the "Headline That Caught My Attention or the WTF" thread

‘My Watch Thinks I’m Dead’​

Dispatchers for 911 are being inundated with false, automated distress calls from Apple devices owned by skiers who are very much alive.

FRISCO, Colo. — On a recent sunny Sunday morning, following a night of fluffy snowfall, tens of thousands of skiers flocked to the resorts of Summit County. Just minutes after the lift lines opened, sirens began blaring in the 911 emergency service center, where four staff members were taking calls and dispatching help.

Each jarring alert was a new incoming call, heralding a possible car crash, heart attack or other life-threatening situation. Often, the phone operators heard a chilling sound at the far end of the line: silence, perhaps from a caller too incapacitated to respond.

At 9:07 a.m., one dispatcher, Eric Betts, responded to such a call. From the map on one of the seven monitors on his desk, he could see that the distress call originated from a slope at the Arapahoe Basin Ski Area. Mr. Betts tried calling back. A man picked up.

“Do you have an emergency?” Mr. Betts asked. No, the man said, he was skiing — safely, happily, unharmed. Slightly annoyed, he added, “For the last three days, my watch has been dialing 911.”

Winter has brought a decent amount of snowfall to the region’s ski resorts, and with it an avalanche of false emergency calls. Virtually all of them have been placed by Apple Watches or iPhone 14s under the mistaken impression that their owners have been debilitated in collisions.

As of September, these devices have come equipped with technology meant to detect car crashes and alert 911 dispatchers. It is a more sensitive upgrade to software on Apple devices, now several years old, that can detect when a user falls and then dial for help. But the latest innovation appears to send the device into overdrive: It keeps mistaking skiers, and some other fitness enthusiasts, for car-wreck victims.

Lately, emergency call centers in some ski regions have been inundated with inadvertent, automated calls, dozens or more a week. Phone operators often must put other calls, including real emergencies, on hold to clarify whether the latest siren has been prompted by a human at risk or an overzealous device.

“My whole day is managing crash notifications,” said Trina Dummer, interim director of Summit County’s emergency services, which received 185 such calls in the week from Jan. 13 to Jan. 22. (In winters past, the typical call volume on a busy day was roughly half that.) Ms. Dummer said that the onslaught was threatening to desensitize dispatchers and divert limited resources from true emergencies.

“Apple needs to put in their own call center if this is a feature they want,” she said.

Her call center and others have alerted Apple to the issue. In mid-January, the company sent four representatives to observe Ms. Dummer and her team for a day; she said they had plenty of examples to show off.

In a written statement, Alex Kirschner, an Apple spokesman, said, “We have been aware that in some specific scenarios these features have triggered emergency services when a user didn’t experience a severe car crash or hard fall.” The company noted that when a crash is detected, the watch buzzes and sends a loud warning alerting the user that a call is being placed to 911, and it provides 10 seconds in which to cancel the call.

Apple also said that updates to the software late last year had been intended to “optimize” the technology and reduce the number of false calls. Mr. Kirschner added, “Crash Detection and Fall Detection are designed to get users help when they need it most, and it has already contributed to saving several lives.”

Apple maintains a collection of incidents in which the two technologies have come to the rescue. In one case, an Apple Watch alerted the authorities after a driver in Indianapolis had crashed into a telephone pole and the device dialed for assistance. In another, a watch called for help after a New Jersey man fell down a steep cliff while hiking.

In Colorado, call dispatchers had trouble recalling an instance in which a watch had saved a skier in distress. (Ms. Dummer added that her team had “very rarely” received false 911 calls from other companies’ devices, such as Android phones.)

The problem extends beyond skiers. “My watch regularly thinks I’ve had an accident,” said Stacey Torman, who works for Salesforce in London and teaches spin classes there. She might be safely on the bike, exhorting her class to ramp up the energy, or waving her arms to congratulate them, when her Apple Watch senses danger.

“I want to celebrate, but my watch really doesn’t want me to celebrate,” she said. Oh great, she thinks, “now my watch thinks I’m dead.”

Recently she fell while racing to catch a bus in the rain. “I went down hard, really hard,” she said. Her watch did not call 911, however. “When I did actually fall running for the bus?” she said. “Crickets.”

Jon Baron, who works in real estate in Golden, Colo., has an Apple Watch that has twice dialed the authorities. Once, he was at an amusement park playing the strongman game, in which the goal is to hit a lever with a hammer firmly enough to ring a bell. Mr. Baron swung, the bell rang, his wife and children seemed duly impressed — until “my watch started making this noise like an air-raid siren,” he said.
“I was trying to show I was physically able, which I thought I’d demonstrated fairly aptly, but my watch thought different,” he added.

Another time, Mr. Baron was in the Tampa airport when the intercom summoned him to a white paging telephone. An emergency services operator at the other end told him his device had dialed 911 for help. Was he OK? “I’m doing all right,” he said he had told the operator. “But I have a plane to catch.”

Apple introduced fall detection technology in 2018 after developing an algorithm based on the trajectory of a wrist wearing a watch and acceleration at time of impact. Its crash-detection technology, introduced in September, was tested in crash tests and labs on iPhones and Apple Watches.

But something about the way skiers accelerate and stop, or jostle, seems to set the technology on edge. And skiers, in helmets and layers of clothing, often do not to detect the warning, so they may not cancel the call or respond to the 911 dispatcher.

“A lot of people don’t feel it or hear it,” said Brett Loeb, emergency services communications director in Pitkin County, Colo., home to Aspen Mountain. Or, he proposed, even when they feel the vibration, “they think, ‘I don’t want to answer my phone right now — I’m having a great time; my phone is killing my buzz.’”

He noted that Aspen Mountain had recently posted signs at lift lines and ticket offices alerting Apple Watch and iPhone 14 users to the problem and encouraging them to upgrade to the latest software version or disable the service, to “prevent unnecessary trips to the slopes” by 911-dispatched ambulances.

At the Summit County call center on Sunday morning, Ms. Dummer was training a rookie dispatch supervisor, Jeff Fitch, to field 911 calls, while Mr. Betts and another dispatcher, David Benson, handled the overflow and communicated with ambulances and the police.

The siren went off, and Mr. Fitch picked up the call. “911,” he said into his headset. “Hello?” A monitor displayed the caller’s location on the ski slope; another displayed the caller’s number. Mr. Fitch leaned forward into the silence: “Hello?”

The watch calls kept coming; the siren kept blaring. Amid it all, Ms. Dummer and Mr. Fitch fielded a genuine distress call from a 78-year-old driver who was having trouble breathing. Traffic was bad, hindering ambulance access, and the dispatch team was calling two nearby counties for help.

Just before noon, Mark Watson, a sergeant with the sheriff’s office, walked into the dispatch room looking glum. “This is not a good day,” he said.

Ordinarily, he had other duties, including patrolling the backcountry on snowmobile, but the ghost calls had kept him at his desk. Whenever the 911 operators were unable to reach the owner of the watch or phone, the case was referred to Sergeant Watson, who would try calling and sending a text; if he didn’t hear back, he forwarded the issue to the ski patrol.

So far that day, Sergeant Watson had fielded seven referrals from 911, four of which he forwarded to the ski patrol. He turned to Ms. Dummer: How many crash-detection calls had come in overall? Eleven, she said, out of 30 calls total.

“I wanted to check the numbers,” he said. “I was writing a letter to Apple.” He described his basic message to the company: “I’m struggling to get my daily job done. I don’t have all day to do Apple products.”

In Grand County, home to a busy mountain called Winter Park, Sheriff Brett Schroetlin decided in late December to devote less attention to the crash-detection calls. Now if a 911 operator receives one from the slopes and no one is on the other end of the line, they know to ignore the call; no more referrals or follow-ups. None of the ghost calls so far have been real emergencies, Sheriff Schroetlin reasoned, and he couldn’t afford to waste limited resources. Besides, he said, there was a better technology: human beings.

“It’s rare that someone falls on the mountain and there’s not a passer-by,” he said. “We’re hoping to get an actual 911 call from the person or someone on the scene.”
 
Great sarcastic OpEd piece after the idiotic banning of "certain" words by Standford's IT Department was reversed...

‘Hip Hip Hooray!’ ​

Cheering News for Free Speech on Campus​

The following is a celebration of the cancellation of the Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative, an attempt by a committee of I.T. leaders at Stanford University to ban 161 common words and phrases. Of those 161 phrases, I have taken pains to use 45 of them here. Read at your own risk.

Is the media addicted to bad news? It’s not a dumb question, nor are you crazy to ask. After all, we follow tragedy like hounds on the chase, whether it’s stories about teenagers who commit suicide, victims of domestic violence or survivors of accidents in which someone winds up quadriplegic, crippled for life or confined to a wheelchair. We report on the hurdles former convicts face after incarceration, hostile attitudes toward immigrants and the plight of prostitutes and the homeless. Given the perilous state of the planet, you might consider this barrage of ill tidings to be tone-deaf.

Well, I’m happy to report good news, for a change. You might call it a corrective, or a sanity check, but whatever you call it (and what you can call things here is crucial), there have been several positive developments on American campuses. The chilling effects of censorship and shaming that have trapped students between the competing diktats of “silence is violence” and “speech is violence” — the Scylla and Charybdis of campus speech — may finally be showing some cracks.

Matters looked especially grim in December, when the internet discovered the 13-page dystopically titled “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative.” A kind of white paper on contemporary illiberalism, it listed 161 verboten expressions, divided into categories of transgression, including “person-first,” “institutionalized racism” and the blissfully unironic “imprecise language.” The document offered preferred substitutions, many of which required feats of linguistic limbo to avoid simple terms like “insane,” “mentally ill” and — not to beat a dead horse, but I’ll add one more — “rule of thumb.” Naturally, it tore its way across the internet to widespread mockery despite a “content warning” in bold type: “This website contains language that is offensive or harmful. Please engage with this website at your own pace.”

Before you get worked up, know this: A webmaster has taken the site down and the program has been aborted for re-evaluation. Last month, in a welcome display of clear leadership, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Stanford’s president, said the policy, brainchild of a select committee of I.T. leaders, had never been intended as a universitywide policy and reiterated the school’s commitment to free speech. “From the beginning of our time as Stanford leaders, Persis and I have vigorously affirmed the importance and centrality of academic freedom and the rights of voices from across the ideological and political spectrum to express their views at Stanford,” he wrote, referring to the school’s provost, Persis Drell. “I want to reaffirm those commitments today in the strongest terms.”

Could this be a seminal moment for academic freedom? Consider other bright spots: Harvard recently went ahead with its fellowship offer to Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch, which was earlier rejected, reportedly owing to his critical views on Israel. M.I.T.’s faculty voted to embrace a “Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom.” At Yale Law School, which has been roiled by repeated attempts to suppress speech, a conservative lawyer was allowed to appear on a panel with a former president of the A.C.L.U. after protests disrupted her visit the year before. And Hamline University, which had refused to renew an art history professor’s contract because she showed an artwork that some Muslim students may have found offensive, walked back its characterization of her as “Islamophobic.”

Finally, when an office within the School of Social Work at the University of Southern California banned the terms “fieldwork” and “in the field” to describe research projects because their “anti-Black” associations might offend some descendants of American slavery, U.S.C.’s interim provost issued a statement that “The university does not maintain a list of banned or discouraged words.”

It’s hard to know how much these shifting prohibitions distress students, whether freshman or senior, given how scared many are to speak up in the first place.

But we do know two things: First, college students are suffering from anxiety and other mental health issues more than ever before, and second, fewer feel comfortable expressing disagreement lest their peers go on the warpath. It would be a ballsy move to risk being denounced, expelled from their tribe, become black sheep. No one can blame any teenager who has been under a social media pile-on for feeling like a basket case. Why take the chance?

Yet when in life is it more appropriate for people to take risks than in college — to test out ideas and encounter other points of view? College students should be encouraged to use their voices and colleges encouraged to let them be heard. It’s nearly impossible to do this while mastering speech codes, especially when the master lists employ a kind of tribal knowledge known only to their guru creators. A normal person of any age may have trouble submitting, let alone remembering that “African American” is not just discouraged but verboten, that he or she can’t refer to a professor’s “walk-in” hours or call for a brown bag lunch, powwow or stand-up meeting with peers.

“You can’t say that” should not be the common refrain.

According to a 2022 Knight Foundation report, the percentage of college students who say free speech rights are secure has fallen every year since 2016, while the percentage who believe free speech rights are threatened has risen. Nearly two-thirds think the climate at school prevents people from expressing views that others might find offensive. But here, too, let’s convey some good news: The number of students who say controversial speakers should be disinvited has fallen since 2019. And one more cheering note: The editors of The Stanford Review, a student publication, poked gleefully at the document before it was taken down, with the shared impulse — irresistible, really — of using a number of taboo terms in the process.

Surely my ancestors from the ghettos of Eastern Europe couldn’t anticipate that their American descendants would face this kind of policing of speech at institutions devoted to higher learning. (While we’re on history, per the document, but news to all the Jews I know: “Hip hip hooray” was a term “used by German citizens during the Holocaust as a rallying cry when they would hunt down Jewish citizens living in segregated neighborhoods.”)

Consider what learning can flourish under such constraints. In a speech last fall celebrating the 100th anniversary of PEN America, the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie noted: “Many American universities are well-meaning in wanting to keep students comfortable, but they do so at the risk not just of creating an insular, closed space but one where it is almost impossible to admit to ignorance — and in my opinion the ability to admit to ignorance is a wonderful thing. Because it creates an opportunity to learn.”

It is reasonable to wonder whether any conceivable harm to a few on hearing the occasional upsetting term outweighs the harm to everyone in suppressing speech. Or whether overcoming the relatively minor discomforts of an unintentional, insensitive or inept comment might help students develop the resilience necessary to surmount life’s considerably greater challenges — challenges that will are not likely to be mediated by college administrators after they graduate.

Rather than muzzle students, we should allow them to hear and be heard. Opportunities to engage and respond. It’s worth remembering how children once responded to schoolyard epithets: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never harm me.” Narrow restrictions on putatively harmful speech leave young people distracted from and ill-prepared for the actual violence they’ll encounter in the real world.
 
I saw that when it first came out and couldn't stop laughing.

"The following is a celebration of the cancellation of the Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative, an attempt by a committee of I.T. leaders at Stanford University to ban 161 common words and phrases. Of those 161 phrases, I have taken pains to use 45 of them here. Read at your own risk."

This part made me laugh till i cried.
.
.But we do know two things: First, college students are suffering from anxiety and other mental health issues more than ever before, and second, fewer feel comfortable expressing disagreement lest their peers go on the warpath. It would be a ballsy move to risk being denounced, expelled from their tribe, become black sheep. No one can blame any teenager who has been under a social media pile-on for feeling like a basket case. Why take the chance?

They even gave all the alternative answers. I forgot to add that whilst i was laughing,i was shaking my head. and thinking Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot. :oops:
 

Vendor apologizes for school lunch served on 1st day of Black History Month​

WABC logo

Friday, February 3, 2023 4:34PM

NYACK, Rockland County (WABC) -- A food vendor in Rockland County is apologizing for what it calls "unintentional insensitivity" for the hot lunch it offered students on the first day of Black History Month.

Students at Nyack Middle School were given chicken and waffles with watermelon for dessert on Feb. 1.

Vendor apologizes for school lunch served on 1st day of Black History Month
 

Beware of Norwegians bearing Lutefisk, or a Market Lady bearing hot buns...​


Retirees Are Losing Their Life Savings to Romance Scams. Here’s What to Know.​

Con artists are using dating sites to prey on lonely people, particularly older ones, in a pattern that accelerated during the isolation of the pandemic, federal data show.

Con artists are using dating apps to prey on lonely people, and older ones are a growing target. In a pattern that accelerated during the isolation of the coronavirus pandemic, romance scams claimed $139 million from adults age 60 and older in 2020, according to data from the Federal Trade Commission, up from $84 million the year before.

In one of the more alarming episodes of what has become a leading type of fraud aimed at older Americans, a Holocaust survivor was swindled out of his life savings of nearly $3 million, according to a federal indictment unsealed in New York last week.

How do romance scams work?​

Alone at home as Covid-19 spread in the summer of 2020, Kate Kleinert decided to accept a Facebook friend request from a handsome stranger. He described himself as a Norwegian doctor working in Iraq and called himself Tony.

“The loss that hurts the most is losing his love and losing the family that I thought I was going to have,” she said.

Ms. Kleinert’s scammer followed a typical playbook, experts said: claiming to be a professional working abroad; exploiting a victim’s loneliness to quickly establish a bond; building an imagined future with them; and then planning an in-person meeting that depended on the victim’s willingness to part with money.

After a couple of months of daily communication on encrypted messaging apps, Tony began asking for money. By December 2020, Ms. Kleinert, 69, had given Tony and two people claiming to be his children some $39,000 in gift cards. The scam devoured Ms. Kleinert’s savings, her late husband’s life insurance, her pension and her income from Social Security, leaving her destitute.

Ms. Kleinert, who was living in Glenolden, Pa., outside Philadelphia, at the time and now lives in Lancaster County, went to the local police and then the state police. She was told that there was nothing they could do.

“I’ve seen elders mortgage their houses, borrow large sums of money from their neighbors, empty out their retirement accounts,” said Michael Delaney, a Chicago-based lawyer who specializes in elder law.

“It is absolutely astonishing to me how much money someone can get out of an elderly person’s account before anyone really notices and puts a stop to it,” he said.

Why are older people targeted?​

While young people are more likely to fall victim to online scams overall, older people are more susceptible to romance scams. The reason, experts say, is simple: They usually have more money.

Peaches Stergo, the woman charged with wire fraud in the federal case involving the Holocaust survivor, extracted some $2.8 million from the victim, an 87-year-old Manhattan man whom she met on a dating website. Federal prosecutors said she used some of the money to pay for a condominium in Florida, rooms at the Ritz Carlton, gold bars, a Corvette and luxury watches and clothing.

The median loss from a romance scam for people 70 and older in 2021 was $9,000, according to the F.T.C., compared with $2,400 across all age groups.

“When older adults lose money,” said Amy Nofziger, the director of fraud victim support for the AARP, “they lose more money because they have more money to lose.”

The F.B.I. has sounded the alarm about romance scams. In 2021, the bureau said, Americans of all age groups coughed up more than a billion dollars to con artists, up from more than $362 million in 2018.

Can dating sites be held liable?​

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act gives online platforms, including dating sites and apps, immunity from liability for content posted by their users.

The F.T.C. sued Match Group in 2019, alleging that the company, which runs online dating platforms like Match.com, Tinder and Hinge, was allowing fraudsters to disguise themselves as normal daters.
A federal court in Texas dismissed the claims last year, citing Section 230.

Still, in recognition of the problem, Match Group rolled out a public awareness campaign earlier this month alerting users of red flags.

While Section 230 makes it hard to sue online platforms over the content they host, individuals can be held legally liable if they willingly become part of a conspiracy to defraud.

Glenda Seim, an 81-year-old Missouri woman, was sentenced last year to five years of probation after pleading guilty to two federal felonies. She admitted that she had acted as a “money mule” on behalf of an online love interest, a man claiming to be an American working in Nigeria in need of money to return home.

She pawned electronics sent to her home and set up fraudulent bank accounts, ignoring federal agents who told her that she was being scammed.

What can you do if you suspect you or a loved one are being scammed?​

Ms. Seim’s reluctance to accept that her online romance wasn’t real is common among older victims of this variety of fraud, Mr. Delaney, the elder-law specialist, said.

“Despite showing incontrovertible evidence that the person they think they’re in love with isn’t who they say they are and the money isn’t being used for what they say it’s being used for, they will defend that exploiter through anything,” he said.

Usually, he added, one of the victim’s grown children must step in to put a stop to it.
This is what happened in the wire fraud case involving the Holocaust survivor in New York. By the time the victim confided in his son, the 62 checks he had written over the course of four years had been cashed.

Still, investigators were able to arrest Ms. Stergo — an unusual outcome in internet romance scams, where perpetrators are rarely found and losses are almost never recoverable.

While there is little recourse for recovering funds that in most cases have already been spent, a family member’s involvement can often halt a scam before it goes any further. In instances where older people refuse to accept that they have been victims of a scam, family members can file an emergency petition for temporary guardianship and ask a judge to issue an order that will immediately freeze bank accounts.

As Ms. Kleinert found, there is little that law enforcement can do to track down online scammers, particularly those operating from foreign I.P. addresses.

After losing all of her money, Ms. Kleinert turned to the young people in her life to tighten her online privacy settings. But after a fire destroyed her home and a friend set up a GoFundMe page to help her, she found she was still vulnerable.

After months of silence, she said, Tony got back in touch to ask for more money.

“‘I know you have money,’” she said he told her, “‘I saw your GoFundMe page.’

“That sent a chill down my spine.”
 
Ooopsie... The Pork is Strong with this one.

The Pentagon Saw a Warship Boondoggle. Congress Saw Jobs.​

After years of crippling problems and a changing mission, the Navy pushed to retire nine of its newest ships. Then the lobbying started.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The 387-foot-long warships tied up at the Jacksonville Navy base were acclaimed as some of the most modern in the United States fleet: nimble, superfast vessels designed to operate in coastal waters and hunt down enemy submarines, destroy anti-ship mines and repel attacks from small boats, like those often operated by Iran.

But the Pentagon last year made a startling announcement: Eight of the 10 Freedom-class littoral combat ships now based in Jacksonville and another based in San Diego would be retired, even though they averaged only four years old and had been built to last 25 years.

The decision came after the ships, built in Wisconsin by Fincantieri Marinette Marine in partnership with Lockheed Martin, suffered a series of humiliating breakdowns, including repeated engine failures and technical shortcomings in an anti-submarine system intended to counter China’s growing naval capacity.

“We refused to put an additional dollar against that system that wouldn’t match the Chinese undersea threat,” Adm. Michael M. Gilday, the chief of naval operations, told Senate lawmakers.

The Navy estimated that the move would save $4.3 billion over the next five years, money that Admiral Gilday said he would rather spend on missiles and other firepower needed to prepare for potential wars. Having ships capable of fulfilling the military mission, he argued, was much more important than the Navy’s total ship count.

Then the lobbying started.

A consortium of players with economic ties to the ships — led by a trade association whose members had just secured contracts worth up to $3 billion to do repairs and supply work on them — mobilized to pressure Congress to block the plan, with phone calls, emails and visits to Washington to press lawmakers to intervene.

“Early decommissioning of littoral combat ships at Mayport Naval Station would result in the loss of more than 2,000 direct jobs in Jacksonville,” a coalition of business leaders from the Florida city wrote last summer.

The effort targeted members of Congress who represent communities with large Navy stations and have collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the same military contractors that help maintain and operate these ships. They included Representative Rob Wittman, Republican of Virginia, who represents the Hampton Roads area, home to the world’s largest naval facility.

Within weeks, lawmakers offered amendments to the 2023 Pentagon spending authorization law that prohibited the Navy from retiring four of the eight ships in Jacksonville and the one in San Diego.

“These ships are not perfect — no new class of ship is,” said Representative John Rutherford, Republican of Florida, who represents the Jacksonville area and introduced one of the amendments after a meeting with a delegation of Florida officials who had flown to Washington to protest the Navy’s decision. “But they are fulfilling operational needs as we speak.”

In December, the amendments were adopted as part of the spending bill passed by Congress and signed into law by President Biden, stymieing the Pentagon’s wishes by allowing only four of the nine targeted ships to be retired.

“Lawmakers are acting like hoarders and forcing the services to keep stuff they don’t want and need,” said Steve Ellis, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a conservative group that seeks to limit government spending. “This is more about parochial concerns than defense priorities.”

Lobbying campaigns built around the economic impact of strategic decisions about weapons systems are a longstanding tactic, but they have taken on new importance as the United States reshapes the military to defend against an ascendant China and a more aggressive Russia.

The Freedom-class ships were first conceived of after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks as part of an effort to combat nontraditional threats. They ended up costing more than twice what had been expected, about $500 million per ship, compared with an early estimate of $220 million. It had taken a dozen years longer than expected to get them operational, at which point the Navy’s war-fighting needs had shifted back to countering global rivals.

The Navy and Lockheed are still negotiating how much the contractors should have to pay to resolve design flaws in the ships’ propulsion systems.

But having largely won the battle, at least for now, to keep the Freedom-class ships operational, the contractors who built them have already returned to promoting a new class of vessels with an even higher price tag.

Fincantieri has already started work on the first of 20 new ships that will be known as the Constellation-class frigate, a $1.1 billion vessel that will eventually replace the troubled Freedom-class ships.

“Now let’s deliver the frigates,” Robert Tullar, a sales executive at Fincantieri, said during a Navy conference last month.

A Failed Mission​

Cmdr. Brad Long was on the bridge of the U.S.S. Little Rock on what was to be its maiden military mission. The Freedom-class ship and its crew of 110 were heading out to help Central and South American nations combat drug trafficking and other illicit activity.

It was a proud moment for him and his crew, a chance to show off the strengths of their new ship. It was designed to travel in shallow, near-shore (littoral) waters, and to go as fast as about 50 miles an hour, an extraordinary speed for a warship.

The vessel was also equipped with an armed MH-60S Seahawk helicopter and an autonomous helicopter, known as a MQ-8 Fire Scout, which could provide surveillance of any drug traffickers in nearby waters.

“You are sitting up there and it was kind of amazing,” said Commander Long, now retired, recalling the moment they set out on the deployment in early 2020, after more than two years of training and preparation. “Just how fast you were going and how smooth.”

But the dream began to crumble as the ship approached the Panama Canal, Commander Long said in an interview, detailing the sequence of events publicly for the first time since he left the Navy in late 2021.
First, the ship’s diesel generators started to malfunction, and the ship briefly lost electric power. The littoral combat ships were built to be operated by a relatively small crew, and did not carry sailors to fix complicated mechanical issues. So Commander Long decided to head back to the Navy base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where the ship sat for about a month waiting for repairs.

An even more complicated issue had emerged with the ship’s radar system — meaning it could not target its guns or look for incoming air threats. A contractor repair team was flown from Germany to Cuba, but the necessary fix was so complex that the Navy decided to send the U.S.S. Little Rock back to Mayport.

And that is when an even bigger problem surfaced.

Commander Long was in his cabin near the bridge when a crew member brought him a sample of the ship’s engine oil. Instead of the caramel-colored, slippery stuff that lubricates the gears, the oil looked like it had been mixed with silvery glitter. The oil was polluted, it turned out, with specks of metal from high-speed clutch bearings of the gears that had broken into tiny bits.

The ship had lost half its engine power — and it had to limp back home.

The Navy soon confirmed that the gear system failure was a design flaw in the Freedom class, meaning all of the vessels then based at Mayport. (A second version of the littoral ships, known as the Independence class, is also in service but has fewer problems.) Engine failure reports were filed on 10 of the 11 deployments these ships were sent on, according to a report last year by the Government Accountability Office examining both classes of the ships.

The final insult came early last year, when the Navy concluded that a towed sonar system developed for the littoral combat ships by Raytheon Technologies, another major military contractor, was not up to the job.

Raytheon had already produced a promotional video featuring this sonar system, nicknamed DART, as it and a second device tracked down an enemy submarine. “Target acquired, launching torpedo,” the video’s narrator says, before the enemy submarine is shown as it is blowing up and sinking.

But in real life, the Pentagon found that engines on the Freedom-class ships were so loud that they handicapped the ability to detect enemy submarines. The Raytheon sonar system itself also swerved erratically as it was dragged from the ship at high speeds.

As a result, the Pentagon said last year, the ship’s most vital mission — hunting submarines — would be abandoned.

Since the ship had been conceived in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks as a “street fighter” to confront less sophisticated enemies from rogue states, according to an official Pentagon history of the vessel, it was built with less extensive protective armor than typical warships. As a result, it is more vulnerable to anti-ship missiles or mines of the sort that it might confront in a conflict with enemies like China. It also is a “gas hog” at its top speed, limiting its range.

As the threat from China rose, doubts intensified within the Pentagon about the value of the littoral combat ships, with some even giving them a new nickname: little crappy ship.

“We need a capable, lethal-ready Navy more than we need a larger Navy that’s less capable, less lethal, and less ready,” Admiral Gilday told a Senate committee. “Those ships, relative to others, just didn’t bring the war-fighting value to the fight.”

Asked about the ships’ troubles, Mark Vandroff, the chief executive of Fincantieri Marinette Marine and a retired Navy captain who served in the Trump White House, referred questions to Lockheed, the primary contractor on the project.

Patrick W. McNally, a spokesman for Lockheed — when also asked what went wrong — said that the company was “proud of our longstanding partnership with the United States Navy,” and was working with the Navy to “deliver affordable capability improvements.”

Pushing Back​

The lobbying campaign to block the retirement of the ships started with a burst of phone calls to Capitol Hill, local officials in Jacksonville, and the Navy’s ship-maintenance division. Orchestrating the appeals was Tim Spratto, the general manager at the sprawling Jacksonville shipyard for BAE Systems, which in 2021 had won part of a Navy contract worth as much as $1.3 billion to do repairs on the troubled Freedom-class vessels.

Had to truncate due to length. Look it up if you're interested...
 
Talk about a badass woman!!!

The Queen of Everest Trains While Working at Whole Foods​

Lhakpa Sherpa has climbed Mount Everest 10 times, the most ascents ever by a woman. She has no plans of slowing down.

When Lhakpa Sherpa trudged into Everest base camp alongside her 15-year-old daughter, Shiny Dijmarescu, last April, it felt like a homecoming.

She was back in Nepal after four long years, hoping to take in the view from the roof of the world for the 10th time. If successful, Lhakpa would break her own record for most Everest ascents ever by a woman.

Unlike the routines of most climbers, who drop into specialized training for months or even years, Lhakpa’s training regimen took place at a Whole Foods in West Hartford, Conn., where she carried large stacks of boxed fruits and vegetables. Occasionally, she hiked to the top of the 6,288-foot Mount Washington, a meager stand-in for the highest mountain on earth.

When she returned to Nepal last spring, Everest looked different. There was noticeably less snow and ice, and what was left felt less stable. The ropes and ladders that a team of Sherpa guides lashed across the chasms in the notorious Khumbu icefall had to be fixed daily rather than the usual once a week. More garbage was visible than in years past. There were dead bodies, too, a sight that is as devastating as it is common these days when the weather changes. Now, as a mother in her mid-to-late 40s — she doesn’t have a birth certificate and doesn’t know her exact birthday — she felt every ounce of the risk.

The first time Lhakpa touched Himalayan blue ice, she was barefoot. One of 11 children born to a shepherd and homemaker in the village of Makalu, Nepal, she grew up on the slopes of Mount Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest peak at 27,825 feet. Her family couldn’t afford shoes for every child, and only her brothers were sent to school. “We had no television and no phone. I used to spend my day watching sheep and birds,” she said. “I could see Mount Everest from my village.”

Stuck at home, she’d escape the withering glare of her disapproving mother by venturing into those mountains barefoot and alone. When she returned, her worried mother often warned her that if by some miracle she weren’t eaten by a snow leopard, nobody would ever wish to marry her.

Her father saw her strength. One spring, he sent her up above Makalu’s base camp to collect the spring lambs and yak calves before snow leopards found them. There she bumped into Sherpa men in technical clothing with ropes and ice axes, preparing to climb the mountain. She vowed to become one of them, even though Sherpa women were not offered those jobs.

“I promised myself that I would reach the top of Everest one day,” she said.

She began looking for a job as a porter at age 15. Babu Chhiri Sherpa, a legendary guide who in 1999 spent a record 21 hours on the summit of Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen, took a chance on her once she turned 17.

She started as a porter, carrying heavy loads up steep mountains, and was promoted to a kitchen boy — a title that illustrates Lhakpa’s unusual career path — within two years. She’d hike and climb all day, then set up the kitchen tent and peel onions and garlic for hours on end before serving guides and their clients. She was paid roughly $50 a month.

In 2000, not quite 10 years since she’d become a porter, Lhakpa approached the future Deputy Prime Minister Sujata Koirala, then best known as Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala’s daughter, with a pitch to fund the first Nepali women-only Everest expedition. The seven-woman team, known as the Daughters of Everest, began their journey in May that year.

On the day the team was set to reach the summit, six of them succumbed to altitude sickness. Lhakpa went on to become the second Nepali woman to reach the summit, and the first to make it back to base camp safely. (In 1993, Pasang Lhamu Sherpa became the first to summit the mountain, but she died on her descent.)

The very next year, Lhakpa summited Everest again, less than three weeks after her mentor, Babu Chhiri, slipped into a crevasse around the second camp and died. It was not the last time she would lose friends on the mountain.

She was there in 2014 when a block of ice the size of a building sheared off Everest’s western slope and an ice avalanche wiped out a Sherpa team in the Khumbu icefall. Sixteen died. She was resting at the first camp when a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck on April 25, 2015, triggering several avalanches. The deadliest one swept through base camp. It’s estimated that 22 people lost their lives on Everest that day. Half were Nepali.

“I’ve lost many of my heroes, many of my best friends,” she said.

Her climbing trajectory took a turn when she moved to Connecticut after marrying the Romanian climber George Dijmarescu in 2002. Together, they ran a roofing and painting business. Lhakpa was most comfortable doing the hard work. She’d climb ladders with shingles piled on one shoulder, tear apart old roofs and piece together new ones. But Dijmarescu, who died in 2020, became violent after her first daughter, Sunny, was born, she said. One night in 2012, he beat her so badly that she was taken to the emergency room, she said. With the help of a hospital social worker, she and her two girls fled to a local shelter where they stayed for eight months.

Desperate for work, she took a job cleaning houses and eventually moved the family into a small apartment. Occasionally clients heard her last name and asked if she had relatives who climbed the big mountains. Her cousin and brother had both followed her into the business and were now leading their own expedition agencies, so she’d nod politely and keep her accomplishments to herself.

Eventually, she started washing dishes in the commercial kitchen of a Whole Foods branch. Co-workers gradually learned of her story because she would sometimes leave town to guide foreigners up Mount Everest. The money she earned went toward her daughters’ college savings.

In 2022, she quit her supermarket job to try her 10th summit, a hallowed number in Everest mountaineering akin to 500 home runs or 3,000 hits in baseball. Thirty-four men had achieved it. Twenty-six of them were Nepali of Sherpa descent, including Babu Chhiri, and Lhakpa wanted to shatter one more Himalayan glass ceiling.

As usual, she had no sponsors. Lack of sponsorship deals is not a new issue in women’s climbing, and if she were going to successfully summit the mountain, she would need to do so with her own funding.

When a three-day weather window opened in May, it seemed that all of base camp had mobilized for a summit push. “Everybody has a dream to reach the summit, but there is only one rope,” Lhakpa said, “and there were so many traffic jams.”

She passed 26,000 feet at around 10 p.m., and kept climbing into the death zone above 26,247 feet, where the chances of succumbing to high-altitude pulmonary edema or high-altitude cerebral edema — both of which can be deadly — rise with each passing hour. Lhakpa was breathing bottled oxygen, but those canisters only last so long.

When word of her summit push reached base camp, Shiny made a Puja, a Hindu ritual, to pray for safe passage. She had a walkie-talkie by her ear to hear the exact moment — 6:30 a.m. on May 12 — that her mother reached the roof of the world for the 10th time. But reaching the summit is only the halfway point. She was still in danger, and with 200 climbers coming up behind her Lhakpa didn’t linger long.

She was out of food and water, utterly exhausted, and her anxious mind kept trying to convince her to sit down and rest as she suffered on the hike down the mountain. She fought that deadly impulse time and again by focusing on her children.

Shiny, who had always opted out of hiking trips back home, made the strenuous climb up to the first camp to celebrate with her mother. When Lhakpa arrived, Shiny saw her immigrant mother — who had worked so hard and overcome so much — in full bloom for the first time. Tears streamed down Lhakpa’s cheeks, which had been baked to crackling from the sun and wind.

Though her accomplishment was splashed across the climbing press, sponsors still did not come calling. She arrived home in Connecticut with no job and bills to pay. Whole Foods couldn’t bring her back on board for months. She had no choice but to clean houses again.

But Lhakpa didn’t consider that a setback. And when those Whole Foods hours returned to her in September, she was already visualizing her next spring season in the Himalayas. She’s planning to climb K2 in 2023, in addition to another summit attempt on Everest. This time, she hopes to bring both of her daughters to base camp, along with a team of girls from all over the world.

“I hope I will bring 20 daughters,” she said. “I want to teach them climbing skills and show them that all girls can climb mountains.”
 
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