Venture Philanthropist Tulaine Montgomery on the Need to Invest in the Unfamiliar

When it comes to funding new and innovative ideas, Black women are routinely overlooked. It’s an experience Tulaine Montgomery, CEO of American venture philanthropy organization New Profit, sees regularly and is working to put an end to. “All the stories about scarcity when it comes to racially and ethnically diverse leadership and entrepreneurship—it’s a myth,” she told TIME Senior Correspondent Janell Ross during a TIME100 Talk at the first-ever TIME Impact House in Martha’s Vineyard on Monday. “These resources and these ideas are abundant.”

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Montgomery was a member of the core team that helped launch New Profit in 1998. During her time at the organization, she has led initiatives focused on strengthening educational pathways and employment opportunities for underserved youth, channeling resources and support to entrepreneurs impacted by the criminal justice system, and building a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive philanthropic sector. New Profit backs social entrepreneurship in support of advancing equity and opportunity, but it should not be confused with charity, emphasizes Montgomery. 

“Charity perhaps has its place in a spiritual context, but when I’m talking about impact and systems change, I have no interest in charity,” Montgomery shared. “The history of charity is that it has its origins in the sort of manifest destiny ethos,” she said. “That idea that there are some people who are ordained by God to help those who are less fortunate, which by definition implies a sort of hierarchy of capability. It means that the solutions could not possibly reside in the people who are in some way receiving the charity.” 

Ultimately, when you invest in someone—as opposed to donating to them—it becomes a partnership, says Montgomery. “We are peers who both have something of equal value to offer to the creation of the solution to the scaling of the business.”

But at the moment, Montgomery says, there’s a trust deficit between those with the resources to give and those in need. She referenced the public outcry following the death of George Floyd in 2020, when corporations pledged billions to advance racial equity. But only a fraction of those funds were paid, she pointed out. 

Too many people don’t see the true value of investing in diverse communities. “Right after the death of George Floyd,” Montgomery said, “I would be in conversations with well-intended people with economic wealth, who will say, ‘It’s really great that New Profit is investing in a broader range of entrepreneurs. That’s great. And I love that. Are you going to sustain the same level of quality and vigor?’” It was a question that suggested doubt in the long-term success of such commitments, often perceived as admirable risks or write-offs rather than necessary investments. 

“We can’t afford to pretend it’s an optional thing. Nor can we afford to, in my opinion, pretend that coalition-building, what some would call ‘diversity work’ is nice to have. We have the benefit of living in a moment where the right thing to do is also the smart thing to do.” Especially as U.S. demographics shift, she says, only those who “know how to build effective and sustainable coalitions are going to have the adaptive capability to thrive.”

“The truth is,” Montgomery said, “that the most high-impact, innovative, economically efficient, and sustainable solutions and business models are coming from the communities that will soon be part of the coalition of a multiracial, multicultural country.”

If there’s anything that Montgomery wanted the audience to take away, it’s that investors can’t have a narrow approach. “We couldn’t only look for the charismatic, Ivy-educated, often male entrepreneur, and say, ‘That’s the ticket,’” Montgomery said of her company New Profit. “We had to learn how to invest in excellence that was unfamiliar.”

The inaugural TIME Impact House, launched on August 7, is a dedicated space to convene and facilitate meaningful action and drive impactful change during the annual Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival. Presented with founding partner UBS, the TIME Impact House features conversations focused on advancing inclusive growth, systems change, and equity-centered approaches to philanthropy with Tulaine Montgomery, CEO of New Profit; Allyson Felix, 11-time Olympic Medalist and cofounder and president of Saysh; Kelly Burton, CEO of Black Innovation Alliance; and more.

source https://time.com/6302487/new-profit-tulaine-montgomery-time-impact-house/

The Mega Millions Jackpot Is Now $1.55 Billion. Here Are Your Odds of Winning It

NEW YORK — There’s no shaking it. Your chances of winning the lottery are extremely slim.

After no big winner Friday night, the Mega Millions jackpot climbed to an estimated $1.55 billion. If someone wins it all on Tuesday, when the next Mega Millions drawing takes place, the prize would one of the largest in U.S. lottery history.

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But don’t plan on entering a new tax bracket anytime soon. The odds of winning a Mega Millions jackpot — no matter the size — stand at about 1 in 302.6 million.

Because of the almost impossible chance of winning big, experts stress that you shouldn’t spend all your money on lottery tickets. If you choose to play, it’s important to be mindful of what you can afford — and maybe consider other places to put your money, even if it’s just a few dollars at a time.

Lottery tickets are “definitely not good investments,” Matthew Kovach, an assistant professor in Virginia Tech’s economics department told The Associated Press last month. “They’re not even investments … there’s an expectation you will always lose money.”

Here are some things to know about the odds of winning the lottery.

Winning the lottery is nearly impossible. What’s more likely?

There’s a long list of rare events that are more likely than winning the Mega Millions or Powerball jackpot.

A common comparison is the odds of getting struck by lightning once in your lifetime, which stand at about one in 15,300. Even if you bought a lottery ticket for every drawing over 80 years — two times a week for Mega Millions and three times a week for Powerball — you would still be far less likely to win than to be struck by lightning one time in your life, Syracuse University mathematics professor Steven Diaz said.

“A slightly darker example,” Kovach added, is comparing the odds of winning the lottery to getting into a fatal car accident on the way to a store. “Imagine you have to drive half a mile to buy your lottery ticket, so you have a 1 mile round-trip. It’s about 4 times as likely that you die in a car accident on the trip to buy your ticket than you are to win,” he said.

Of course, both Mega Millions and Powerball offer a handful of tiers below the top jackpots — with the lowest prizes starting at $2 and $4, respectfully. For both games, the odds of winning any prize stand at about 1 in 24.

Has winning the lottery become harder?

Yes. Winning the lottery has become harder in recent years, causing jackpots to grow bigger and bigger — and that’s by design.

Such big jackpots comes down to math and more difficult odds. In 2015, the Powerball lottery lengthened the odds of winning from 1 in 175.2 million to 1 in 292.2 million. Mega Millions followed two years later, lengthening the odds of winning the top prize from 1 in 258.9 million to 1 in 302.6 million. The largest lottery jackpots in the U.S. have come since those changes were made.

How much do jackpot winners really take home?

When someone wins a lottery jackpot in games like Powerball or Mega Millions they have two options: an annuity that is distributed over 29 years or a (significantly smaller) cash payout.

The estimated $1.25 billion jackpot seen for Mega Millions’ Friday drawing, for example, is the annuity option — and the cash value for this prize is nearly half that, standing at $625.3 million. Most jackpot winners opt for the cash.

Federal and state taxes will also lower the money you take home, with deductions depending on where you live.

Is buying a lottery ticket a good investment?

Because winning is so rare, experts maintain that lottery tickets are horrible investments — but note that every person’s reason for playing the lottery is different.

Some people might buy a $2 lottery ticket as a form of entertainment and find satisfaction in “the excitement of thinking you might win,” Diaz said. Meanwhile, others may enter the lottery out of feelings of desperation or financial struggle — with experts pointing to consequences that have disproportionately impacted low-income communities.

The lottery has historically acted as a regressive tax on the poor, meaning the people that can least afford to lose their money buy the most tickets, Lia Nower, a professor and the director of the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers University, previously told The AP.

She said her “concern with lottery is really more people who are buying it every day or two or three times a week” as opposed to those who purchase one ticket as the jackpot nears $1 billion.

A $2 ticket may not seem like much — but it can add up for those who are regularly entering the lottery over time. Alternative spending options could include opening an investment account that allows you to invest in small amounts or buying partial stock, Kovach said.

“In reality, it’s probably best to diversify by something like an index fund — but if you’re just starting out, I would… (suggest putting it) in the stock market or something like that,” he said. “You will actually probably see a return over time.”

source https://time.com/6302476/mega-millions-jackpot-odds/

A Russian Jet Was Spotted in North Korea, Raising Concerns Over Possible Arms Deal

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An unusual sighting of a Russian military jet in North Korea is stoking concern that Kim Jong Un is selling Vladimir Putin weapons as ties strengthen between the sanctioned states.

Tracking data from FlightRadar24 shows the Russian Air Force Ilyushin IL-62M flying from Moscow to Pyongyang on July 31 and returning on Aug. 2. Satellite imagery showed the aircraft at Pyongyang’s international airport for about 36 hours, according to NK News, a Seoul-based provider of news on North Korea that also tracks flight activity in the isolated country.

The flight was the first by this type of Russian military VIP plane to North Korea since mid-2019, when Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin traveled to Pyongyang, NK News said. Pyongyang closed its borders in early 2020 due to the pandemic, choking its economy.

Neither Russia nor North Korea have reported on the plane, and it is unclear who was aboard. Russia’s Defense Ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The journey by the Russian Air Force jet came just days after Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu traveled to Pyongyang on a similar plane to attend a military parade hosted by Kim, who also gave him a tour of a weapons exhibit. It “appears related to following up on Shoigu’s delegation visit and possibly agreements made with Kim,” NK News said, adding that analysts “speculated that the two could have made weapons deals.”

North Korea has been trying to revive its economy, largely by resuming trade with China and evading international sanctions. Russia recently restarted oil shipments to North Korea for the first time since 2020, the United Nations has said, following the earlier resumption of grain exports. It is impossible to know what North Korea is sending in return but both the U.S. government and independent analysts suggested munitions from the stockpiles North Korea has built up amid tensions with Seoul.

For months, U.S. officials have said Moscow is seeking to restock ammunition reserves depleted by its war in Ukraine.

“We have made clear our concerns about cooperation between Russia and North Korea, we have made clear our concerns about North Korea seeking to assist Russia in its aggression in Ukraine,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Monday at a briefing in Washington in response to a question about the plane.

“We will continue to make those concerns clear and we will continue to enforce all of our sanctions,” he said.

The U.S., European Union and others stepped up sanctions against Russia after its February 2022 invasion, including against its leading banks, while also warning nations against materially supporting Moscow’s war effort. The U.S. strategy over Ukraine rests in part on choking off Putin’s economy and hindering its armed forces so any backing from other nations could undercut that.

The most obvious items that Pyongyang has and Moscow needs are artillery shells and rockets that Moscow can use in Soviet-era weaponry pushed into service in Ukraine. The Kremlin’s war machine has been burning through its stocks and is scrambling for supplies with the war now in its second year. 

Since North Korea’s economy is so small, an arms deal of about $250 million would be equal to about 1% of its GDP and welcome for a country cut off from the global financial system due to sanctions aimed at ending its nuclear weapons program.

Read More: North Korea Resumes Launching Missile Tests. How Worried Should We Be?

A sale of North Korea’s newest short-range ballistic missiles would constitute a pretty significant escalation, said weapons expert Joost Oilemans. It “would likely be soon identified (if only during transport) and condemned as a gross sanctions violation,” he wrote in an email to Bloomberg News.

Russia has been scouring its arms depots for any functioning armored vehicles, “reactivating some absolutely stunningly old equipment” such as T-54 and T-62 tanks and may need help keeping them running, he said. “North Korea is perhaps the final remaining producer of spare parts for these types as it still maintains an extensive inventory itself,” Oilemans said.

Kim also showed Shoigu new drones but those are unlikely to make their way to a battlefield in Ukraine anytime soon.

“They are just not at a mature stage,” said Yoon Sukjoon, a retired captain in South Korea’s navy who is a senior fellow at the Korea Institute for Military Affairs. North Korea lacks the manufacturing capacity to produce them in significant numbers anyway, he said.

Whatever the exact reason for the mysterious military flight, Russia and North Korea would be aware that they were “fanning the flames of the U.S. government’s accusation that the two countries have a weapons deal,” said Rachel Minyoung Lee, a regional issues manager at the Vienna-based Open Nuclear Network who was an analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency’s Open Source Enterprise for almost two decades.

Lee added that she was concerned the countries “might have discussed deeper-level military cooperation” during the Russian defense minister’s visit. “Clearly, showcasing to the world that they have each other’s back was more important than whatever optics Shoigu’s visit would present,” she said.

—With assistance from Danny Lee.

source https://time.com/6302471/russia-military-jet-north-korea-arms-deal/

How a Former Oil Guy Is Using Fracking Tech to Boost Geothermal Energy

Of all the technological progress of the past few decades, there is a good argument to be made that a series of fossil fuel industry innovations that helped spark the U.S. shale oil boom have had the single largest effect on the course of global geopolitics, and the world’s biosphere. Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracking shifted the U.S. from being a net fuel importer to exporter—a realignment of the world’s strategic chessboard currently being demonstrated in the fleets of American oil and natural gas tankers helping circumvent Russia’s energy blockade of Europe. At the same time, all that new, cheap fuel helped prolong the U.S.’s carbon addiction for years, with incipient renewables unable to compete against natural gas.

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But that drilling technology may yet have a climate upside. Last month, Houston-based startup Fervo announced the successful test of a first-of-its kind commercial-scale power plant, which uses the shale oil drilling innovations to produce zero-emission geothermal energy. While horizontal drilling allows oil producers to access new seams of fossil fuels, in Fervo’s case, the company is drilling sideways into hot, porous rocks heated by tectonic activity. The company then pumps water through those rocks in order to generate steam and produce electricity. Right now, its project in northern Nevada is capable of producing about 3.5 megawatts of energy, or enough electricity to power about 2,600 homes. Once the plant gets hooked up to the grid later this year, that electricity will be used to power Google data centers and other Alphabet operations.

Unlike solar and wind energy, which only generate energy when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, geothermal plants can provide a constant stream of power, which is crucial to balancing the grid. Currently, geothermal energy accounts for about 0.4% of U.S. electricity. But, like in the U.S. fracking boom, Fervo’s technology could make it feasible to develop geothermal power plants in many more areas where it wouldn’t have made financial sense before, a change that could help raise geothermal energy as a serious player in decarbonizing the U.S. grid.

Tim Latimer started his career in the oil and gas industry, before co-founding Fervo in 2017. He spoke with TIME about finding a way to use oil industry technology for the planet, and his vision for the future of geothermal energy. 

The following conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

TIME: Can you tell us about how Fervo’s technology works? Why is it important?

Tim Latimer: Geothermal power generation has been around for over 100 years. The first geothermal power plant was built in Italy around the turn of the last century. All geothermal [power] kind of works the same way: you drill to high temperature geology, and then you produce hot water or steam out of wells that you drill into, and then capture that at the surface to create electricity. There’s been plants built all over the world. It’s a huge part of the electricity mix in places like Iceland, New Zealand, and Kenya. But traditionally, the struggle has been that you [have to] tap really hot, shallow, productive, natural basins to be cost-effective. But those sites got tapped [decades] ago, and we had to drill deeper to less hot places and less productive wells, and technology really didn’t keep up. So the reason geothermal hadn’t expanded was that once you cherry pick these geologic hotspots and try to move on to other places, the tech didn’t exist to make it cost effective.

Traditionally, you would drill simple vertical wells, and you would flow [water] between injection wells and production wells. What’s novel about our site is we drilled down about 8,000 ft., and then we turned and drilled horizontally for 4,000 ft. And then we flowed [water] from one horizontal well to the other across several hundred feet in that high temperature rock 8,000 ft. beneath our feet. That solves some of these economic challenges and allows us to go to deeper places and still make the economics work. 

What was the biggest challenge of making that oil and gas technology work for geothermal power?

Our geology requirements are quite a bit different. In the U.S., there’s been well over 100,000 horizontal oil and gas wells drilled, but generally, those are in shallower places where the rock is softer, and it’s not as hot. So it has taken a lot of work to be able to adapt the equipment. Our wells are much higher temperature—the project that we did here was nearly 400℉. We’re also drilling through granite, and so that’s much harder rock. 

What sort of new technology did you need to drill through harder rock and higher heat?

Some of it is better tools, like drill bits with harder surfaces, and motors and electronics that are built to deal with higher temperatures. And some of it is just better techniques. One of the things that we drove forward was a way of pumping fluid down while we’re drilling that cools your drilling system more efficiently than in an oil and gas operation.

Where are these hot rocks that you need? How much more geothermal energy could your technology open up?

Our current projects are in states like Utah and Nevada that have good natural geology for geothermal, where we can still drill relatively shallow wells and get to high temperature [rock]. But we’re not limited to those geologies. We’re just starting there first because it’s the low-hanging fruit. Principally, there’s virtually an unlimited amount of geothermal energy. The world is really big, and the world is really hot. We’ve got billions of years of energy under our feet. It’s all a question about how much you can access economically. We think with existing technology, drilling down to about 4,000 meters [over 13,100 ft.] is probably cost effective.

Read more: How Amazon Became the Largest Buyer of Renewable Energy in the World

As part of the [U.S.] Energy Secretary’s enhanced geothermal Earthshot that she announced last year, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory did a study looking in detail at the Western United States, and determining how much high temperature rock can you find at 4,000 meters [over 13,100 ft.] or shallower, and found over 200 gigawatts of [potential power] that was just in that shallow depth. That would represent as much as 20% of U.S. electricity supply, if we can develop that amount. But what we think is, as we expand this technology, we won’t have to be just limited to the western United States. We can get so cost effective that we can come to the Eastern United States where we would have to drill deeper, but still make it cost effective. And so there’s really no practical limit to how much geothermal [energy] there can be. It’s just a question of how quickly we can get more efficient at drilling and repeat the results that we did in our pilot, and just continue to bring costs down every time we build a new power plant.

Was there a particular day where you got out of bed, and said, “I’m done with oil and gas, and I’m going to use this drilling technology for renewables instead?” 

I’ve always been really passionate about the environment. I love the outdoors. And so even when I started my career in oil and gas, it was something I was thinking about a lot. I’m from Houston. The oil and gas industry has been a big part of my life and my community. But the more I got passionate about climate change, the more I really wanted to start looking at new solutions.

There’s two things that happened for me that were important. I realized that a lot of my friends, a lot of my family, and a huge part of our city all had our employment prospects tied up in the oil and gas industry. And I started realizing this energy transition is real, and if we’re going to take serious action on climate, we need to make sure that there’s something that Houston is doing. And not just Houston, but other major oil and gas places around the world. People in places where oil and gas is the primary economic driver need to find a way to transition. And so I wanted to figure out how somebody from the oil and gas industry could apply their skills to climate change. When I discovered geothermal, I felt really excited. This is a field that needs drilling engineers, but to produce a carbon-free energy source.

And then another thing for me was I lived in Houston during this series of floods we got in the 2010s. Year after year, we got these one-in-1,000 year events. Everybody knows about Hurricane Harvey in 2017. But for me, in 2015, there was a flood and they canceled my work. And I walked outside my apartment, and the road outside had 20 ft. of water on it. Everything was underwater. It was this moment where [climate change] went from being this thing that I was intellectually curious and about to being like, “This is not normal. This is a pretty urgent crisis.”

I ended up quitting my job just a couple of months after that to go to graduate school, and ended up pursuing this new geothermal path. I wrote in my application essay to Stanford Business School that my goal was to learn the entrepreneurial skills to launch a geothermal company that can take technology from the oil and gas industry to disrupt the geothermal sector. So it was a pretty calculated move.

I imagine that a lot of people you’re working with also come from an oil and gas background, and maybe decided to leave because that industry is not really going to be viable anymore for us as a species. Does that play into recruiting folks?

Totally. 60% of the employees at Fervo come from a background in the oil and gas industry. Growing up here [in Houston], oil and gas is just a massive employer. I really get frustrated when people demonize the people that work in oil and gas. They are some of the best people. It’s an incredibly diverse group with people from all over, and a lot of them are also passionate about climate change. We’re able to tap into that growing part of that workforce that is thinking deeply about climate change. If we want to deploy geothermal energy as quickly as we need to to actually have an impact on global carbon emissions, we need to recruit tens of thousands of people to come work with us. And so recruiting from the oil and gas industry is a major part of our strategy.

What does the future look like for Fervo? 

We’re going into full deployment mode. Technologies like this only make a difference if we deploy them at large-scale in a way that can reduce carbon emissions and increase the reliability of the grid. Our next project that we’re breaking ground on is going to be nearly 100 times bigger than our pilot. We’re targeting a 400 megawatt project [in Utah] that we’re going to be constructing over the next four years. And then beyond that, it’s our ambition to unlock that full multi-hundred gigawatt resource that the National Renewable Energy Lab has identified. The goal here is to be 20% of U.S. electricity supply by 2050, and then to repeat that around the world.

source https://time.com/6302342/fervo-fracking-technology-geothermal-energy/

Attacks on Hospitals Mean Health Care is One of the U.S.’s Most Violent Fields

Word spread through an Oregon hospital last month that a visitor was causing trouble in the maternity ward, and nurses were warned the man might try to abduct his partner’s newborn.

Hours later, the visitor opened fire, killing a security guard and sending patients, nurses and doctors scrambling for cover.

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The shooting at Legacy Good Samaritan Medical Center in Portland was part of a wave of gun violence sweeping through U.S. hospitals and medical centers, which have struggled to adapt to the growing threats.

Such attacks have helped make health care one of the nation’s most violent fields. Data shows American health care workers now suffer more nonfatal injuries from workplace violence than workers in any other profession, including law enforcement.

“Health care workers don’t even think about that when they decide they want to be a nurse or a doctor. But as far as actual violence goes, statistically, health care is four or five times more dangerous than any other profession,” said Michael D’Angelo, a former police officer who focuses on health care and workplace violence as a security consultant in Florida.

Other industries outpace health care for overall danger, including deaths.

Similar shootings have played out in hospitals across the country.

Read More: The Tulsa Shooting Is a Reminder Health Care Workers Face Violence Every Day

Last year, a man killed two workers at a Dallas hospital while there to watch his child’s birth. In May, a man opened fire in a medical center waiting room in Atlanta, killing one woman and wounding four. Late last month, a man shot and wounded a doctor at a health center in Dallas. In June 2022, a gunman killed his surgeon and three other people at a Tulsa, Oklahoma, medical office because he blamed the doctor for his continuing pain after an operation.

Almost three-fourths of all nonfatal workplace injuries

It’s not just deadly shootings: Health care workers racked up 73% of all nonfatal workplace violence injuries in 2018, the most recent year for which figures are available, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

One day before the July 22 shooting in Portland, employees throughout the hospital were warned during meetings to be prepared for a possible “code amber” announcement in case the visitor attempted to kidnap the child, according to a nurse with direct knowledge of the briefing who spoke to The Associated Press. She spoke on condition of anonymity because she feared retaliation at work.

Fifteen minutes before the shooting, someone at the hospital called 911 to report the visitor was threatening staffers, according to a timeline provided by Portland police.

Read More: Column: The Coming Collapse of the U.S. Health Care System

“He kind of fell through the cracks,” the nurse said. “I don’t know how many chances he received. It kind of got to the point where staff did not know what to do, or what they could or couldn’t do with him.”

Police arrived at the maternity ward within minutes, but it was too late. Bobby Smallwood, a security guard who had been called in from another Legacy hospital to cover shifts for Good Samaritan’s understaffed security team, had been fatally shot. Another hospital employee was wounded by shrapnel. The suspect fled and was later killed by police in a nearby community.

The hospital declined to respond to the nurse’s comments because the case is still under investigation.

“Events like these are unpredictable, but our team exhibited professionalism and a great deal of courage in the face of extraordinarily challenging circumstances that day,” Legacy Health said in a statement to the AP.

Legacy Health in Portland plans to install additional metal detectors, require bag searches at every hospital and send patients and visitors to controlled entrances. More security officers will be provided with stun guns, the hospital said, and bullet-slowing film is being applied to some interior glass and at main entrances.

Around 40 states have passed laws creating or increasing penalties for violence against health care workers, according to the American Nurses Association. Hospitals have armed security officers with batons, stun guns or handguns, while some states, including Indiana, Ohio and Georgia, allow hospitals to create their own police forces.

The problems with hospital police forces

Critics say private hospital police can exacerbate the health care and policing inequities already experienced by Black people. They also say private police forces often don’t have to disclose information such as how often they use force or whether they disproportionately detain members of minority groups.

Security teams cannot address all of the factors leading to violence because many of them are caused by a dysfunctional health care system, said Deborah Burger, a registered nurse and the president of National Nurses United.

Patients and families are often bounced between emergency rooms and home, and are frustrated over high costs, limited treatment options or long wait times, Burger said.

“Hospitals don’t really have a complaints department, so the only real target they have is the nurse or staff that are standing right in front of them,” she said.

Understaffing forces nurses to care for more patients and affords them less time to assess each one for behavior problems. Efforts to de-escalate aggression aren’t as effective if nurses haven’t had time to bond with patients, Burger said.

Understaffing is an “absolutely catastrophic formula for workplace violence increasing,” D’Angelo said. “Now you don’t even have the good old buddy system of two co-workers keeping an eye out for each other.”

Some hospital administrators encourage staff to placate aggressive visitors and patients because they are worried about getting bad reviews, Burger said. That’s because the Affordable Care Act tied a portion of federal reimbursement rates to consumer satisfaction surveys and low satisfaction means a hit to the financial bottom line.

“The results of those surveys should never take priority over staff safety,” D’Angelo said.

Eric Sean Clay, the president-elect of the International Association for Healthcare Security & Safety and vice president of security at Memorial Hermann Health in Houston, said the workplace violence rates attributed to health care facilities are “grossly underreported.”

“I think that a lot of it comes down to caregivers are just very tolerant, and they come to look at it as just part of the job,” he said. “If they’re not injured, sometimes they don’t want to report it, and sometimes they don’t think there will be any change.”

Read More: Column: American Health Care Faces a Staffing Crisis And It’s Affecting Care

Clay’s hospital uses armed and unarmed security officers, though he hopes to have them all armed eventually.

“We actually have our own firing range that we use,” Clay said. None of his security officers have drawn their weapons on the job in recent years, but he wants them to be ready because of the rise in gun violence.

Clay and Memorial Hermann Health declined to answer questions about whether an armed security force could negatively affect access to health care or existing inequities.

Traumatized nurses

The nurse at the Portland hospital said the shooting left her colleagues terrified and unusually solemn. She is worried Legacy Health’s promises of increased safety will be temporary because of the cost of finding, training and retaining security officers.

Some of her co-workers have resigned because they don’t want to face another “code silver,” the alert issued when someone at the hospital has a weapon.

“You know, we always say these patients and their families are so vulnerable, because they’re having the worst day of their life here,” the nurse said, and that makes many staffers reluctant to demand better behavior.

“We have to stop that narrative,” she said. “Being vulnerable is bleeding out from a bullet wound in your chest. Being vulnerable is having to barricade yourself and your patients in a room because of a code silver.”

source https://time.com/6302386/health-care-violence-medical-center-attacks/

William Friedkin, Oscar-Winning Director of The French Connection and The Exorcist, Dies at 87

William Friedkin, the Oscar winning director who became a top filmmaker in his 30s with the gripping “The French Connection” and the horrifying “The Exorcist” and struggled in the following decades to match his early success has died. He was 87.

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Friedkin, who won the best director Oscar for “The French Connection,” died Monday in Los Angeles, his wife, producer and former studio head Sherry Lansing told The Hollywood Reporter.
The movie, based on a true story, deals with the efforts of maverick New York City police Detective James “Popeye” Doyle to track down Frenchman Fernando Rey, mastermind of a large drug pipeline funneling heroin into the United States. It contains one of the most thrilling chase scenes ever filmed.

The movie also won Academy Awards for best picture, screenplay and film editing and led critics to hail Friedkin, then just 32, as a leading member of a new generation of filmmakers.
He followed with an even bigger blockbuster, “The Exorcist,” based on William Peter Blatty’s best-selling novel about a 12-year-old girl possessed by the devil.

The harrowing scenes of the girl’s possession and a splendid cast, including Linda Blair as the girl, Ellen Burstyn as her mother and Max Von Sydow and Jason Miller as the priests who try to exorcise the devil from her, helped make the film a box-office sensation. It was so scary for its era that many viewers fled the theater before it was over and some reported being unable to sleep for days afterward.

It received 10 Oscar nominations, including one for Friedkin as director, and won two, for Blatty’s script and for sound.

With that second success, Friedkin would go on to direct movies and TV shows well into the 21st century. But he would never again come close to matching the success of those early works.
Other film credits included “To Live and Die in L.A.,” “Cruising,” “Rules of Engagement” and a TV remake of the classic play and Sidney Lumet movie “12 Angry Men.” Friedkin also directed episodes for such TV shows as “The Twilight Zone,” “Rebel Highway” and “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.”

The late Associated Press Correspondent Bob Thomas was the primary writer of this obituary.

source https://time.com/6302352/william-friedkin-dies-87/

Tens of Thousands of Scouts Came to South Korea. Now They’re Evacuating as a Storm Looms

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea is preparing to evacuate tens of thousands of scouts from a coastal jamboree site as Tropical Storm Khanun looms, officials said Monday.

Starting Tuesday morning, South Korea will deploy about a thousand buses to pull out some 36,000 scouts from 156 countries from the World Scout Jamboree in the southwestern county of Buan, according to Kim Sung-ho, a vice minister at South Korea’s Ministry of the Interior and Safety.

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He said most of the scouts will be accommodated at venues in the country’s capital, Seoul, and the nearby metropolitan area. Officials were trying to secure spaces at government training centers and education facilities. Kim said it would take six hours or more to evacuate the scouts from the campsite, which organizers said will no longer be used for any event after they leave.

Read More: The True Story Behind Hulu’s Boy Scouts Documentary ‘Leave No Trace’

The announcement came after The World Organization of the Scout Movement said it urgently called on South Korea to quickly move the scouts from the storm’s path and “provide all necessary resources and support for participants during their stay and until they return to their home countries.”

South Korea’s weather agency reported that Khanun was expected to make landfall in South Korea on Thursday morning, potentially packing winds as strong as 118 to 154 kilometers (73 to 95 miles) per hour. Large swaths of the country’s south, including Buan, could be affected by the storm as early as Wednesday, the agency said.

President Yoon Suk Yeol’s office said he called for “contingency” plans, which could include relocating them to hotels and other facilities in the country’s capital, Seoul, and nearby metropolitan areas. Khanun has taken an unusual, meandering path around Japan’s southwestern islands for more than a week, dumping heavy rain, knocking out power to thousands of homes and disrupting flights and train services. On Monday afternoon, it had sustained winds of 108 kilometers (67 miles) per hour, with higher gusts, and was forecast to maintain that strength as it brushed Japan’s main island of Kyushu this week, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.

The agency said the storm was at about 160 kilometers (99 miles) east of Amami city on Japan’s southern main island of Kyushu and moving gradually toward the north as of Monday afternoon. It warned residents in affected regions to watch out for mudslides, high winds and rough seas.

The storm has caused one death and 70 injuries on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa, according to the country’s Fire and Disaster Management Agency. Due to the forecast of harsh weather in the region, West Japan Railway Co. said there was a possibility of suspending “Shinkansen” bullet train services from Wednesday night to Thursday morning.

Hot temperatures have already forced thousands of British and American scouts to leave the site, which is made on land reclaimed from sea. Hundreds of participants had been treated for heat-related ailments since the jamboree started on Wednesday. Long before the event’s start, critics raised concerns about bringing such large numbers of young people to a vast, treeless area lacking protection from the summer heat.

Organizers earlier on Monday were scurrying to come up with plans to evacuate the scouts ahead of the storm’s arrival. Choi Chang-haeng, secretary-general of the jamboree’s organizing committee, said organizers have secured more than 340 evacuation venues, including community centers and gyms, in regions near Buan.

About 40,000 scouts — mostly teenagers — from 158 countries came to the jamboree, built on land reclaimed from the sea. About 4,500 were from the U.K., representing the largest national contingent, while about 1,000 were from the United States.

South Korea categorizes Khanun as a typhoon, defined as a tropical storm with winds stronger than 61 kilometers (38 miles) per hour. South Korea’s weather agency expects Khanun to weaken to a storm within the next five days.

—Associated Press writer Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed to this report.

source https://time.com/6302195/scout-jamboree-south-korea-weather/