In Brief: June 30, 2021

At 100, China’s Communist Party looks to cement its future

BEIJING — For China’s Communist Party, celebrating its 100th birthday on Thursday is not just about glorifying its past. It’s also about cementing its future and that of its leader, Chinese President Xi Jinping.

In the build-up to the July 1 anniversary, Xi and the party have exhorted its members and the nation to remember the early days of struggle in the hills of the inland city of Yan’an, where Mao Zedong established himself as party leader in the 1930s.

Dug into earthen cliffs, the primitive homes where Mao and his followers lived are now tourist sites for the party faithful and schoolteachers encouraged to spread the word. The cave-like rooms feel far removed from Beijing, the modern capital where national festivities are being held, and the skyscrapers of Shenzhen and other high-tech centers on the coast that are more readily associated with today’s China.

Yet in marking its centenary, the Communist Party is using this past — selectively — to try to ensure its future and that of Xi, who may be eyeing, as Mao did, ruling for life.

“By linking the party to all of China’s accomplishments of the past century, and none of its failures, Xi is trying to bolster support for his vision, his right to lead the party and the party’s right to govern the country,” said Elizabeth Economy, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

Condo board boss warned of worsening structural damage before collapse

Weeks before a Florida condo building collapsed, the president of its board wrote that structural problems identified in a 2018 inspection had “gotten significantly worse” and owners needed to pay a hefty price to get them fixed.

The April 9 “Dear Neighbors” letter from Champlain Towers South Condominium President Jean Wodnicki hinted at an ongoing debate over the repairs and a reluctance by some condo owners to pay for major work that would cost at least $15.5 million.

“A lot of this work could have been done or planned for in years gone by. But this is where we are now,” she wrote in the letter, which was confirmed to The Associated Press by a spokesman for the condo board.

Wodnicki noted costs had increased since an October 2018 report by engineering firm Morabito Consultants first identified key issues with weakening concrete, and she predicted they would only grow more if put off any longer.

“Indeed the observable damage such as in the garage has gotten significantly worse since the initial inspection,” Wodnicki wrote. “The concrete deterioration is accelerating.”

Tigray fighters reject cease-fire as a ‘sick joke’

NAIROBI, Kenya — The fighters now retaking parts of Ethiopia’s Tigray region will pursue soldiers from neighboring Eritrea back into their country and chase Ethiopian forces to Addis Ababa “if that’s what it takes” to weaken their military powers, their spokesman said Tuesday, as a conflict that has killed thousands of civilians looked certain to continue.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Getachew Reda said that “we’ll stop at nothing to liberate every square inch” of the Tigray region of 6 million people, nearly eight months after fighting erupted between the Tigray forces and Ethiopian soldiers backed by Eritrea.

He rejected the unilateral cease-fire Ethiopia’s government declared Monday as a “sick joke” and accused Ethiopia of long denying humanitarian aid to the Tigrayans it now “pretends to care about.” Ethiopia declared the unilateral cease-fire as its soldiers and hand-picked regional interim administration fled the Tigray regional capital following some of the fiercest fighting of the war.

“We want to stop the war as quickly as we can,” the Tigray spokesman said.

Confusion surrounds vote count in NYC mayoral primary

NEW YORK — The Democratic primary for mayor of New York City was thrown into a state of confusion Tuesday when election officials abruptly retracted their latest report on the vote count after realizing it had been corrupted by test data never cleared from a computer system.

The bungle was a black mark on New York City’s first major foray into ranked choice voting and seemed to confirm worries that the city’s Board of Elections, which is jointly run by Democrats and Republicans, was unprepared to implement the new system.

The disarray began as evening fell, when the board withdrew data it had released earlier in the day purporting to be a first round of results from the ranked choice system.

That data had indicated that Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, a former police captain who would be the city’s second Black mayor, had lost much of his lead and was ahead of former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia by fewer than 16,000 votes.

Facebook message leads to warrant in rape claim

PHILADELPHIA — While she pleaded for prosecutors to take up her college rape complaint, Shannon Keeler studied in Spain, won a national championship in lacrosse, earned a bachelor’s degree and fell in love.

All the while, she gathered evidence from the freshman year attack and passed it on to investigators. Here are the names of people who saw the upperclassman stalk me at the frat party in 2013. Here’s the phone number of the friend who saw him follow me home. Here’s the name of the hospital where my coach took me for a rape kit.

And then, just last year: Here’s a recent message from his Facebook account that says, “So I raped you.”

After verifying the account, and after Keeler told her story to The Associated Press, a new team of police and prosecutors on Tuesday obtained an arrest warrant, charging Ian Cleary, 28, of Saratoga, California, with sexually assaulting Keeler when they were students at Gettysburg College in 2013. Police say they had not yet located him, and aren’t sure where he is. So it’s still not clear whether Keeler will see the case go to trial.

From wire sources

“While I am moved to tears by this result, which I have waited for (for) over seven years, I am mindful that this moment came because I went public with my story, which no survivor should have to do in order to obtain justice,” Keeler, now 26, said in a statement issued through her lawyer.

___

Blackouts in US Northwest due to heat wave, deaths reported

SPOKANE, Wash. — The unprecedented Northwest U.S. heat wave that slammed Seattle and Portland, Oregon, moved inland Tuesday — prompting a electrical utility in Spokane, Washington, to resume rolling blackouts amid heavy power demand.

Officials said a dozen deaths in Washington and Oregon may be tied to the intense heat that began late last week.

The dangerous weather that gave Seattle and Portland consecutive days of record high temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.7 degrees Celcius) was expected to ease in those cities. But inland Spokane saw temperatures spike.

The National Weather Service said the mercury reached 109 F (42.2 C) in Spokane— the highest temperature ever recorded there.

About 9,300 Avista Utilities customers in Spokane lost power on Monday and the company said more planned blackouts began on Tuesday afternoon in the city of about 220,000 people.

Kim berates North Korean officials for ‘crucial’ virus lapse

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un berated top officials for failures in coronavirus prevention that caused a “great crisis,” using strong language that raised the specter of a mass outbreak in a country that would be scarcely able to handle it.

The state media report Wednesday did not specify what “crucial” lapse had prompted Kim to call the Politburo meeting of the ruling Workers’ Party, but experts said the North could be wrestling with a significant setback in its pandemic fight.

So far, North Korea has claimed to have had no coronavirus infections, despite testing thousands of people and sharing a porous border with China. Experts widely doubt the claim and are concerned about any potential outbreak, given the country’s poor health infrastructure.

At the Politburo meeting, Kim criticized the senior officials for supposed incompetence, irresponsibility and passiveness in planning and executing anti-virus measures amid the lengthening pandemic, the North’s official Korean Central News Agency said.

Kim said “senior officials in charge of important state affairs neglected the implementation of the important decisions of the party on taking organizational, institutional, material, scientific and technological measures as required by the prolonged state emergency epidemic prevention campaign,” according to the KCNA. This “caused a crucial case of creating a great crisis in ensuring the security of the state and safety of the people and entailed grave consequences.”