Prominent evangelical author and teacher Beth Moore has said she is no longer a Southern Baptist, a split that comes after her criticism of sexism in the church and condemnation of “Trumpism.”
“I am still a Baptist, but I can no longer identify with Southern Baptists,” Moore, founder of Living Proof Ministries, told Religion News Service in an interview published Tuesday.
“I love so many Southern Baptist people, so many Southern Baptist churches, but I don’t identify with some of the things in our heritage that haven’t remained in the past,” she said.
Living Proof Ministries, which Moore founded in 1994, guides women who seek to model their lives on evangelical principles.
Moore, who is based in Houston, has spoken out against sexism and misogyny inside and outside the church. She has revealed that she is among the many women who have been sexually abused and harassed, and she has said “we’re tired of it.”
In 2016, after the “Access Hollywood” recording of Donald Trump was made public, Moore called on people to “wake up.”
In December, she tweeted: “I have never seen anything in these United States of America I found more astonishingly seductive & dangerous to the saints of God than Trumpism. This Christian nationalism is not of God. Move back from it.”
In a 2018 blog post titled “A Letter to My Brothers,” Moore described her experience as a female leader in the conservative evangelical world and having to learn to show “constant pronounced deference,” being disrespected and dismissed and dealing with attitudes among key Christian leaders “that smacked of misogyny, objectification and astonishing disesteem of women.”
Moore, 63, has faced backlash for her comments. She told Religion News Service that she did not feel welcome at the 2019 Southern Baptist Convention, where she spoke on a panel about abuse, and that things have gotten worse since then.
Moore also told the outlet that she has ended her publishing agreement with Lifeway, although it will still distribute her books.
Representatives of the Nashville, Tennessee-based organization did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment Tuesday night.
Southern Baptists are the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. The convention listed total membership at 14.5 million in its most recent annual report.
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The secretary of Defense has approved a request to keep nearly 2,300 National Guard personnel at the U.S. Capitol through much of spring, the Pentagon said Tuesday.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin approved the request from U.S. Capitol Police for continued Guard support through May 23, the Pentagon said in a statement.
The Guard presence will represent “a reduction of nearly 50 percent of the current support force,” Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said in the statement.
National Guard troops have been in Washington since the Jan. 6 riot by a pro-Trump mob.
More than 26,000 Guard personnel were on duty Jan. 20 to support the inauguration of President Joe Biden.
Capitol Police Acting Chief Yogananda Pittman last week asked that the Guard support be extended.
She cited an increase in threats to members of Congress in the first two months of the year.
Security was on high alert Thursday after the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI warned that some domestic extremist groups had discussed actions that day. No attack occurred.
Kirby said the Department of Defense “will work with the U.S. Capitol Police to incrementally reduce the National Guard footprint as conditions allow.”
After the request was granted, the Capitol Police department issued a statement thanking the Department of Defense for its “continued commitment to support our critical mission to protect Congress.”
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Last year, like many other Democrats, I took action. I campaigned, responded to social media misinformation and donated money to candidates. I celebrated when Joe Biden was announced as the winner of the presidency and when Democrats took back the Senate.
The bill could end my ability to be my own boss, set my own hours and otherwise live the American worker’s dream.
I also wrote a book to remind myself — and all of us — that honesty was something that still mattered, despite having the most dishonest person imaginable leading our country. But now that Donald Trump is out of office, I’m facing a painful truth: The man I prayed would become president could sign a piece of legislation that would kill my career as a freelance writer.
It’s the strangest political cognitive dissonance I’ve ever experienced.
Right now, my party is pushing a bill called the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or the PRO Act, in an ostensible bid to help gig workers exploited by employers who won’t give them health care coverage and other benefits. But because of a problematic clause in the bill, it’s far more con than pro for me. The bill could end my ability to be my own boss, set my own hours and otherwise live the American worker’s dream.
The problem with the measure, which is being voted on by the House on Tuesday, is its way of determining who’s considered an employee. Instead of using the IRS standard, which can tell the difference between an independent contractor and an employee, it uses a far narrower standard from the 1930s — called the ABC test— that can’t.
According to the ABC test, businesses need to treat someone like me as an employee — with all the rights and benefits that entails — even if I’m writing only a single story for them. Ditto for all types of creatives who support themselves through gigs, like actors, artists and musicians. How many companies will continue to use our services under these circumstances? It’s simply not feasible.
Being an employee might sound like an improvement for me, but the least I ever made as a full-time freelancer was still far more than I ever made on someone else’s payroll. I have supported my family of four this way for 20 years. (My husband is a stay-at-home dad.) We buy health insurance on our state’s exchange — which, admittedly, isn’t cheap — but the tradeoff is worth it, because I have flexibility and independence and am not subject to the whims of an employer.
And I’m not an anomaly. According to Upwork’s 2020 Independent Workforce Report, 75 percent of independent contractors who left employers to freelance say they make the same or more money now. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 79 percent of independent contractors prefer to retain their independent status over being employees.
But for the 1 in 5 American workers who are independent contractors, that option might disappear. Last year, when California enacted a bill, known as AB5, that supposedly protected gig workers from exploitation, it used the ABC test. The stories of lost work in more than 150 professions were heartbreaking.
And we heard multiple times how the law particularly hurt women, people of color and parents of children with disabilities, who often choose the flexibility of freelancing, especially if they’ve faced workplace discrimination. The Legislature later had to pass a bill to clean up the mess, and voters overturned part of it in a referendum.
California should have been a wake-up call for Democrats, but the result did nothing to stop the House from rushing to pass national legislation to enshrine the ABC test into law. (Thankfully, it looks like the Senate is a little more willing to apply the brakes.)
And that’s one of the most disappointing aspects of how this has played out. Instead of listening, Democratic lawmakers are doing what I have long criticized Republicans for: resorting to talking points that play well to a base while overlooking the facts. House rules allowed this bill to be voted on Tuesday without full committee hearings — so no chance for testimony from freelancers like me.
It would be wrong to say no one is listening, however, because the Republicans certainly are. They’ve offered amendments to eliminate the ABC test from the bill, which I am grateful for, even though I know we agree on little else.
When I reached out to my own Democratic senator here in Ohio, Sherrod Brown, his office pointed me toward another bill he introduced that he claims would fix the ABC test issue for freelancers like me. To me, this means he knows that my livelihood is at risk but would rather take California’s approach by cleaning it up after the fact — when lives have already been damaged.
Beyond that, all my colleagues and I have been hearing from Democrats in response to our concerns are talking points about how they are fighting for American workers. Don’t I count as an American worker? And if I don’t, then what exactly have I been supporting all these years?
I know what I believe in — things like an end to systemic racism, better support for families and children, increased voting rights and equity in schools. Yet now I find myself looking at Democrats’ slogans and questioning my assumption that their bills truly help the people who need it most.
I recognize that I’ve bought into broad narratives about the power of the people, usually pushing the most progressive-minded, feel-good policies that have easily repeatable language about things like the “dignity of work.” But when you’re the one whose work is suddenly threatened, it’s a bit more complicated.
The PRO Act is specifically aimed at strengthening employees’ rights to unionize, which I support, and certainly some workers are exploited by corporations that make them independent contractors to avoid paying benefits. But you know what? That’s why we have the IRS test. Use it.
But don’t enact sweeping legislation that squashes the vast majority of independent contractors and call it part of your plan “to create an economy where everyone can succeed.” It’s a great slogan, and it plays well on a Twitter video, but it’s hypocrisy as long as the ABC test is part of your plan to do it.
I still believe good ideas and earnest people will be heard. But right now, it feels like I’m being sacrificed for support from unions.
I’m still holding on to my idealistic Leslie Knope-ish tendencies. I still believe good ideas and earnest people will be heard. But right now, it feels like I’m being sacrificed for support from unions — the major interest group pushing this legislation. And given the vitriol my colleagues and I are getting on Twitter, like repeatedly being called “scabs,” I don’t think there’ll be any holiday cards this year.
I’m not looking for sympathy. After all, I’m a well-paid professional with plenty of lucky breaks to my name. What I am looking for is to be heard by the party I always believed best appreciated the breadth and width of America.
Build back better? Absolutely. But gaslighting independent contractors is a terribly poor foundation.
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Oprah Winfrey’s landmark interview with Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, watched by 17.1 million, almost felt like a bonus episode of Season 4 of Netflix’s “The Crown.” It certainly made the line between the scripted series and reality blurrier; the similarities between the two dramas are, we now know, truly uncanny.
Listening to Meghan unload about how lonely and suffocating life at Buckingham Palace was, and how unprepared she was for that, her words might have come out of the mouth of Princess Diana, who died in 1997 at age 36 — or her avatar in the Netflix series, Emma Corrin.
Just like Diana, Meghan was initially warmly welcomed to the Royal Family, and brought it the glamour of a stunning, fashionable American actor, with the added frisson of being biracial. Only, once married and bound to “The Firm,” as the institution of the monarchy is more broadly known, Meghan was no longer allowed to be Meghan and being biracial became seen as a decided liability.
To Winfrey, Meghan complained that “The Firm,” did little to protect her from the ravages of the British tabloids and was unconcerned about her deteriorating mental health, causing her to confess startling thoughts of suicide.
It’s hard to know what parts are really true when watching “The Crown,” because well-told narratives have a way of embedding in our brains. But there seems to be something to it.
“I was ashamed to have to admit it to Harry,” she told Winfrey. “I knew that if I didn’t say it, I would do it. I just didn’t want to be alive anymore.”
Diana, after the glow of a royal wedding wore off, also found herself isolated, without allies, and in a loveless marriage to Prince Charles, who was 13 years her senior and in love with another woman. Given no support by The Firm and the cold shoulder by the family, we now know Diana turned both to other men and bulimia for comfort.
“You inflict it upon yourself because your self-esteem is at a low ebb, and you don’t think you’re worthy or valuable,” she told the BBC’s Martin Bashir in an explosive interview in 1995. (The BBC is reportedly conducting an investigation into whether Bashir used forged documents to convince Diana that staffers were being paid to spy on her; British police only last week ruled out one of their own.) “You fill your stomach up four or five times a day — some do it more — and it gives you a feeling of comfort.”
It was that same interview in which Diana told the world her husband was cheating on her, and there were “three of us” in their marriage, ultimately winning more sympathy than barbs from the international public.
Charles, of course, was said to be unhappy as well. In Season 4 of “The Crown,” which portrays this time period, he tells his mother several times that “he’s suffering,” pleading to let him follow his love for Camilla Bowles. (The two are now married in real life.) But the Queen shuts him down, reminding him that duty to the monarchy comes before all else. The Charles of the series obeys; so, apparently, did the Charles in real life.
It’s much harder to control the storyline when the rebuffed players are more sympathetic than a steely, cold monarchy ruled by pretense and myths.
Harry instead broke with The Firm’s prescriptive and constrictive lifestyle, though at the cost of alienating his father who reportedly no longer returns his phone calls.
“There is a lot to work through there,” Harry said about his relationship with his father in the Winfrey interview. “I feel really let down. He’s been through something similar. He knows what pain feels like.”
Meghan, too, appears to have been as emotionally fragile as Diana once was — only Meghan was, in the end, more fortunate. She had Harry, and they were allowed to give up their titles, were cut off financially and moved to California.
Of course, it’s hard to know what parts are really true when watching “The Crown,” because well-told, credible narratives have a way of embedding in our brains and becoming our truths even when they are not.
But there seems to be something to it; Harry admitted last month to James Corden.
“It’s fictional, but it’s loosely based on the truth,” said Harry. “Of course, it’s not strictly accurate, but loosely, it gives you a rough idea about what that lifestyle, what the pressures of putting duty and service above family and everything else, what can come from that.”
Publicly admitting you are human, it seems, works better than an attempt to assert the privileges of dynastic, monarchical power in the modern media era.
Perhaps that’s why season four’s take on Charles and Diana’s dissolving marriage finally angered the palace, according to close pals of Charles, who claim the series is exploiting pain for financial gain.
Aware that an estimated 29 million Brits watched the series, the U.K.’s culture secretary wrote to the streaming giant in November demanding it include a “health warning” at the start of each episode. He wanted it made clear to viewers that “The Crown” is pure fiction and not fact, afraid the series was harming the monarchy’s reputation.
Netflix declined. And now people believe that even less.
Meghan and her late mother-in-law, Diana, seemingly mastered derailing the institutional narratives laid out by The Firm. After all, it’s much harder to control the storyline when the rebuffed players are more sympathetic than a steely, cold monarchy ruled by pretense and myths.
And now, no matter how hard Buckingham Palace tries to micromanage the message, Winfrey’s damning interview, combined with Diana’s own words and the family’s portrayal in “The Crown” — and especially the Charles and Diana act in season four — show they cannot control the narrative (at least on this side of the pond).
It didn’t stop them from trying: Days before the Winfrey interview, the palace fed a story about Meghan bullying two staffers when she was part of the royal household. The transparent timing of the leak was clearly designed to defuse whatever allegations were made in the interview, but it couldn’t.
Meghan and Harry’s candid, emotional stories of The Firm’s cruelty and the racism are far more believable than a secondhand report of bullying, especially watching the vulnerable couple reveal their pain.
Publicly admitting you are human, it seems, works better than an attempt to assert the privileges of dynastic, monarchical power in the modern media era.
Ironically, Harry and Meghan may again have the last word. They have signed a multiyear production deal with Netflix — which produces “The Crown” — giving them yet another chance to usurp the narrative.
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Across the country, vaccination sites are coming up with creative solutions to encourage people in the U.S. to get their vaccine shots.
In cities both big and small, facilities are hosting themed events to break the tension and get people excited about being vaccinated against Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus — all while having some fun.
A vaccination site in Texas made headlines Saturday after hosting an ’80’s-themed, 24-hour “Vax-A-Thon,” according to ABC affiliate KVUE. The Family Hospital Systems partnered with Williamson County to vaccinate 7,000 people in 24 hours at the Kelly Reeves Complex in Austin, the station reported.
Staff and volunteers, clad in masks, can be seen wearing neon-colored windbreaker tracksuits, shaggy wigs, and bright leg warmers at the drive-thru.
“This is Austin, baby,” resident Judy Brenstein told the station. “This is the way people should look when you come to get a vaccine.”
Just northeast of Texas, staff members and residents at an assisted living facility in Bella Vista, Arkansas, “rode the wave” to their Covid-19 vaccinations earlier this year in luau-themed costumes, NBC affiliate KNWA reported.
Photos showed employees and residents dressed in grass hula skirts, coconut bras, flower headpieces and leis.
An assisted living home in Wisconsin threw it back to the ’70s with a vaccination “disco party,” ABC affiliate WISN reported.
Nursing home residents could be seen smiling behind a mask while getting their vaccine shot against the backdrop of shiny gold streamers and rainbow-colored balloons at the Congregation Home in Brookfield, about 12 miles west of Milwaukee.
And in Kentucky, an assisted living home kicked off their vaccine event around Sylvester Stallone’s 1976 boxing classic, “Rocky.”
Staff members and residents at The Lantern of Morning Pointe in Russell wore red, white and blue, listened to the movie’s theme song, and made homemade rocky road ice cream.
Many can be seen posing with red boxing gloves and raising their fists in front of a banner that read, “First round knock-out!”
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The entire state of Hawaii was under a flash flood watch Tuesday morning after heavy rainfall overflowed a dam and forced people to evacuate their homes for fear of fast-rising waters and landslides.
“Deep moisture will remain over the state through tonight,” the National Weather Service based in Honolulu warned early Tuesday morning.
The grounds were already saturated from heavy rainfall Monday that caused the Kaupakalua Dam on the island of Maui to overflow. The Weather Service said Tuesday that the dam could potentially fail.
Maui officials on Monday thought the dam had failed but later said it had not suffered structural damage. Still, those in Haiku in the vicinity of the Kaupakalua Dam and Kaupakalua Road were ordered to evacuate, according to Facebook posts on the County of Maui page.
The dam can hold 68 million gallons of water, according to NBC affiliate KHNL.
“People near heavily flowing streams also should evacuate or seek higher ground,” the posts said. “Even if it appears that there is less rainfall and conditions are improving, people should not return to the area until there is an ‘all clear’ announcement.”
Two evacuation shelters were open as of late Monday night.
The Maui Fire Department reported responding to more than a dozen calls from residents who were trapped by rising waters.
While some roadways that had been closed Monday have reopened, others remain shuttered, according to the Maui Police Department.
All County of Maui parks on Maui island were closed, according to the Department of Recreation.
“This is a real flooding situation we have not seen in a long time,” Maui County Mayor Michael Victorino said Monday during a live address on Facebook. “Some of the residents have told me this is the worst they’ve seen in over 25 years.”
“If you have family and friends and you can get out of the area, that is probably preferable. But be careful if you see high water, turn around and go back,” Victorino said. “Do not try to cross it at this time.”
He also urged tourists to stay in their hotel rooms or other lodging and not go out Monday evening.
The Weather Service cautioned residents to expect mudslides in steep terrains.
A dam failure turned fatal in Hawaii in 2006, when seven people were killed after the Ka Loko dam on the island of Kauai collapsed and hundreds of gallons of water rushed downhill.
But East Maui residents say they haven’t seen rains like Monday’s downpours in years.
“I have lived here for 30 years and I think this is the first time that I have seen so much rain,” Makawao resident Lydia Toccafondi Panzik told KHNL. “I’ve seen hurricane times, I’ve seen floodings, but this was really a bad one.”
The Associated Press contributed.
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Les Miles is out as Kansas’ head coach just days after he was placed on administrative leave amid sexual misconduct allegations from his tenure at LSU.
Kansas announced Miles’ departure Monday night, describing it as a mutual agreement to part ways. Miles has three years left on his original five-year contract with the school that pays him $2.775 million annually through December 2023 and includes several bonuses, among them a $675,000 retention bonus paid last November.
“I am extremely disappointed for our university, fans and everyone involved with our football program,” Kansas athletic director Jeff Long said in a statement. “We will begin the search for a new head coach immediately with an outside firm to assist in this process. We need to win football games, and that is exactly what we’re going to do.”
The 67-year-old Miles was 3-18 in two seasons with the Jayhawks. Offensive coordinator Mike DeBord was named acting head coach.
“This is certainly a difficult day for me and for my family,” Miles said in a statement. “I love this university and the young men in our football program. I have truly enjoyed being the head coach at KU and know that it is in a better place now than when I arrived.”
Last week, LSU released a 148-page review by a law firm about the university’s handling of sexual misconduct complaints campus-wide. One part described how Miles “tried to sexualize the staff of student workers in the football program by, for instance, allegedly demanding that he wanted blondes with big breasts, and ‘pretty girls.’”
The report also revealed then-LSU athletic director Joe Alleva recommended firing Miles in 2013 to university officials.
Kansas placed Miles on leave later that day and said it would conduct a review of allegations against the coach that it had previously been unaware of.
Kansas said terms of the agreement with Miles on his departure will be released in the coming days.
Miles spent 11-plus seasons with LSU, leading the school to a national title in 2007. He was fired four games into the 2016 season.
Miles was investigated at LSU after two female student workers in the football program accused the coach of inappropriate behavior in 2012.
While that 2013 investigation by the Taylor Porter law firm found Miles showed poor judgment, it did not find violations of law or that he had a sexual relationship with any students. Taylor Porter also concluded it could not confirm one student’s allegation that Miles kissed her while they were in the coach’s car with no one else present.
In an email dated June 2013 and sent to the president of LSU, Alleva wrote Miles was guilty of “insubordination, inappropriate behavior, putting the university, athletic (department) and football program at great risk.”
The Taylor Porter review had been kept confidential for about eight years until a redacted version of it was released this week after a lawsuit filed by USA Today.
For Kansas, Miles’ departure is just the latest setback for what has been college football’s worst Power Five program for a decade. The Jayhawks have not won more than three games in a single season since 2009.
Miles had been out of coaching for two years when Long hired him after the 2018 season, hoping a notable name and experienced coach could help break the apathy that has enveloped the Kansas program for a decade.
Long and Miles were friends dating to their time at Michigan in the late 1980s.
While recruiting has improved under Miles, little else has changed. The Jayhawks were winless last season for the third time in program history, losing by an average of more than 30 points per game.
Kansas has not had a winning season since 2008, the year before Mark Mangino was fired amid allegations of verbal and physical abuse. He was followed by Turner Gill, who won five games over two seasons, and Charlie Weis, who was 6-22 before getting fired four games into the 2014 season.
David Beaty was 6-42 in four seasons in charge of the Jayhawks and sued Kansas for withholding his buyout because of NCAA infractions. Beaty reached a $2.55 million settlement with the school last summer.
Now, with spring football practice around the corner, Kansas is starting over again, still stuck in a deep hole.
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Republican lawmakers in New York introduced a resolution Monday to begin impeachment proceedings against Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo — which hasn’t been done in New York in over 100 years.
“There’s been one bombshell after another,” Will Barclay, the Republican leader of the state Assembly, told reporters at the state Capitol in Albany, where he announced the impeachment resolution.
Cuomo has been besieged by bipartisan calls to either resign or be impeached over dual scandals that have rocked his administration in recent weeks: allegations that his administration intentionally undercounted Covid-19 nursing home deaths and allegations from five women that he sexually harassed them. Cuomo has denied wrongdoing with the nursing home numbers, and he has denied having harassed women while apologizing for how his behavior might have made some of them feel.
“The real problem now is the governor’s lost so much credibility and trust that we don’t feel like he can go forward and govern,” Barclay said. “So we want to move ahead, do this impeachment in the Assembly.”
The impeachment resolution isn’t likely to proceed at the moment. Democrats control 106 of the Assembly’s 150 seats, and only a handful of members have said they would vote to impeach.
If Cuomo is impeached, however, there’s “very little precedent to rely on,” said Peter Galie, a professor emeritus of political science at Canisius College in Buffalo.
Only one New York governor has ever been impeached — William Sulzer, who was impeached for campaign finance violations and removed from office in October 1913 after a three-week trial. Historians have said he was targeted for having crossed Tammany Hall, the corrupt political organization that had once backed him.
“During his tenure, his efforts to remove Tammany Hall influences in state government resulted in an investigation that discovered fraud in his own campaign contributions,” the National Governors Association website said.
Sulzer said his impeachment was a “political lynching” and “the culmination of a deep-laid political conspiracy to oust me from office.”
As for the impeachment process itself, Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor, said, “it’s a lot like but not the same as in the federal system.”
Impeachment begins in the Assembly and “requires a majority of the members of the Assembly” to vote to charge the governor.
Unlike the federal Constitution, New York’s Constitution makes “no mention of high crimes and misdemeanors,” Galie said. In terms of possible charges, “there’s nothing there at all,” leaving the way forward entirely up to the Assembly, he said.
If the Assembly votes to charge the governor, a trial is held before the state Senate. Unlike in the federal system, the senators aren’t the only judges/jurors. Judges from the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, hear the case, as well. That could be a boon for Cuomo, who appointed all seven of the judges.
Gillers said the judges probably were added to eliminate appeals, because the “state high court judges would already have participated in the impeachment trial.”
A two-thirds vote is required for conviction, and the penalty is removal from office. The Senate and the judges could also vote to ban the governor from holding any other state office — a penalty that wasn’t used against Sulzer. He was elected to the Assembly just weeks after he was impeached.
A spokesman for Cuomo responded to the impeachment threats Monday by saying Cuomo is focused on his work.
“There’s a job to be done, and New Yorkers elected the governor to do it, which is why he has been focused on getting as many shots in arms as possible, making sure New York is getting its fair share in Washington’s Covid relief package and working on a state budget that is due in three weeks,” said the spokesman, Rich Azzopardi.
Twenty Democratic female legislators issued a statement Monday calling for state Attorney General Letitia James to be given time to complete her investigation of the sexual harassment allegations, saying, “Our democracy demands that we be diligent and expeditious in our search for truth and justice.”
James announced later Monday that her office had hired Joon Kim, a former acting U.S attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Anne L. Clark, an employment discrimination lawyer, to lead an independent investigation into the allegations of sexual harassment.
“These are serious allegations that demand a rigorous and impartial investigation. We will act judiciously and follow the facts wherever they lead,” Kim said in a statement.
Tom Winter contributed.
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FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Carla Wallenda, a member of “The Flying Wallendas” high-wire act and the last surviving child of the famed troupe’s founder, has died at the age of 85.
Her son, Rick Wallenda, said on social media she died Saturday in Sarasota, Florida, of natural causes. She was the daughter of Karl Wallenda, who had founded the troupe in Germany before moving to the United States in 1928 to great acclaim. She was the aunt of aerialist Nik Wallenda.
Carla Wallenda was born Feb. 13, 1936, and appeared in a newsreel in 1939 as she learned how to walk the wire, with her father and mother, Mati, looking on. But she said her first time on the wire was much earlier.
“Actually, they carried me across the wire when I was 6 weeks old,” she said in a 2017 interview with a Sarasota TV station. “My father rode the bicycle, and my mother sat on his shoulders, holding me and introducing me to the public.”
She spent her younger years traveling the country as her father’s troupe performed in the Ringling Bros. circus. She had a brother, Mario, and a sister, Jenny — all performed in the act.
She began appearing in the family’s show in 1947, but not on the high wire at first, according to her biography on the family’s website. In 1951, her father told her she could join the high-wire act if she could do a headstand on top of the family’s seven-person pyramid. She was able to join the high-wire act later that year.
Carla Wallenda left the family act in 1961 to form her own troupe. The next season, two of the Wallendas were killed in an accident while performing the pyramid. Her brother was paralyzed.
Wallenda rejoined the family troupe in 1965, replacing an aunt who died doing a solo act.
Her husband, Richard Guzman, died in 1972 when he fell 60 feet during a performance in West Virginia. Her father died in 1978, falling while walking a wire across a street in Puerto Rico.
Still, she would not be deterred from performing.
“Accidents can happen anyplace,” she told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in 2014. “I have to make a living and this is the only way I know or want to. I’ve done waitress work and hated every minute of it. Why should I go and do a job that I hate?”
She worked through her 70s, including in a Miley Cyrus music video. She finally retired in 2017 at the age of 81 after appearing on a Steve Harvey TV special, doing a headstand atop a 80-foot sway pole.
“When I am out there, all of my pain and all that goes away and I am in a world of my own,” she said in the 2017 TV interview.
She is survived by her son, two daughters, Rietta Wallenda Jordan and Valerie Wallenda, and 16 grandchildren. A second son, Mario, died in 1993.
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The founder of a California artists’ warehouse that burned in a massive blaze that killed 36 people five years ago was sentenced Monday to nine years in prison and three years of post-supervision release, authorities said.
Alameda District Attorney Nancy O’Malley’s office said in a statement that Derick Almena, the master tenant of the Ghost Ship warehouse in Oakland, California, can serve the remainder of his prison term at home with a GPS monitor.
In a statement read in court by Almena’s lawyer, Tony Serra, Almena apologized for his role in the Dec. 2, 2016 fire, saying: “I am very afraid to say more,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported. “I am sick with shame. I am so sorry. My shame cannot stand as any defense against what I am responsible for.”
Almena pled guilty to 36 counts of manslaughter in January, more than two years after a jury deadlocked on the charges in an earlier trial. The same jury acquitted a co-defendant, Max Harris, who had also faced involuntary manslaughter charges.
Almena and Harris had agreed to an earlier plea deal and were set to be sentenced to nine and six years, respectively, when Judge James Cramer rejected the deal, saying that Almena hadn’t accepted “full responsibility and remorse” for the fire.
Almena rented the warehouse in 2013 to build theatrical sets, but prosecutors said he began subletting sections to other artists. Harris allegedly helped convert the building into a living area, organize massive parties and collect rent.
They converted the warehouse into a “death trap” filled with flammable objects, blocked exits and no fire alarms or sprinklers, prosecutors said.
A defense lawyer for Almena had argued that a society that allows the kind of extreme wealth and poverty that co-exist in the San Francisco Bay Area was to blame for the fire.
“People like Derek take a warehouse and get people out of the gutter and put a roof over their head and don’t have the money to furnish it according to the laws of Oakland,” the lawyer, Brian Getz, said. “And that’s why this happened.”
Last year, the city of Oakland agreed to pay more than $32 million to settle a lawsuit brought on behalf of the fire’s victims, including $23.5 million for the families of those who died and $9.2 million for a survivor who suffered critical injuries.
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