THE POWER OF OUR EXAMPLE opinion Bright Idea Parking spots are hard to come by in the snowy West Ridge neighborhood of Chicago, and resident Adam Selzer has become the talk of the town for the novel method he’s using to save his spot -- freezing pairs of pants and standing them up on the street like traffic cones, WBBM-TV reported. “Soak a pair, put outside. In about 20 minutes you can form them to shape, and in another 20 they’re solid,” Selzer posted on Twitter. Next, Selzer is planning to perfect a frozen shirt. “We’ll see if this works,” he said. New Things to Worry About Bradford Gauthier of Worcester, Massachusetts, had a bit of trouble swallowing when he woke up on Feb. 2, but he went about his day after drinking some water. Later, “I tried to drink a glass of water again and couldn’t,” he said, and that’s when he realized one of the AirPods he sleeps with at night was missing and “felt a distinct blockage in the center of my chest,” he said. KVEO reported that it didn’t take doctors in the emergency room long to discover the AirPod lodged in Gauthier’s esophagus. An emergency endoscopy removed it and Gauthier went home feeling much better. Oops Tessica Brown of New Orleans was out of hairspray in January as she got ready to go out, so she reached for the only spray she could find, Gorilla Glue, to shellack her hair into place. “I figured ... I could just wash it out,” she told WDSU-TV, but “it didn’t.” Brown and her mother tried olive oil and vegetable oil, to no avail, and the local hospital could offer little help. She cut off her ponytail to reduce the weight, but the spray on her scalp continued to painfully tighten and harden. On Feb. 10, she posted on Instagram, she was scheduled to fly to Los Angeles to meet with plastic surgeon Michael Obeng to undergo a procedure that costs more than $12,000 -- for free. Neighbors in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, called police on Feb. 8 after witnessing an unidentified man apparently take a joyride on an excavator parked in the street, knocking it into power lines and making a getaway on a bicycle. WPLG-TV reported the incident resulted in every sports fan’s worst nightmare: a power outage just before the big game. “About 30 to 40 minutes before the Super Bowl started, (the power) just went all the way out,” said Bubba James. Crews from Florida Power & Light attended to the problem, and the power was back on by halftime. Wait, What? Jane Louise Kellahan, 49, of Wanaka, New Zealand, appeared before Judge Russell Walker in Queenstown District Court on Feb. 2, her second appearance on a charge of assault and the second time she refused to answer when called upon. “That sounds like my name, Your Honor, but I want to see it in writing,” she said. The Otago Daily News reported Kellahan, a local artist, denies being a person, saying, “I’m a living being on the land.” The judge told her, “You are a living being, which means you are a person” and entered a plea of not guilty on her behalf. Her trial is set for April 28. Keystone Car Chase In the wee hours of Jan. 26, police in Bellevue, Washington, spotted a car running
a red light, so they ran the tag and discovered the car was reported stolen. The driver failed to yield when officers attempted a traffic stop, KOMO-TV reported, but a mechanical problem prevented the vehicle from exceeding 25 mph. The driver also observed all traffic laws as the pursuit continued for about a mile and a half until the vehicle burst into flames and became fully engulfed. The suspect male driver fled into a nearby nature park and escaped; a female passenger was detained by police and taken into custody. Weird Antiquities Bidding is underway in Boston-based RR Auction’s special Presidents Day online sale of presidential artifacts, which includes locks of George and Martha Washington’s hair, John F. Kennedy’s Harvard cardigan sweater and the pen Warren G. Harding used to officially end U.S. involvement in World War I, reported The Associated Press. The auction, which continues through Feb. 18, features around 300 items from “America’s esteemed commanders-in-chief,” said company spokesperson Mike Graff. Last year, the company sold a lock of Abraham Lincoln’s hair wrapped in a bloodstained telegram about his 1865 assassination for $81,000. State of the Union Instagramer Matt Shirley of Los Angeles conducted an informal survey among his more than 300,000 followers, asking them which state they hate most, the Asbury Park Press reported Jan. 21, and from the 2,500 responses, he determined that, among the expected regional rivalries, New Jersey hates every other state and Florida hates ... Florida. The Sunshine State was the only one to choose itself as most-hated, with four-fifths of respondents agreeing. “I live in Florida, have my whole life, and would not hesitate to unironically put that as my answer,” one survey participant wrote. The Aristocrats Rapper Lil Uzi Vert, whose real name is Symere Woods, revealed on Instagram in early February that he has had a $24 million 10-carat pink diamond implanted in his forehead, reported Rolling Stone. According to Simon Babaev, spokesman for the New York-based jeweler Eliantte & Co. that implanted the stone, Uzi fell in love with the marquise-shaped diamond when he saw it in 2017 and has been making payments on it as he determined what he wanted to do with it. “We didn’t think he was serious about it,” said Babaev, but as it became clear that he was, “we engineered a specific mounting that clips and locks in place. There’s a whole mechanism involved.” Cliche Come to Life A U.S. Coast Guard crew on routine patrol Feb. 8 in the Bahamas spotted three people who had reportedly been stranded on uninhabited Anguilla Cay for 33 days. ABC News reported the two men and a woman, all Cuban nationals, survived by eating rats, coconuts and conch shells, and suffered from dehydration because of the lack of freshwater on the island. A Coast Guard helicopter hoisted them off the island and delivered them to the Lower Keys Medical Center in Key West, Florida, where helicopter commander Mike Allert said they were in generally good condition. It was unclear how they ended up on the island.
8 • february 22, 2021 • Northern Express Weekly
By Jack Segal Every new president faces a daunting array of problems, but 2021 will go down in the history books: Our country is under siege from a virus that has killed 485,000 Americans; Congress is locked in partisan struggles over the election, the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and another stimulus bill; and our people are deeply divided. These domestic challenges would have been plenty for President Biden to tackle. But having been vice president for eight years, Joe Biden knows that disasters on the foreign policy front can quickly suck all the oxygen from the room. So pushed onto his already crowded plate are three overseas crises that have also required his immediate action: nuclear arms control, the Iran nuclear deal, and the future of Afghanistan. One of President Biden’s first acts was to delay a confrontation with Russia by extending the “New START” nuclear agreement by an additional five years, just days before it was set to expire. That agreement limits both sides’ strategic nuclear warheads and bombs. While we still have many disagreements with Putin’s Russia, President Biden wisely decided to keep a treaty that both sides want and need while leaving the many other flashpoints for future negotiations. The next wolf at President Biden’s door is Iran and its nuclear program. It will be far more difficult to turn President Trump’s “maximum pressure” strategy into meaningful progress with Iran. Biden has said he intends to reverse President Trump’s 2018 decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal (the JCPOA) but not without conditions. A short time later, Iran took steps that violated key provisions of that agreement. Each of Iran’s provocative actions are, according to their foreign minister, “still reversible,” but only if the U.S. withdraws all its sanctions first — a nonstarter. On Feb. 6, President Biden replied that Iran would have to stop enriching uranium before we would lift sanctions. This seemingly unbridgeable impasse can be overcome. Given our very long list of sanctions, it should be possible to offer to gradually lift those sanctions that harm the average Iranian in return for Iran reversing its violations of the JCPOA. The U.S. has partners still in the JCPOA who can play a helpful role in getting the Iranians to negotiate. We have applied maximum pressure — and while it won’t be easy, now we need to apply our diplomatic skills to find a solution. The third challenge facing the Biden administration — perhaps the hardest — is our withdrawal from Afghanistan. In Feb. 2020, President Trump agreed with the Taliban to withdraw the last 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, if certain conditions were met. These were: 1) ending Taliban support for Al-Qaida and other terrorist groups, 2) reducing violence against the Afghan people, and 3) negotiating in good faith directly with the Afghan government.
While it is very attractive to finally end our 20-year involvement in Afghanistan (and what, after all, can 2,500 brave Americans accomplish that our once-100,000 troops on the ground couldn’t?), it’s not clear we are ready to stomach what is likely to come next in Afghanistan: A return to power of the Taliban and their brutal authoritarian ways. The influential bipartisan Afghanistan Study Group has called for delaying our withdrawal until “conditions are right” to “honor the sacrifices that have been made.” It should be no surprise that newly appointed Secretary of Defense Austin is studying the issue again. Certainly, even with our greatly reduced numbers in Afghanistan, the continued presence of key “enablers” that we provide for Afghan troops — intelligence, airstrikes, drones, money — have prevented the Taliban from tilting the balance on the ground. What is our plan for when these last vestiges of support are removed? Will the situation become so intolerable that the U.S. is tempted to bring its military presence back up to pre-agreement levels? That is clearly a trap we should avoid. But none of the alternatives are attractive. If the U.S. withdraws on schedule, before intraAfghan talks have progressed, the entire process could collapse, resulting in renewed violence. If we decide to keep our troops on the ground beyond the May deadline, the Taliban could abandon the agreement and turn again to fighting the 2,500 U.S. troops still left behind. While President Biden would love a foreign policy success in Afghanistan, his real challenge is to simply keep it from becoming an even greater disaster. Like with the examples of Iran and nuclear weapons outlined above, the answer must be intense diplomacy in order to find a political solution to this endless war — diplomacy that includes creative use of money, behindthe-scenes pressure on all sides, including Afghanistan’s neighbors, and even some arrangements for continued limited military support. But in the end, no number of U.S. troops can bring about peace. These are just three of the many terribly difficult foreign policy challenges confronting the Biden administration. Most of all, the new team needs bipartisan support for our next moves in all the negotiations that lie ahead. That recalls the maxim that used to be true: “Politics end at the water’s edge.” We may struggle to reach agreements here at home on what our policies should be, but once we embark on a course, we must all pull together. Jack Segal is a retired senior U.S. diplomat who served with his spouse, Karen Puschel, in Russia and the Middle East. He also served at the NSC and long ago in Vietnam. As a NATO official, he made 40 trips to Afghanistan. He now teaches aspiring diplomats online at Norwich University and offers ZOOM courses through Northwest Michigan College to his many friends here.
