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"Every man who speaks out loud and clear is tinting the "Zeitgeist." Every man who expresses what he honestly thinks is true is changing the Spirit of the Times. Thinkers help other people to think, for they formulate what others are thinking. No person writes or thinks alone--thought is in the air, but its expression is necessary to create a tangible Spirit of the Times."

-- Elbert Hubbard

News and Opinion

For A Westerner, Opposing The Empire Is The Only Path To Dignity

The only way to truly have dignity and integrity as a westerner is to put your energy into opposing the empire under which you live.

Under the individualism of our capitalist society, we are indoctrinated with the belief that the most important and interesting things about us are the personal characteristics which distinguish us from other people: our likes and dislikes, our lifestyle, our interpersonal relationships, our sense of fashion, how successful we are professionally, academically and romantically, etc.

But when you live under the most murderous and tyrannical power structure on the planet, your individual little quirks and facets are a lot less significant than the extent to which you oppose the abuses that your rulers are inflicting upon human beings around the world. If you met a German in 1940, you would probably be a lot less curious about his taste in music and fondness for dapper suits than you would be about his level of support for Adolf Hitler.

That’s you right now. You’re the German in 1940. The most interesting and relevant thing about you is the extent to which you oppose the globe-spanning empire you live under. At this point in history, everything else about you is a very distant second.

I’m sure you’re a nice person. I’m sure you try to be decent to everyone you encounter, and I’m sure you’ve created a really nifty personality for yourself over the course of your life. You probably own some cool stuff and have some fun stories about things you’ve experienced over the years. But as a westerner, none of that matters nearly as much as the degree to which you stand in opposition to the psychopathic dominators who run your society today.

If we lived in Africa, Asia or Latin America, the unique qualities of our individual personalities would have more relevance, because we wouldn’t be materially benefiting from an empire which murders, exploits and steals from the people of the global south. But we are westerners, and the river of blood which feeds our way of life is always the loudest thing in the room.

For us, opposing that river of blood is the only path to a respectable life. We have no control over the fact that right now we live in a society that is fueled by a system of imperialist extraction propped up by the barrel of a gun, but we can control our response to that reality. We can do something every day to throw sand in the gears of the imperial machine. We can help weaken public trust in its propaganda services. We can help open the eyes of our fellow westerners to the reality of what our governments are doing in our name. We can work to foment a revolutionary zeitgeist. We can help construct a robust and widespread anti-war movement.

Your choice to do that or not is the most interesting and significant thing about you as a person. I mean no disrespect to your other wonderful attributes when I say this; that’s just the reality of what it means to be born into this particular slice of spacetime.

Max Blumenthal discusses Iran war at Vermont's Bread & Puppet

IRAN PREPARES TO LAUNCH PRE-EMPTIVE ATTACK IN OCTOBER – w/ Trita Parsi

Iran claims to have attacked 10 ships near strait of Hormuz after US strikes

Tehran has said it attacked 10 ships around the strait of Hormuz after the US sunk five Iranian tankers, as escalating strikes between the two countries sent the oil price above $100 a barrel for the first time since July. The attacks were the sharpest flare-up of strikes in weeks, as the two sides struggled to break a deadlock in the six-month-long war. Fighting in recent weeks has largely revolved around who controls the strait of Hormuz, as Iran attempts to close off the waterway and Washington enforces a blockade of Iranian ports.

The strait is a critical route for global energy supplies, with up to 20% of the world’s oil and gas transiting it before the US-Iran war. The rising price of oil, above the psychologically significant $100 mark, is likely to raise inflation and the price of goods. Stocks fell on Wall Street while rising fuel and food prices in the US will further frustrate the Trump administration, which faces a midterm election with an unpopular war and a cost-of-living crisis.

Among the vessels struck by Iran were two US vessels and eight oil tankers, the Iranian’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said on Wednesday.

The back-and-forth strikes signalled an intensifying escalation between the two sides as Washington announced a new policy of attacking Iranian tankers if Iran targets its warships. “Iran continues to try to hit US naval ships, and for every time they do that or try to do that, they’re going to lose tankers,” the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, told reporters.

Iran said it would also escalate its attacks, and that for every two or three tankers struck it would respond by hitting 20. The IRGC said it would also release maps of a new, much-larger area near the strait that it considers forbidden for ships to traverse, extending as far as the Gulf off Chabahar for the first time.

OIL PRICES SPIKE After Houthi Stunning Victory In Saudi

Pakistan Likely To Carry Out Airstrikes in Yemen at Saudi Request

Pakistan is likely to carry out airstrikes against Yemen’s Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthis, at Saudi Arabia’s request, Türkiye Today reported on Wednesday, citing Pakistani sources.

The report said that one of the goals of the potential military action would be to “clear the Houthis” from northern Yemen’s Saada province, which would be an extremely tall order since the region is where Ansar Allah began as a political movement and the historic heartland of Yemen’s Zaydi Shia Muslims, the religious community from which the movement emerged.

Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Asif has also said publicly that the Ansar Allah attacks on Saudi Arabia could trigger the new Mecca defense pact, a three-way military agreement between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey that was signed last month.

“If there is unprovoked aggression, or a spillover of whatever is happening in Yemen into Saudi Arabia, definitely the Mecca agreement will become operational,” Asif told Geo News on Tuesday night, according to Al Jazeera.

As Netanyahu Threatens Libel Suit, Haaretz ‘Stands By Its Reporting’ on 10/7 Attack

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz did not appear alarmed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s threat on Wednesday to sue the outlet over its new reporting that Netanyahu was explicitly warned about the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack that killed more than 1,200 Israelis and led to the Israel Defense Forces’ destruction of Gaza.

After Netanyahu sent a “warning letter” saying he would file a libel lawsuit against Haaretz and journalists Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval over their Tuesday report, the newspaper said simply in a post on social media, “Haaretz stands by its reporting.”

The newspaper based its reporting on accounts from three senior foreign sources, reporting that in September 2023, now-deceased Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar had told an intermediary trusted by both Hamas and Israeli intelligence agencies that an “earthquake” would be coming to Israel.

The warning reportedly came after Sinwar had grown frustrated with deadlocked talks over an exchange of Israeli and Palestinian prisoners.

Sinwar told the intermediary to convey a message to the United Arab Emirates, with whom Netanyahu had developed close ties, “that I am preparing the mother of all surprises. A terrifying operation. Something extraordinary.”

UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed then gave a warning to Netanyahu in a 45-minute phone call weeks before the attack, according to Haaretz.

Netanyahu lashed out at the newspaper in a social media post, saying the reporters “fabricated a false story against the prime minister that never happened and was never created.”

“The Prime Minister’s Office, the National Security Council, and the military secretary meticulously reviewed the prime minister’s call log for those days—and found no trace of it whatsoever,” said Netanyahu, who is behind his top opponent, former military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, in polls ahead of legislative elections set for October 27.

Netanyahu’s official social media account also confirmed he had instructed his lawyers to file the libel lawsuit. He blamed security officials for failing to alert him to the October 7 attack early enough after it had begun, repeating a recent claim that they feared he would launch an aggressive response to the attack and set off a war.

“If, instead of fearing a miscalculation, they had instructed the IDF, the Shin Bet, and the standby units to preempt the blow, and if they had updated Prime Minister Netanyahu in time, the terrible massacre could have been prevented,” said Netanyahu’s official account.

Netanyahu has been attempting to account for his actions on October 7 recently, releasing his full schedule from the day of the attacks last week. The log showed he did not speak to IDF officials until several hours after the attack began.

Researcher Shaiel Ben-Ephraim compared Netanyahu’s threat to sue Haaretz to his angry response earlier this year to a report by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, which included testimony from 14 Palestinians who said they had been sexually assaulted in Israeli prisons or during attacks by the IDF or Israeli settlers.

Netanyahu claimed the Times’ reporting was “blood libel” as he threatened to take legal action in May. Thus far, he has not followed through on the threat.

“This will likely end up just like the time he threatened to sue The New York Times,” said Ben-Ephraim, “and didn’t because every word was true.”

On Tuesday, four Israeli opposition leaders called for an independent commission to investigate the October 7 attacks, citing a “series” of revelations about Netanyahu’s actions and reported inaction ahead of the assault.

“Netanyahu and his partners in the October 7 government are unfit to continue in office,” they wrote. “We will work in coordination and with the required responsibility to prevent them from leading to another disaster.”

The prime minister has long resisted calls for an independent investigation, agreeing earlier this year only to a proposal in which half of the commission’s members would be selected by Netanyahu’s own government, in violation of Israeli law—a suggestion that one opposition leader, Yair Lapid, called a “shameful farce” that was meant to “help the prime minister duck responsibility.”

‘It’s a good start’: prominent Israelis welcome UK sanctions on illegal settlements

Prominent Israelis have welcomed new UK sanctions as a necessary response to settlement expansion and spiralling violence in the occupied West Bank. The intervention was described – by the president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, a former prime minister, an ex-head of the army and former ministers and diplomats – as an “inevitable consequence” of Israeli government and security failures.

“Sanctions [are being imposed] against Jewish terrorists, and not against the legitimacy of the state of Israel,” they wrote in a joint statement. “There is no basis to the [Israeli] government’s response that the decision to impose sanctions against Jewish terrorists is an expression of antisemitism.”

Ed Miliband, the foreign secretary, had indicated Britain was planning new sanctions but the strength of his language and the scale of the controls he announced on Tuesday were a surprise. It was the most significant attempt in many years, from a close Israeli ally, to leverage economic power to force change in the occupied West Bank.

The impact was multiplied when France and Canada announced plans for trade bans on settlement goods and 10 other European countries backed similar measures. Nor did any senior figure in the Trump administration, which was briefed in advance on the UK plans, criticise the measures.

“Jerusalem had prepared for rain, but what arrived yesterday was a full-blown storm,” Itamar Eichner wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth. “Yesterday Israel was caught off guard, to the point that senior Israeli officials used the term ‘an intelligence-diplomatic failure’.” Nearly three-quarters of Jewish Israelis favour partial or total annexation of the occupied West Bank, a poll for the Jewish People Policy Institute found. All leading candidates in the upcoming election reject a Palestinian state.

Kabuki incoming ...

Israel sanctions will not hurt intelligence sharing between spy agencies, says Miliband

British intelligence has been given assurances by its Israeli counterpart that information sharing with the UK will continue as before, Ed Miliband, the foreign secretary, has said. The disclosure counters predictions that his decision to impose a ban on trade with illegal Israeli settlements would lead to a collapse in cooperation between the agencies.

The exchanges of information are seen as mutually beneficial and it is understood that Israeli intelligence was never willing to become mired in any political dispute between the two governments. Miliband insists the intelligence sharing from the UK has not aided the Israeli occupation or its actions in Gaza and the West Bank.

Miliband also expressed confidence that the US shared some of his exasperation with Israel’s reluctance to constrain the settlers in the West Bank, or to engage fully with the 20-point plan for Gaza set out by Donald Trump’s Board of Peace. As yet there has been no explicit criticism of the UK’s actions by the White House.

Trump avoided taking a hard stance when pressed about the coalition of countries, including the UK, France, and Canada, that have imposed new sanctions on Israeli settlements in the West Bank. “I’ll be speaking to Israel, I’ll be speaking to them, and I’ll find out what’s their thinking,” he said on Wednesday.

Trump, now locked in fighting midterm elections, appears reluctant to leap to the aid of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, who persuaded him to go to war against Iran. That decision has pushed oil prices beyond $100 a barrel, helping to swell a threatened “blue wave” that could leave the Democrats in charge of both the House and the Senate.

Mercouris: Backlash Against War Spreading Across Europe

Sean Foo: U.S. Allies Dumping Bonds - Is the Dollar Next?

Bond market rebuffs US treasury’s plan to buy back $6bn in government debt

The US treasury moved to cut the cost of borrowing on Wednesday only to be swiftly rebuffed by the bond market. Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, announced the US would buy back $6bn worth of government debt – treasuries – in an effort to alleviate a selloff in the US bond market that has put pressure on interest rates. But the size of the deal failed to appease bond buyers and the yield on 10-year treasuries rose to a three-year high.

Rising inflation and uncertainty from the war in Iran have spooked investors from US bonds, what has historically been known to be one of the safest investment vehicles. Treasury yields have been rising, with the yield for the 30-year treasury bond hitting about 5.2% – the highest yield since the 2008 financial crisis.

In an attempt to alleviate the bond market, Bessent on 19 August announced the treasury would at least double its typical buyback operation. The move is meant to stabilize the market: fewer bonds on the market should mean that yields go down. But in the weeks since the announcement, treasury yields have continued to rise. Even after Bessent announced the operation would target $6bn worth of government bonds, yields on Wednesday continued to rise.

The move puts more pressure on the US Federal Reserve to deal with inflation, which has been pushed up by the war in Iran. The annualized inflation rate hit a three-year high in May before going down to 3.4% in July – 0.7% higher than the same time last year – largely because of higher energy prices.

Anthropic Building a ‘Pre-Crime’ System to Surveil Anti-AI Dissenters

The American Prospect on Wednesday published an investigation revealing that top artificial intelligence firm Anthropic is building a predictive surveillance system aimed at tracking activists who are opposed to advanced AI development.

The Prospect found that Anthropic last month issued a job posting seeking an intelligence specialist to “identify, assess, track, and investigate global threats including geopolitical instability, terrorism, crime, activism, nation-state targeting of the AI sector.”

This job will also employ a “pre-crime” approach that will involve “attempting to predict incidents before a crime occurs,” according to the Prospect. The concept of “pre-crime” was explored in Minority Report, a dystopian science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick.

A report last week in The San Francisco Standard revealed there is already at least one example of Anthropic taking this kind of predictive approach to policing.

Specifically, Anthropic called police last year and informed them that one of its users told the company’s Claude AI chatbot that he had purchased a rifle and had CEO Dario Amodei “in his sights.”

The AI lab told police that this person “was going to kill everyone at Anthropic,” but it didn’t provide law enforcement officials with transcripts of the chats, which would have let them make their own determination about the seriousness of the threat.

The person in question was not arrested or charged with a crime, and they told the Standard that they were “just fucking around” when they talked about buying a gun.

Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, told the Standard that he had some sympathy for Anthropic because if they don’t report potential crimes to police then “they face significant liability if, in fact, a crime does occur.”

“As they become more hated,” Goldman said of the AI companies, “there’s more pressure on them to over-disclose knowing that some of the people they identify for law enforcement shouldn’t be targeted at all.”

Anthropic isn’t merely using technology to monitor potential crimes, but also to keep tabs on US citizens lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights.

The Prospect tracked down a podcast interview with Keon Ellison, global security operations center manager at Anthropic, where he revealed how employees at the company use technology provided by risk detection firm Samdesk to monitor activists.

“Last year we had an executive travel into a major city when we received some intelligence through Samdesk about a planned protest,” Ellison said. “Samdesk gave us about 60 minutes of advanced notice that the protest organizers had moved the timeline... That extra hour was critical. Without it our executives would have departed their meetings, they would have ran right into the heart of the disruption.”

This story about taking great lengths to evade protesters drew a sarcastic reaction from tech journalist and author Brian Merchant.

“You know what you’re doing is good,” Merchant wrote in a social media post, “when you have to develop an in-house, real-time surveillance system to help your executives locate the ideal service exit to avoid contact with the public.”

AI World In CHAOS After Whistleblower Sounds Alarm on Human Extinction

Anthropic researchers say AI could cause human extinction by 2030

Artificial intelligence could kill off humanity within the decade, according to three researchers with the industry giant Anthropic, one of whom has quit his job in protest. The latest doom-laden predictions came in posts on social media on Tuesday by a researcher who said he resigned because Anthropic and his previous employer, OpenAI, were ignoring or, at best, mishandling their response to the threat.

“Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” wrote Jacob Coxon. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible – but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.”

The post garnered responses from at least two other Anthropic employees who backed up Coxon’s dire predictions. In the first, Evan Hubinger, who describes himself as a lead in the company’s alignment division, which works on ensuring Anthropic’s AI models function in line with human goals, said his former colleague was “correct”, and that the industry was falling behind in attempts to deal with the apocalyptic potential. “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” Hubinger wrote. “I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”

Hubinger’s comments mark a surprising affirmation of Coxon’s unflattering, apocalyptic predictions from a person still on Anthropic’s payroll. A second response came from Samuel Marks, Anthropic’s “scalable oversight lead”, who posted a lengthy analysis he stressed was in his personal capacity, and not the views of his employer. “AI developers believe their technology could cause human extinction (or similarly bad outcomes),” wrote Marks. “This could happen in the next few years. In general, the more senior the employee, the more concerned they are.”

The researchers’ musings on the possibility of human extinction follow more concrete warnings about AI’s cybersecurity capabilities by Sam Altman, chief executive of Anthropic’s rival OpenAI. OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman, has conceded previously that “we underestimated the real-world cyber capabilities of our AI models”. Altman said last year that certain aspects of AI, including what he called the “silent surrender” of human decision-making, terrified him. Those executives, however, have stopped short of agreeing with the full doomsday warnings like Coxon’s and have bristled at any attempts to regulate the AI industry.

New Mexicans meet Trump’s threat to change state’s name with ridicule and outrage

When scrolling through social media over the Labor Day weekend, Steven Michael Quezada, an actor, comedian and native New Mexican, was stopped cold by a post about Donald Trump’s recent call to rename New Mexico as “New America”.

“At first I thought, nah, that’s got to be a joke,” said Quezada, who played the drug enforcement agent Steven Gomez in the legendary TV series Breaking Bad. But it’s not drawing a lot of laughs in the state with the largest percentage of Latinos and the most federally recognized Native American tribes in the United States.

The president’s calls to rename New Mexico have reopened deep wounds for a state with a racial and ethnic composition that has made it a target for bigoted attacks dating back to 1848, when the US acquired the Mexican territory as part of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Later, the former civil war general William T Sherman said the US should “declare war on Mexico and make it take back New Mexico”.

An AI-generated video of the president changing a “Welcome to New Mexico” sign to “Welcome to New America” comes 10 days after the Trump administration sued the state for providing in-state tuition and state-funded financial assistance to undocumented immigrant students – the majority of whom are Latino – another example of what some residents said were policies targeting people of color.

The messages have tapped into longstanding anger in the state over racist government policies. US lawmakers resisted statehood for New Mexico for more than 60 years – until 1912 – because of its large Spanish-speaking and Native populations. “We were denied statehood because we were considered mixed-blood Mexicans, fanatical Catholics and savage Indians,” said Rob Martinez, the New Mexico state historian. “We went to bed Mexicans and woke up supposedly American citizens, but we weren’t treated like Mexican American citizens, we were treated like foreigners in our own land.”

Republicans kick off ‘midterm convention’ to overcome Trump unpopularity

Republicans are gathering in Texas on Wednesday for a rare “midterm convention”, as they attempt to convince Americans to vote for a party led by a deeply unpopular president who has overseen inflation and led the US into an increasingly unpopular war.

Donald Trump will dominate the two-day convention, appearing both nights as the GOP works to cling to control of the House of Representatives in November. Republicans plan to put the president at the center of the event, a bold strategy given his approval rating is hovering at about 38%, while accusing the Democratic party of being socialist and out of touch with Americans.

However, in a sign of Trump’s toxicity, some vulnerable Republicans have said they will not attend the Dallas event: risking the potential ire of the president, but avoiding a public association with a deeply unpopular leader.

Less than two months out from the midterm elections, the Republican party faces a serious battle to retain its slender control of the House, while Democrats are increasingly hopeful they could pick up Senate seats. Winning either would put the Democratic party in position to stymie Trump’s aims during his final two years in office.

The convention represents perhaps Republicans’ final opportunity to make a large-scale, high-profile pitch to Americans. Joe Gruters, the chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC), which is organizing the convention, said the program would attempt to demonstrate how Republicans are “lowering costs, securing our border, making our communities safer, and putting American workers and families first”. Whether voters buy that is a different matter, given costs, including gas prices, have risen during Trump’s presidency.

Desperate Trump Promises 5K CHECK For Republican Votes

Democrat John Fetterman makes surprise appearance at Republican convention

Democratic senator John Fetterman made a surprise virtual appearance at the Republican midterm convention, delivering a video address supporting Dave McCormick, a Republican senator in Pennsylvania.

Fetterman, who has increasingly broken with his party since his election in 2022, said he would always reject “extremes and socialism” in the video, repeating an oft-used Republican critique of the Democratic party’s increasingly popular left wing.

In the video, he was seen standing outside the Mon Valley Works – a processing plant operated by US Steel in Pittsburgh. In a stunning display of support for Republican colleague in the Senate, Fetterman called McCormick his “great friend”, and said that he would work with him and Donald Trump “to fight and defend the steel way of life”.

“Yes, I’m a Democrat. Why am I here talking to you today? Because well, I’m a commonsense Democrat. I’m always going to stand with America,” the Pennsylvania lawmaker said in the pre-recorded message. “I’m always going to reject the extremes and socialism and that anti-American way of life. Dave McCormick is the kind of senator that gets the job done, and he’s going to fight for Pennsylvania.”

Fetterman’s fellow Democrats were not so charitable. “John Fetterman is the laziest Benedict Arnold America has ever seen. He didn’t even have it in him to get off his couch in his million-dollar penthouse to kiss Donald Trump’s ring in person. He phoned it in, just as he has every day as our senator. John should do his job or resign,” Pennsylvania state representative Malcolm Kenyatta said in a statement.

Can an entire Arctic ecosystem evolve to adapt to the climate crisis?

The Arctic summer is short-lived, and sparrows have only a few weeks to establish territories, find mates, lay eggs and raise their chicks on a steady diet of bugs. From every ensnared bird, the scientists collect blood, feather and faecal samples to see what they are eating and how that changes over the summer. One thing they want to know is whether the sparrows are consuming a lot of stream insects, such as stoneflies and mayflies, says Ian Shuman, a doctoral student in quantitative ecology at Columbia University. As willow shrubs claim new territory along the Arctic’s rivers and streams – a process scientists call “shrubification” – this could disrupt the life cycles of stoneflies and mayflies. If the songbirds also depend on aquatic insects to thrive, that might affect the sparrows’ prospects.

The tundra can feel immutable in its vastness. A sea of grass and moss extends as far as the eye can see. But above the Arctic Circle, change is happening faster than anywhere else on Earth. Snow is melting earlier in the spring, sending torrents of water downstream. By late summer, such early season deluges have given way to parched creek beds. The Arctic grayling – cold water fish in the salmon family – that swim between deep lake winter refuges and shallow summer spawning streams may become stranded in isolated pools. Their survival, too, rests on the mayflies and stoneflies.

Across the planet, global heating is reshuffling the order of life. Some species will prosper, while those that can’t adapt quickly enough will nosedive toward extinction. Evolution and adaptation have long been thought of as solitary endeavours – a survival of the fittest. But what if species could instead draw on their longstanding relationships not to succeed or fail alone, but to swiftly evolve and adapt together to climate breakdown, keeping whole ecosystems intact?

That’s the question evolutionary ecologists, biologists, physiologists and geneticists are trying to answer from Alaska’s stream and tundra ecosystems in a first-of-its-kind $15m (£11m) project, supported by the US National Science Foundation. Over six years, scientists will closely assess five species and their connections to one another: the white-crowned sparrow, the feltleaf willow, the Arctic grayling, an aquatic mayfly and a ground beetle (the exact species are yet to be determined). If species adapt in response to temperature, they may also adapt in response to each other – and each other’s adaptations.

“There is how organisms respond individually, but then all those organisms also live in a matrix that is an ecosystem,” says Linda Deegan, a senior scientist at Woodwell climate research center in Massachusetts who is leading the project, known as the Evolving Meta-Ecosystems Institute (Evome). “We think those connections will help them prosper in climate change. Things won’t completely fall apart.” Scientists chose Alaska’s tundra and stream ecosystems to study, not only because the Arctic is the fastest-warming region on Earth, but because it is also home to relatively simple ecosystems where a handful of species shape the environment. Still, what they find in the far north will help inform how ecosystems around the world, from the tropics to the alpine regions, might be able to withstand the climate crisis.

California confirms rare sighting of gray wolf in Mendocino national forest

A gray wolf has recently been seen in California’s Mendocino national forest for the first time since the species returned to the state 15 years ago, state wildlife officials confirmed. Officials in Lake county, which is about two hours north of San Francisco, said last week the California department of fish and wildlife (CDFW) had received reports of sightings in the forest in late August. The agency verified the presence of a wolf in the far north end of the county, county supervisor Brad Rasmussen said in a statement on social media.

The CDFW confirmed the sightings in a statement, telling the Guardian it had received two separate reports from an area where Mendocino, Glenn and Lake counties meet. The agency received photos and were on the ground to confirm the presence of the animal the following day, said Alicia de la Garza, the CDFW deputy director of public affairs.

“The sighting was verified by a CDFW wolf biologist who confirmed the validity of the photos, conducted surveys in the area and confirmed wolf tracks where one of the sightings was reported,” De la Garza said.

A century ago hunters and settlers drove wolves in California to extinction, but the animals returned to the state in 2011 and have significantly expanded their presence over the last decade, largely in the rural and remote north-east. There are at least 50 documented wolves in California.

The recent appearance in the Mendocino national forest, which was first reported by MendoLocal.News last week, is significant. It represents the only confirmed sighting west of the Sacramento valley, Axel Hunnicutt, the state gray wolf coordinator for the CDFW, told the Sacramento Bee, and is a sign the species is expanding its range. “Evidence of wolves in that part of the state is a good thing,” he said.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some of which defied fair-use abstraction.

25 Years of War Was the Exact Wrong Response to 9/11

Joe Biden’s Three Genocides in Four Years: Ukraine, Part 1

Biden And Netanyahoo Were Warned Of Oct. 7 – Both Ignored The Hostages

Craig Murray: Nonsense Drones & Novichok

Missouri’s voting maps saga reaches supreme court after conflicting rulings

A Little Night Music

Joe Turner – Shake It And Break It

Joe Turner – Honey Hush / Yakety Yak

Big Joe Turner – Martin Luther King Southside

Joe Turner With Fats Domino – Lucille

Big Joe Turner - I Need A Girl

Big Joe Turner - Oke-She-Moke-She-Pop

Big Joe Turner - Boogie Woogie Country Girl

Big Joe Turner - My Gal's A Jockey

Pete Johnson and Joe Turner - Roll 'Em Pete