One more reason to win back the Senate. Come on Georgia!
Puerto Ricans have voted in favor of statehood. Now it’s up to Congress.
PS: I was born in Puerto Rico, a navy brat, so I would LOVE to see this be a thing.
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From the newly elected Senator of Alabama
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Holy moly. Rumors are flying that Putin is quitting soon and may have Parkinson’s. He’s been showing major signs of pain and issues and recent legislation to make him a “senator for life” when he resigns are causing speculation!
PUTIN ‘TO QUIT’
Vladimir Putin, 68, ‘set to resign as Russian president early next year amid fears he has Parkinson’s’
VLADIMIR Putin is planning to quit early next year amid growing fears for his health, Moscow sources claimed last night.
Kremlin watchers said recent tell-tale footage showed the 68-year-old strongman has possible symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease.
And informed analysts claimed that the Russian president’s glamorous ex-gymnast lover Alina Kabaeva, 37, is begging him to release his grip on power.
Observers who studied recent footage of Putin noted his legs appeared to be in constant motion and he looked to be in pain while clutching the armrest of a chair.
His fingers are also seen to be twitching as he held a pen and gripped a cup believed to contain a cocktail of painkillers.
Speculation that his 20-year-reign - second only to that of Stalin - could be nearing an end grew earlier this week when laws were drafted to make him a senator-for-life when he resigns.
Legislation introduced by Putin himself was being rushed through parliament to guarantee him legal immunity from prosecution and state perks until he dies.
Moscow political scientist Professor Valery Solovei fuelled further speculation last night by suggesting Putin may have symptoms of Parkinson’s.
The academic said he also understood Putin’s undisclosed partner Alina was pressuring him to quit - along with his daughters Maria Vorontsova , 35, Katerina Tikhonova, 34.
Solovei said: "There is a family, it has a great influence on him. He intends to make public his handover plans in January”.
The professor predicted that Putin would soon appoint a new prime minister who would be groomed to become his eventual successor.
The president’s staff have repeatedly played down rumours that he is paving the way for a political exit.
And Putin himself has regularly released pictures of him looking fit and toned in Action Man poses hunting, shooting, horse riding and playing ice hockey.
His spokesman Dmitry Peskov said of the senator-for-life move: : "This is the practice that is being applied in many countries of the world, and it is quite justified.
“This is not innovation from the point of view of international practice.”
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I am glad Vindman is there - writing a book and supported by an honorable grant supporting the military.
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And in another election…
It can’t fly and it hides during the day but a critically endangered large parrot is back in the limelight having been named New Zealand’s bird of the year for an unprecedented second time.
The green and fawn kākāpō – the world’s heaviest, longest-living parrot – first won in 2008. After conservation efforts, the population of this large parrot has risen from 50 during the 1990s to 213 now.
Kākāpō – a bird also known as “mighty moss chicken” – used to live throughout Aotearoa, but today survive only on predator-free islands.
Another endangered bird, the antipodean albatross, which is often caught in fishing nets, won most first-choice votes out of the more than 55,000 votes cast but under the competition’s preferential system the kākāpō came through. Organisers said they hoped the antipodean albatross did not feel robbed.
The world’s most famous Kākāpō is Sirocco, who reputedly thinks he is human after a respiratory illness meant he became the first male to be hand reared.
Aged 23 – scientists believe kākāpō can live for around 60 years – Sirocco has toured New Zealand to promote the plight of his species. In 2009, he rocketed to global fame after attempting to mate with zoologist Mark Carwardine’s head during filming for the BBC documentary Last Chance to See with British actor Stephen Fry, who likened the bird’s face to that of a Victorian gentleman. The video of the incident – with commentary from Fry: “He’s really going for it!” – has had more than 18m views.
No stranger to scandal, the competition this year involved the endorsement by an adult toy store of the polyamorous hihi, or stitchbird, and voter fraud. Volunteer scrutineers found 1,500 votes cast one night were from the same IP address, all for the smallest kiwi species, the kiwi pukupuku or little spotted kiwi.
Some of our birds are now twittering that it was a rigged election!
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Coronavirus (Community Thread)Some good news to be thankful for:
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I really want to read that because I could use some news like that, but paywall 
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Not sure how to copy the whole article.
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@Whoosie I am putting it in 
…all you do is highlight sections of the article, and paste it into the body of an entry. You can copy photos too. Then you need to use the Quote (") symbol - highlight article and click (") from the above edit bar.
@celena here you go.
For 10,000 years, the Swinomish tribe has fished the waters of northwestern Washington, relying on the bounty of salmon and shellfish not only as a staple of its diet but as a centerpiece of its culture. At the beginning of the fishing season, the tribe gathers on the beach for a First Salmon ceremony, a feast honoring the return of the migratory fish that binds the generations of a tribe that calls itself the People of the Salmon.
At the ceremony’s conclusion, single salmon are ferried by boat in four directions — north to Padilla Bay, east to the Skagit River, south to Skagit Bay and west to Deception Pass — and eased into the water with a prayer that they will tell other salmon how well they were treated.
In recent years, though, the tribe’s harvest, diminished by vanishing habitat and warming waters fueled by climate change, hasn’t been sufficient to feed the hundreds of people who come to pay homage to their ancestors and to the fish that sustained them.
“We don’t have that abundance anymore,” said Lorraine Loomis, an elder who has managed the tribal fishery for 40 years. “To get ceremonial fish, we buy it and freeze it.”
For the Swinomish, perched on a vulnerable, low-lying reservation on Fidalgo Island, the effects of a warming world have been a gut punch.
LEFT: A carving represents a legend linking native people and the sea, at Deception Pass State Park on Fidalgo Island, Wash. RIGHT: Waves crash on Rosario Beach at Deception Pass State Park.
The tribe has responded with an ambitious, multipronged strategy to battle climate change and improve the health of the land and the water and the plants, animals and people who thrived in harmony for generations. In 2010, the Swinomish became one of the first communities to assess the problems posed by a warming planet and enact a climate action plan. An additional 50 Native American tribes have followed, creating climate strategies to protect their lands and cultures, ahead of most U.S. communities.
The Swinomish see the tasks beyond addressing shoreline risk and restoring habitats. They look at climate adaptation and resilience with the eyes of countless generations. They recognize that the endangered “first foods” — clams, oysters, elk, traditional plants and salmon — are not mere resources to be consumed. They are central to their values, beliefs and practices and, therefore, to their spiritual, cultural and community well-being.
Loomis is 80. Every member of her family, from her grandfather to her nine great-grandchildren, has fished the tribe’s ancestral waters. She has watched over the decades as the salmon disappeared and her family turned to crab, geoduck and sea cucumbers. She’s seen the salmon season drop to only a few days per species from the eight months — May through December — of decades past in order to protect populations. The Skagit River is the last waterway in the United States that’s home to all five species of Pacific salmon.
Progress has been slow; some researchers say it could be 90 years before the salmon recover. Loomis is taking the long view. “If I didn’t believe we would recover [the fishery], I guess I wouldn’t still be working on this,” she said.
In recent years, the tribe has fostered salmon recovery through a variety of projects. It has restored tidelands and channels, planted trees along streambeds to cool warming waters, and collaborated with farmers to increase stream setbacks to improve water quality.
Restoring salmon populations is just part of an ambitious climate action plan to blunt the effects of increased flooding, ocean acidification, rising river temperatures, more-destructive storms and habitat loss.
The Swinomish are rebuilding oyster reefs for the native Olympia oyster. They’re planning the first modern clam garden in the United States on the reservation’s tidelands, reviving an ancient practice. They’re monitoring deer and elk populations through camera traps to understand the climate change pressures and to inform hunting limits. And they have ongoing wetland restoration projects to explore preserving native plants and to help naturally manage coastal flooding.
“They’re doing really innovative climate adaptation,” said Meade Krosby, a senior scientist with the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington. “They were way ahead of the curve. And that really shouldn’t be surprising, because the tribes have shown tremendous leadership in climate adaptation and mitigation.”
While the Swinomish have been pioneers, they are among an increasing number of Indigenous communities across the country that have created climate plans guided by science and culture.
The Tulalip tribes, neighbors to the south, are relocating nuisance beavers from urban areas to streams with salmon to improve water quality and lower the temperature, reduce sediment flowing into streams and mitigate the effects of increasingly intense storms. The Karuk tribe of Northern California has a 232-page plan that calls for prescribed burning to reduce increasing wildfires and removing dams to help decreasing salmon and eel populations.
The Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes of Montana have a resilience plan that calls for prescribed burns and restoring whitebark pine, a key part of tribal culture. They plan to identify trees resilient to blister rust — a fungus exacerbated by climate change — collect their seeds and eventually plant 100,000 seedlings on their lands.
And in Alaska, a partnership of 11 tribes has formed to identify harmful algae blooms so that it’s clear when shellfish can be safely harvested.
Native Americans acutely feel the effects of the changing climate because they were forced onto the most vulnerable lands, places that were of little use to others, said Nikki Cooley, co-manager of the Tribes and Climate Change Program for the Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals.
“There’s that big push to address climate change because we’re feeling the effects more so than other places,” said Cooley, 40, who grew up without electricity or running water, herding sheep in the sprawling Navajo Nation reservations of the Arizona desert.
The institute has consulted with more than 300 of the 574 tribes in the United States, Cooley said. It’s natural that Indigenous people who have lived with the land for generations, attuned to the cycles of nature, would be leaders in adapting to climate change and marrying that to culture and health. “We’ve always been taught and are still being told we have to preserve for the future generations,” she added.
‘A symbiotic respect’
An 1855 treaty established the Swinomish Reservation, a 15-square-mile skinny rectangle on Fidalgo Island with 2,900 acres of tidelands and 7,450 acres of uplands. The tribe, which has about 1,000 members, owns a casino, an RV park and a golf course on the island 80 miles north of Seattle. It leases 420 acres of the reservation to a planned community of 2,000 people.
The hydrology of the area has been radically altered over a century, destroying critical habitat for fish and wildlife. For example, the Swinomish Channel, once a complex waterway on the eastern edge of the reservation, was dredged and 900 acres of tidelands were diked and drained in 1937, blocking the way for young salmon to reach the tidal channels critical to their development as places to feed, grow and rest.
In early 2006, a 100-year storm struck the island, causing damaging flooding. Later that year, another storm downed trees and power lines, isolating the residents and causing evacuations. Those extreme weather events helped spur the tribe to examine a future imperiled by climate change.
Their plans merge traditional and academic resources. When looking at ways to protect wetlands, Todd Mitchell, the tribe’s director of environmental protection, discovered that knowledge about traditional plantings passed down through the generations was lost. So he turned to the University of Washington, which had archived notes by ethnographers and anthropologists who had interviewed tribe elders in the 1950s and 1960s.
A tribal member who earned a geology degree from Dartmouth College and a master’s degree at Washington State University, Mitchell returned to work for the tribe 20 years ago. “I think the missing piece — and I’ve been working on it ever since I got here — is how to take this straight-up science in the academic sense and put it together with traditional knowledge.”
One way the tribe’s approach differs from others is an innovative focus on community health. While the health effects of a changing climate have become a focus in recent years, the Swinomish, typically, have developed a broader view.
Jamie Donatuto, the tribe’s environmental health officer, and Larry Campbell, a 71-year-old tribal elder, have created a tool, Indigenous Health Indicators, that goes beyond typical morbidity and mortality measures and considers ecosystem health, social and cultural beliefs, and values integral to a community. “It’s a very different way of thinking about health,” she said.
Seen through that lens, restoring “first foods” is important not just for diet and nutrition but for nourishment of the soul. Living somewhere for a long time fosters a sense of place, and a sense of place fosters stewardship.
“It’s a different worldview,” said Donatuto, who has a doctorate in resource management and environmental sustainability from the University of British Columbia. “The salmon and the crabs and the clams are relatives. They’re living relatives. They’re not just resources. And so you treat them with a symbiotic respect. They feed you because you take care of them. It’s a very different way of thinking about why these areas are important.”
Donatuto and Campbell have created an index of six health indicators: cultural use, community connection, self-determination, resiliency, transferring traditional knowledge across generations, and natural resource security.
“We believe that if we can go back to the foundation of our teachings, the foundation of what our elders knew, that it would help us in the long run,” Campbell said, adding that merging traditional knowledge with Western science is “the best of both worlds.”
Plans for the clam garden exemplify the intersection of community health and climate adaptation. Donatuto and Campbell surveyed tribal members about three possible sites on the west side of the reservation. They discovered that one, which had been returned to the tribe after years in private hands, had a meaningful history. Elders told stories about growing up playing on the beach all day. It had been a popular clam-digging spot and place to net fish from the beach. But for years, members had been chased off the tidelands by the property owners.
Creating the garden at that spot would not only provide first foods — including the return of native littleneck clams that were once a Swinomish staple — but symbolize community health.
The Swinomish tribe’s pioneering climate action plan was designed with many generations in mind.
A clam garden requires tribal members to work together to build and maintain a low rock wall at the shoreline. Once in place, the garden will create a spot for elders to share stories, passing on tribal knowledge. It will supply a first food while serving as an example of the tribe’s resilience, self-determination and cultural stewardship, all health indicators.
Krosby said the tribe’s outreach is a lesson. “When we engage communities and when we incorporate their knowledge and concerns into climate planning, you wind up with a more equitable and robust outcome,” she said. “You wind up with the backing of the community. You end up with the benefit of their knowledge and expertise. And that’s especially important for front-line communities.”
Mitchell and Shelly Vendiola, a tribal elder, are chairs of the Protect Mother Earth Committee, working on involving the community in the plan’s update and creating a climate change curriculum for schoolchildren and adults that marries an introduction to tribal lore with climate science.
The idea is to interest members in exploring science, going away to study and perhaps returning to help develop and implement future climate adaptation.
“Climate change,” Mitchell said, “is going to last for a long time. So what we set up now builds the foundation.”
Consider it newly traditional knowledge to pass down across the generations.
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Poke me next time, I have a WaPo subscription, and I know how to get around the NYT paywall.
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I really ought to subscribe to WaPo. What made you decide to go for it?
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Well, while my wife and I are highly impressed with the reporting from both the NYT and WaPo, the NYT has a severe issue with its editorial department consistently putting out offensive, idiotic editorials (though it does have some really good ones also.) You get a little of that at WaPo, but MUCH less; it’s usually only from guest writers, not their main crew, and I feel their editorial department, and upper echelon, fall much more in line with our views, enough so that we feel we can support them with a subscription. At the time, too, we weren’t as financially stable as we are now but we were doing okay for ourselves finally after a long time of scraping by, and we found we were often reading WaPo articles and wanted to keep on top of what is happening in the White House and elsewhere in our current mad state of affairs.
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One of the reasons I’ve started to consider a subscription more seriously is that (before my free views were up) their headlines seemed the least overtly sensationalized, but more importantly, actually representative of the contents of the articles themselves. I really appreciate that. I can’t really say the same for many other major publications, and they somehow make everything more of a slog because simple clickbait is the worst. I think so few people read the whole article that the false pretenses have been damaging overall.
Since you’ve had more time with it, I was wondering if that was your experience with it or if it’s just the things I’ve happened to look at.
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I have found this to be pretty much the case; they engage in serious, good journalism and tend to avoid the clickbait. Even their editorials tend to be higher quality.
Put bluntly, it’s usually worth reading.
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Listen to New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern’s call for Climate Change. Passionate.
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How do you poke somebody here?
Click on their name, a window pops, click on “messages”.
I just did to you.
Here come the books from the Trump Administration
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