Whether you’re looking to fly through the air with the greatest of ease, explore the aerial arts, or just raise your spirits, the Trapeze School in Washington, DC, will make sure things are looking up. Maxim Moskalkov visited the school and met its many instructors.
Camera: David Gogokhia
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Former President Barack Obama commemorated the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Saturday as a man “who got things done,” as Democratic leaders gathered from around the country to recall Reid—often laughingly—as a man whose impatience for pleasantries was part of a drive to improve the lives of ordinary Americans.

The turnout at Reid’s Las Vegas memorial service testified to Reid’s impact on some of the most consequential legislation of the 21st century, despite coming from a childhood of poverty and deprivation in Nevada. President Joe Biden escorted Reid’s widow, Landra Reid, to her seat at the outset of services, before an honor guard bore a flag-draped casket to the well of a hushed auditorium.

Reid died December 28 at home in Henderson, Nevada, at 82 of complications from pancreatic cancer. 

“Let there be no doubt. Harry Reid will be considered one of the greatest Senate majority leaders in history,” Biden said, as leaders credited Reid’s work on strengthening health care and on Wall Street reform and economic recovery in the wake of the 2008 recession.

Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who described Reid to mourners as a “truly honest and original character,” spoke during an invitation-only memorial. Former President Barack Obama, who credits Reid for his rise to the White House, delivered the eulogy.

Obama said that when Reid helped pass the Affordable Care Act, “he didn’t do it to burnish his own legacy,” recalling how, as a boy, Reid’s family was so poor that Reid himself pulled out one of his father’s teeth.

“He did it for the people back home and families like his, who needed somebody looking out for them, when nobody else did. Harry got things done,” Obama said.

“The thing about Harry, he never gave up. He never gave up. He never gave up on anybody who cared about him,” said Biden, who served for two decades with Reid in the Senate and worked with him for eight years when Biden was vice president.

“If Harry said he was going to do something, he did it,” Biden added. “You could bank on it.” 

Reid’s son, Leif, was one of a series of speakers who recalled his father’s well-known habit of abruptly hanging up on telephone conversations without saying goodbye, sometimes leaving the other person—whether powerful politicians or close family—chatting away for several minutes before they realized he was no longer there. 

Leif Reid said it was “part of the narrative” of his father’s life, and tried to explain that the gesture was more about Reid preserving time for family. 

“When he hung up on you, maybe so quickly, it isn’t as much about him being brusque as it is about him being devoted to my mom,” Leif Reid said. 

“I probably got hung up on the most by Harry Reid, two or three times a day, for 12 years”—Pelosi told mourners. 

“Sometimes I even called him back and said Harry, ‘I was singing your praises,’” Pelosi said. To which Reid replied: “I don’t want to hear it,” she said, before she’d hear the phone click dead. 

Reid served for 34 years in Washington and led the Senate through a crippling recession and the Republican takeover of the House after the 2010 elections.

Harry Mason Reid hitchhiked 40 miles (64 kilometers) to high school and was an amateur boxer before he was elected to the Nevada state Assembly at age 28. He had graduated from Utah State University and worked nights as a U.S. Capitol police officer while attending George Washington University Law School in Washington. 

In 1970, at age 30, he was elected lieutenant governor with Democratic Gov. Mike O’Callaghan. Reid was elected to the House in 1982 and the Senate in 1986.

He built a political machine in Nevada that for years helped Democrats win key elections. When he retired in 2016 after an exercise accident at home left him blind in one eye, he picked former Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto to replace him.

Cortez Masto became the first woman from Nevada and the first Latina ever elected to the U.S. Senate. 

Those flying to Las Vegas will arrive at the newly renamed Harry Reid International Airport. It was previously named for Pat McCarran, a former Democratic U.S. senator from Nevada who once owned the airfield and whose legacy is clouded by racism and anti-Semitism.
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“It’s still a unique thing to see a woman driver in the cab of a large truck, but it’s not as unique as it used to be,” Sherri Garner Brumbaugh, president and CEO of Garner Trucking Inc. told VOA. “The number of women operators is increasing, and when I see one driving a truck, I still give them a thumbs up and a smile because they’re changing our industry.” 

It’s a change experts say has been decades in the making and one accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic, leading more American women to embark on a career traversing the nation’s highways driving the biggest vehicles on the road. 

Trucking outfits need all the bodies they can get at a time when the number of trailers loaded with goods far exceeds the number of drivers who can get them to their destinations. Surging consumer spending has outpaced the ability of the U.S. supply chain to transport all that Americans want to buy. 

For many companies, recruiting women truck drivers is helping fill the labor shortage. 

“Back in the middle of the twentieth century, people saw trucking as a ‘man’s job’ because of how physically demanding it was,” said Ellen Voie, president and CEO of Women in Trucking, a nonprofit that encourages the employment of women in the field. “Technological improvements like power steering, power brakes, the way you drop your trailer and so much more make it so you don’t have to be this big, burly man to do the job anymore. 

“And, in fact, women are proving they have specific talents that — in a lot of ways — make them especially suited for the job.” 

 

Rising number of women drivers 

Georgia-based driver Vanita Johnson has been on the road as a trucker for nearly a year. 

“I’m 50 years old and just started this new career, but I’ve been amazed by trucks since I was a little girl,” Johnson said. 

She has youthful memories of driving with her parents from their Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, home to visit family in West Virginia, Maryland, and Ohio. While on the highways, she’d see truck after truck and wonder where they were headed. 

Voie says Americans have traditionally held truck drivers in high regard as part of their romanticism of the open road. 

“Truck drivers used to be called the ‘Knights of the Road,’” she said. “We saw them as not only literally carrying the American economy in their trucks, but also being out there to help us regular, four-wheel drivers if something went wrong. They were American knights and it was a noble profession.” 

That vision has been eroded in recent decades. Waves of experienced drivers have retired, and there’s been a lack of younger drivers entering the field to replace them. The American Trucking Association estimates the industry will need more than 1.2 million new drivers over the next decade, forcing companies to do a better job of enticing recruits. 

“Those of us in charge of trucking companies are having to find ways to better meet the needs of potential drivers,” Brumbaugh explained. “That means if a driver says they need to be home on weekends, we must find a way to make that happen. But it also means attracting this untapped potential group of women drivers—particularly those who are middle aged and older—for whom being out driving on the open road could be appealing.” 

The industry’s overtures appear to be working, if slowly. 

While only about 3% of truck drivers were women in 2007, the year Women in Trucking was founded, a recent survey by the group found the percentage had more than tripled. 

Discovering the open road 

It’s the pandemic that has brought many women, Vanita Johnson included, into the trucking industry. 

“I had been working in education for years, but always remembered my childhood dream of becoming a trucker,” she said. “When we were switching to virtual classrooms because of coronavirus, that wasn’t something I wanted to do. I left my job, tried to figure out what was next, and that’s when I decided to get my license.” 

Johnson said she was surprised to see that six of the 10 graduates in her truck driving class were women. 

“There are so many incredible women, including women much older than me, out on the road. Women of all shapes, sizes, ages, and race,” she said. “It’s a sisterhood out here.” 

Voie said she’s seeing many new drivers who, like Johnson, discover a love for their new career. 

“First off, it’s a job that pays well when so many other people are losing their jobs, and it’s a job that gives you independence when people are worried about COVID,” she said. “But it’s also a job that gives you the freedom to drive from coast to coast, that lets you visit family and friends along the way, and that lets you take in sunrises and sunsets most of us miss. Many of the women I speak with are rediscovering what has historically made the job so special.” 

A difficult job 

For all its positives, however, being a truck driver is anything but easy. 

Long hours and stretches of time far from home, sleeping in your truck and navigating America’s busy interstates are just some of the challenges drivers face. 

“It’s one of the most dangerous jobs there is,” said Kellylynn McLaughlin, who has been a truck driver for more than seven years and helps train new drivers. “You have to understand the equipment, and you also have to be constantly anticipating what’s happening out there while driving.” 

There are also issues of harassment women must worry about in an industry where men still far outnumber women. 

That harassment can encompass anything from dangerous and uncomfortable situations while training in close quarters with members of the opposite sex to enduring mocking and unwanted attention when pulling into a loading area during the day — or a truck stop at night. 

“The first three months of driving, I would organize my schedule so I didn’t have to pull into truck stops after dark,” McLaughlin remembered. “I’ve got long, blonde hair and there’s no mistaking I’m a woman when I’d pull in with my truck. It felt like I was driving through a gauntlet of guys waiting to see if I’d screw up. I’d rather start super early so I didn’t have to deal with that.” 

A rewarding job 

But McLaughlin said, as her skills improved, so did her confidence. 

“Now I feel like, ‘You know what? Let them look, because I’m damn good at this!’” she said, smiling. “I remember pulling into a loading dock and hearing someone yell up the dock that it’s a woman driver. All these guys came out on the platform to watch with their arms crossed, and I absolutely nailed it. My heart was beating out of my chest, but I was perfect and they recognized how good I was at my job.” 

Voie noted that research is increasingly showing there are advantages for companies employing more women drivers. 

“According to the American Transportation Research Institute, male commercial drivers are 20% more likely to be involved in a crash in every statistically significant area than their female counterparts,” Voie said. “The data shows women are safer and more risk averse, so even when they’re involved in an accident, it’s at a slower speed with less loss of life and less damage to equipment.” 

Voie said she’s heard many reports in the industry that women provide better customer service and take better care of their equipment. 

But Johnson said in her year on the job, though she’s dealt with difficult situations with male drivers, she doesn’t see the relationship between male and women drivers as adversarial. 

“For every guy out there that’s no good, there are a dozen who are wonderful and who want us to succeed because they see us as colleagues,” she said. “My experience on the road has been wonderful. I meet incredible people, see our beautiful country, and help people get the goods they need during a challenging time for America. I couldn’t be happier with my choice to become a trucker.” 
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Lani Guinier, a civil rights lawyer and scholar whose nomination by President Bill Clinton to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division was pulled after conservatives criticized her views on correcting racial discrimination, has died. She was 71.

Guinier died Friday, Harvard Law School Dean John F. Manning said in a message to students and faculty. Her cousin, Sherrie Russell-Brown, said in an email that the cause was complications due to Alzheimer’s disease.

Guinier became the first woman of color appointed to a tenured professorship at Harvard law school when she joined the faculty in 1998. Before that she was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school. She had previously headed the voting rights project at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in the 1980s and served during President Jimmy Carter’s administration in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which she was later nominated to head.

“I have always wanted to be a civil rights lawyer. This lifelong ambition is based on a deep-seated commitment to democratic fair play — to playing by the rules as long as the rules are fair. When the rules seem unfair, I have worked to change them, not subvert them,” she wrote in her 1994 book, Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy.

Clinton, who knew Guinier going back to when they both attended Yale’s law school, nominated her to the Justice Department post in 1993. But Guinier, who wrote as a law professor about ways to remedy racial discrimination, came under fire from conservative critics who called her views extreme and labeled her “quota queen.” Guinier said that label was untrue, that she didn’t favor quotas or even write about them, and that her views had been mischaracterized.

Clinton, in withdrawing her nomination, said he hadn’t read her academic writing before nominating her and would not have done so if he had.

In a press conference held at the Justice Department after her nomination was withdrawn, Guinier said, “Had I been allowed to testify in a public forum before the United States Senate, I believe that the Senate also would have agreed that I am the right person for this job, a job some people have said I have trained for all my life.”

Guinier said she was “greatly disappointed that I have been denied the opportunity to go forward, to be confirmed, and to work closely to move this country away from the polarization of the last 12 years, to lower the decibel level of the rhetoric that surrounds race and to build bridges among people of good will to enforce the civil rights laws on behalf of all Americans.”

 

She was more pointed in an address to an NAACP conference a month later.

“I endured the personal humiliation of being vilified as a madwoman with strange hair — you know what that means — a strange name and strange ideas, ideas like democracy, freedom and fairness that mean all people must be equally represented in our political process,” Guinier said. “But lest any of you feel sorry for me, according to press reports the president still loves me. He just won’t give me a job.”

On Twitter Friday, NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund head Sherrilyn Ifill called Guinier “my mentor” and a “scholar of uncompromising brilliance.”

Manning, the Harvard law dean, said: “Her scholarship changed our understanding of democracy — of why and how the voices of the historically underrepresented must be heard and what it takes to have a meaningful right to vote. It also transformed our understanding of the educational system and what we must do to create opportunities for all members of our diverse society to learn, grow, and thrive in school and beyond.”

Penn Law Dean Emeritus Colin Diver, whose time as dean overlapped with Guinier’s time on the faculty, said she “pushed the envelope in many important and constructive ways: advocating for alternative voting methods, such as cumulative voting, questioning the implicit expectations of law school faculty that female students behave like ‘gentlemen,’ or proposing alternative methods for evaluating and selecting applicants to the Law School.”

Carol Lani Guinier was born April 19, 1950, in New York City. Her father, Ewart Guinier, became the first chairman of Harvard University’s Department of Afro-American Studies. Her mother, Eugenia “Genii” Paprin Guinier, became a civil rights activist. The couple — he was Black and she was white and Jewish — were married at a time when it was still illegal for interracial couples to marry in many states.

Lani Guinier, who graduated from Harvard’s Radcliffe College, is survived by her husband, Nolan Bowie, and son, Nikolas Bowie, also a Harvard law school professor.

“My mom deeply believed in democracy, yet she thought it can work only if power is shared, not monopolized. That insight informed everything she did, from treating generations of students as peers to challenging hierarchies wherever she found them. I miss her terribly,” her son wrote in an email.

Other survivors include a stepdaughter, daughter-in-law and granddaughter. 

 
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U.S. President Joe Biden, visiting the scene of Colorado’s most destructive wildfire on record, said on Friday the rare winter blaze marked the latest “code red” reminder of an ominously changing climate he hopes to confront with his renewable energy agenda. 

“We can’t ignore the reality that these fires are being supercharged” by global warming, Biden said after touring a neighborhood in the Denver-area town of Louisville reduced to ruins by last week’s devastating Marshall Fire. 

Two people were missing and feared dead after the wind-driven, prairie-grass fire incinerated more than 1,000 dwellings on December 30-31, making it the most destructive Colorado blaze on record in terms of property losses. 

The fire in Boulder County, on the northern outskirts of the Denver metropolitan area, charred 6,000 acres and laid waste to parts of Louisville and the adjacent town of Superior. Fanned by gale-force winds, the flames at times devoured football-field-size stretches of drought-parched landscape in seconds. 

Biden’s trip to Boulder County marked his second as president to Colorado and his second focused on wildfires. 

Under bright sunny skies, the president and first lady Jill Biden walked through a flame-ravaged Louisville neighborhood where blackened rubble and scorched tree trunks poked through a blanket of snow. They spoke briefly with emergency workers and families displaced by the blaze. 

The president, pausing to embrace some residents and place a hand on the shoulders of others, was joined on the tour by Colorado Governor Jared Polis and three members of the state’s congressional delegation. 

“We lost everything,” one man said. Biden gave him a hug. 

Addressing first-responders and members of the community at a nearby recreation center later, Biden said he was as moved by the scope of devastation he saw as he was by “the incredible courage and resolve that you all show.” 

“We’re going to make sure that everything you need occurs,” Biden told the crowd. 

He noted the blaze was the latest in a string of highly destructive wildfires in Colorado and elsewhere in the West that experts say are symptomatic of extreme drought and rising temperatures associated with climate change. 

“The situation is a blinking code red for our nation,” he said. 

Biden also used the occasion to make a pitch for his chief legislative initiative, the Build Back Better Act, which would funnel billions of dollars to enhanced forest management, firefighting and efforts to reduce carbon emissions. 

The bill, opposed by Republicans, passed the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives in November. It must still clear the Senate, where it has yet to secure the needed support of all of Biden’s fellow Democrats. 

While acknowledging such measures offer no immediate solace to survivors of last week’s fire, he said greater investments in renewable energy would spur major job growth while addressing the looming threat of more climate-related calamities. 

Biden has declared the latest fire zone on the eastern fringe of the Rocky Mountains a national disaster, freeing up federal funds to assist residents and businesses in recovery efforts. 

The normal wildfire season in Colorado does not typically extend into the winter thanks to snow cover and bracing cold. But climate change and rising global temperatures are leaving vegetation in parts of the western United States drier and more incendiary. 

Insured losses from the fire are expected to run about $1 billion, according to catastrophe modeling firm Karen Clark & Company. 

Local authorities put the value of residential property damage alone at more than $500 million. 
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U.S. employers added 199,000 new jobs in December, 50,000 fewer than November, the Labor Department reported Friday, as business continue to struggle to fill vacancies due to American workers’ reluctance to return to the workforce during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Despite the hiring slowdown, December’s jobless rate fell to a healthy 3.9% — a 22-month low — from November’s 4.2%.

December’s modest jobs gains belie the fact that 2021 was one of the best years for U.S. workers in decades, even though the pandemic caused the previous year to be one of the job market’s worst since the government began tracking hiring in 1939.

A monthly average of 537,000 jobs were added to the economy in 2021, the Labor Department said Friday, and a record 6.4 million jobs were created”America is back to work,” President Biden declared Friday before reporters at the White House. “The increase in Americans joining the labor force was the fastest this year of any year since 1996.”

Companies posted a record high number of job vacancies in 2021 and offered sharply higher pay to try to attract and retain employees, a record number of whom quit their jobs in search of higher-quality positions.

Biden said U.S. workers saw their wages increase last year by nearly 16%, “the highest in history.”

“Wage gains for all workers who are not supervisors went up more in 2021 than any year in four decades. There’s been a lot of press coverage of people quitting their jobs,” Biden said. “Well, today’s report tells you why: Americans are moving up to better jobs with better pay, with better benefits. That’s why they’re quitting their jobs.”

December’s report reflects the state of the economy early in the month, before the highly contagious omicron variant sickened millions of people in the U.S., forcing the cancellation of thousands of commercial flights and leading to reduced traffic at bars and restaurants and some school closures.

Many economists believe job growth may slow in January and possibly in February because of the omicron outbreak, which has forced millions of sick workers to quarantine at home, potentially disrupting employers, including hospitals, airlines and ski resorts.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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