Astros Ace Justin Verlander Throws 3rd No-Hitter Of His Career
Houston Astros starting pitcher Justin Verlander celebrates after throwing a no hitter against the Toronto Blue Jays, marking his third career no-hitter.
USA Today Sports/USA TODAY Sports via Reuters
hide caption
toggle caption
USA Today Sports/USA TODAY Sports via Reuters
Houston Astros pitcher Justin Verlander lifted both his arms aloft then bent to his knees with the clenched fists of a victorious warrior before his teammates thronged him from all sides.
Verlander was not just not marking any old win. The right-hander tossed a no-hitter Sunday against the Toronto Blue Jays.
It is his third career no-hitter, putting Verlander among an elite group of just six other major league pitchers with three or more no-hitters under their belt. It’s a group that includes Cy Young, the namesake for the award that goes to the best pitcher each year in the American and National Leagues.
“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t know that the list of guys who have thrown three instead of two gets pretty small — some of the guys I’ve idolized,” Verlander said after the game. “It’s a special moment. I’m so happy to be able to celebrate this with my teammates.”
Verlander, 36, struck out 14 and allowed just one base runner after walking Cavan Biggio in the first inning.
Propelled by Verlander’s blazing fastball, the Astros topped the Blue Jays 2-0.
His last no-hitter was also against Toronto, in 2011, when he was throwing for the Detroit Tigers.
He now has the bragging rights to becoming the first pitcher to throw a no-hitter twice against a team in its own stadium.
While Verlander now joins a small cadre of pitchers who have hurled three or more no-hitters, the top record-holder belongs to Nolan Ryan, who completed seven career no-hitters.
Report: Hundreds Of Florida Nursing Homes Fall Short Of Post-Irma Regulations
NPR’s Michel Martin talks with reporter Elizabeth Koh about how Florida nursing facilities are preparing — or not — for intense hurricanes.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Now staying here in Florida, residents may be spared a direct hit from Dorian, but forecasters say dangerous storm surges, hurricane-force winds and power outages are still expected. For Floridians, the memory of Hurricane Irma two years ago is still fresh, in part because at least 84 people in the state died as a result of the storm. Twelve of those deaths occurred at a nursing home in Hollywood, Fla., near Fort Lauderdale after the storm knocked out power to the facility’s air conditioning system. On Tuesday, four employees of the center were charged with aggravated manslaughter in connection with those deaths.
That tragedy raises the question of whether the state is better prepared today, especially in caring for vulnerable residents. A Miami Herald report found that hundreds of nursing homes do not meet new requirements put in place since Hurricane Irma. Miami Herald reporter Elizabeth Koh is with us now from Tallahassee to tell us more.
Elizabeth, thanks so much for joining us.
ELIZABETH KOH: Thanks for inviting me.
MARTIN: So, Elizabeth, has the state taken steps since Hurricane Irma to ensure that facilities like nursing homes can continue to care for residents in the event of a major hurricane? Are they ready?
KOH: The biggest thing that the state did after Irma was to pass regulations last year shortly after the storm hit to say that nursing homes and assisted living facilities needed backup power, specifically for their air conditioning, which is where the Hollywood Hills nursing facility failed. The regulations call for additional fuel storage in addition to powerful generators that can keep those temperature facilities running. And that was supposed to go into implementation at the beginning of last year’s hurricane season.
MARTIN: Last year’s hurricane season – so did it? I mean, are these facilities ready?
KOH: Hundreds of facilities needed more time. They cited delays with local governments that required additional permits, backlogs and contractors, difficulty getting the equipment installed. When we’re talking about large nursing home facilities, we’re talking about some pretty powerful, substantial generators that need concrete pads to sit on, things like that. So the state gave them an extension until the end of the year.
MARTIN: So do you have a sense of whether the staff at these facilities and the families of the residents – do they feel prepared for the storm?
KOH: That’s something that the state is trying to check. Unfortunately, as we learned in Irma, that’s something that can be difficult to determine with full certainty. The Hollywood Hills nursing facility, as we discussed, is a facility that had a generator on the premises. It just didn’t power their air conditioning. It had an emergency plan, like a lot of nursing home facilities have now. But that was a plan that wasn’t very thoroughly vetted by county officials.
So the question of how safe nursing home facilities actually are – that’s something that we’re seeing local officials do site checks and calls to see if they can establish generator statuses at various facilities and ensure the safety of residents. But if you are concerned about a family member who is at a facility, it’s worth calling and checking and asking how they’re preparing for this storm.
MARTIN: Are there any other lessons that the states learned from the tragedy that occurred in Hollywood Hills? Is there any – are there any other steps that they’re taking to give the public confidence that something like this won’t happen again?
KOH: They’ve put out a new website – it’s fl-generator.com – that gives the public an opportunity to look at what kind of generator status is on file with the state – whether they have a permanently installed generator, whether it’s a temporary generator on site, off site. So that’s a resource for the public.
The state has also promised that they will do spot checks after the storm to make sure that facilities that have gotten generators have those generators up and running. We’ve been told that the state has stockpiled additional generators in case some of those generators fail so that they have backups. And we’re told that the Department of Health is also helping with that, too – the State Department of Health.
MARTIN: That was Miami Herald reporter Elizabeth Koh joining us from WFSU in Tallahassee, Fla.
Elizabeth, thanks so much for joining us, and thanks for your reporting.
KOH: Thank you very much.
Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
Facebook’s New Requirements For Political Ads
NPR’s Michel Martin speaks with Dipayan Ghosh, a fellow at Harvard University, about Facebook’s new political ad requirements.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Facebook’s credibility has been called into question ever since the company admitted that its platform was used as part of disinformation campaigns during the 2016 elections. Lawmakers threatened regulations, none came. And in the years that followed, the companies struggled to regain trust with the public as other abuses of the platform have come to light. Last week, Facebook announced a new set of requirements for any group or company that wants to target users with political ads on its site.
Here to talk more about that is Dipayan Ghosh. He is co-director of the Technology and Democracy Project at the Shorenstein Center. That’s at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Ghosh previously worked at Facebook on issues of global privacy and public policy design. Dipayan, thanks so much for joining us.
DIPAYAN GHOSH: Of course. Thanks for having me.
MARTIN: Could you just start by telling us what we mean by a Facebook ad? Like, what do these political ads look like now, and what will they look like after these new requirements are implemented? I guess what I’m asking is, how will I know if I’m looking at a political ad on Facebook?
GHOSH: Well, that’s one of the criticisms that people have laid on this announcement, which is that we’re not really going to see. As users of Facebook, we’re likely not going to see much change on the front end of seeing the apps that we interact with on Facebook’s platforms, Facebook and Instagram. Instead, these changes are more on the back end for Facebook to help verify that the people putting ads out are legitimate political actors.
MARTIN: So to whom is this being disclosed? Is this being disclosed through Facebook? Is this being disclosed to the viewer on the site? How will we know?
GHOSH: Well, it seems like things are slightly unclear still, but what we have heard from the company is that the company is going to move toward a more rigorous verification system. Before – or, in fact, currently what the company is doing is if you’re a political operator, a political advertiser and you want to push an ad on Facebook or Instagram or one of its platforms, what you’ve got to do is essentially just let Facebook know that you’re a political advertiser, a political organization. And you’ve just got to register that with Facebook and register your name and your location.
What Facebook is additionally going to ask for now is, in addition to your street address and contact information, a tax ID number or a Federal Election Commission identification number or some kind of a governmental identification that can help the company verify that you are a political organization. That’s the main change that’s happening on the back end to help the company sort out whether or not you’re a political organization trying to advertise or you’re an illegitimate actor that’s trying to push a political ad.
MARTIN: And why is that? Again, just for people who – I mean, maybe this is obvious – but why does Facebook remain such an attractive place for political campaigns?
GHOSH: So much attention is moving toward Facebook and other digital platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Google. So many millions of dollars are spent to push political ads on these platforms. The eyeballs of society, particularly of young people in society who are coming into voting age are on Internet platforms. They’re not – they’re increasingly less and less on broadcast and radio. Additionally, what what political advertisers have realized is that they can start using these platforms in potentially interesting ways.
They can slice and dice different audience segments, meaning different classes of a constituent population and target them with incisive political advertising that triggers what those constituents believe or attempts to trigger an emotional response in ways that you can’t do on broadcast or radio because you’ve got to advertise to the entire constituent population, not just a targeted segment of it. And this, in fact, is exactly the tool that the Russian disinformation operators used in 2016 and which caused all the problems that we’ve seen in the aftermath of Cambridge Analytica.
MARTIN: So, you know, given all that, given, you know, everything that we just talked about, some have called on Facebook to ban political ads altogether. What’s your opinion about that?
GHOSH: I think it’s very clear that companies should discontinue political advertising until and unless it can show that it can operate political advertising in a way that protects our democracy. To the extent that we lack transparency into the interactions that we have with political ads and the company remains unaccountable to mistakes that it makes, we should absolutely discontinue political advertising on Facebook. Now, the company can correct those problems, and if it can, then I think it can come back. But for the time being, we’ve seen too many mistakes to allow for another 2016 to happen.
MARTIN: That’s Dipayan Ghosh. He is a fellow at the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School. He’s the co-director of the Technology and Democracy Project there. Mr. Ghosh, thank you so much for talking to us.
GHOSH: Thanks so much, Michel.
MARTIN: And we do want to mention that Facebook is among NPR’s financial supporters.
Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
