Already-lagging broadband program faces more uncertainty under Trump

• February 28, 2025

By Madyson Fitzgerald, Stateline.org

A massive federal program meant to expand broadband access to underserved areas across the country is falling behind schedule, state broadband officials and experts say, even as Trump administration actions create further uncertainty about its funding and rules.

Now in its third year, the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program, known as BEAD, is largely still in the planning phase.

In Alpine County, California, the vice chair of the county Board of Supervisors, David Griffith, said he is still waiting to see how BEAD funds will help his area. Out of the county’s roughly 1,100 residents, most rely on phone lines to connect to the internet and can’t afford high-speed connections.

That means instead of renewing their driver’s licenses online, for example, many of the county’s residents drive 30 miles to the closest department of motor vehicles location, he said. They lack internet speed for telemedicine, banking and tax filing.

“We all want government to work,” Griffith said, “and unfortunately, the BEAD program is an example where the need is there and the funding is there, but it’s just a very inefficient process.”

Congress awarded California $1.8 billion to ensure households get access to high-speed internet as part of the $42.45 billion BEAD program, created under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021.

All 50 states have had their initial proposals approved, unlocking a portion — often 20% — of the money the feds will provide. Delaware, Louisiana and Nevada are the only states to have submitted their final proposals.

Some local officials and experts are questioning the efficiency of the program. Progress is slow in part, they say, because of inadequate federal mapping of where broadband is most needed and a lengthy challenge process to the maps. And some experts worry that states are favoring overly expensive infrastructure.

Federal and state broadband officials are also waiting to see how President Donald Trump’s funding freeze may affect the BEAD program, as well as how federal officials might change an affordability requirement or the type of technologies given preference under the program.

At his confirmation hearing, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, who took office Feb. 19, said he supported the goals of BEAD but wanted to make sure it was done “efficiently and effectively” and sidestepped questions asking him to commit to sending money out to states.

Griffith said he’s hopeful the money will still flow, noting that most of BEAD’s funds will go to rural areas, many of which tend to elect and support Republicans.

State snags

Louisiana was the first state to have both its initial and final BEAD proposals approved by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

The state plans to deploy more than $1.35 billion in funding through its GUMBO 2.0 program. States grant the federal money to internet service providers, local governments, nonprofits and other groups to build out the infrastructure.

Shortly after the state’s plans were approved in January, Louisiana Republican Gov. Jeff Landry sent a letter to the Commerce Department asking for changes within NTIA and the BEAD program, including a request to streamline the agency’s requirements and a commitment to more timely and transparent funding reviews.

NTIA declined to answer Stateline’s questions about the BEAD program.

Officials in some states have run into snags with challenges to the Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband Map.

Through the map challenge process, local governments, internet service providers, nonprofits and other groups can help determine whether a particular location actually has internet service.

Griffith, the California county supervisor, said the map was originally “full of errors” in his area.

“We went through it in Alpine County, and about 7-8% of residences and businesses were left off of the National Broadband Map,” he said. “Unless you’re on the National Broadband Map, that money cannot be used to connect your home or business.”

The BEAD program also has an affordability requirement that mandates state broadband officials include a low-cost service option for low-income households. But industry groups have pushed back, calling the rule “completely unmoored from the economic realities of deploying and operating networks in the highest cost, hardest-to-reach areas.”

The BEAD program has “moved a little slower than it should have,” said Sachin Gupta, the vice president of business and technologies strategies at Centranet, part of the Central Rural Electric Cooperative in Oklahoma. The group serves households living just outside of Oklahoma City.

“There are people who cannot do remote work, or distance learning, or be part of the digital economy or do telehealth and telemedicine,” he said. “So, there’s real-world consequences.”

In August, the feds approved Oklahoma’s initial BEAD proposal, allowing the state to request access to over $797 million.

The goal is to get households connected to the internet as quickly as possible, but there are going to be some challenges, such as mapping, Gupta said.

“This work has gone on for some time,” Gupta said, “but if you pull this money back, people are just going to be even more distressed than they were before.”

Technology choices

Experts at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a science and technology policy think tank based in Washington, D.C., have argued that the BEAD program favors overly expensive broadband infrastructure.

Fiber-optic internet, which BEAD gives preference to, is considered faster and more reliable than other methods of connection, but other technologies, such as satellites, could be more cost-effective, according to the group. The money saved from using less costly infrastructure could be put toward affordability efforts instead.

“That may be the best kept secret: The reason people aren’t online anymore is not about broadband being unavailable,” said Joe Kane, the director of broadband and spectrum policy at the foundation. “It’s that they can’t afford it.”

In states like Nevada, where officials are planning to spend about $77,000 per business or residential location to deploy fiber, there’s not going to be much money left over for affordability efforts, Kane said. It’s even more crucial now that the Affordable Connectivity Program, a pandemic-era discount program for low-income households, has dissolved.

“I think the most important thing for broadband overall is that we should be trying to take a data-focused approach to what are the real causes of the digital divide, and how is our broadband policy meeting that,” Kane said. “Because right now, we have a complete mismatch.”

But Gupta, who has been involved with Oklahoma’s broadband expansion for years, said other types of broadband internet cannot provide the same internet speed as fiber.

“If we deploy technologies that are not scalable, then all we’re doing is kicking that can down the road another five years.”

Affordability concerns

As consumer prices rise, internet affordability is a significant concern, said Derrick Owens, the senior vice president of government and industry affairs at WTA — Advocates for Rural Broadband. The group represents small, rural telecommunications providers across the country.

Alongside federal broadband programs, some states have worked to expand broadband access by passing new laws. As of Feb. 24, lawmakers in 43 states had filed a total of 300 bills regarding broadband access, infrastructure, affordability and more, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures broadband legislation database.

Three of those states — Connecticut, Minnesota and New York— are hoping to improve the process of mapping which areas need better internet service.

This year, lawmakers in 10 states — Connecticut, Indiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York and Virginia — have filed legislation to expand broadband access to rural areas.

“If you don’t have access to broadband today on a permanent, full-time basis, then you’re not able to participate fully in today’s economy,” Owens said. “And it’s not just the local economy, it’s the global economy. And so, the efforts are being made to make sure people have high-speed, quality, reliable broadband, and hopefully that’s what BEAD brings.”

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

​ Orange County Register 

Where things stand as Congress tries to avoid a partial government shutdown in two weeks

• February 28, 2025

By KEVIN FREKING, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — As House members finished voting for the week and left Washington, the lead Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, voiced frustration that Republicans had yet to respond to her latest offer on a full-year spending bill, even though it had been made five days earlier.

Meanwhile, her Republican counterpart outright dismissed Democratic efforts to include assurances in the legislation that funding approved by Congress would be spent by President Donald Trump’s administration as lawmakers intended.

“A Republican Senate and a Republican House are not going to limit what a president can do, particularly when he has to sign the bill,” said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla.

The exchanges demonstrate the divides that remain as the nation approaches a March 14 deadline to avoid a partial federal government shutdown.

Such deadlines have become commonplace in recent years with lawmakers almost always working out their differences in the end, or at least agreeing to a short-term funding extension.

But with Republicans now in charge of the White House and Trump sidestepping Congress on previous funding decisions, a more contentious dynamic has emerged during negotiations, raising questions about whether lawmakers will avoid a shutdown this time.

Here’s a look at where things stand.

First things first: How much to spend?

The stage for the current negotiations was set nearly two years ago when then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and then-President Joe Biden worked out a two-year budget deal that would essentially hold non-defense spending flat for 2024, while boosting it slightly for defense. The agreement provided for 1% increases for both in 2025.

Democrats want to adhere to that agreement, which would bring defense spending to about $895.2 billion and non-defense to about $780.4 billion. Republicans are looking to spend less on non-defense programs. Cole has argued Republicans are not bound to an agreement negotiated by two men no longer in office.

It’s unclear how much the two sides disagree on an overall spending amount. But Sen. Patty Murray, the lead Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said they weren’t far apart.

“We are close on topline spending, but we need to know Republicans are willing to work with us to protect Congress’ power of the purse — and I welcome any and all ideas they may have on how we can work together to do just that,” Murray said.

With Trump and Musk slashing government, Democrats want guarantees

Trump pushed early to pause grants and loans potentially totaling trillions of dollars while his administration conducted an across-the-board review of federal programs. A subsequent memorandum purported to rescind the pause.

Still, a federal judge issued an order earlier this week as a backstop. The preliminary injunction continued to block the pause. The judge said the freeze had “placed critical programs for children, the elderly, and everyone in between in serious jeopardy.”

Meanwhile, Trump has empowered Elon Musk to help engineer the firing of thousands of federal employees and potentially shutter entire agencies created by Congress.

The U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power to appropriate money and requires the executive to pay it out. A 50-year-old law known as the Impoundment Control Act makes that explicit by prohibiting the president from halting payments on grants or other programs approved by Congress.

Democrats have sought to place in the spending bill some guarantees the administration would follow what Congress intended.

“What we’ve been talking about is the numbers, and we’re talking about the issue of assurances,” DeLauro said. “It’s trying to make it possible to have the money go as intended.”

But Republicans are making clear that’s a non-starter.

“Democrats are placing completely unreasonable conditions on the negotiations. They want us to limit the scope of executive authority. They want us to tie the hands of the president,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said.

Why is Congress so late?

The current fiscal year began in October, so lawmakers are already five month late.

Trump complained Thursday on Truth Social, blaming Biden, saying he “left us a total MESS.”

“The Budget from last YEAR is still not done. We are working very hard with the House and Senate to pass a clean, temporary government funding Bill (“CR”) to the end of September. Let’s get it done!”

But it was congressional Republicans who opted in December to hold over budget negotiations for a few months, largely because Trump would be in the White House. Johnson on Fox News in December urged a short-term extension so “we get to March where we can put our fingerprints on the spending. That’s when the big changes start.”

What happens if they can’t reach an agreement?

The first fallback option is the continuing resolution Trump endorsed, a stopgap measure that would generally fund federal agencies at current levels.

“It looks as though it is becoming inevitable at this point,” Johnson said, blaming Democrats.

That will be tough for defense hawks to accept, as many Republicans already consider the Pentagon to be underfunded. But it will also be tough for Democrats who worry that funding for housing programs, child care, nutrition assistance and other services is failing to keep pace with inflation, fraying the safety net for many Americans.

Murray and DeLauro issued a joint statement Friday morning, saying they hoped Republicans would return to the negotiating table and that “walking away” from bipartisan talks “raised the risk of a shutdown.”

They also said the continuing resolution being pursued by Republicans would “give Trump new flexibility to spend funding as he sees fit.”

“While Elon Musk has been calling for a shutdown, Democrats have been working to pass bills that make sure Congress decides whether our schools or hospitals get funding — not Trump or Musk,” the two Democratic lawmakers said.

The White House has submitted to lawmakers a list of what are referred to as “anomalies” that it wants to see added to a continuing resolution. For example, it wants an additional $1.6 billion to increase pay for junior enlisted service members by an average of 10% effective April 1. Congress has also supported a pay increase in previous legislation.

The White House is also seeking $485 million for more immigrant detention beds and for removal operations at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The request also seeks to give Trump more flexibility on how money within certain departments is spent. For example, the White House wants language allowing $30 billion in Department of Defense transfers.

Democrats will want to negotiate some of the changes the White House is seeking, adding to the uncertainty of reaching a final agreement.

Republicans likely need votes from the other side

Getting spending bills over the finish line has required support from both parties. Some Republicans never vote for continuing resolutions. Nearly three dozen House Republicans voted against the last one in December, and they now only have a one-vote cushion to work with in the House if Democrats withhold their support.

If talks break down completely, funding for agencies will end at midnight March 14. Both parties will pin the blame on the other — and some of that is already happening.

Trump is no stranger to shutdowns. He presided over the longest one in the nation’s history, one that lasted 35 days, with Trump relenting only after intensifying delays at the nation’s airports and another missed payday for hundreds of thousands of federal workers brought new urgency to resolving the standoff.

Associated Press writer Leah Askarinam contributed to this report.

​ Orange County Register 

Watch: Trump and Vance call Zelenskyy ‘disrespectful’ in Oval Office meeting

• February 28, 2025

President Donald Trump shouted at Ukraine’s leader on Friday during an extraordinary meeting in the Oval Office, berating President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for “gambling with millions of lives” and suggesting his actions could trigger World War III.

The last 10 minutes of the nearly 45-minute engagement devolved into a tense back and forth between Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Zelenskyy — who had urged skepticism about Russia’s commitment to diplomacy, citing Moscow’s years of broken commitments on the global stage.

It began with Vance telling Zelenskyy, “Mr. President, with respect. I think it’s disrespectful for you to come to the Oval Office to try to litigate this in front of the American media.”

Zelensky tried to object, prompting Trump to raise his voice and say, “You’re gambling with the lives of millions of people.”

“You’re gambling with World War III, and what you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country that’s backed you far more than a lot of people say they should have,” Trump said.

It was an astonishing display of open antagonism in the Oval Office, a setting better known for somber diplomacy. Trump laid bare his efforts to coerce Zelenskyy to agree to giving the U.S. an interest in his country’s valuable minerals and to push him toward a diplomatic resolution to the war on the American leader’s terms.

​ Orange County Register 

Skype to shut down 14 years after Microsoft’s $8.5 billion purchase

• February 28, 2025

By Matt Day | Bloomberg

Microsoft Corp. is signaling the end of the line for Skype, the iconic internet calling and chat service it bought almost 14 years ago.

Once a byword for digital calls that bypassed long-distance charges, Skype was surpassed in recent years by smartphone-native communication apps and Zoom video calls. When Microsoft tried to stretch the Skype brand into the workplace, it lost out to Slack Technologies Inc.

Microsoft’s response was to start from scratch and build Teams, a chat, voice and video communication service for the workplace, which gained ground as part of its software bundle. The Redmond, Washington-based company will offer Skype users the option of migrating to Teams, which is now its strongest rival to Salesforce Inc.-owned Slack, before it shuts down in May.

“I’ve been at Microsoft for over 30 years, and there’s a lot of software that we’ve done that was incredibly valuable in its era, and then the next era came and it was the foundation,” said Jeff Teper, a Microsoft president who oversees communications and collaboration tools.

Microsoft said there were more than 300 million monthly Skype users in 2016, but its daily user count had dwindled to 36 million in 2023. Teams, by comparison, has risen to 320 million monthly users.

Founded in 2003 by Nordic entrepreneurs, Skype at one time was owned by eBay Inc. and was in the hands of a private equity-led consortium when Steve Ballmer came knocking. The then-Microsoft boss made an uncharacteristically splashy bet on the market leader in online calls, paying $8.5 billion, a 40% premium to Skype’s internal valuation. The May 2011 deal was the largest acquisition by Microsoft at the time, and Skype became a key piece of its strategy for the emerging mobile age.

It didn’t pan out as Ballmer would have hoped. Upstarts like Telegram, Snapchat, WeChat and WhatsApp solved problems that Skype didn’t. Microsoft’s center of gravity in corporate software ultimately ensnared Skype, which found itself in the Office division and under orders to build tools geared toward a workplace audience as well as a consumer one.

By the time Slack arrived on the scene, Skype users were complaining that elements of the core experience had started to break down. They cited missed or phantom calls and failures to sync information on different devices. The company worked to improve the service’s reliability, but some loyal users were put off by frequent redesigns, including a short-lived effort to fashion Skype in the mold of Snapchat.

Microsoft, which also saw its acquisition of Nokia Oyj’s mobile phone business end in failure, is far from alone in encountering rejection by a fickle consumer market. Alphabet Inc.’s Google has cycled through several iterations and brands for its online communications tools, which are today known as Chat and Meet. And this month, Amazon.com Inc. said it would be winding down Chime, the video and voice calling service it tried with little success to sell to corporate clients.

The Windows maker is shuttering Skype to focus on developing new features for Teams, including artificial intelligence tools, Teper said. The company is working to infuse AI into its product suite, while keeping a lid on spending that isn’t part of that effort. It’s reassigning staff that had worked on Skype to other areas of the business and will not lay anyone off, Teper added.

At one point, Skype played host to one of Microsoft’s biggest AI demonstrations: a real-time translator. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella had nudged researchers to bring the product to market as quickly as possible and heralded it as “magical” in a 2014 demonstration early on in his tenure.

Teams is “going well and this is a step to double down on it,” Teper said, adding that Microsoft wanted to keep Skype running until it was confident that the Teams version for individual users was fully ready. “It’s the most successful product in its category by far,” he said.

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com

©2025 Bloomberg L.P.

​ Orange County Register 

Most Americans who experienced severe winter weather see climate change at work, poll shows

• February 28, 2025

By TAMMY WEBBER and AMELIA THOMSON-DeVEAUX, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Matt Ries has lived in Florida only three years, but everyone told him last summer was unusually hot. That was followed by three hurricanes in close succession. Then temperatures dropped below freezing for days this winter, and snow blanketed part of the state.

To Ries, 29, an Ohio native now in Tampa, the extreme weather — including the bitter cold — bore all the hallmarks of climate change.

“To me it’s just kind of obvious,” said Ries, a project manager for an environmental company and self-described conservative-leaning independent. “Things are changing pretty drastically; just extreme weather all across the country and the world. … I do think humans are speeding up that process.”

About 8 in 10 U.S. adults say they have experienced some kind of extreme weather in recent years, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, with about half saying they’ve been personally affected by severe cold weather or severe winter storms.

Among those saying severe cold was among the types of extreme weather they experienced, about three-quarters say climate change is at least a partial cause of those events — suggesting that many understand global warming can create an unstable atmosphere that allows cold air from the Arctic to escape farther south more often.

Midwesterners are most likely to feel the brunt of the cold weather, with about 7 in 10 adults who live in the Midwest experiencing severe cold in the past five years, compared with about half of residents of the South and the Northeast and about one-third of those in the West, the survey found.

“It’s counterintuitive to think, ‘Oh, gee, it’s really cold. That probably has something to do with global warming,’” said Liane Golightly-Kissner, of Delaware, Ohio, north of Columbus, who believes climate change is influencing many weather extremes.

Golightly-Kissner, 38, said it was so cold this winter that schools were closed and her family let faucets drip to prevent burst pipes. She remembers one extremely cold day when she was a child in Michigan, but she says now it seems to happen more often and over multiple days.

The poll also found that, while only about one-quarter of U.S. adults feel climate change has had a major impact on their lives so far, about 4 in 10 think it will in their lifetimes — including on their health, local air quality and water availability. About half of adults under age 30 believe climate change will impact them personally.

About 7 in 10 U.S. adults believe climate change is occurring, and they are much more likely to think it has had or will have a major impact on them than those who say climate change isn’t happening.

Americans are catching on, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, who credits a combination of media coverage, political leaders speaking up and public concerns that creates a “symbiotic relationship.”

“We have seen growing awareness among the American people that climate change is affecting them here and now,” though many still see it as a distant problem that their grandchildren will have to worry about, he said.

Rosiland Lathan, 60, of Minden, Louisiana, said she’s a believer because it seems that summers are getting hotter and winters colder — including a couple years ago, when snow and ice kept her car stuck at work for several days.

This winter, she said, there was a stretch of temperatures in the teens and 20s, while a couple of summers ago, it got “real, real hot” with highs in the 100s.

“It’s normally hot in Louisiana, but not that hot,” Lathan said.

Hurricanes, wildfires and other natural disasters, like the devastating Southern California fires, also have many concerned that climate change could lead to higher property insurance premiums and household energy costs.

About 6 in 10 U.S. adults are “extremely” or “very” concerned about increasing property insurance premiums, and just over half are similarly concerned about climate change’s impact on energy costs, the AP-NORC survey found. About half are “extremely” or “very” concerned that climate change will increase costs for local emergency responders and infrastructure costs for government. Republicans are less worried than Democrats and independents.

The survey also found broad support for a range of measures to help people who live in areas becoming more susceptible to extreme weather and natural disasters, with the exception of restricting new construction in these communities.

About 6 in 10 U.S. adults said they “somewhat” or “strongly” favor providing money to local residents to help them rebuild in the same community after disasters strike, while similar shares support providing money to make residents’ property more resistant to natural disasters and providing homeowners’ insurance to people who cannot get private insurance. About one-quarter of Americans neither favor nor oppose each of these proposals, while around 1 in 10 are “somewhat” or “strongly” opposed.

When it comes to restricting new construction, opinion is more divided. About 4 in 10 “somewhat” or “strongly” favor restricting new construction in areas that are especially vulnerable to natural disasters, about 4 in 10 have a neutral view and about 2 in 10 are “somewhat” or “strongly” opposed.

Golightly-Kissner said she believes there should be rebuilding restrictions or tougher building standards in disaster-prone areas.

“These extreme weather conditions, they’re not going anywhere, and it would be hubris for us to continue in the same way,” she said. “I think we we have to change. We have to look toward the future and what’s the best way to keep our lives together when this happens again. Because it’s really not a question of if, it’s when.”

The AP-NORC poll of 1,112 adults was conducted Feb. 6-10, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.

Webber reported from Fenton, Michigan

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find the AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

​ Orange County Register 

Israel’s army admits failures on Oct. 7. Its probe of the attack could put pressure on Netanyahu

• February 28, 2025

By TIA GOLDENBERG, Associated Press

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — An investigation by the Israeli military has determined that Hamas was able to carry out the deadliest attack in Israeli history on Oct. 7, 2023, because the much more powerful Israeli army misjudged the group’s intentions and underestimated its capabilities.

The findings, released Thursday, could pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to launch a widely demanded broader inquiry to examine the political decision-making that preceded the attack, which triggered the war in Gaza.

Many Israelis believe the mistakes of Oct. 7 extend beyond the military, and they blame Netanyahu for what they view as a failed strategy of deterrence and containment in the years leading up to the attack. That strategy included allowing Qatar to send suitcases of cash into Gaza and sidelining Hamas’ rival, the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority.

Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada and the European Union.

The prime minister has not taken responsibility, saying he will answer tough questions only after the war, which has been paused for nearly six weeks by a tenuous ceasefire. Despite public pressure, including from the families of the roughly 1,200 people killed in the Oct. 7 attack and the 251 taken as hostages into Gaza, Netanyahu has resisted calls for a commission of inquiry.

The military’s main findings were that the region’s most powerful and sophisticated military misread Hamas’ intentions, underestimated its capabilities and was wholly unprepared for the surprise attack by thousands of heavily armed terrorists in the early morning hours of a major Jewish holiday.

In comments made to military commanders Monday, and shared with the media on Thursday, the army’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, said he took responsibility for the army’s failures.

“I was the commander of the military on October 7th, and I have my own responsibility. I also carry the weight of all your responsibility — that, too, I see as mine,” said Halevi, who announced his resignation in January and is set to step down next week.

The military’s findings are in line with past conclusions reached by officials and analysts. The military released only a summary of the report and military officials outlined its findings.

“Oct. 7 was a complete failure,” said one military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

A central misconception was that Hamas, which seized control of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in 2007, was more interested in governing the territory than fighting Israel, the inquiry found.

The military also misjudged the group’s capabilities. Military planners had envisioned that, at worst, Hamas could stage a ground invasion from up to eight border points, the official said. In fact, Hamas had more than 60 attack routes.

Intelligence assessed in the aftermath of the attack has shown Hamas came close to staging the offensive on three earlier occasions but delayed it for unknown reasons, the official said.

The official said that in the hours before the attack, there were signs that something was amiss, including when Hamas fighters switched their phones over to the Israeli network.

The perception that Hamas did not want war guided decision makers away from taking action that night that might have thwarted the attack. The Israeli military official said intelligence shows that Yahya Sinwar, a mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack who was killed last October, had begun planning it as early as 2017.

With the military off guard on a holiday weekend, Hamas launched a heavy wave of rockets that allowed thousands of fighters to burst through the security fence or fly over it on hang gliders. They knocked out surveillance cameras and quickly overwhelmed hundreds of soldiers stationed along the border.

From there they advanced to key highway intersections and attacked troops dispatched to the area, including some senior officers, disrupting the military’s command and control, according to a second military official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity.

For the first three hours after the attack, Hamas fighters marauded through border communities and a music festival with little resistance. That was when most of the 251 hostages were taken and most people were killed, the official said. The official said the chaos led to friendly fire incidents, although he said there were not many, without disclosing a figure.

It took hours for the military to regain control and days until the area was fully cleared of fighters.

According to the first official, the report blamed the military for being overconfident in its knowledge and not showing enough doubt in its core concepts and beliefs. The summary said a key lesson was that Israel could not let a threat develop on its border.

It spelled out several recommendations, including creating special units meant to prepare for such surprise and large-scale events, as well as reform in the military intelligence department that would foster “openness, skepticism, listening, learning.”

It did not place blame on any individual soldiers or officers, but is likely to pave the way for a reckoning in the military and eventual dismissals.

Some high-ranking officers other than Halevi have also resigned, including the former head of military intelligence.

​ Orange County Register 

Hundreds fired at weather agency as US faces storm, wildfire warnings

• February 28, 2025

Lauren Rosenthal, Brian K. Sullivan and Ari Natter | Bloomberg

The Trump administration fired hundreds of employees at the top US agency overseeing weather prediction and climate research, raising concerns about the nation’s preparedness amid wildfire and tornado warnings.

The cuts affect the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which includes the National Weather Service and a vast observational system that supplies free data to commercial forecasters. The move is part of a broad effort by the administration to shrink the size of the federal government.

At least 880 people were terminated, Senator Maria Cantwell, the ranking member on the Senate Committee that oversees the agency, said in a statement Thursday. Hundreds more are expected to be let go at NOAA as soon as Friday, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the information is private.

“It’s ridiculous that this is happening to government employees,” said Marnie Brown, who was fired from her job Thursday as a program specialist providing administrative support in NOAA’s Office of General Counsel in Silver Spring, Maryland. She added that the agency “touches your life from the surface of the sun to the bottom of the ocean.”

The firings are taking place just as critical fire weather conditions are expected to develop this weekend in parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. A potentially severe round of thunderstorms, hail and even tornadoes is forecast for the lower Mississippi River Valley next week, said the U.S. Storm Prediction Center, which is part of the NWS.

Typically, the weather service has at least two meteorologists on duty overnight at its more than 120 forecast offices across the US. The staff writes outlooks, launches weather balloons to collect data, and issues warnings for flash floods and tornadoes. When severe weather strikes, such as hurricanes, additional staff are often brought in and more observations can be ordered to feed computer forecast models.

NOAA employed about 12,000 prior to the cuts, including more than 6,700 scientists and engineers and a uniformed service that operates NOAA’s fleet of research ships and planes. Rick Spinrad, an oceanographer who led NOAA during the Biden administration, said the agency had been working to fill vacant positions after a wave of retirements in 2024.

Losing workers “will cause a lot of damage and potentially loss of lives, impact on property and economic development,” Spinrad said. “The mission will suffer. The agency was already understaffed, so if you are cutting into it, you are already cutting into bone.”

NWS spokesperson Susan Buchanan declined to confirm the exact size and scope of the job cuts, citing “long-standing practice” against discussing personnel or management matters at the agency.

“NOAA remains dedicated to its mission, providing timely information, research and resources that serve the American public and ensure our nation’s environmental and economic resilience,” Buchanan said in an email Thursday. “We continue to provide weather information, forecasts and warnings pursuant to our public safety mission.”

Almost 21 million people will have at least a 15% chance of experiencing severe weather Tuesday, including those in Dallas, St. Louis and Nashville. Last year, severe storms — including an outbreak of 110 tornadoes across the central US — killed 51 people and caused about $46.8 billion in damage, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information.

NWS weather forecasts are produced by staff at local field offices, which also maintain critical monitoring equipment. In a bulletin Thursday morning — hours before job cuts were announced — Mike Hopkins, a director in NOAA’s Office of Observations, said the agency was “indefinitely suspending” weather balloon launches from Kotzebue, Alaska, due a staffing shortage at the local forecasting station.

The cuts to NOAA come amid an effort from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to reduce the size of the federal workforce. That initiative has included a voluntary program for transitioning to retirement and instructions from the Office of Personnel Management to fire probationary employees, who typically have held their positions for two years or less and sometimes previously served as contractors.

More layoffs are in the works: The White House has directed federal agencies to submit plans by March 13 for “large-scale reductions in force,” in the first phase of more drastic cuts to the federal workforce.

Conservative critics have called for NOAA to be broken up and its responsibilities and assets distributed among other federal departments. But Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who oversees the agency, testified at his confirmation hearing in January that he believes NOAA should remain intact.

Neil Jacobs, the scientist who has been nominated as NOAA’s next administrator, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Jacobs, who was acting NOAA administrator during President Donald Trump’s first term, was cited for misconduct related to the “Sharpiegate” hurricane forecasting controversy.

​ Orange County Register 

Alexander: As women’s basketball grows, remember Diana Taurasi, one of the builders

• February 28, 2025

The world according to Jim:

• Diana Taurasi announced her retirement this week, and the news seemed way underplayed. All of the things that are coming to the current stars of women’s basketball, in its era of newly discovered popularity and prosperity, have been built on the accomplishments of the sport’s past stars, and Taurasi – Chino Don Lugo High’s own, University of Connecticut star, the WNBA’s all-time leading scorer with the Phoenix Mercury and a six-time Olympic gold medalist – might be the OG of the OGs. …

• A reminder, for those whose exposure to the women’s game is recent: For years the stars of the WNBA had to play overseas in the fall and winter just to pull in anywhere near the salary appropriate for a professional athlete. There was, in fact, a season in the middle of the last decade when the team Taurasi played for in Russia paid her a bonus to take the WNBA season off and get some rest. (Rest, of course, being a foreign concept to Taurasi, who couldn’t get enough of this game.) …

• This was, of course, well before the arrest of Brittany Griner in Russia in 2022, which should have been a sign for Americans to reconsider playing in that country. More of them now play in the Unrivaled 3-on-3 league, and their salaries for that circuit augment a WNBA pay scale that still lags but could jump upward soon, since negotiations for a new collective bargaining contract will take place following the 2025 season. …

• I asked Taurasi in a 2014 interview, when she had just turned 32, how long she wanted to play. “I’m gonna play until it’s not fun or I can’t walk, one or the other,” she said. “We’ll see which one comes first.”

But eventually the fatigue overrides the fun. Taurasi said in an exclusive retirement announcement with Time Magazine earlier this week that while she usually starts to ramp up her workout schedule around the first of the year, this New Year’s “I just didn’t have it in me. That was pretty much when I knew it was time to walk away.” …

• If the TV folks are looking for someone outspoken, feisty and funny – the female Charles Barkley, perhaps – the search should stop at Diana’s doorstep. Consider, for example, her reminiscence of where her ferocious work ethic came from.

“I guess I want to go out there and play every day,” she said in that 2014 interview. “When I was younger if I didn’t have practice I was in the driveway every single day. Ask my mom. She’d yell, ‘Get in the house!’ It was 11:30 and boomp, boomp, I’d be playing, the neighbors would be screaming and yelling. I just loved doing it, loved playing, loved the game.”

She loved the game, and the game loved her back. That’s a fair trade. …

• I’m not sure how much attention Colorado two-way football star Travis Hunter has paid to Shohei Ohtani, but his insistence that he wants to play both wide receiver and cornerback in the NFL might run into the same resistance Ohtani faced when he was determined to both pitch and hit. The difference here: Being a designated hitter in baseball is far less perilous than it is in football.

The quote attributed to him by ESPN: “They say, ‘nobody has ever done it the way I do it.’ I tell them, ‘I’m just different.’” We’ll see who, if anyone, is willing to let him try. …

• Nestor Cortes – former New York Yankee, now in the Milwaukee Brewers’ camp, last seen trudging off the mound while Freddie Freeman took his joyful trip around the bases at the end of Game 1 of the World Series last October – was bold enough to say in a recent interview with The Athletic, “We were the better team.”

His rationalization seems rather pained.

“We had done enough to win that (Game 1),” Cortes said. “They can talk whatever they want to talk, but we win Game 1 – which we should have – we lost 2 and 3, we win Game 4 and we should have won Game 5. Then we go back to L.A. up 3 to 2. So people can say it slipped away from us, people can say we made a lot of mistakes, which we did. But at the end of the day, we were the better team.”

Suit yourself, Nestor. Bottom line is, the scoreboard determines which is the better team, always. And the rings are going to be handed out in L.A. …

• Tristan Boyer, a former Stanford tennis star who reached his first main draw at a Grand Slam event last month at the Australian Open, will participate in the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells beginning next week, but he has some business to attend to first.

Boyer, an Altadena native whose family had to evacuate their home during last month’s fires, will hold a fundraiser for fire relief and autograph session Saturday from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. at the 24 Hour Fitness in Altadena, 2180 Lincoln Ave., building 4. Additionally, 24 Hour Fitness will donate $200 for every Boyer ace at Indian Wells. …

• Things I wish I’d written: “When Don Drysdale entered a room, the room knew it. When Drysdale walked to the top of a mound, it seemed to grow and rise, and everyone in the ballpark knew anything was possible or at least memorable.”

That is the first paragraph of retired SCNG columnist Mark Whicker’s biography of Big D, “Up And In: The Life Of A Dodgers Legend” (Triumph Books, $30), which hit bookstores and online book platforms last week. If you are a fan of this publication’s former lead columnist – and really, why wouldn’t you be – this book is absolutely worth your time, as is Whicker’s Substack newsletter, The Morning After.

[email protected]

​ Orange County Register