Sacramento’s streets were flooded. In fact, much of California was. A 300-mile-long lake was created in the Central Valley from near Bakersfield to Red Bluff. At least 4,000 people were killed.

It was the largest flood in the recorded history of California, Nevada and Oregon, dumping 10 feet of water on this state over a 43-day period.

The Great Flood of 1862 followed a 20-year drought.

Gov. Gavin Newsom seems, in every other sentence, to blame the intensity of our current storms — or any drought or wildfire — on climate change. We’re getting drier and wetter and the cycles are becoming more frequent, he and experts warn.

OK, I’m no climatologist. But I do read history. And you can acknowledge history without being a climate denier. Burning fossil fuel has warmed the planet and appears to have mucked up our climate. But we’d still suffer terrible droughts and disastrous storms even if all the energy we used was carbon free.

Cycles of drought and flooding have been the California way — nature’s way — for eons.

Times columnist Gustavo Arellano recently wrote about the Great Flood of 1938.

“California has lots of extremes. We’ve always had more wet years and drier years than any part of the country,” Jay Lund, vice director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, once told me. “Every year we’re managing for drought and for floods, and we always will.”

Yes, and we’ve got lots of catching up to do on flood management with or without climate change.

But the state has added little to its once-prized water system since approval of Gov. Pat Brown’s then-controversial California Water Project in 1960.

One failure is we’re not capturing and storing nearly as much floodwater as we should. The primary example is in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the source of drinking water for 27 million Californians and irrigation for 3 million acres.

Ideally, we’d be grabbing big pools of nature’s gift and storing it for use in dry years. Instead, it escapes through San Francisco Bay and flows into the ocean.

One immediate reason we’re capturing less water than we could is a regulation agreed to by the former Trump administration.

Under it, the “first flush” of each season’s major storm is reserved for the bay. For two weeks, state and federal pumps at the southern end of the Delta have been permitted to pump at only about half capacity.

The main reason is to protect endangered fish. Aggressive pumping reverses San Joaquin River flow, sucking endangered tiny smelt and little salmon into the pumps or mouths of large predator fish. But fish aside, the reverse flows draw in salt water from the bay. And that gets pumped south into Southern California reservoirs.

“That’s why we’re so focused on the Delta tunnel. It’s going to allow us to pump large amounts of water during big winter storms without an environmental impact,” says Wade Crowfoot, secretary of the state Natural Resources Agency.

Fresher Sacramento River water from the north Delta would be siphoned into a 45-mile-long, 39-foot-wide tunnel ending near the southbound aqueducts. If it had been in place, Crowfoot estimates that an additional 131,000 acre-feet of floodwater could have been captured during the current storm as of late last week.

But small Delta communities, local farmers and environmentalists worry that if the tunnel existed, water grabbers — meaning San Joaquin agriculture and L.A. — wouldn’t just be taking stormwater. They’d also be seizing water during dry summers and droughts, leaving the Delta saltier.

All that must be negotiated and litigated. If it’s ever built, the $16-billion project probably couldn’t be operational until at least 2040.

There also needs to be more storage room for floodwater. There’s a perpetual cry for additional costly dams. But we’re already dammed to the brim. There are nearly 1,500 dams in California. Practically every good site has been used.

But one sensible dam project is noncontroversial and headed for construction. It’s Sites in Colusa County, an off-stream reservoir that would hold 1.5 million acre-feet of water siphoned off the nearby Sacramento River. Construction on the $4.5-billion project could begin in 2025.

Some existing dams, including San Luis in Merced County and Los Vaqueros in Contra Costa County, probably will be expanded.

But the future of storage is underground in depleted aquifers. That’s a major focus of state and local governments.

Meanwhile, even with climate change, Newsom didn’t need to row a skiff to his recent second inauguration at the Capitol. He was driven to the outdoor ceremony in a big SUV as storm clouds briefly parted.

George Skelton is a Los Angeles Times columnist.

Every flyer over the past two decades knows that airport security procedures involve a lot of unpacking, screening and repacking. This is the price that must be paid for using commercial air travel.

Yet, it does not need to be this way, and the Transportation Security Administration has the right idea in testing and deploying biometrics such as facial identification technology at airport security checkpoints.

Although travelers believe that the most important task undertaken by the TSA is detecting threat items, the true role of airport security screening is ensuring that you are the person you claim to be.

The TSA has been working on moving more passengers from “unknown” to “known” status for more than a decade. The first effort in this regard was the introduction of TSA PreCheck in 2011, which gives travelers the privilege (for a fee) of accessing expedited screening lanes. This means that your shoes can stay on, your computers and electronics can stay in your carry-on bag, and light outerwear can remain in place.

The launch of facial identification technology enhances such efforts and has the potential to revolutionize the way that airport security checkpoints are designed and operated.

Facial identification technology ensures that you are who you claim to be. When presenting yourself at a checkpoint, your face becomes your entry pass, based on a repository of pictures that you have voluntarily provided in the past. These pictures are assembled from passports or visas.

It is now being tested on a limited scale at 16 airports.

After more than two decades in a post-9/11 world, most travelers believe that airport screening is about stopping threat items from getting onto planes. In reality, the focus on detection is a surrogate for stopping bad people from inflicting harm to the air system. By elevating identity validation, the need for threat item detection is reduced.

Once a person’s identity is confirmed using facial identification technology, they may be subjected to expedited screening, much like those who have been vetted by TSA PreCheck. As more people opt in to the facial identification program, the aggregate air system risk is reduced.

The biggest criticism of facial recognition technology is the perceived invasion of privacy and the security of photos taken at checkpoints. Yet the photos being used to match your identity, like when applying for a passport or participating in the Global Entry program, are those that have already been shared with Customs and Border Protection. New photos taken at airport security checkpoints do nothing more than supplement what has been freely provided.

The long game for facial identification technology is screening in real time. This means that most travelers can pass through checkpoints without stopping, with none of their personal items requiring screening.

This futuristic vision for airport security is a far cry from the physical screening-centered approach travelers endure today. Facial identification technology is a driver to make this future a reality. Such changes will not happen overnight. It will take many years before facial identification technology is sufficiently robust to effect such massive changes.

However, the technology is a game changer. It adds a layer of security that will revolutionize airport screening. Once implemented and perfected, it will create a pathway for an airport screening experience that will be eventually embraced as the new model for airport security.

Sheldon Jacobson is a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. ©2023 Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

That hasn’t happened.

Putin unleashed missile attacks on Ukraine’s cities and its electrical grid, but the Ukrainians repaired their transformers and fought on.

Putin unleashed a mercenary force, the Wagner Group, which used convicts to try to take the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. They’re still trying.

Putin cut natural gas supplies to the West, hoping to freeze comfortable Europeans into abandoning Ukraine. But Europe’s winter has been one of the warmest on record; gas prices are lower than they were before Russia invaded Ukraine.

Instead of abandoning Ukraine, the United States and its allies are sending more aid: Patriot missiles and Bradley fighting vehicles from the U.S., Challenger tanks from Britain, armored vehicles from Germany and France.

That doesn’t mean Ukraine is winning. The winter war has settled into a stalemate, with little territory changing hands.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s promise that victory is coming may be good for morale, but remains premature.

Putin has told foreign visitors that he’s planning for a two- or three-year war. He says he’s confident his larger forces can outlast Ukraine and its allies.

Both sides are preparing for new offensives this spring.

U.S. officials don’t believe Ukraine is likely to retake all of the land Russia has occupied; they’re not counting on the Russian army to collapse.

Instead, they hope Ukrainian successes on the battlefield will convince Putin that the war has become a losing proposition and that it’s time to negotiate a truce.

But there’s a problem with that optimistic scenario: Neither Russia nor Ukraine appears eager to compromise.

All of which leads some foreign policy experts to conclude that the most likely outcome isn’t military victory or a negotiated peace, but a “frozen conflict.”

“Rather than assuming that the war can be ended through triumph or talks, the West needs to contemplate a world in which the conflict continues with neither victory nor peace in sight,” Ivo Daalder of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and James Goldgeier of American University wrote in Foreign Affairs last week.

“Not all wars end — or end in permanent peace settlements,” they noted.

As examples, they cite the Korean War, which has officially continued despite a 1953 armistice; the 1973 war between Israel and Syria, which produced only “disengagement agreements”; and Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea and other parts of Ukraine, a clash that had become largely frozen before last year’s invasion.

It would mean the United States and its allies would need to continue massive support for Ukraine — both to enable it to defend against the next Russian invasion and to rebuild its economy. Daalder and Goldgeier propose a formal NATO security guarantee for Ukraine, even if the country isn’t admitted to the alliance as a member.

Their proposal adds up to a strategy of stabilizing Ukraine and containing Russia, much like the containment policy the United States applied to the Soviet Union during 45 years of Cold War. With luck, Ukraine and the West will be able to wait Putin out and seek a settlement with his successors.

Such a strategy would be costly, and even risky. Frozen conflicts aren’t always trouble-free; just look at Korea, Syria and Crimea.

The plan would ask Americans to support aid to Ukraine for years or decades, even as Republicans, once the party of anti-Soviet resolve, complain about the cost.

But foreign policy is often a choice among options that are less than ideal — and a cold war is less destructive, and probably cheaper, than a hot one.

Doyle McManus is a Los Angeles Times columnist. ©2023 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

The gallery owner, Collier Gwin, semi-apologized later, telling a television interviewer, “I totally understand what an awful thing that is to do, but I also understand what an awful thing it is to leave her on the streets.”

Gwin said he and other business owners complained to police about her blocking the sidewalks and business entrances. Efforts had been made to help her get off the streets, but nothing has worked.

“We called the police. There must be at least 25 calls to police,” Gwin said. “It’s two days in a homeless shelter, it’s two days in jail, and then they drop them right back on the street.”

Finally, after the woman once again refused to move, in frustration Gwin sprayed her down.

Gwin obviously did the wrong thing, but the incident dramatized the frustration that millions of Californians feel about the squalid encampments of homeless people that have become the defining feature of urban California.

Gov. Gavin Newsom acknowledged the growing resentment as he introduced his new state budget last week. “People have just had it,” he told reporters. “They want the encampments cleaned up.”

“People are dying on the streets all across this state,” Newsom said. “The encampments, we’ve got to clean them up, we’ve got to take ownership, we’ve got to take responsibility.”

In the last two state budgets, Newsom and the Legislature have committed $17.5 billion for housing and services to the estimated 170,000 homeless Californians – about $100,000 each. However, as Newsom’s new budget acknowledges, “Despite unprecedented resources from the state and record numbers of people being served by the homelessness response system, the population of unhoused individuals grows faster than the population exiting homelessness.”

The new budget adds several more billion dollars, but suggests that local governments are still not doing enough – a theme that Newsom has pursued in recent months.

Last year, he rejected all of the plans that local governments had submitted, saying they fell well short of actually making real progress on reducing the upward trend. After a showdown meeting with local officials, he agreed to release more state aid.

“The first iteration of these plans made clear that more ambition is required – and more direction from the state is necessary,” the budget declares. “Accordingly, the administration plans to work with the Legislature this year to advance homeless accountability legislation.”

The budget suggests that cities failing to meet their state quotas for zoning land for new housing might lose state financing for homelessness programs.

“If we can’t clean up the encampments and address what’s happening chronically on our streets, I’m going to be hard-pressed to make a case to the Legislature to provide them one dollar more,” Newsom told reporters.

That threat doesn’t sit well with local government officials. The League of California Cities issued a sharp reaction, saying, “one-time investments will not solve the crisis” and adding, “We need ongoing state funding and a coordinated approach with clearly defined roles and responsibilities for all levels of government that supports long-term solutions.”

The exchanges suggest there is still no consensus on what combination of actions would have a visible impact and all of the politicians involved are engaged in some blame-shifting as the voting public’s patience with the squalor wears thin.

Newsom knows that if the crisis is not resolved, it will leave an indelible mark on his governorship and haunt whatever future political career moves he might make.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.

The dangers are well documented. Gas-fired water heaters — even the more efficient, tankless kind — regularly puff out clouds of methane, a greenhouse gas that, in the short term, traps at least 100 times more atmospheric heat than carbon dioxide (per unit). Every minute that it’s in your house, even when it’s turned off, your gas stove may be flatulating dangerous pollutants and climate-warming gases into your kitchen.

About 13% of cases of childhood asthma in the United States may be attributable to gas cooktops, a recent study found — a population-level effect similar to that of exposure to secondhand smoke.

So what’s a homeowner to do? If you spend time around environmentalists or energy experts, you’ll hear a simple answer: Electrify! Most gas appliances can now be replaced with healthier and more efficient alternatives powered by electricity — heat pumps instead of gas-fired furnaces, for instance, or induction stoves instead of gas burners. Electrification is also crucial to the world’s plan for mitigating climate change: We’ll clean up how we generate electricity (wind, solar) while electrifying everything we can (cars, factories, shopping malls, houses), the thinking goes. Add government incentives and stir.

In some sectors, like automobiles, electrification is catching on. At home, though? Despite growing recognition of the dangers of gas-powered appliances, electrifying our abodes is going to be much slower, more expensive and more complicated than electrifying other parts of our lives. There is also a growing political freakout — on Twitter and Fox News, right-wingers are swearing allegiance to gas stoves as if they were AR-15s.

But whatever your politics, I’m not sure gas stoves are a hill to die on. Some electric advances make clear sense — in a lot of places, getting rooftop solar panels is a no-brainer. But an induction stove? An electric water heater? It’s hard to say; experts I talked to said that whether people should adopt these climate-aiding systems depends on a lot of factors. Houses are like people; they’re all ailing in different ways, and some of them may be just too set in their ways to be rehabilitated.

Take cooking. Researchers have been documenting the dangers of natural gas-burning stoves for decades. Once, chefs and foodies justified gas for its superior culinary performance, but then came induction stoves, which use electricity to produce a magnetic current that heats certain types of cookware. Induction cooktops can heat up and cool down more quickly than gas; many home cooks and even professional chefs rave about them.

State and local governments have started to phase out natural gas hookups in new buildings, and the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act provides billions in new incentives for people to electrify their home appliances.

Does that mean you should go electric? I don’t know — I can’t even figure out if I should get an induction stove.

In homes that already have electric cooktops, switching to induction may be relatively easy. But in my home, as in millions of others piped for gas cooking, getting an induction range would require extensive electrical work and the capping of my existing gas line. Induction stoves also tend to cost slightly more than comparable gas stoves (but new tax credits could change that). Also, you don’t have to entirely replace your stove to mitigate the health dangers of cooking with gas — upgrading and always turning on your ventilation hood, if you have one, is a very good idea.

It’s no surprise, then, that induction stoves have struggled to take off; according to a survey by Consumer Reports, only about 3% of American households have them.

Instead of getting an induction stove, then, it might make a lot more sense for you to spend your money on a heat pump, an underappreciated and kind of magical electric device that can replace both a gas-powered furnace and an air conditioner. But there may be an even simpler and cheaper thing to do first: Weather seal your house. Ed May, a partner at an environmental consulting practice, told me that a lot of the ways to improve your home’s environmental impact are just “really not that exciting at all,” including “lots and lots of insulation.”

So, sure, your gas-powered stove may be out to get you. But it’s the furnace that may be a bigger menace. And don’t forget to insulate.

Farhad Manjoo is a New York Times columnist.

Before I get into the puzzles, let me start by pointing out that the plot against the social safety net isn’t a conspiracy theory. The general shape of the scheme has been widely reported for months. The arithmetic is also clear: Without deep cuts in popular social programs, it isn’t possible to achieve huge reductions in the budget deficit while at the same time depriving the IRS of the resources it needs to go after tax cheats.

And beyond all that, we now have it in black and white — well, blue on blue. CNN has obtained a screenshot of a slide presented at a closed-door Republican meeting Tuesday. The first bullet point calls for balancing the budget within 10 years, which is mathematically impossible without deep cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The second calls for reforms to “mandatory spending,” which is budget-speak for those same programs. And the final point calls for refusing to raise the debt limit unless these demands are met.

So, the plan isn’t a mystery. I would add only that if Republicans try to assure currently retired Americans that their benefits wouldn’t be affected, this promise isn’t feasible — not if they’re serious about balancing the budget within a decade.

But where is this determination to gut programs that are crucial to well over 100 million Americans coming from? These programs are, after all, extremely popular — even among Republican voters.

It’s true that self-identified Republicans say that they are vehemently opposed to “socialism.” But when an Economist/YouGov poll asked them which programs they considered socialistic, none of the big-ticket items made the cut. Social Security? Not socialism. Medicare — which is, by the way, a single-payer national health insurance program, which we’re often told Americans would never accept — also isn’t socialism.

Unfortunately, that poll didn’t ask about Medicaid, a program targeted at lower-income Americans that many Republicans consider a form of “welfare.” Even so, a Kaiser Family Foundation survey found far more Republicans approving of Medicaid than disapproving.

One reason even Republicans support major social programs may be that GOP support comes disproportionately from older voters — and most of America’s social spending goes to seniors. This is obviously true for Social Security and Medicare, which kick in primarily when you reach a minimum age. But it’s even true for Medicaid: Most of Medicaid’s beneficiaries are relatively young, but almost two-thirds of the spending goes to seniors and the disabled, many in nursing homes.

The attitude of the Republican rank and file, then, seems to be that big government is bad — but when we get down to specifics, don’t cut you, don’t cut me, cut that fellow behind the tree. Which means that the priorities of the new House majority are wildly out of line with those of its own voters, let alone those of the electorate as a whole.

And history says that attacks on the safety net come with a heavy political price. George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security in 2005 surely played a role in the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006; Donald Trump’s attempt to kill Obamacare helped Nancy Pelosi regain the speakership in 2018.

So, where is the push to gut Social Security and Medicare coming from? Ronald Reagan left the White House 34 years ago. The modern GOP seems much less animated by small-government ideology than by the desire to wage culture war.

Put it this way: Advocating a welfare state for white people might well be politically effective. But in America, it’s a road not taken.

Here’s what I think is going on: Even now many, perhaps most Republicans in Congress aren’t culture-war zealots. Instead, they’re careerists who depend, both for campaign contributions and for post-Congress career prospects, on the same billionaires who have supported right-wing economic ideology for decades. They won’t stand up to the crazies and conspiracy theorists, but their own agenda is still tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for the poor and middle class.

And the culture warriors go along because they basically aren’t interested in policy substance.

I’m not completely sure that this analysis is right. But all indications are that at some point this year, the Biden administration will have to deal with a full-scale effort at economic blackmail, a threat to blow up the economy unless the safety net is shredded. And I worry that Democrats still aren’t taking that threat seriously enough.

Paul Krugman is a New York Times columnist.

Newsom was immensely lucky that fellow Democrats controlled the federal government the last two years. President Biden and Congress showered California with tens of billions in economic aid, enough for the governor to avoid a budget crisis this winter.

It’s doubtful the federal largess would have showed up if Biden had lost to then-President Trump in 2020 and if Democrats hadn’t controlled the Senate and House by razor-thin margins.

“If it was up to, respectfully, the Republican Party, none of this would have happened. Not one dollar would have come our way,” Newsom told reporters Tuesday, referring to federal funding boosts as he unveiled a $297-billion state budget plan for the next fiscal year.

In all, Newsom said, California has received $48 billion from two major federal bills: the $700-billion Inflation Reduction Act and the $1.2-trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Much of the money was distributed to local governments and private entities.

“We could receive an additional $48 billion,” he said.

That’s luck. But Newsom has been lucky for several reasons since taking office four years ago.

Both legislative houses have been controlled by supermajorities of Democrats. He can govern without Republican interference. He doesn’t need them for anything.

Newsom has had no significant political rival in either party. Republicans are too weak. Democrats don’t dare.

Thanks to voters in 2010, the legislative vote requirement for passing a budget is only a simple majority. Before that, a two-thirds vote was needed, resulting in summer-long deadlocks that tarnished the images of all Sacramento politicians. These days, it’s easy for a governor to get his spending plan passed.

Newsom also was lucky to govern in good economic times. Until very recently, the state treasury continually overflowed with tax revenue. Unlike predecessors Jerry Brown and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Newsom hasn’t had to gut popular state programs to balance the books, angering political allies.

Last year, a ridiculous $100-billion surplus was projected for the current budget. But because of the economic downturn, general fund tax revenues are running nearly $30 billion short, resulting in a projected deficit of $22.5 billion.

Except for brief fiscal jitters during the 2020 pandemic that turned out to be a false scare, this is the first time Newsom has confronted a real deficit.

The governor was justified in patting himself on the back and praising the Legislature for socking away nearly $36 billion in various piggy banks — so-called rainy-day funds — to be tapped during bad times. But he left them alone. Things could get worse, he explained, and they’d be needed then.

The governor called for delaying lots of planned programs for a year, but not outright eliminating them. He proposed paying for some public works projects with bond financing rather than cash. He reduced some planned expenditures but offered a “trigger” mechanism that would restore the funding if tax revenues picked up.

No slash and burn. Just a gentle touch as you’d expect from a liberal governor. But even with that, he’ll be under pressure from liberal lawmakers and interest groups to restore the cuts when he revises the budget proposal in May.

Newsom was asked by a reporter whether he thought the House leadership change would affect the state budget. His immediate answer seemed to contradict what he’d said a few minutes earlier about how Republicans wouldn’t have produced federal funding as Democrats did.

“Speed bumps,” Newsom replied. “I don’t see their agenda getting any traction whatsoever.”

He said House GOP legislation would be blocked by Senate Democrats and Biden.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s “priorities … are not the agenda of the American people,” Newsom said. “It’s just noise.”

But then he seemed to think again and added, “They can be a roadblock. … Momentum will be disrupted.

“So, we have to step up our game. … We have the moral authority to push back, and I can assure you we will do that.”

And his relationship with fellow California native McCarthy? “To be determined.”

Regardless of how far their legislation advances in Congress, however, House Republicans are positioned to block additional funding for California. They’ve never been enthusiastic about climate programs, for example.

And one thing seems certain: There won’t be any additional federal funding for California’s practically broke bullet train while McCarthy is speaker. He’s one of the pokey project’s most adamant opponents.

Rare bad luck for Newsom.

George Skelton is a Los Angeles Times columnist.

Yet this is an uplifting slum. Against all odds, Kibera is also a place of hope, and it offers a lesson in bottom-up development that the world should learn from.

The tale begins with a boy whose single mom — 15 years old when she gave birth — named him Kennedy, because she wanted him to be like an American president she had heard of. Little Kennedy Odede didn’t attend formal school, and at the age of 10 he ran away from a violent stepfather and ended up sleeping on the streets.

Kennedy taught himself to read and was inspired by a biography of Nelson Mandela that a researcher shared with him. Kennedy, ebullient and charismatic, then formed a Kibera self-help association called Shining Hope for Communities, better known as SHOFCO.

An American student from Wesleyan University, Jessica Posner, volunteered at SHOFCO and then persuaded Wesleyan to accept Kennedy as a full scholarship student, even though he had never even gone through a real elementary school. Jessica and Kennedy fell in love and married when he graduated.

One of SHOFCO’s early projects was Kibera School for Girls, which recruited some of the most impoverished girls in the slum. Their parents were sometimes illiterate, and one-fifth of those little girls had been sexually assaulted. Yet the girls knew that they were special, and with intensive tutoring they turned into star students, outperforming children at expensive Kenyan private schools.

I am an old friend of Kennedy and have been following his work since my first visit a dozen years ago. One girl I met then, when she was a second grader, is now studying at Columbia University. Her former classmates are studying at four other U.S. universities as well as at Kenyan universities.

Let’s just acknowledge that development is hard, particularly in urban slums that are growing fast around the world. Billions of dollars are poured into the poorest countries, and in Haiti and South Sudan one sees fleets of expensive white SUVs driven by aid organizations; what’s missing is long-term economic development. International aid keeps children alive, which is no small feat. But it has had less success in transforming troubled places.

That’s where SHOFCO is intriguing as an alternative model. Its grassroots empowerment approach has similarities with BRAC, a Bangladesh-based development organization that I consider one of the most effective aid groups in the world, and with Fonkoze, a similar homegrown nonprofit in Haiti.

SHOFCO has spread through low-income communities across Kenya and now boasts 2.4 million members, making it one of the largest grassroots organizations in Africa. It provides clean water, fights sexual assault, runs a credit union, coaches people on starting small businesses, runs libraries and internet hot spots, mobilizes voters to press politicians to bring services to slums, runs public health campaigns and does 1,000 other things.

It succeeds, I think, because it exemplifies a partnership: local leadership paired with a reliance on the best international practices. SHOFCO, for example, adopted deworming and cervical cancer prevention programs that reflect the best international knowledge, and these were accepted by local people partly because they trusted Kennedy.

I often write about poverty, and while the subject can be depressing at times, I also regularly find reason to be inspired.

Kibera still needs sewers, schools and decent roads, but Lauren’s success is a reminder of what a grassroots organization can accomplish against all odds in even the grittiest slum. That fills me with hope. Shining hope.

Nicholas Kristof is a New York Times columnist.

The beautiful racket that boils from an attack on playground equipment or a race around it or any of the thousand other impulses bursting from dynamo bodies and newly freed minds has a clamorous harmony like nothing else.

There’s one school I walk past almost every day, through the park across the street, then back across the full span of its architectural footprint. With or without the soundtrack, I look for only one thing — someone who looks out of place, or who is carrying something that looks out of place, but more bluntly, someone with a gun.

Since about Columbine (1999).

There is no school at Richneck Elementary in Newport News, Virginia, this week because last week ended with a first grade teacher getting shot in her classroom by a 6-year-old.

“This,” said Newport News Mayor Phillip Jones, “is a red flag for the country.”

Respectfully, Mayor, you new to this country?

This country did not lose its gun-loving mind last Friday. It took decades upon decades of ill-conceived arguments, millions upon millions of gun lobby dollars, and generations upon generations of gutless politicians to make this a country with more guns than people, a country with less than 5% of the world’s population holding 40% of its civilian-owned weaponry.

If the red flag is the signal to question how a 6-year-old got a gun in the United States of America, the better question is probably, “How did he avoid it for the first five years of his life?”

Only by the favorable exactitudes of trajectory and ballistics was first grade teacher Abby Zwerner not murdered in her classroom by a 6-year-old extracting a gun from his backpack — and maybe that’s why this particular news story got such poor traction in a media culture consumed by Prince Harry, Kevin McCarthy and the all-important re-jiggering of the NFL playoff format. Nobody died at Richneck Elementary. It was the first school shooting of the year. If trends continue, we’ll get 50 or 60 more.

If there’s a red flag still flappable in all of this, it might be the psychological compromise we demand from America’s children to appease the craven political culture that contorts itself to the Second Amendment.

Ninety-five percent of public schools in America have some kind of active shooter drills. The most sickening quote I’ve ever seen was something an elementary school kid told his parents about active shooter drills; he hates them because “the good hiding places are always taken first. There’s nothing to hide behind. He’ll be able to see me.”

In America, in 2022, gun violence surpassed car crashes as the No. 1 killer of young people. Schools, our supposed safe space, have been the stage for nearly 150 shootings since 2018.

A law professor who runs the Children’s Defense Clinic at the University of Richmond weighed in Tuesday on the matter of what to do with the 6-year-old shooter. “Obviously this is a tragedy on every level,” she said. “As a 6-year-old, he just doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to even understand how to form the intent to commit a crime like this.”

No, he doesn’t. But a gun — yeah, that he’s got.

One day the sound an elementary school makes before you see it will be different, no longer pulsating with its total color and richness, not exactly full with its accustomed joy. There will be no mystery as to why.

Gene Collier is a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist. ©2023 PG Publishing Co. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s penchant for braggadocio was in full flower eight months ago when he declared that California had a $97.5 billion budget surplus and boasted that “no other state in American history has ever experienced a surplus as large as this.”

He and the Legislature then wrote a 2022-23 budget with major increases in education, medical care and social services, plus a multi-billion-dollar cash rebate to taxpayers and other one-time expenditures.

On Tuesday, a more subdued Newsom acknowledged that the projected surplus had morphed into a $22.5 billion shortfall. He proposed a $297 billion 2023-24 budget that throttles back some of the additional spending and indirectly borrows billions of dollars to close the gap.

Moreover, Newsom warned that if the Federal Reserve System’s interest rate increases trigger a recession, the deficit could become much worse.

The situation is another reminder that California’s public finances are at the mercy of an extremely volatile revenue system, one dominated by personal income taxes, especially those paid by high-income Californians on their stocks and other capital investments.

As he began his presentation to reporters, Newsom displayed a chart demonstrating the ups and downs of capital gains as a percentage of personal income – reaching a peak of 9.7% in 2021 and now expected to decline to 5% by 2025.

Newsom said it “sums up California’s tax structure, sums up boom and bust.”

The decline in investment earnings, Newsom said, is the primary reason for a $29 billion reduction in projected income. His estimate of revenue declines and the resulting $22.5 deficit is a bit more optimistic than a November forecast from the Legislature’s budget analyst, Gabe Petek.

The situation rekindles a decades-old debate in political, academic and media circles about the state budget’s volatile dependence on the investment earnings of a relative handful of affluent taxpayers.

Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders created a blue-ribbon commission to recommend tax system changes that would lessen volatility. The badly divided commission proposed to reduce the reliance on the income tax by flattening it to just two brackets, eliminating sales and corporate income taxes, and creating a new “net business receipts tax.”

When the “Parsky Commission,” so dubbed for its chairman, businessman Gerald Parsky, finally released its report in 2009, it was quickly consigned to oblivion. When Jerry Brown returned to the governorship in 2011, he proposed to deal with volatility by creating a “rainy day” reserve financed by windfall revenues.

That fund and other reserves now total $35.6 billion, which would easily cover the current deficit, but Newsom – agreeing with Patek – is not tapping them, citing the danger of recession.

“We’re not touching these reserves,” he said. “We’re in a very volatile moment.”

As hefty as the reserves appear, it’s questionable whether they would be enough to counter even a moderate recession.

Petek, who pegged the current shortfall at $24 billion without a recession, warned in his November forecast that “Based on historical experience, should a recession occur soon, revenues could be $30 billion to $50 billion below our revenue outlook in the budget window.”

In other words, a recession could have as much as a $74 billion negative impact on the budget, more than twice the state’s reserves. In relative terms, the state has faced deficits of that magnitude in past recessions.

“What’s consistent is the inconsistency of our tax structure,” Newsom acknowledged.

Ideally, California would alter that structure to make it less dependent on a narrow base of taxable income – but as the fate of the Parsky Commission’s report indicates, there’s little political appetite for such reform.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.