Twitter’s viewing limits: Will users and advertisers go elsewhere?

• July 3, 2023

By Matt O’Brien | The Associated Press

TikTok and Instagram users can scroll with abandon. But Twitter owner Elon Musk has put new curfews on his digital town square, the latest drastic change to the social media platform that could further drive away advertisers and undermine its cultural influence as a trendsetter.

Keeping up with a sports game, extreme weather conditions or a major news event is getting harder under Musk’s new rules, which cap the number of tweets you can view as part of an apparent attempt to relieve the company’s overloaded web infrastructure.

“The joke on Twitter is that people are going to go outside instead, but the reality is that they’re going to go to another app,” said Jasmine Enberg, an analyst with Insider Intelligence. “By sending users elsewhere, Musk is killing the main proposition Twitter has had for advertisers — a highly engaged user base, especially around news and events.”

SEE MORE: Twitter worst social media for LGBTQ+ safety, GLAAD says

Musk recently hired longtime NBC Universal executive Linda Yaccarino as Twitter’s CEO to try to win back advertisers annoyed by a host of changes since Musk bought the platform for $44 billion last year. But she’s been silent about the new restrictions that lock users out if they view too many tweets in a day, leaving Musk to announce and explain them.

The moves are “remarkably bad for Twitter’s users and advertisers,” decimating the reach and engagement that advertisers depend on, according to a statement from Forrester analyst Mike Proulx.

“The advertiser trust deficit that Linda Yaccarino needs to reverse just got even bigger. And it cannot be reversed based on her industry credibility alone,” Proulx said.

An Associated Press inquiry on Monday about how long the limits will last triggered a crude automated reply that Twitter sends to most media queries without addressing the question.

Musk had tried on Saturday to describe how the limits work, saying accounts that don’t pay for a monthly subscription will temporarily be restricted to reading 600 posts per day, while verified accounts will be able to scroll through up to 6,000.

After facing backlash, he tweeted that the thresholds would be raised to 800 posts for unverified accounts and 8,000 for verified accounts before later settling on 1,000 and 10,000 tweets, respectively.

Many unverified users are “going to hit that limit fast,” said Enberg, because most Twitter users are consuming, not creating posts, and “typically scroll through an enormous number of tweets in a short period of time.”

Enberg said Musk should be doing whatever he can to encourage engagement to show Twitter is still viable as it faces growing competition from upstart rivals, as well as a new Twitter-like service coming from Facebook and Instagram parent Meta. “Instead, he’s throttling it,” she said.

Proulx, of Forrester, said the “real reason behind Musk’s temporary rate limits” is still unclear.

Musk over the weekend explained the new restrictions as an attempt to prevent unauthorized scraping of potentially valuable data from the social media platform. He said it was a temporary measure that was taken because “we were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!”

The site is now requiring people to log on to view tweets and profiles — a change in its longtime practice to allow everyone to peruse the chatter on what Musk has frequently touted as the world’s digital town square.

Musk has pushed back on what he calls misuse of Twitter data to train popular artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT. They scour reams of information online to generate human-like text, photos, video and other content.

The higher tweet-viewing threshold allowed on verified accounts is part of an $8-per-month subscription service that Musk rolled out earlier this year in an effort to boost Twitter revenue. It has fallen sharply since the billionaire Tesla CEO took over the company and laid off roughly three-fourths of the workforce to cut costs and stave off bankruptcy.

Advertisers have since curbed their spending on Twitter, partly because of changes that have allowed more hateful or prickly content that offends a wider part of the service’s audience.

​ Orange County Register 

Seal Beach ends animal services contract with Long Beach, launches own program

• July 3, 2023

Seal Beach has officially implemented its own animal control services program — ending its nearly 20-year contract with Long Beach’s agency.

The Long Beach Animal Care Services Department previously provided shelter, rescue operations, and animal licensing and enforcement to neighboring Seal Beach — until the agency moved to increase the costs of those services. Seal Beach’s new local program went into effect on Saturday, July 1, less than a week after the City Council OK’d it.

The program, though, had been under development for more than a year, Seal Beach officials said.

“Approximately 18 months ago, Long Beach notified the city of Seal Beach of impending cost increases to provide animal control cervices,” Seal Beach police Capt. Nick Nicholas said at the June 26 council meeting. “Cost increases prompted review of the Long Beach animal control contract.”

Seal Beach spent the next year or so weighing its options, including sticking with the Long Beach contract and absorbing the cost increase; entering into an agreement with Westminster; or establishing its own animal control program within the Seal Beach Police Department from the ground up.

Seal Beach chose the last option.

The city enrolled SBPD’s senior community officer and police aides in animal control training programs, and secured contracts with organizations to provide sheltering and wildlife services. The city also worked to obtain the equipment necessary to launch an animal control program and formalized its procedures for licensing and enforcement.

“We’re confident that our personnel are trained, equipped and ready to go into service immediately,” Nicholas said. “With any program, we know that there will be growing pains and bugs to work through. But we know that based on the assistance we’ve received from other agencies and the large amount of research that we’ve done, we’ll be able to tackle any issues that arise.”

It’s a big change for both the Long Beach and Seal Beach communities. Seal Beach had contracted with the Long Beach Animal Care Services Department since 2004.

Related links

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Long Beach to scale back Belmont Pool project, aims to open in late 2025

Now, Seal Beach residents who need assistance with animal care — be it a lost pet or an issue with wildlife — should contact the SBPD at its non-emergency number, 562-594-7232, rather than Long Beach.

The SBPD will handle all matters relating to animal care, such as investigating violations of animal welfare, licensing pets, issuing citations, treating animals, and conducting community outreach and education.

“We wish to thank the city of Long Beach, their animal care program, staff and volunteers for the service they provided to Seal Beach for many years,” SBPD Chief Michael Henderson said in a recent press release. “Without their assistance and guidance, we would not have been able to bring animal control services back in-house.”

Seal Beach has yet to update their animal care website with information about the new program. Tthat additional information, Nicholas said, will be shared with the public via social media and other communications in the coming weeks as the department works to implement the new program.

​ Orange County Register 

Fullerton College student receives scholarship in honor of late journalist John Westcott

• July 3, 2023

Fullerton College journalist Pedro Saravia was selected to receive the fourth annual John Westcott Memorial Journalism Scholarship.

The $350 scholarship is named in honor of Westcott, an Orange County Register staff member from 1981 to 2001 and an adjunct journalism professor at Fullerton and Saddleback community colleges. Westcott died in 2019 from brain cancer.

Saravia, 19, will be the news editor for Fullerton College’s newspaper, The Hornet, in the fall semester.

“Pedro is a hardworking journalist who wants to work in the field and has already amassed a body of work in sports, news, culture and multimedia production at Fullerton College,” Fullerton College journalism instructor Jessica Langlois said in a release.

Related Articles

​ Orange County Register 

When TV game shows needs talent, they tune in to the radio

• July 3, 2023

Radio has a long history of sending its top personalities to host television game shows. Among the most famous include Wink Martindale, Jim Lange, Bob Eubanks, Gene Rayburn, and Pat Sajak, among many more.

To that list, add KIIS (102.7 FM) morning man Ryan Seacrest, who will replace Sajak on “Wheel of Fortune” at the end of the 2024 season. When Sajak leaves, he will end more than four decades with the show, after taking over for original host Chuck Woolery who left the show in a salary dispute in 1981.

Seacrest started in Los Angeles radio in 2004 at Star 98.7 FM (now known as Alt 98.7, KYSR). But he was only 16 when he started in the profession after winning an internship at his hometown radio station WSTR/Atlanta where he learned all aspects of radio … including filling in for ill or vacationing air personalities and eventually getting a regular weekend shift … while still in high school.

His show on Star was during the afternoon drive, and he was definitely a star (pardon the pun) on the station paired with Lisa Fox. He left for San Francisco’s K-101 in 2003, returning to Los Angeles less than a year later to replace Rick Dees in February 2004, a position he still holds and has held all the while taking on numerous other radio and television gigs, including hosting syndicated radio program “American Top 40” and television shows such as “American Idol,” “Live with Kelly and Ryan,” and the legendary “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve,” which he inherited from another radio personality, Dick Clark.

Many have compared Seacrest with Clark, primarily due to his boyish looks and on-air charm. He has always been able to engage his audiences, and Seacrest has often said that he idolized Clark growing up.

There was some pushback on the internet boards and social media over the announcement of the “Wheel” replacement. One comment on Twitter asked, “How many jobs do you need?” with another pleading with him to reconsider, writing “We don’t want you! Go away lol! You’re just going to ruin this amazing show.”

“Wheel” producers obviously feel differently, and are paying Seacrest a reported $28 million per season, $13 million more than Sajak reportedly earned from the show. Sajak, by the way, will stay on as a consultant for three years. For historical reference, Woolery was let go when he was asking $500,000 per season.

Salary issues aside, I do think Seacrest will be a good host. His radio duties including hosting KIIS mornings will continue at least through 2025, the end of his current contract. My hunch is that he will remain at KIIS for far longer. Radio stations often benefit from television exposure of their personalities, and you can’t get much more exposure than Seacrest.

Cardinal Rule

A wise programmer and consultant once told me that a general interest morning show should shun discussion or presentation of political viewpoints in order to avoid ticking off half of your potential audience.

Which is why I was surprised when I tuned in to KROQ’s (106.7 FM) morning Klein and Ally show last Friday. During a segment presented as news, co-host Ally Johnson launched into a short rant condemning a recent Supreme Court decision and lamenting the state of the country.

Remember, this was supposedly news, though the segment also devolved to include conjecture as to how couples can “hook up” behind the rows of port-a-potties at festival concerts. KROQ does not run editorials.

Personally, I don’t care what her opinion is, on any subject. She can think whatever she wants. But if I was the program director of KROQ, trying to build an audience for a dying station against competition that has been killing the morning show in the ratings for years, I’d be livid.

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​ Orange County Register 

What LA County’s new environmental regulations mean for coastal fireworks shows

• July 3, 2023

Several July 4 fireworks shows on Los Angeles County’s coast have fizzled this year — because of tighter environmental regulations.

Recently adopted rules regulating over-the-water fireworks displays in Los Angeles and Ventura counties have caused some tension between pyrotechnic companies and environmentalists, furthering an ongoing battle over the displays and potentially changing Fourth of July celebrations on the coast in the coming years.

The Los Angeles County Regional Water Quality Control Board, which is charged with protecting the water supply of the LA and Ventura regions, suddenly adopted a new fireworks-related permitting process in late May.

As a result, at least one major producer of fireworks shows that take place over the water has backed out of its commitments this year, citing the new regulations. That, in turn, has caused several major shows — including Redondo Beach’s popular King Harbor event — to be canceled, while a show in Long Beach had to find another producer.

The new rules have led to some sparring among those on both sides about the impact and benefits they will reap.

Water board officials and environmental advocates, on the one hand, say the new rules will help ensure pollutants from fireworks don’t end up in the ocean or other bodies of water.

“The permit requires implementation of best management practices,” water board Chair Norma Camacho said in a recent statement, “to ensure plastic and trash resulting from fireworks displays are captured and removed from our coastal waters.”

Those opposed to the new rules, on the other hand, say the regulations are unnecessary and that some of the recommended best practices could endanger those who set off the fireworks.

Jeff Ginsberg, for example, is a former Redondo Beach councilmember who for a couple of years has spearheaded a smaller Fourth of July fireworks show from that city’s Riviera Village neighborhood. That show has also been nixed.

The speedy implementation of the water board’s regulations, Ginsberg said, left everyone flat-footed.

“This is our country’s birthday and this is about freedom,” Ginsberg said, “and the freedom of having fireworks. And having them taken away from us goes against why we have the holiday in the first place.”

The new rules, though, are just the latest salvo in a years-long battle over coastal fireworks shows.

The impetus for the rules

The new rules quickly followed a federal judges’s ruling in a court case involving Long Beach’s popular Big Bang on the Bay, an annual fireworks show on Independence Day eve.

John Morris, owner of the Naples Restaurant Group, has put on that fireworks show over Alamitos Bay for years; it’s also a fundraiser for local charities.

The Coastal Environmental Rights Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group, filed a lawsuit against Morris and the Naples Restaurant Group in 2021, arguing organizers had violated the Clean Water Act by disseminating pollutants into the water. CERF sought to ban the show.

But a federal judge ruled against the environmental group in April.

The court found there was sufficient evidence to prove fireworks discharge entered Alamitos Bay during last year’s show, a violation of the CWA. But the judge also said there was not enough evidence to show a continuous problem, or that such issues were likely to occur in the future.

Still, because CERF was able to prove that a Clean Water Act violation occurred, the nonprofit and water board officials said, the ruling set a precedent that fireworks shows should be regulated under that law via a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit — which aims to prevent water pollution by regulating the sources that cause it.

A little more than a month later, the water board adopted the new permit.

“CERF is proud that we have influenced that decision and, of course, influenced the conditions that the board has implemented in that general permit,” CERF attorney Amy Johnsgard said in a Friday, June 30 interview. “In general, the idea is, if you’ve discharged fireworks over water — you have to clean up after yourself.”

Water board staffers said they moved quickly on establishing the regulations to ensure upcoming Independence Day fireworks displays could continue lawfully.

But so far, several Fourth of July fireworks displays have already been nixed because of the new permit requirements. The producer for most of those shows was Pyro Spectaculars, a major Rialto company that organizes about 400 professional shows across the state and country every year.

Shortly after the water board gave notice about the plan to adopt the permitting requirement, Pyro issued a statement saying it wouldn’t comply — citing concerns that the stricter water-protection rules could put their workers’ safety at risk.

Pyro officials denied several requests for an interview to elaborate further about their concerns.

Since then, the company has pulled out of at least five Independence Day shows, including those at Redondo Beach’s King Harbor, the Bel-Air Bay Club, and the Santa Monica Beach Club, as well as fireworks that were set to be shot off from a barge behind Long Beach’s Queen Mary.

The Queen Mary show, though, will go on, Morris said in a Friday interview. After Pyro pulled out, he said, a different pyrotechnic company called Garden State Fireworks agreed to take over the show.

Morris uses Garden State for Big Bang on the Bay and helped connect that company with the organizers of the Queen Mary show, which is sponsored by the Long Beach Convention & Visitors Bureau.

In lieu of the popular and long-standing King Harbor display, meanwhile, the Redondo Beach City Council recently OK’d a drone show.

“We cannot and will not risk the safety of our staff and the public to comply with the restrictive regulations,” Pyro CEO Jim Souza said in a recent statement. “The water board instituted the new regulations quickly and unilaterally, with little input from us, one of the largest and most experienced firework show producers in the nation.”

Water board staffers, though, said they sent a draft copy of the permit to Pyro for review and input. They made changes before the final version was OK’d, based on the company’s input, to clarify that the rules set forth should only be implemented “to the extent practicable and economically achievable.”

The board’s staffers also said they made the relevant pyrotechnic companies aware of the coming change in April and offered them a chance to get their applications in before the rules were even formally adopted, to ensure they’d still be ready come Independence Day.

Still, there were others aside from Pyro who took issue with the changes and the quickness with which they were implemented — such as Redondo Beach Councilmember Nils Nehrenheim.

Nehrenheim works as an independent contractor for Pyro Spectaculars and other fireworks companies, and he, like Souza, said the permit regulations may put fireworks crews in harm’s way during shows.

Under the water board’s new rules, to get an NPDES permit, fireworks show organizers must submit a “best management practices plan,” which describes procedures they’ll use to avoid polluting water.

It lays out several recommendations for prevention, though opponents took issue with some specific ones, including:

Setting up three walls around the fireworks barges to prevent low-level pollution into the water.
Using cameras before, during and after the show to monitor pollution levels.
Employing a dive team or equivalent monitoring device to track pollution levels on the bay floor before and after fireworks shows.

Both Pyro and Nehrenheim said putting walls up around the barge, from which fireworks are launched, could put workers in danger by blocking their ability to exit the platforms in an emergency.

They also said requiring dive teams to check for fireworks discharge pollution on the ocean floor at night after shows could also put crews in harm’s way — and that visual recording equipment could create a tripping hazard.

But board staffers pointed out that the permit asks the pyrotechnic companies to submit a best practices plan that is doable — both practically and financially — for their specific shows.

“This Order prohibits discharge of plastic trash associated with firework displays into surface waters, and requires implementation of best management practices (BMPs) in lieu of traditional effluent limitations,” said the fact sheet for the water-quality board’s new regulations, “to ensure the discharges of residual firework pollutants do not cause pollution or nuisance conditions in surface waters within the Los Angeles Region.”

Water board officials also said that all of the listed recommendations, including the three walls around the barge, have been used in other shows, including Long Beach’s Big Bang, with no issues reported.

Johnsgard, meanwhile, also defended the speed with which the water board implemented the new rules.

While they may have been established quickly in LA, Johnsgard said, they have been in the works for years, and come on the heels of other regional water quality boards, including in San Diego and San Francisco, OK’ing NPDES permits with similar regulations in recent years. Generally, south Orange County is governed by the San Diego water board, while the rest is overseen by the one in Santa Ana; it doesn’t appear as if the Santa Ana board has such rules.

“It’s worth noting that before this general permit was developed, these fireworks dischargers were required to obtain an (individual) permit (to comply with the CWA),” Johnsgard said. “It’s really not that significant of a difference in terms of the method of compliance — the only difference is the enrollment process.”

The future of coastal shows

Still, Morris said, the new rules are frustrating — especially because of his recent lawsuit victory.

Big Bang also takes environmental protections seriously, he said. The event has had water-quality testing before and after Big Bang on the Bay for the last eight or nine years, Morris said. And Big Bang, he said, also uses fireworks with biodegradable shells, monitors potential impacts on the local bird population and routinely commissions a robotic camera to travel to the bottom of Alamitos Bay after the fireworks to search for any pollutants.

“There’s never been any pollutants in the water and we proved that in our trial,” Morris said. “You’d think we lost our trial, not won.”

And even though the water board included Morris in the permitting development process, he said, putting on this year’s show has proven to be the most difficult yet — as he attempts to comply with varying levels of regulatory requirements.

“I just don’t see the necessity to do a lot of the things that now we’re required to do,” he said. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”

It’s also costly, Morris said.

Sending a dive team to the bottom of the bay to check for pollutants will cost about $2,000, he said, on top of the combined $8,000 he paid for permits from the water board and the California Coastal Commission, not to mention the $40,000 cost of the fireworks themselves.

Big Bang also faces another challenge down the road: CERF recently filed an appeal against the court’s April ruling in Morris’s favor.

But, Morris said, he’s not planning to back down anytime soon.

“It brings the community together,” Morris said. “We take care of kids on the Westside with that money we raise, but nobody wants to look at that side of the equation.”

It’s unclear, meanwhile, whether Pyro Spectaculars will return to putting on coastal fireworks shows throughout LA County next year. The company didn’t address the future in its statement.

Water board staffers, though, said Pyro officials have agreed to meet to discuss their concerns about the permit’s requirements. The water board is confident, officials said, that Pyro will agree to the provisions before Fourth of July next year.

But even if Pyro decides not to apply for the new permit in the future, Johnsgard said, it won’t be the end of water-based fireworks in Southern California.

“Clearly,” Johnsgard said, “there’s other vendors that can and are willing to put on fireworks displays that comply with safety and environmental regulations.”

Related Articles

​ Orange County Register 

Senior living: Dementia can take a toll on financial health

• July 3, 2023

By Sarah Boden, WESA,

KFF Health News

Angela Reynolds knew her mother’s memory was slipping, but she didn’t realize how bad things had gotten until she started to untangle her Mom’s finances: unpaid bills, unusual cash withdrawals and the discovery that, oddly, the mortgage on the family home had been refinanced at a higher interest rate.

Looking back, Reynolds realizes her mother was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease: “By the time we caught on, it was too late.”

Reynolds and her mother are among a large group of Americans grappling with the financial consequences of cognitive decline.

A growing body of research shows money problems are a possible warning sign — rather than only a product — of certain neurological disorders. This includes a 2020 study from Johns Hopkins University of more than 81,000 Medicare beneficiaries that found people with Alzheimer’s and related dementias became more likely to miss bill payments up to six years before a formal diagnosis.

The reach of these conditions is enormous. One recent study found nearly 10% of people over age 65 have dementia; more than twice as many are living with mild cognitive impairment.

Missing the signs of declining cognition

One weekday in the spring of 2018, Reynolds sat next to her 77-year-old mother, Jonnie Lewis-Thorpe, in a courtroom in downtown New Haven, Connecticut. She listened in discomfort as strangers revealed intimate details of their own finances in a room full of people waiting their turn to come before the judge.

Then it hit her: “Wait a second. We’re going to have to go up there, and someone’s going to be listening to us.”

That’s because the family home was in foreclosure.

The daughter hoped if she explained to the judge that her mother had Alzheimer’s disease, which had caused a series of financial missteps, she could stop the seizure of the property.

Reynolds can’t pinpoint when Alzheimer’s crept into her mother’s life. A widow, Lewis-Thorpe had lived alone for several years and had made arrangements for her aging, including naming Reynolds her power-of-attorney agent. But Reynolds lived a 450-mile drive away from New Haven, in Pittsburgh, and wasn’t there to see her Mom’s incremental decline.

It wasn’t until Reynolds began reviewing her mother’s bank statements that she realized Lewis-Thorpe — once a hospital administrator — had long been in the grip of the disease.

Financial problems are a common reason family members bring their loved ones to the office of Robin Hilsabeck, a neuropsychologist at the University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School who specializes in cognitive issues.

“The brain is really a network, and there are certain parts of the brain that are more involved with certain functions,” Hilsabeck said. “You can have a failure in something like financial abilities for lots of reasons caused by different parts of the brain.”

Some of the reasons are due to normal aging, as Reynolds had assumed about her mother. But when a person’s cognition begins to decline, the problems can grow exponentially.

Dementia’s causes — and sometimes ruthless impact

Dementia is a syndrome involving the loss of cognitive abilities: The cause can be one of several neurological illnesses, like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, or brain damage from a stroke or head injury.

In most cases, an older adult’s dementia is progressive. The first signs are often memory slips and changes in high-level cognitive skills related to organization, impulse control and the ability to plan — all critical for money management. And because the causes of dementia vary, so do the financial woes it can create, Hilsabeck said.

With Alzheimer’s disease, for example, comes a progressive shrinking of the hippocampus. That’s the catalyst for memory loss that, early in the course of the disease, can cause a person to forget to pay their bills.

Lewy body dementia is marked by fluctuating cognition: A person veers from very sharp to extremely confused, often within short passages of time. Those with frontotemporal dementia can struggle with impulse control and problem-solving, which can lead to large, spontaneous purchases.

And people with vascular dementia often run into issues with planning, processing and judgment, making them easier to defraud.

“They answer the phone, and they talk to the scammers,” Hilsabeck said. “The alarm doesn’t go off in their head that this doesn’t make sense.”

For many people older than 65, mild cognitive impairment, or MCI, can be a precursor to dementia. But even people with MCI who don’t develop dementia are vulnerable.

“Financial decision-making is very challenging cognitively,” said Jason Karlawish, a specialist in geriatrics and memory care at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Memory Center. “If you have even mild cognitive impairment, you can make mistakes with finances, even though you’re otherwise doing generally OK in your daily life.”

Some mistakes are irreversible. Despite Reynolds’s best efforts on behalf of her mother, the bank foreclosed on the family home in the fall of 2018.

Property records show that Lewis-Thorpe and her husband bought the two-bedroom Cape Cod for $20,000 in 1966. Theirs was one of the first Black families in their New Haven neighborhood. Lewis-Thorpe had planned to pass this piece of generational wealth on to her daughters.

Instead, U.S. Bank now owns the property. A 2021 tax assessment lists its value as $203,900.

Financial protections are slow to come

Though she can’t prove it, Reynolds suspects someone had been financially exploiting her Mom. At the same time, she feels guilty for what happened to Lewis-Thorpe, who now lives with her.

“There’s always that part of me that’s going to say, ‘At what point did it turn,’” she said, “‘where I could have had a different outcome?’”

Karlawish often sees patients who are navigating financial disasters. What he doesn’t see are changes in banking practices or regulations that would mitigate the risks that come with aging and dementia.

“A thoughtful country would begin to say we’ve got to come up with the regulatory structures and business models that can work for all,” he said, “not just for the 30-year-old.”

But the risk-averse financial industry is hesitant to act — partly out of fear of getting sued by clients.

The 2018 Senior Safe Act, the most-recent major federal legislation to address elder wealth management, attempts to address this reticence. It gives immunity to financial institutions in civil and administrative proceedings stemming from employees reporting possible exploitation of a senior — provided the bank or investment firm has trained its staff to identify exploitative activity.

It’s a lackluster law, said Naomi Karp, an expert on aging and elder finances who spent eight years as a senior analyst at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Office for Older Americans. That’s because the act makes training staffers optional and it lacks government oversight.

“There’s no federal agency that’s charged with covering it or setting standards for what that training has to look like,” Karp said. “There’s nothing in the statute about that.”

One corner of the financial industry that has made modest progress is the brokerage sector, which concerns the buying and selling of securities, such as stocks and bonds. Since 2018, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority — a nongovernmental organization that writes and enforces rules for brokerage firms — has required agents to make a reasonable effort to get clients to name a “trusted contact.”

A trusted contact is similar to the emergency contact health care providers request. They’re notified by a financial institution of concerning activity on a client’s account, then receive a basic explanation of the situation. Ron Long, a former head of Aging Client Services at Wells Fargo, gave the hypothetical of someone whose banking activity suddenly shows regular, unusual transfers to someone in Belarus. A trusted emergency contact could then be notified of that concerning activity.

But the trusted contact has no authority. The hope is that, once notified, the named relative or friend will talk to the account holder and prevent further harm. It’s a start, but a small one. The low-stakes effort is limited to the brokerage side of operations at Wells Fargo and most other large institutions.

The same protection is not extended to clients’ credit card, checking or savings accounts.

A financial industry reluctant to help

When she was at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Karp and her colleagues put out a set of recommendations for companies to better protect the wealth of seniors.

The 2016 report included proposals on employee training and changes to fraud detection systems to better detect warning signs, such as atypical ATM use and the addition of a new owner’s name to an existing checking account.

“We would have meetings repeatedly with some of the largest banks, and they gave a lot of lip service to these issues,” Karp said. “Change is very, very slow.”

Karp has seen some smaller community banks and credit unions take proactive steps to protect older customers — such as instituting comprehensive staff training and improvements to fraud detection software. But there’s a hesitancy throughout the industry to act more decisively, which seems to stem, in part, from fears about liability, she said. Banks are concerned they might get sued — or at least lose business — if they intervene when no financial abuse has occurred, or a customer’s transactions were benign.

Policy solutions that address financial vulnerability also present logistical challenges. Expanding something as straightforward as the use of trusted contacts isn’t like flipping a light switch, said Long, the former Wells Fargo executive.

“You have to solve all the technology issues,” Long said. “Where do you house it? How do you house it? How do you engage the customer to even consider it?”

Still, a trusted contact might have alerted Reynolds much sooner that her Mom was developing dementia and needed help.

“I fully believe that they noticed signs,” Reynolds said of her mother’s bank. “There are many withdrawals that came out of her account where we can’t account for the money.

“Like, I can see the withdrawals,” she added. “I can see the bills not getting paid. So where did the money go?”

This article is from a partnership that includes the Pittsburgh radion station WESA, NPR and KFF Health News.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

​ Orange County Register 

Israel targets a West Bank militant stronghold with drones and troops, killing 8 Palestinians

• July 3, 2023

By NASSER NASSER and JOSEF FEDERMAN

JENIN, West Bank — Israel struck targets in a militant stronghold in the occupied West Bank with drones early Monday and deployed hundreds of troops in the area, in an incursion that resembled the wide-scale military operations carried out during the second Palestinian uprising two decades ago. Palestinian health officials said at least eight Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded.

Troops remained inside the Jenin refugee camp at midday Monday, pushing ahead with the largest operation in the area during more than a year of fighting. It came at a time of growing domestic pressure for a tough response to a series of attacks on Israeli settlers, including a shooting attack last month that killed four Israelis.

Black smoke rose from the crowded streets of the camp, exchanges of fire rang out and the buzzing of drones could be heard overhead as the military pressed on. Residents said electricity was cut off in some parts and military bulldozers plowed through narrow streets, damaging buildings as they cleared the way for Israeli forces. The Palestinians and neighboring Jordan and Egypt and the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation condemned the violence.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the operation was “proceeding as planned,” but gave no indication when the incursion would end. Fighting was continuing at midafternoon, some 14 hours after Israel entered the camp.

Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, an army spokesman, said a brigade-size force — roughly 2,000 soldiers — was taking part in the operation, and that military drones had carried out a series of strikes to clear the way for the ground forces.

Although Israel has carried out isolated airstrikes in the West Bank in recent weeks, Hecht said Monday’s series of strikes was an escalation unseen since 2006 — the end of the Palestinian uprising.

Smoke billowed from within the crowded camp, with mosque minarets in the backdrop. Ambulances raced toward a hospital where the wounded were brought in on stretchers.

Lynn Hastings, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in the Palestinian areas, said on Twitter that she was “alarmed by scale of Israeli forces operation,” noting the airstrikes in a densely populated refugee camp. She said the U.N. was mobilizing humanitarian aid.

According to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa, the military blocked roads within the camp, took over houses and buildings and set up snipers on rooftops. The tactics signaled the operation could drag on for some time.

“There are bulldozers destroying the streets, snipers are inside and on roofs of houses, drones are hitting houses and Palestinians are killed in the streets,” said Jamal Huweil, a political activist in the camp, predicting the operation would fail.

“They can destroy the refugee camp but will fail again because the only solution is the political solution in which a Palestinian state is established and the occupation ends,” he said.

The Palestinian Health Ministry said at least eight Palestinians were killed and 50 people were wounded — 10 critically.

In a separate incident, a 21-year-old Palestinian was killed by Israeli fire near the West Bank city of Ramallah, the ministry said.

“Our Palestinian people will not kneel, will not surrender, will not raise the white flag, and will remain steadfast on their land in the face of this brutal aggression,” said Palestinian presidential spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh.

The Jenin camp and an adjacent town of the same name have been a flashpoint as Israeli-Palestinian violence escalated since spring 2022.

Israel’s foreign minister, Eli Cohen, accused archenemy Iran of being behind the violence by funding Palestinian militant groups.

“Due to the funds they receive from Iran, the Jenin camp has become a center for terrorist activity,” he told foreign journalists, adding that the operation would be conducted in a “targeted manner” to avoid civilian casualties.

Palestinians reject such claims, saying the violence is a natural response to 56 years of occupation since Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war.

Jenin has long been a bastion for armed struggle against Israel and was a major friction point in the last Palestinian uprising.

In 2002, days after a Palestinian suicide bombing during a large Passover gathering killed 30 people, Israeli troops launched a massive operation in the Jenin camp. For eight days and nights they fought militants street by street, using armored bulldozers to destroy rows of homes, many of which had been booby-trapped.

Monday’s raid came two weeks after another violent confrontation in Jenin and after the military said a pair of rockets were fired from the area last week. The rockets exploded shortly after launch, causing no damage in Israel, but marked an escalation that has raised concerns in Israel.

But there also may have been political considerations at play. Leading members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government, which is dominated by West Bank settlers and their supporters, have been calling for a broader military response to the ongoing violence in the area.

“Proud of our heroes on all fronts and this morning especially of our soldiers operating in Jenin,” tweeted National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist who recently called for Israel to kill “thousands” of militants if necessary. “Praying for their success.”

Israeli military experts said they expected the operation to wrap up quickly — within hours or a day or two. Prolonged violence and heavy casualties would risk attracting increased international criticism and drawing militants from the Gaza Strip or even Lebanon into the fighting.

“From the Israeli point of view, the intent and interest are to end this very limited operation ASAP and to make sure it does not become a regional event,” said Giora Eiland, a retired Israeli general and former national security adviser.

Islamic Jihad, a militant group with a large presence in Jenin, threatened to launch attacks from its Gaza Strip stronghold if the fighting dragged on.

“If the Israeli aggression against Jenin does not stop, the Palestinian resistance will do what it has to do in a short time,” said Dawood Shehab, a spokesman for the group.

More than 130 Palestinians have been killed this year in the West Bank, part of more than a yearlong spike in violence that has seen some of the worst bloodshed in the area in nearly two decades.

The outburst of violence escalated last year after a spate of Palestinian attacks prompted Israel to step up its raids in the West Bank.

Israel says the raids are meant to beat back militants. The Palestinians say such violence is inevitable in the absence of any political process with Israel and increased West Bank settlement construction and violence by extremist settlers.

Israel says most of those killed have been militants, but stone-throwing youths protesting the incursions and people uninvolved in confrontations have also been killed.

Palestinian attacks against Israelis since the start of this year have killed 24 people.

Israel captured the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians seek those territories for their hoped-for independent state.

Federman reported from Jerusalem. AP writer Julia Frankel in Jerusalem and Omar Akour in Amman, Jordan, contributed to this report.

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​ Orange County Register 

Passport backup is snarling summer travel plans

• July 3, 2023

By LAURIE KELLMAN, REBECCA SANTANA and DAVID KOENIG | Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Seeking a valid U.S. passport for that 2023 trip? Buckle up, wishful traveler, for a very different journey before you step anywhere near an airport.

A much-feared backup of U.S passport applications has smashed into a wall of government bureaucracy as worldwide travel rebounds toward record pre-pandemic levels — with too few humans to handle the load. The result, say aspiring travelers in the U.S. and around the world, is a maddening pre-travel purgatory defined, at best, by costly uncertainty.

With family dreams and big money on the line, passport seekers describe a slow-motion agony of waiting, worrying, holding the line, refreshing the screen, complaining to Congress, paying extra fees and following incorrect directions. Some applicants are buying additional plane tickets to snag in-process passports in other cities so they can make the flights they booked in the first place.

So grim is the outlook that U.S. officials aren’t even denying the problem or predicting when it will ease. They’re blaming the epic wait times on lingering pandemic -related staffing shortages and a pause of online processing this year. That’s left the passport agency flooded with a record-busting 500,000 applications a week. The deluge is on-track to top last year’s 22 million passports issued, the State Department says.

Stories from applicants and interviews by The Associated Press depict a system of crisis management, in which the agencies are prioritizing urgent cases such as applicants traveling for reasons of “life or death” and those whose travel is only a few days off. For everyone else, the options are few and expensive.

So, 2023 traveler, if you still need a valid U.S. passport, prepare for an unplanned excursion into the nightmare zone.

‘PLENTY OF TIME’ TO ‘WE’LL STILL BE OK’ TO BIG PROBLEMS

It was early March when Dallas-area florist Ginger Collier applied for four passports ahead of a family vacation at the end of June. The clerk, she said, estimated wait times at eight to 11 weeks. They’d have their passports a month before they needed them. “Plenty of time,” Collier recalled thinking.

Then the State Department upped the wait time for a regular passport to as much as 13 weeks. “We’ll still be okay,” she thought.

At T-minus two weeks to travel, this was her assessment: “I can’t sleep.” This after months of calling, holding, pressing refresh on a website, trying her member of Congress — and stressing as the departure date loomed. Failure to obtain the family’s passports would mean losing $4,000, she said, as well as the chance to meet one of her sons in Italy after a study-abroad semester.

“My nerves are shot, because I may not be able to get to him,” she said. She calls the toll-free number every day, holds for as much as 90 minutes to be told — at best — that she might be able to get a required appointment at passport offices in other states.

“I can’t afford four more plane tickets anywhere in the United States to get a passport when I applied in plenty of time,” she said. “How about they just process my passports?”

THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT HAS A CULPRIT: COVID

By March, concerned travelers began asking for answers and then demanding help, including from their representatives in the House and Senate, who widely reported at hearings this year that they were receiving more complaints from constituents on passport delays than any other issue.

The U.S. secretary of state had an answer, of a sort.

“With COVID, the bottom basically dropped out of the system,” Antony Blinken told a House subcommittee March 23. When demand for travel all but disappeared during the pandemic, he said, the government let contractors go and reassigned staff that had been dedicated to handling passports.

Around the same time, the government also halted an online renewal system “to make sure that we can fine tune it and improve it,” Blinken said. He said the department is hiring agents as quickly as possible, opening more appointments and trying to address the crisis in other ways.

Passport applicants lit up social media groups, toll-free numbers and lawmakers’ phone lines with questions, appeals for advice and cries for help. Facebook and WhatsApp groups bristled with reports of bewilderment and fury. Reddit published eye-watering diaries, some more than 1,000 words long, of application dates, deposits submitted, contacts made, time on hold, money spent and appeals for advice.

It was 1952 when a law required, for the first time, passports for every U.S. traveler abroad, even in peacetime. Now, passports are processed at centers around the country and printed at secure facilities in Washington, D.C. and Mississippi, according to the Government Printing Office.

But the number of Americans holding valid U.S. passports has grown at roughly 10% faster than the population over the past three decades, according to Jay Zagorsky, an economist at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.

After passport delays derailed his own plans to travel to London earlier this year, Zagorsky found that the number of U.S. passports per American has soared from about three per 100 people in 1989 to nearly 46 per 100 people in 2022. Americans, it turns out, are on the move.

“As a society gets richer,” says Zagorsky, “the people in that society say, ‘I want to visit the rest of the world.’”

FOR AMERICANS AND OTHERS ABROAD, IT’S NO PICNIC EITHER

At U.S. consulates overseas, the quest for U.S. visas and passports isn’t much brighter.

On a day in June, people in New Delhi could expect to wait 451 days for a visa interview, according to the website. Those in Sao Paulo could plan on waiting more than 600 days. Aspiring travelers in Mexico City were waiting about 750 days; in Bogota, Colombia, it was 801 days.

In Israel, the need is especially acute. More than 200,000 people with citizenship in both countries live in Israel. It’s one appointment per person, even for newborns, who must have both parents involved in the process, before traveling to the United States.

Batsheva Gutterman started looking for three appointments immediately after she had a baby in December, with an eye toward attending a family celebration in July, in Raleigh, N.C.

Her quest for three passports stretched from January to June, days before travel. And it only resolved after Gutterman payed a small fee to join a WhatsApp group that alerted her to new appointments, which stay available for only a few seconds. She ultimately got three appointments on three consecutive days — bureaucracy embodied.

“We had to drive the entire family with three small children, an hour-and-a-half to Tel Aviv three days in a row, taking off work and school,” she said. “This makes me incredibly uneasy having a baby in Israel as an American citizen, knowing there is no way I can fly with that baby until we get lucky with an appointment.”

Recently, there appeared to be some progress. The wait for an appointment for a renewed U.S. passport stood at 360 days on June 8. On July 2, the wait was down to 90 days, according to the web site.

FRUSTRATING TALES EMERGE FROM THE TRENCHES

Back in the U.S., Marni Larsen of Holladay, Utah, stood in line in Los Angeles on June 14, in hopes of snagging her son’s passport. That way, she hoped, the pair could meet the rest of their family, who had already left as scheduled for Europe, for a long-planned vacation.

She’d applied for her son’s passport two months earlier and spent weeks checking for updates online or through a frustrating call system. As the mid-June vacation loomed, Larsen reached out to Sen. Mitt Romney ’s office, where one of four people he says is assigned full-time to passport issues were able to track down the document in New Orleans.

It was supposed to be shipped to Los Angeles, where she got an appointment to retrieve it. That meant Larsen had to buy new tickets for herself and her son to Los Angeles and reroute their trip from there to Rome. All on a bet that her son’s passport was indeed shipped as promised.

“We are just waiting in this massive line of tons of people,” Larsen said. “It’s just been a nightmare.”

They succeeded. But not everyone has been so lucky.

Miranda Richter applied in person to renew passports for herself and her husband on Feb. 9 for a trip with their neighbors to Croatia on June 6. She ended up canceling, losing more than $1,000.

Her timeline went like this: Passports for her husband and daughter arrived in 11 weeks, while Richter’s photo was rejected. On May 4, she sent in a new one via priority mail. Then she paid a rush fee of $79, which was never charged to her credit card. Between May 30 and June 2, four days before travel, Richter and her husband spent more than 12 hours on the national passport line while also calling their congressman, senators and third-party couriers.

Finally, she showed up in person at the federal building in downtown Houston, 30 minutes before the passport office opened. Richter said there were at least 100 people in line.

“The security guard asked when is my appointment, and I burst out in tears,” she recalls. She couldn’t get one. “It didn’t work.”

FINALLY: A HAPPY ENDING

“I just got my passports!” Ginger Collier texts.

She ended up showing up at the passport office in Dallas with her daughter-in-law at 6:30 a.m. and being sorted into groups and lined up against walls. Finally they were called to a window, where the agent was “super nice” and pulled all four of the family’s applications — paperwork that had been sitting in the office since March 17. More than seven hours later, the two left the office with directions to pick up their passports the next day.

They did — with four days to spare.

“What a ridiculous process,” Collier says. Nevertheless, the reunion with her son in Italy was sweet. She texted last week: “It was the best hug ever!”

___

Kellman reported from Tel Aviv, Israel, Santana reported from Washington, and Koenig reported from Dallas. Follow Kellman on Twitter at http://twitter.com/APLaurie Kellman, Santana at http://twitter.com/russkygal and Koenig at http://twitter.com/airlinewriter.

​ Orange County Register