Feminists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries fervently campaigned for women’s suffrage in the United States by organizing, petitioning and picketing.  One hundred years ago this month they were finally granted the right to vote through passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. From the time the amendment was introduced to Congress in 1878, it took more than 40 years for it to be passed and then ratified by three-quarters of the states. The fight to vote goes back to the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Held at Weslyan Methodist Church, the convention was attended by an estimated 300 people, including abolitionist Frederick Douglass. No women of color were present.  The church is now part of the Women’s Rights At the first women’s rights convention, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the principle author of the Declaration of Sentiments, a document that called for equality with men, including the right to vote.Delegates included Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the principle author of the Declaration of Sentiments, a document written at the convention calling for equality with men, including the right to vote.During the early 20th century, a new generation of women continued the struggle with protests, silent vigils, hunger strikes and parades. This parade took place by the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. in 1913.“They give speeches for women’s suffrage in public to rally male audiences and go into crowds of men at factory gates at lunchtime, and they often win them over,” DuBois said.  Renewed momentum, along with President Woodrow Wilson changing his stance and supporting the amendment in 1918, eventually led to its passage two years later.  A century later, many women still face voter suppression, says the League of Women Voters, including “forcing discriminatory voter ID and proof-of citizenship restrictions on eligible voters, reducing polling place hours in communities of color, and illegally purging voters from the rolls.” Inequalities like these and others may be alleviated through passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, proponents say, which was introduced to Congress in 1923, three years after women gained voting rights. The ERA was approved by the House of Representatives in 1971 and by the Senate in 1972. It was ratified by three-quarters of the states in January 2020 — years after the deadline.  Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, argues that if the deadline was removed, the amendment that says “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex,” could become a part of the Constitution.  Like women who fought for voting rights, Smeal said, “the Equal Rights Amendment is very important because it establishes that all women must be treated equally under our Constitution.”   Among other things, she explains, it will end pay, education and insurance discrimination, and help prevent violence against women. 
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A U.S. disease expert says COVID-19 survivors may expect to be immune from another case for as long as one year. Former Food and Drug Administration official Dr. Scott Gottleib appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday to talk about new findings by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that say a three-month immunity is a certainty.  “But it’s probably the case that you’re going to have a period of immunity that lasts anywhere from six to 12 months. It’s going to be highly variable. Some people will have less immunity, some people will have slightly more. But it’s good news that they’re able to document that people have really sterile immunity. They’re not going to get reinfected for at least three months and probably longer than that after infection.” But Gottlieb cautioned that the COVID-19 is called the novel (new) coronavirus for a reason – there is still much that doctors don’t know about it. With the U.S. closing in on 170,00 coronavirus deaths, experts at the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics predict that number will hit 186,000 by September 1 and more than 390,000 by December 1.  Health officials have not been able to convince enough people to wear masks and practice social distancing to slow the spread of the disease.A man wearing a face mask walks across the street in Los Angeles, Friday, Aug. 7, 2020.U.S. scientists say they have isolated infectious particles of the coronavirus as far as 4.8 meters away from hospitalized patients. The scientists said the widely accepted 2-meter social distancing advice provides a “false sense of security” and could result in large groups of people being exposed to the disease. The study, conducted at the university of Florida Health Shands Hospital, has not been peer reviewed.   The Italian cruise ship MSC Grandiosa will began a voyage to the Mediterranean on Sunday, after it and four sister cruise ships were idled by the coronavirus pandemic in Civitavecchia, one of the world’s busiest ports.  The five ships can hold a total of 26,000 people. The four other ships will also resume operations soon, positioning Italy as the epicenter of the effort to resume cruises worldwide.   
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A rare summer thunderstorm brought lightning that sparked several small blazes in Northern California on Sunday and stoked a huge forest fire that has forced hundreds of people from their homes north of Los Angeles.  More than 4,500 buildings remained threatened by the wildfire, which was burning toward thick, dry brush in the Angeles National Forest. Firefighters already battling the blaze in steep, rugged terrain in scorching heat faced more hurdles Saturday when hundreds of lightning strikes and winds up to 15 mph (24 kph) pushed the flames uphill.”We set up a containment line at the top of the hills so the fire doesn’t spill over to the other side and cause it to spread, but it was obviously difficult given the erratic wind and some other conditions,” said fire spokesman Jake Miller.The Lake Fire was just 12% contained as of Sunday morning and has burned nearly 28 square miles (72 square kilometers) of brush and trees. Fire officials said 33 buildings had been destroyed, including at least a dozen homes.  Temperatures were expected to hit the mid 90s to 100s, Miller said, a slight drop from Saturday when the mercury hit 111 degrees (44 Celsius) on Saturday at the firefighters’ base camp. Thunderstorm and gusty wind could return in the late afternoon.Thunderstorm and excessive heat were also a concern for firefighters battling a blaze that blackened almost 4 square miles (10 square kilometers) in the foothills above the Los Angeles suburb of Azusa. The fire, believed to be started Thursday by a homeless man, is only 3% contained.Many areas of the state saw triple-digit temperatures through the weekend and the combination of prolonged heat and smoke from wildfires sent ozone pollution to levels not seen in a decade in some areas. Air quality may reach unhealthy to very unhealthy levels in several regions of Southern California on Sunday and Monday afternoons, the South Coast Air Quality Management District said.  In Northern California, a thunderstorm moving rapidly from the Pacific Ocean onshore brought thunder and more than 4,000 lightning strikes, some of which ignited small fires and knocked out power across the San Francisco Bay Area.  Wind gusts reached 75 mph (121 kph), according to the National Weather Service.  “This is probably the most widespread and violent summer thunderstorm event in memory for Bay Area, & it’s also one of the hottest nights in years,” tweeted Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.Unsettling weather triggered an unusual warning by the weather service of a fire-induced tornado at an out-of-control forest fire that broke out north of Lake Tahoe on Saturday afternoon.  A massive fire cloud known as a pyrocumulonimbus formed over the fire, which started east of the town of Loyalton. When high winds came into contact with the fire and whipped it into the air, a spectacular tornado-shaped spiral of flames was formed.  The fire has burned at least 31 square miles (80 square kilometers) and triggered evacuation orders for sparsely populated portions of Plumas, Lassen and Sierra County, said Tahoe National Forest spokesman Joe Flannery.  Firefighters aided by water-dropping helicopters and air tankers faced “extreme fire behavior,” he said, and worked through the night to extinguish spot fires and protect threatened structures.  At one point, the fast-moving fire jumped a highway and came dangerously close to a fire truck. A fire crew from Truckee tweeted a video of firefighters dragging hoses as they ran alongside a moving truck that was dodging the flames.
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Out on her first day of knocking on doors in the Bay Area, the census taker had limited success getting people to answer the questions on the 2020 census.Residents at only two homes answered all the questions about how many people lived there, what their relationships were and their sex, age, race and whether they’re Hispanic. No one was home at three households, residents at two homes wouldn’t give her the time of day, and the rest only answered some questions.Workers on the front-lines of the massive effort trying to count everyone in the U.S. have faced unprecedented obstacles in the last phase of the 2020 census: people wary of talking to strangers in a pandemic and distrustful of government; a shortened schedule; administrative snafus, and nagging concerns about the quality of the protective equipment they’ve received.The California census taker and others interviewed by The Associated Press asked not to be identified for fear of losing their jobs — they are prohibited by the bureau from talking to reporters. Up to a half million census takers started hitting the streets last week to knock on the doors of around 56 million homes that haven’t yet responded to the 2020 census. The AP talked to two census takers in California, two in Alaska and one each in Florida and Massachusetts, and the concerns they raised were similar.A 2020 census letter and a multilingual guide mailed to a U.S. resident in Fairfax, Virginia, March 12, 2020. (Photo: Diaa Bekheet)Following her training, the California census taker tried to establish a rapport by smiling frequently, but that chemistry was hampered by her mask. She also told them she was just trying to do her job in an effort to win them over. She was taken aback by how reluctant people were last Tuesday, either for privacy reasons or distrust of the government.At a couple of houses, she knew the family, but even then they didn’t want to be interviewed by her, though they were happy to share neighborhood gossip.Several census workers said they wished the personal protective equipment the Census Bureau gave them was of higher quality. The census takers, also called enumerators, were given white cloth masks, some made by underwear manufacturer HanesBrands, and a small bottle of bourbon-scented hand sanitizer made by a distillery in Oklahoma. Census takers also were told to conduct interviews outside as much as possible and maintain 6 feet (2 meters) of distance from people they interview.The Florida enumerator said her mask was flimsy and too big for her face. One of the California census takers described the masks as “stretchy” and lacking a filter. A spokeswoman for the Census Bureau said the masks conformed to CDC guidelines, were washable and could be reused up to 10 times.Johnny Zuagar, who is president of a union that represents permanent census workers but not the temporary census takers, said he thought the Census Bureau did the best it could on masks, given the competition from other companies in ordering 2.4 million masks.”They are trying to do something unprecedented,” said Zuagar, president of Census Council 241.The census helps determine how $1.5 trillion in federal spending is distributed and how many congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state gets.Some of the census takers said the training they received was fraught with administrative confusion. The Florida census taker received a phone call two weeks ago, asking her to show up for an in-person training session across town 10 minutes before it was supposed to start. A week later, after she met her supervisor, she still had not been able to start her online training sessions because she was switched into another group of enumerators and her new supervisor had not yet contacted her.One of the California census-takers said he was sent an email notice about a virtual training session hours after it was supposed to have taken place. No one told the Massachusetts census taker he needed to bring his Social Security card or passport for in-person training.The Massachusetts census taker said he had been disappointed in the way his supervisor was communicating with him.The 2020 census has been whip-lashed by a constantly changing schedule. The door-knocking phase was supposed to start in May and wrap up at the end of July, but the pandemic pushed the start for most census takers back to August with a deadline for wrapping up the head count at the end of October.But the Census Bureau recently announced it would end the count a month early, at the end of September, after requests for deadline extensions stalled in Congress. The inaction in the Republican-controlled Senate coincides with a memorandum President Donald Trump issued last month to try to exclude people living in the U.S. illegally from being part of the process for redrawing congressional districts.Census takers this year have to reach 8 million more homes than they did in 2010, and they have only six weeks instead of the 10 weeks they did a decade ago, according to an analysis by the Center for Urban Research at CUNY. Forty-eight senators, including Alaska’s two Republican senators, last week sent a letter to Senate and House leaders urging them to extend the deadlines.The Alaska census taker worried that lopping off a month from the schedule would sabotage the count.In Idaho, Wendy Jaquet, who is co-chairing that state’s census efforts, says she’s already seeing the impact of the door-knockers as the state’s response rate has edged up this week.”That has made me more encouraged,” Jaquet said.Census advocates and some U.S. Census Bureau officials have said the extensions were needed, not only to get the work done, but also to avoid confusing people about when the census was ending.”We are fearful that a lot of undercounted communities will not complete it because they think it ends Oct. 31,” said Sabeen Perwaiz, who is leading an alliance of nonprofits in effort to increase census participation in Florida. “We absolutely think there will be some confusion in communities.
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