconino County distributed a number of QR codes that, when scanned with the camera application on a smartphone, will lead to resources available regarding evacuations and updates on the fire.

St. Mary's Food Bank sent a truckload of bottled water and snacks for firefighters from the Tunnel Fire on Wednesday, according to spokesperson Jerry Brown. The food bank is also assisting families impacted by the fire with the help of the Flagstaff Family Food Center and sent 100 emergency food boxes on Thursday.

Brown said they will send more boxes and will be standing by with more resources as needed.

Weather, fire outlook for Tunnel fire

On Friday morning, rain fell over the greater Flagstaff area. Observations from Doney Park and the Tunnel Fire have indicated that a few hundredths of an inch have fallen, according to a tweet by the National Weather Service in Flagstaff.

The rain helped douse dry grasses, which kept them from igniting more easily, but precipitation levels were not enough to control large burning logs and large hotpots across the fire. High winds also dried out the precipitation quickly, according to Coconino National Forest.

Strong shifting winds out of the north and east forecast for Saturday and Sunday are posing a major concern for fire managers who are dealing with various spot fires. Due to the wind, they are hesitant to call certain areas "contained" until the winds pass. The containment level remains at 3%, the Forest Service said Friday night.

Fire crews are working on a spot fire that began about 9 p.m. in the Schultz Fire scar area and grew to 500 acres on Friday night, Byrne said. A spot fire is a fire ignited outside the perimeter of the main fire by flying sparks or embers, according to the USDA Forest Service. Large downed trees from the Schultz Fire helped keep the spot fire alive, and strong winds cultivated dry conditions.

Though spot fires have been popping up in the area, this is the largest spot fire that has been seen so far, Byrne said.

"Bulldozers and hand crews are building lines around the edge of the fire between O'Leary Peak and Black Mountain and crews continued to patrol and mop up hot spots in the Timberline Estates and Wupatki Trails subdivisions, as well as along the southern flank of the fire along Forest Road 545," the Coconino National Forest said on Friday night.

Additional resources and personnel from the Type 1 Incident Management Team have allowed firefighting efforts to expand to the east of the Tunnel Fire, where firefighters will see if established fire lines will hold up to Friday's critical fire weather and strong winds, according to a Coconino National Forest news release.

Lines will be constructed near Black Mountain on Friday, just east of O’Leary Peak and in the Strawberry Crater Wilderness Area, forest officials said.

Protecting homes and property at Timberline Estates and Wupatki Trails subdivisions as well as along Forest Road 420 have remained a top priority since the fire started.

Reach breaking news reporter Amaris Encinas at amaris.encinas@arizonarepublic.com or on Twitter @amarisencinas.

Reach breaking news reporter Angela Cordoba Perez at Angela.CordobaPerez@Gannett.com or on Twitter @AngelaCordobaP.

Support local journalism. Subscribe to azcentral.com today.

Best July 4th fireworks shows include Washington, D.C., St. Louis ...

As cities and households around the country gear up to celebrate the 246th birthday of the United States of America, some shows promise to put on bigger and better firework displays than ever before.

For many Americans today, fireworks are often accompanied with a day of other Fourth of July related activities, but the tradition of sending bright flares into the sky has been around since the very first Independence Day in 1776, according to the American Pyrotechnics Association (APA).

“Early U.S. settlers brought their love of fireworks with them … a tradition that continues every 4th of July when we celebrate as John Adams had hoped, ‘with pomp, parade….bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other,’” APA’s website states.

Out of all the dazzling firework displays in the nation, here are 10 of the most spectacular.

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St. Louis, Missouri

Framed by the iconic Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular – dubbed "America's biggest birthday party" – boasts a “world-class” display, typically lasting 20 to 30 minutes, over the Mississippi River.

Officials say this year’s show will be the largest display in the fair’s history. Other activities include concerts, food vendors and more.

Washington D.C.

Fireworks launched from the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool illuminate the sky behind the Capitol and Washington Monument during one of the most patriotic fireworks displays in the nation, which draws in about 700,000 people each year.

Celebrations occur all day throughout the city, beginning with a parade down Constitution Avenue.

Idaho Falls, Idaho

Celebrating its 29th anniversary, the Melaleuca Freedom Festival is the largest Independence Day fireworks show west of the Mississippi River, according to the event website.

It’s appeared twice on the American Pyrotechnics Association list of “must-see Independence Day fireworks displays.”

Over 18,000 shells will be launched this year over the banks of the Snake River in honor of America’s Founding Fathers, veterans, and service members.

New York City

The 46th annual Macy’s 4th of July Fireworks celebration in New York City is the country's largest pyrotechnic display.

“Expect a rapid-fire succession of blasts to go off from each of the East River barges, creating a two-hour (spectacle) with round after round of rocking entertainment,” Macy’s website states.

Viewers can expect to see unique patterns, including a Whistling Jellyfish, snakes, a blinking smiling face, and swimming chrysanthemums.

San Francisco

San Francisco’s firework show can be seen along the waterfront with the city’s dramatic skyline in the background. Fireworks are launched from a barge off of Pier 39 and from the Municipal Pier.

Tourist attraction Fisherman’s Wharf hosts a number of local bands ahead of the celebration.

Nashville

The annual Music City July 4th: Let Freedom Sing celebration in Nashville, the region's largest fireworks show, will hold its longest show ever in Nashville this year.

There will be more than 1,000 floating flares, 40,000 pounds of explosives, and 200 miles of wire used.

Spectators can expect to hear a symphony playing patriotic tunes and new popular music, including hits from Star Wars.

Addison, Texas

Kaboom Town, a top-ranked Independence Day festival with food vendors, entertainment, and an air show, host's a dazzling 25-minute fireworks display annually.

Addison is only home to 16,000 residents, but the event brings more than 500,000 guests to the town from across the nation, according to the event website.

Alachua, Florida

Dubbed the "Largest Small Town Fireworks Display in America,” thousands of people will flock to Alachua, Florida, for the 22nd annual Fourth of July celebration. This free event positively impacts local businesses, according to the city’s website.

Amazing fireworks celebrationsin Florida

Philadelphia

What better way is there to celebrate independence than in the birthplace of the United States?

The Philadelphia Museum of Art on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Pennsylvania provides the perfect backdrop for one of the nation’s greatest fireworks shows as part of the Wawa Welcome America festival.

Pasadena, California

The Rose Bowl Stadium is recognized as home to one of the nation’s largest and longest running Independence Day shows.

The96th Annual AmericaFest Celebration includes musical performances, a motocross show and other family-friendly activities.

Camille Fine is a trending visual producer on USA TODAY's NOW team. She loves monochromatic outfits, making pizza, and spoiling her loving cat Pearl. You can see more of her work at camillefine.com.

Disney Store closing sale 2021: See locations shuttering by Sept. 15

More Disney Store locations are closing in September.

As Target plans to open more than 100 new Disney shops inside its stores, the Walt Disney Co. is shuttering nearly 60 of its full-size retail locations across the country. The company updated its store locator tool to identify stores closing "on or before" Sept. 15.

Disney announced in March it would close at least 60 Disney stores in North America this year. Nearly 40 stores were included in the first round of closings.

The company said in March that it was reducing the number of stores to focus on its e-commerce business.

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"While consumer behavior has shifted toward online shopping, the global pandemic has changed what consumers expect from a retailer,” Stephanie Young, president of consumer products, games and publishing, said in a statement at the time.

After the latest round of closures, about two dozen stores will remain. The closings don't affect more than 600 stores inside Disney theme parks and other locations, including small Disney shops inside Target stores.

“Over the past few years, we’ve been focused on meeting consumers where they are already spending their time, such as the expansion of Disney store shop-in-shops around the world," Young said. "We now plan to create a more flexible, interconnected e-commerce experience that gives consumers easy access to unique, high-quality products across all our franchises.”

Disney officials did not provide an official list of the closures or a new statement and directed USA TODAY to use the store locator tool on its website to find the closing stores.

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Disney Store closings September 2021

The following stores are slated to close on or before Sept. 15, 2021, according to the store locator.

Arizona Disney Store closing locations

Tempe: Arizona Mills, 5000 Arizona Mills Circle

Tucson: Tucson Premium Outlets, 6401 W. Marana Center Blvd.

California Disney Store closings

Brea: Brea Mall, 1065 Brea Mall

Carlsbad: Carlsbad Premium Outlets, 5610 Paseo Del Norte

Cerritos: Los Cerritos Shopping Center, 163 Los Cerritos Center

Concord: Sunvalley Mall, 1 Sunvalley Mall

Daly City: Serramonte Center, 25 Serramonte Center

Fresno: Fashion Fair, 587 E Shaw Ave.

Gilroy: Gilroy Premium Outlet, 681 Leavesley Road

Lakewood: Lakewood Center, 88 Lakewood Center Mall

Los Angeles: Westfield Century City, 10250 Santa Monica Blvd.

Modesto: Vintage Faire, 3401 Dale Road

National City: Westfield Plaza Bonita, 3030 Plaza Bonita Road

San Francisco: Stockton Street, 39 Stockton St. (Closing on or before Sept. 8)

Santa Clara: Westfield Valley Fair, 2855 Stevens Creek Boulevard

Sherman Oaks: Westfield Fashion Square, 14006 Riverside Drive

Thousand Oaks: The Oaks, 350 West Hillcrest Drive

Torrance: Del Amo Fashion Center, 21712 Hawthorne Blvd.

Valencia: Valencia Town Center, 24201 West Valencia Blvd.

Connecticut Disney Store closures

Danbury: Danbury Fair, 7 Backus Ave.

Farmington: Westfarms Mall, 500 Westfarms Mall

Florida Disney Store closing locations

Doral: Miami International Mall, 1455 Northwest 107th Ave.

Lutz: Tampa Premium Outlets, 2300 Grand Cypress Drive

Miami: Dadeland Mall, 7527 Dadeland Mall

Orlando: The Florida Mall, 8001 So. Orange Blossom Trail

Georgia Disney Store closing

Buford: Mall of Georgia, 3333 Buford Drive

Illinois Disney Store closures

Aurora: Chicago Premium Outlets, 1650 Premium Outlet Blvd.

Chicago: North Michigan Avenue, 717 North Michigan Ave. (Closing on or before Sept. 1)

Gurnee: Gurnee Mills, 6170 West Grand Ave.

Schaumburg: Woodfield Mall, 1600 Golf & Meacham Road

Maryland Disney Store closing

Clarksburg: Clarksburg Premium Outlets, 22705 Clarksburg Road

Massachusetts Disney Store closings

Burlington: Burlington Mall, 75 Middlesex Turnpike

Wrentham: Wrentham Village Premium Outlets, 1 Premium Outlets Blvd.

Michigan Disney Store closure

Auburn: Great Lakes Crossing, 4286 Baldwin Road

Missouri closing Disney Store

Chesterfield: St. Louis Premium Outlets, 18521 Outlet Blvd.

Nevada Disney Store closure

Las Vegas: Las Vegas South Premium Outlets, 7400 Las Vegas Blvd. South

New Hampshire Disney Store closure

Merrimack: Merrimack Premium Outlet, 80 Premium Outlets Blvd.

Deptford: Deptford Mall, 1750 Deptford Center Road

Edison: Menlo Park Mall, 55 Parsonage Road

Jackson: Jackson Premium Outlets, 537 Monmouth Road

Paramus: Garden State Plaza, 1 Garden State Plaza Blvd.

New York Disney Store closures

Central Valley: Woodbury Common Premium Outlets, 191 Marigold Court

Elmhurst: Queens Center, 90-15 Queens Boulevard

Lake Grove: Smith Haven Mall, 313 Smith Haven Mall Road

Niagara Falls: Fashion Outlets of Niagara Falls, 1900 Military Road

North Carolina closing Disney Store locations

Charlotte: SouthPark Mall, 4400 Sharon Road

Concord: Concord Mills, 8111 Concord Mills Blvd.

Pennsylvania Disney Store closings

Limerick: Philadelphia Premium Outlet, 18 West Lightcap Road

Whitehall: Lehigh Valley Mall, 217 Lehigh Valley Mall

Tennessee closing Disney Store

Nashville: Opry Mills, 433 Opry Mills Drive

Texas Disney Store closings

Houston: Houston Galleria, 5015 Westheimer Road

McAllen: La Plaza Mall, 2200 South 10th St.

Mercedes: Rio Grand Valley Premium Outlets, 5001 East Expressway 83

Round Rock: Round Rock Premium Outlets, 4401 North Interstate Highway 35

Utah Disney Store closure

Salt Lake City: City Creek Center, 51 South Main Street

Virginia Disney Store closing

Woodbridge: Potomac Mills, 2700 Potomac Mills Circle

Washington closing Disney Store

Tukwila: Westfield Southcenter, 536 Southcenter Mall

Contributing: David P. Willis, Asbury Park Press

Follow USA TODAY reporter Kelly Tyko on Twitter: @KellyTyko. For shopping news, tips and deals, join us on our Shopping Ninjas Facebook group.

Solar surges in California desert. Environmentalists aren't happy

Alfredo Figueroa, an 85-year-old former miner, can rattle off the name of every major geographic feature rising from the desert floor outside of Blythe, Calif., a town of 19,000 off the Interstate 10 freeway, halfway between Los Angeles and Phoenix.

On a warm winter day, the descendant of the Chemehuevi and Yaqui tribes hiked along a mesa dotted with petroglyphs, and waved his walking stick at a chunky mountain peak 20 miles in the distance, bathed in orange by sunshine. "That's Palen," he chuckled, pointing at the formation. "See his chin sticking up?"

All of the peaks are part of creation stories, he says, from birth in the Big Maria range to death in the Mule Mountains just behind him. But it's the time-varnished desert floor that concerns him right now.

Two industrial solar farm projects — called Crimson Solar and Desert Quartzite — are proposed for just below where he's standing. And between here and Desert Center, 20 miles west, another 10 have been built, are under construction or are seeking approvals.

Mandated by law in 2018, California is attempting to engineer a monumental shift to zero-emission electricity by 2045. To get there, the state is adopting various measures, including a first-in-the-nation law that went into effect Jan. 1 requiring rooftop solar panels on nearly all new homes.

While California recently surpassed 1 million solar rooftops, clean energy advocates and industry officials say that won't be enough to reach the goals. They argue every possible option will be needed — including solar farms in the desert.

That's re-ignited a battle with longtime activists like Figuroa. He and area environmental groups say while they are 100% in favor of solar power, it should be installed on rooftops, landfills and other disturbed lands in urban areas — not hundreds of miles away on fragile desert landscapes.

"Along here are the ancient trails our ancestors took between all these sacred places," Figueroa says, pointing to the creosote-studded land where the 350-megawatt Crimson Solar project is proposed. "This is a pristine area that hasn't been destroyed, and they will destroy it."

Solar power for 400,000 homes?

But when others look out at the Southern California desert, they see a different story.

"There are two places in the world that have this high level of solar radiance: One is the California desert and the other is northern Africa," says Shannon Eddy, founding executive director of the Large-Scale Solar Association, based in Sacramento. "What's unique about the California desert is that ... it's so close to load centers (cities that need power). There's nothing like it in the world."

With carbon emissions from coal and natural gas-powered plants stoking climate change worldwide, Eddy and others say industrial-strength renewables are critical. "It's time to dispel the myth that rooftop solar alone is enough," says Eddy, who represents solar developers in California, Nevada and Arizona. "I love rooftop, but we need to be doing that, we need to do large-scale utility, and we need to be looking under mattresses for energy efficiency measures. We need it all!"

All told, nearly 30,000 acres of photovoltaic solar farms producing up to 4,000 megawatts could come online in the California desert within the next few years, a 30% uptick statewide over 2018, the latest year for which data is available. That's enough to power as many as 400,000 homes for a year.

Current solar projects:

Desert Quartzite (First Solar), about 3,800 acres, 450 megawatts, near final approval

Crimson Solar (Recurrent), about 2,500 acres; 350 megawatts, public comment period open until Jan. 30

Palen (EDF Renewables) approx. 3,140 acres; 500 megawatts, under construction

Blythe (NextEra), approx. 4,318 acres; 485 megawatts (235 operational, 250 pending construction)

McCoy/Arlington (NextEra) approx. 4,282 acres; 750 megawatts (250 operational, 500 pending construction)

Desert Sunlight (NextEra) approx. 4,084 Acres; 550 megawatts cconstructed and operational

Genesis (NextEra) approx. 1,950 acres; 250 megawatts constructed and operational

Desert Harvest (EDF Renewables) approx. 1,412 acres; 150 megawatts under construction

Arica (Clearway Energy Group) approx. 2,000 acres; 265 megawatts, application being processed

Victory Pass (Clearway Energy Group) approx. 1,800 acres; 200 megawatts, application being processed

IP Athos (Intersect Power) private land facility, 3,600 acres, 500 megawatts tie-in on public lands, being constructed

Two companies have applied for a 12th project on the same acreage; both are being reviewed by BLM.

Kevin Emmerich, co-founder of the environmental group Basin and Range Watch, based in Beatty, Nev., has methodically opposed every large solar project in the desert. He says the increase "is just a gigantic assault of these industrial projects on desert habitats and cultural sites."

"We have the ability to get off of fossil fuels in a responsive, ecologically friendly way," he says. "We're not doing that. We're creating new environmental problems by trying to create solutions to old environmental problems."

But Eddy says the new projects are far more environmentally friendly than earlier ones. She says the project boom may seem large, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to state modeling showing an estimated 90,000 to 125,000 megawatts of large-scale solar power needs to be added to the grid in the next 25 years.

"We have to figure out where we want to build these plants, and we can't fight each other anymore," she says. "The further we stall, the worse shape we're in" in terms of greenhouse gases.

Rooftops versus long-distance

The wrangling offers a snapshot of the current state of solar energy in California: It's surging, but not quite as planned. Thanks to homeowner rebates, a sharp drop in prices of photovoltaic panels, and consumer jitters over blackouts due to wildfires, rooftop solar installations have climbed to 9 gigawatts of power, closing in on the 12 gigawatts of industrial solar power.

Large-scale solar farms are growing too, but, some say, not at the pace originally envisioned in the 2016 Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan (DRECP).

That plan was signed by federal, state, county, tribal, environmental and industry groups in the last months of the Obama administration. It was supposed to fast-track California's industrial solar, wind and geothermal projects across 388,000 acres (about 600 square miles). At the same time, it outlined a process to preserve six million acres of federal land.

But U.S. Bureau of Land Management officials have denied 93 proposals, often due to environmental concerns. Trump administration officials have ordered BLM to re-open the plan to all energy development, including oil and gas drilling and mining.

The initial slow ramp-up of big solar plants was fine with desert environmental and tribal groups.

"I don't think the average person driving by appreciates how ecologically valuable these desert wash habitats are," says Chris Clarke, associate director of the California desert program for the National Parks Conservation Association. He says large-scale power generation tied to a massive grid is "a 20th-century business plan for a 21st-century problem."

But others say all options need to be considered as officials push to potentially electrify the entire state with enough clean energy to power nearly 36 million cars and trucks and 17 million buildings.

"2020 is going to be a pivotal year; I would say it's going to set the pace for the next decade of renewables," says Bernadette Del Chiaro, executive director of the California Solar and Storage Association, a Sacramento-based group that represents manufacturers of rooftop solar and other small "distributed" systems. "We really don't have a clear road map for how to meet the zero-carbon mandate."

Del Chiaro says current state modeling wrongly assumes rooftop solar will plateau or even decline, and questions the megawattage that Eddy says must come from industrial solar farms.

Nevertheless, she says, California can't wait a decade to see if enough rooftop solar can be built. Approvals and construction of utility-scale projects in carefully selected landscapes also need to start now. "Climate change is doing far worse damage to species than habitat loss," she says.

Feds want 'to have the DRECP blown up'

While both environmentalists and industry representatives say the aims of the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan were noble, neither is totally happy with how things have played out.

In sun-drenched eastern Riverside and San Bernardino counties, many residents and conservationists say the seeming "no man's land" areas were wrongly made a "development focus areas," or as they see it, sacrifice zones.

Solar industry representatives, meanwhile, are not pleased with the fees they have to pay to lease public lands for their projects. The costs have skyrocketed 600% in recent years, said Eddy, via a series of increases. A BLM spokeswoman said they now collect $6 million in rent annually from eastern Riverside County projects.

Responding to rural constituents' anger, San Bernardino County has banned the construction of large solar and wind farms across more than one million acres. Riverside County continues to process projects on private lands.

One reason more projects have not been approved since the DRECP was adopted is that more endangered or threatened species have been found in areas slated for renewable development than expected. At the same time, species that the plan aimed to protect have not always been found in designated conservation areas.

"They thought the desert tortoise were going to be in one place, and instead, there were lots of them in an area identified for solar development, and none in the places where they're supposed to be," says Eddy of the Large-Scale Solar Association

Jeremiah Karuzas, BLM's renewable energy program manager for California, says his agency is drafting an amendment to the DRECP. "We realized some things we needed to fix or adjust to give additional flexibility, both for project developers and BLM itself."

Asked about the Interior Department order to allow all kinds of energy projects — including oil drilling and mining — in the DRECP, Karuzas acknowledged the proposed adjustments "wouldn't apply just to renewable energy, but to any BLM activity in that area."

That prospect sets off alarm bells for solar developers and environmentalists alike, despite their issues with the current plan.

"The BLM guys know the ways the regs got written has led to barriers that were unintended," says V. John White with the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies, a Sacramento partnership of major environmental groups and clean energy companies. "And changes that could be agreed to by environmentalists,(and) solar and wind industry developers, can't get accomplished because the federal government wants to have the DRECP blown up to do more mining."

Eddy, the solar industry advocate, agrees the plan needs to be fixed, but says fossil fuels should not be added. "Oil and gas was never envisioned as part of the desert conservation plan," she says.

Clarke with the National Parks Conservation Association says: "People have a diversity of opinions about the DRECP, but the conservation community is unanimous that it needs to be defended in its current form."

There is good news, say some

Alex Daue, the assistant director of energy and climate for The Wilderness Society, a national organization, says the solar farm activity along the 10 freeway near existing transmission lines shows that the plan is beginning to work.

Daue sees it as a model for bipartisan legislation proposed in both houses of Congress to designate areas across the West for utility-scale renewables.

The Public Land Renewable Energy Development Act would identify lower-value areas for commercial-scale renewable development. But instead of sending all land leasing revenues to the general treasury, as is currently done, millions would go to local communities, states and federal conservation and innovation efforts.

As big cities and suburbs cut the cord with coal-fired power plants in Utah and elsewhere, they're looking to sign contracts with wind and solar power from rural California. That includes the fully approved Palen project, a 3,100-acre development named for a dry lake below the mountains of the same name, near Joshua Tree National Park.

EDF Renewables North America, the developer, announced last month that it has sold nearly all of the 500 megawatts the facility will create. Its customers include Southern California Edison, a subsidiary of Shell Oil, and CleanPowerSF, which serves 300,000 San Francisco customers.

Plants, animals and desert soil

Conservationists say the long-distance sales prove the desert is being used as a sacrifice zone. They and developers offer dueling research on the impact of the projects, which average five square miles in size.

Clarke with the National Parks Association and Emmerich of Basin and Range Watch say the solar farms are harming myriad plants and animals, like the desert tortoise, Mojave fringe-toed lizard, ironwood tree stands and a suite of desert flowers.

They point to wildlife mortality counts showing scores of species of birds, along with bats and monarch butterflies, have been injured or killed at solar projects. Thousands of birds have been incinerated or singed mid-air at the Ivanpah desert facility due to its concentrating thermal technology, which creates extreme heat via a series of mirrors.

Pilots also have complained about blinding glare produced by its thermal towers, which create a piercing light. BLM and other agencies are conducting "glint and glare" and wildlife studies. The thermal technology is not being used in new projects because the price of photovoltaic solar panels has plummeted, notes Eddy.

But photovoltaic solar can create a phenomenon called the "lake effect," says Clarke, sending birds winging their way into hot panels, mistakenly thinking they are a cool oasis.

Peter Weiner, head of the environment and energy practice at the law firm Paul Hastings in Los Angeles, says there's no research definitively documenting such a problem. "We don’t think there is evidence of a lake effect," says Weiner, who works with solar developers. He said while an early mortality count at the Desert Sunlight facility found dead water birds, there is also a working fish farm nearby that might attract them. Tracking at other PV solar facilities shows "insignificant" impacts on birds, he adds.

Another concern raised by Clarke is that solar installations disturb a type of desert soil called caliche. A 2014 UC Riverside study for the California Energy Commission concluded losses of caliche and organic matter in surface soil layers "compromise the value of solar energy as an alternative to fossil carbon burning by releasing stored inorganic carbon into the atmosphere and destroying the ability of the deserts to sequester carbon."

The researchers recommended locating solar developments on previously disturbed lands.

Weiner said he is not aware of further studies on caliche, but that solar farm sites are no longer mass graded, with post holes being dug in carefully selected spots. Eddy offered two other studies, funded by solar companies, showing that with proper siting, endangered kit foxes fared better than in raw wilderness at San Luis Obispo County PV farms, possibly even using the panels for protection from predators.

Public comment period closing soon

As technology has evolved, developers are proposing smaller solar projects than in the boom days of major federal incentives more than a decade ago. BLM staff now also often ask developers to surgically excise ravines and other watershed areas, to preserve woodlands and other key habitat.

That's the case with the Crimson Solar project, they note, where Recurrent Energy is seeking a right of way on 2,500 acres of public land to construct a 350-megawatt photovoltaic facility. That's down from nearly 7,000 acres first proposed years ago by another developer.

Scott Dawson, director of permitting for Recurrent Energy, said at a recent public hearing that the project would not destroy any petroglyphs or sacred sites, and was being proposed in an environmentally sensitive fashion. Public comment is open until Jan. 30.

Both Figueroa's cultural resources group, La Cuna de Aztlan, and Basin and Range Watch say while the project is smaller, neither Recurrent nor BLM are presenting the full picture. For instance, says Emmerich, a popular biking and jeep trail would be heavily impacted by chain link fencing, as would vistas from documented historic sites.

The adjoining 450 megawatt project, Desert Quartzite, by First Solar, could receive final approvals soon. It would connect with Southern California Edison’s Colorado Substation, on about 3,700 acres of federal land and 154 acres of private land.

As a former Sierra Club staffer, Eddy says tough choices need to be made about where to locate large solar projects.

"California has set some good and aggressive climate targets, and getting there is going to require breaking ground that hasn't been broken before," she says. "It requires very important conversations about land use, conversations that are deep and profound and difficult. ... The whole world is facing these decisions on a macro-level."

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Alex Daue's last name and gave an incorrect title for him. He is assistant director of energy and climate at The Wilderness Society.

Janet Wilson is senior environment reporter for The Desert Sun and writes USA Today's Climate Point newsletter @janetwilson66 janet.wilson@desertsun.com

California is about to experience a political earthquake. Here's why ...

In Los Angeles and San Francisco, two of the nation's most liberal large cities, voters are poised to send stinging messages of discontent over mounting public disorder, as measured in both upticks in certain kinds of crime and pervasive homelessness

That dissatisfaction could translate into the recall of San Francisco's left-leaning district attorney, Chesa Boudin, likely by a resounding margin, and a strong showing in the Los Angeles mayoral primary by Rick Caruso, a billionaire real estate developer and former Republican who has emerged as the leading alternative in the race to Democratic US Rep. Karen Bass , once considered the front-runner.

Linking both these contests -- as well as several Los Angeles City Council races and an ongoing effort to recall George Gascon , Los Angeles County's left-leaning district attorney -- is a widespread sense among voters in both cities that local government is failing at its most basic responsibility: to ensure public safety and order. It's a sentiment similar to the anxiety over urban disarray that inspired the "broken windows" policing theory during the 1980s, and contributed to the election of Republican Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Richard Riordan in New York and Los Angeles, respectively, amid the cascading violence of the crack epidemic in the early 1990s.

Tuesday's California results will likely send a stark message to the Democrats controlling Congress and the White House. The outcome will again underscore how much danger a party in power can face when voters feel that certainty has been stripped from their lives -- a dynamic that extends beyond crime and homelessness to inflation, soaring gasoline prices and continued disruption from the unending Covid pandemic.

"In the broadest perspective, the voters and residents are feeling that the governing regime, the liberal Democratic regime that has dominated LA for the last 30 years, and California and San Francisco, is not meeting the moment," says Fernando Guerra, a political scientist who directs the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University.

Zev Yaroslavsky, who served on the LA City Council and then the LA County Board of Supervisors for almost 40 years starting in 1975, says the only time he can remember Los Angeles voters as discontented as they are today was in the late 1970s , an era of high inflation and soaring property tax bills that produced California's Proposition 13 and the tax revolt that helped elect Ronald Reagan president in 1980.

"What people used to take for granted they can no longer take for granted -- on your ability to pay your rent, your ability to walk the streets safely, on your ability not to be accosted by a homeless person," says Yaroslavsky, now director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California Los Angeles. "It's a lack of confidence in government's ability to respond."

Los Angeles City Council President Nury Martinez, who took office in 2013, feels those gusts too. "I've never seen a more angrier electorate than this particular election," she told me. "I think all of this is just at a boiling point."

A flipped agenda

The dominant role of crime and homelessness in the Los Angeles and San Francisco elections represents an inversion of the political agenda since the summer of 2020. Like dozens of other cities, both places saw protesters for police reform fill the streets following George Floyd's murder . In Los Angeles, that energy helped propel Gascon to a narrow victory over the law enforcement-backed District Attorney Jackie Lacey in November 2020 and also powered voter approval of a ballot initiative to combat racial inequities by shifting county funds toward social services and alternatives to incarceration.

Boudin, the San Francisco district attorney, who was narrowly elected in 2019, and Gascon have pursued largely parallel agendas centered on reducing incarceration through measures such as a virtual prohibition on trying juveniles as adults, the rejection of "enhancements" (for such factors as gang involvement or use of a gun) that extend sentence lengths and a policy of not prosecuting "quality of life" misdemeanors associated with homelessness, such as trespassing and public urination.

That agenda quickly faced fierce resistance from other elements in the criminal justice system committed to traditional approaches, including the unions representing police in both cities. Law enforcement interests are backing the recalls against Gascon and Boudin, and in LA the police union is spending heavily against Bass, a leader in the House of Representatives' passage last year of sweeping federal police reform legislation. The recall efforts against Boudin and Gascon, as well as Caruso's mayoral bid in Los Angeles, have also drawn support from big Republican donors, who constitute a distinct minority in both cities.

The role of both law enforcement insiders and conservative donors and activists has frustrated advocates for police reform, who see the backlash across these many fronts as an attempt to restore hardline approaches before new alternatives are given a chance to demonstrate whether they can succeed.

Take a look at our streets: No matter where you live now, you can walk down the street, you can look out your front window, and you will see ... that what the city and the county have been doing simply is not working. Nury Martinez, Los Angeles City Council president

"I think to a very large degree that more conservative forces have been very, very adept at framing the issues of homelessness and of crime so that the discussion about ... how to respond to those two issues is very, very narrow," says Los Angeles City Council Member Mike Bonin, an outspoken liberal who is not seeking reelection this year after narrowly avoiding a recall drive centered on his resistance to tougher measures against the endemic homelessness across his Westside district.

JUST WATCHED Rep. Bass: 'We really have a humanitarian crisis in Los Angeles' Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Rep. Bass: 'We really have a humanitarian crisis in Los Angeles' 17:04

Yet the evidence is overwhelming that the unease dominating Tuesday's elections extends far beyond conservative circles. Yaroslavsky points out that in the UCLA Luskin School's annual polling across Los Angeles County, concern about crime has increased substantially not only among Whites, but among Hispanics, Blacks and Asian Americans as well.

Ben LaBolt, a San Francisco-based Democratic strategist and former campaign spokesperson for Barack Obama, likewise notes that prominent local Democrats have played leading roles in the effort to recall Boudin. "The notion that this [recall] is some right-wing misinformation campaign is dangerous for Democrats to say or think, because it's definitely not," he says.

In both cities, anxiety about public safety is rising faster than the actual trends in reported crime. The online dashboard maintained by the San Francisco Police Department shows that through May 29 (the latest week for which figures are available) burglaries and break-ins or thefts of motor vehicles are clearly up from the comparable period in 2019, before Boudin took office. But assaults and homicides are virtually unchanged over that period, and robberies are down, as are the total number of serious offenses.

"We are not seeing numbers that look anything like some of the worst eras that people have been through," says Michelle Parris, California program director at the Vera Institute of Justice, speaking on behalf of Vera Action, a criminal justice advocacy group. Moreover, she points out, California communities with tough-on-crime policies like Sacramento and rural Kern County are experiencing crime upticks that in some cases exceed the increases in Los Angeles and San Francisco. "We've seen that even tough-on-crime prosecutors in California have not delivered safety," she says. "They are subject to the same exact trends we are seeing around the country."

A problem with high visibility

Like many other observers in both cities, Parris points to a different cause than crime per se as the primary driver of rising anxiety over public safety. "Homelessness and untreated mental illness ... impacts people's perception of safety," she says. "And so I think that's part of why in places like Los Angeles or San Francisco in particular, where [that] is quite visible, that has a great impact of what people are talking about."

In both cities, pervasive homelessness has rekindled the concern about losing control of city streets that inspired advocates of the "broken windows" theory to argue 40 years ago for greater enforcement against crimes of "disorder" like loitering, panhandling and public intoxication. In San Francisco, concern has centered on the Tenderloin neighborhood , which has been overwhelmed with open drug use among the homeless. In Los Angeles, the mayoral and City Council races have been dominated by concerns about the spread of large homeless encampments across the city. These encampments have proliferated despite the approval of two ballot initiatives in Los Angeles in 2016 authorizing substantial expenditures to build housing and provide services for the homeless -- and t he City Council's passage of an ordinance last fall authorizing the removal of encampments around sensitive areas such as schools, libraries and day care centers.

"Take a look at our streets: No matter where you live now, you can walk down the street, you can look out your front window, and you will see ... that what the city and the county have been doing simply is not working," says Martinez, the LA City Council president.

Yaroslavsky, the former city and county official, says the persistence of the homeless encampments has become a viscerally visible symbol of fundamental governmental failure. "I think homelessness is both a real issue but it's also a metaphor for everything else that's gone wrong in society and government's ability to address something that is so visible and so ubiquitous in the county," he says. "So it's like a billboard that says failure."

My last email to the mayor's office was that, amongst other things, we just had a massacre in Texas, an unstable man who was ignored, but it's not like people didn't know he was unstable. We have a park of mentally unstable people currently slashing and shooting each other. What would make us think this wouldn't turn into something much more tragic? Elizabeth Clay, activist and land use planner

The neighborhood uproar over a large encampment around the public library in the traditionally liberal oceanfront LA community of Venice encapsulates the discontent that has upended politics in both cities. After the city of Los Angeles finally cleared out a massive homeless encampment along the Venice boardwalk that attracted national attention, a new one developed last fall around the community's public library. It has now engulfed the library on all sides, angering and frightening nearby residents, who have posted viral videos of rampant drug use and violence in the area. Longtime library patrons have publicly lamented that they no longer feel safe using the facility, which was also threatened by a recent fire that started in the camp.

"There's slashings. There's shootings," says Elizabeth Clay, a local activist and land use planner who has been involved in community protests against the encampment. "My last email to the mayor's office was that, amongst other things, we just had a massacre in Texas, an unstable man who was ignored, but it's not like people didn't know he was unstable. We have a park of mentally unstable people currently slashing and shooting each other. What would make us think this wouldn't turn into something much more tragic?"

To frustrated residents, the effective surrender of the library -- the quintessential public service -- to a homeless encampment amounts to a perverse elevation of the interests of those who don't pay taxes over those residents who do. Many, like Clay, express deep disappointment with outgoing Mayor Eric Garcetti , who they view as disengaged from his job and the mounting crisis on the streets as he tries to win approval for his nomination as ambassador to India.

But the principal focus of residents' ire is Bonin, the liberal council member who was one of two to oppose the ordinance barring camping around sensitive facilities. The city's anti-camping ordinance requires that the council vote to approve each individual enforcement action, and Clay and others say that Bonin has repeatedly blocked plans for such efforts around the library.

In the interview, Bonin denied blocking cleanup plans (except for once, he said, when he asked the city to hold off while he tried to assemble a broader interagency response that never materialized). But he was adamant in insisting that simply dismantling the tent city in the park would only compound the problem unless it was accompanied by permanent housing and services for the homeless now living there. "If there is a massive enforcement without offering services ... what that's going to do is just move people across the street in front of people's homes and deeper into residential neighborhoods," he argues.

Voters feel conflicted

There is still substantial support in Los Angeles for providing services to homeless people. Even Caruso, who has promised to build much more housing and provide more services to the homeless, sounds very different from Giuliani and other early hardline advocates of the broken windows theory, whose policies were often derided as unfairly increasing police enforcement against young minority men. No mainstream voice in either city is suggesting that policymakers can simply arrest their way out of the homeless crisis or even the uptick in crime.

But all sides in the debate agree the public appears out of patience, both in San Francisco and Los Angeles, with a set of policies that has surrendered control of public spaces and made it difficult for residents to get through the day without encountering people who appear to be a danger to themselves or others. The same ebbing of patience is visible in the often-expressed belief that Boudin and Gascon, by placing so much priority on reducing incarceration, have encouraged a sense of invulnerability among repeat criminal offenders. "The voters are conflicted: Karen Bass, Mike Bonin, all these guys, they reflect our values," says Guerra, the political scientist. "But that's not where we are right now. The moment is about homelessness, public safety, and they are not even speaking to that."

Rick Caruso shakes hands with workers during a tour of Industrial Metal Supply in Sun Valley, California, Monday, June 6, 2022.

Caruso has declared that if elected he will declare emergency powers as mayor that authorize him to clear homeless encampments without approval from the City Council. Bass hasn't gone that far, but she's also pledged to end encampments. "There are some things you just don't do outside, and sleeping is one of them," Bass has repeatedly said

Whoever wins the LA mayoral race, "the tide is turning, and now I feel that in each district you have an avalanche of people who are just outright pissed off at the state of affairs in our city," says Martinez, the City Council president. "I believe that is what is moving the council to take a harder stance on allowing encampments to remain."

The same trajectory is evident on policing. While activists had hoped to significantly redirect funding away from the LAPD -- an institution with a long history of racial bias -- in the aftermath of the Floyd murder, Caruso is now promising to add 1,500 officers. Even Bass, while not abandoning her calls for reform and accountability, wants to maintain the department's current staffing level and move more officers out from desk jobs to augment its presence on the streets.

It's still an open question how far this public demand for order will extend. Boudin's recall seems almost inevitable, and it will likely reinforce the message of the recent recalls of three very liberal members of the city's Board of Education : that local residents want their government to focus less on absolutist ideological statements than on delivering basic services. LaBolt predicts that after Boudin, San Francisco won't see a lurch to the right on law enforcement but rather a recalibration toward the center: "I think what we'll see is a return to the assertion that you don't have to choose between public safety and criminal justice reform."

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The landscape in LA is complex too. Polls show widespread discontent with Gascon's performance, and the campaign against him claims it is well on its way toward obtaining the signatures it needs by early July to qualify a recall against him on the November ballot. But it is not unusual in California for such efforts to fail after large number of signatures are disqualified. Meanwhile, the county's hardline and scandal-tarred sheriff, Alex Villanueva, who has denounced liberal policies on crime and homelessness, will likely face a runoff after Tuesday with a challenger to his left. Tuesday's City Council primaries could see strong showings for hardline law-and-order candidates -- in particular in Bonin's district, where discontent is peaking -- but in several other districts, left-leaning candidates deeply critical of the LAPD and the anti-encampment laws are mounting serious challenges to more centrist incumbents.

Even the mayoral race shows conflicting currents. The fact that Caruso, a former Republican, is demonstrating so much strength is revealing in itself (even if he's been buoyed by his massive personal spending). But Caruso has endorsed conventionally liberal positions on almost all issues beyond crime and homelessness, and most analysts expect that he and Bass will meet in a November runoff because neither will attract the 50% of the vote needed to win outright on Tuesday.

Rep. Karen Bass greets supporters on Sunday, June 5, 2022, in Los Angeles.

Caruso's promises to restore order "can have great appeal ... in a time that is unsettled and you have $30 million to spend," says Manuel Pastor, director of the Dornsife Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California. "The question is whether or not there's a cap to that [support] similar to the top that there was to the recall campaign" against California Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021, which qualified for the ballot but then failed last fall.

Yet even if Bass ultimately squeezes past Caruso, Gascon narrowly avoids a recall or San Francisco doesn't swing hard to the right on law enforcement if Boudin is recalled, the evidence suggests Democrats would be wrong to minimize the magnitude of the tremors building in California. In both Los Angeles and San Francisco, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the most progressive forces have opened the door to a right-tilting backlash by failing to adequately respond to, or even acknowledge, the depth of public discontent over the mounting disorder -- even among many voters who lean left in their values. More than even the specific issues of crime and homelessness, "what's feeding the beast" of backlash "is just the general sense of disarray and dysfunction that is permeating everything," says veteran Democratic pollster Paul Maslin, who is advising an independent expenditure campaign supporting Bass.

Analysis Ronald Brownstein
Nury Martinez
Los Angeles City Council President
Elizabeth Clay
Activist
Land Use Planner

Lockout Limbo: Judge, Sale, others find fields to stay loose

AP

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — Aaron Judge stepped into the batting cage and sent a long, high drive completely out of the park.

Far behind the left-field wall, a couple of University of South Florida students paid no attention. They walked right past the stray ball that glistened in bright sunshine on the lush green grass – they had to get to class.

Campus life carries on. The big league baseball world these days, now that’s a lot different.

Caught in lockout limbo, Judge and his New York Yankees teammates, Boston ace Chris Sale, Atlanta slugger Adam Duvall and others are doing their best to stay loose. Instead of playing on perfect diamonds in spring training games that had been set to start this weekend, they've taken to open fields all over.

“We’ve got to be ready,” Yankees infielder Gio Urshela said after a session with Gleyber Torres at Leto High School in Tampa.

“We can’t wait, just like sitting on the couch. We’ve just got to be working. We enjoy working out, like hitting, all that," he said.

There were players at one spring park — Max Scherzer, Gerrit Cole and Francisco Lindor were among those this week at Roger Dean Stadium in Jupiter, Florida, home of the St. Louis Cardinals and Miami Marlins, for negotiations with owners.

Otherwise, the complexes are shut for the pros and exhibition games are canceled. So as the Major League Baseball lockout reached its 87th day Saturday, players are finding their own places to break out the bats and balls.

Oakland Athletics second baseman Tony Kemp and his former Vanderbilt teammates are holding their own spring camp of sorts in Nashville, Tennessee, along with a handful of big leaguers who didn’t go to school there but are welcomed by longtime Commodores coach Tim Corbin.

Atlanta right-hander Kyle Wright is working out alongside Giants catcher Curt Casali and San Francisco outfielder Mike Yastrzemski, Kemp’s old college roommate. Most of them live within 10 minutes of each other, so there’s a support network off the diamond, too.

Duvall joined the mix Friday. Marlins catcher Jacob Stallings, Seattle second baseman Adam Frazier and free agent Phil Gosselin also have taken part.

“We’ve got a lot of guys up at Vanderbilt that train. It’s a get-ready environment,” Kemp said in a phone interview. “Honestly it’s just a true blessing."

“I can’t thank Corbin enough. It’s the best, you have a bunch of guys and it makes for a good working environment because everyone is in there getting after it," he said. "Even right now we’ve been able to stay ready because we have the guys here that train in Nashville, we almost have enough to field a team.”

Kemp is a new father to 8-week-old daughter McKenna Catherine, who is now sleeping six-hour stretches at night.

“She’s been an angel baby, to be honest,” the proud pop said.

From Judge crushing balls in Tampa to Sale throwing off a mound in Fort Myers at his alma mater of Florida Gulf Coast University, lockout workouts are in full swing.

The two-hour, on-field sessions at USF have all the ingredients of normal spring training. There is stretching, throwing, defensive work and even pitchers tossing live batting practice with major league balls.

Beyond that it’s a whole different ballgame, with no fans and no stadium music.

Team rivalries are irrelevant, and major leaguers mix with minor leaguers. Judge’s teammates, DJ LeMahieu and Luke Voit, have worked out with ex-Yankee Mike Ford, Baltimore’s Richie Martin, Minnesota’s Tim Beckham and Toronto’s Mallex Smith.

The South Florida players and staff have lent a hand.

“We have some great people helping us,” LeMahieu said. “They’re awesome. They’re out there grinding with us. It’s been good to work with some other guys from different organizations.”

Most of the normal amenities are nonexistent.

The big league players occupy most of the parking spots on a small stretch of grass behind the right-field fence. Others park on a nearby side street, bringing along equipment bags with names like Dodgers and Marlins stenciled on them.

There are no post-workout meals or showers. When the session ends, the players collect their gear and go to their vehicles. A few change shirts in the lot before departing.

The venues also vary greatly.

The USF Baseball Stadium opened in 2011 and is considered a facility that could host a NCAA regional or super regional.

Urshela and Torres have been at a high school about 15 minutes away from Steinbrenner Field, the currently empty Yankees’ spring training complex. The park features a quaint set of metal bleachers behind the plate and a small press box above the red-painted, third-base dugout.

Tampa Bay Rays pitcher Nick Anderson might have the most unusual location — he's tossing in the parking lot of his physical therapist’s office. The right-hander, expected to start the season on the injured list because of an elbow injury, plays catch there after getting treatment.

“You’re never too big to play some catch in a parking lot,” Anderson told the Tampa Bay Times.

The labor strife has brought about challenges, but also opportunities.

The South Florida players get the chance to interact with big leaguers and are displaying extra enthusiasm while shagging batting practice. At Florida Gulf Coast, Sale threw off the mound to some of the players.

“The thing that stands out to me most about these guys is their character,” USF baseball coach Billy Mohl posted on his Twitter account. “They are great ambassadors to the game of baseball and great human beings.”

And also, the weather has cooperated. Sunny skies and warm temperatures have prevailed.

“Awesome,” LeMahieu said. “It’s good to be outside.”

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AP Baseball Writer Janie McCauley contributed to this report.

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