All dogs may go to heaven, but when older pooches wind up in shelters, chances of them living out their final years in contentment are slim.
At Marty’s Place in Upper Freehold, New Jersey, however, the resident family of senior sanctuary dogs is getting a whole new “leash” on life.
Andrey, CC license
Marty’s Place founder Doreen Jakubcak understood that older dogs have significantly less chance of getting adopted, so she made it her mission to look out for the underdogs. The focus is on rehomed canines, age 7 and up.
Amenities at the upscale doggy retirement village include generous living quarters, medical and dental care, regular exercise, and activities geared toward their capabilities and limitations.
With plenty of sofas for just hanging out—and even an in-ground pool for those inclined to take a dip—every dog here is ensured of having his or her day.
While some dogs that pass through Marty’s Place eventually find adoptive pet parents, none of them ever have to worry about being abandoned. “When we commit to a dog that comes to Marty’s Place they do have a forever home,” Jakubcak told ABC News. “That forever home can be here at the sanctuary and when we can we try to place a dog into a new adoptive home.”
Rburtzel, CC license
Jakubcak noted that recently Marty’s Place has been catering to dogs of more advanced age, from 10 to 18. Many also have pre-existing health conditions, making finding new “furever” homes more of a challenge. Even so, Jakubcak says that prospective adopters shouldn’t rule out older dogs.
“When people hear the term senior dogs, they immediately think, ‘Ugh they’re boring,’ but some are high energy and require lots of exercise and stimulation,” Jakubcak told Good Morning America. “I do believe they know instinctively what you did for them and they are forever grateful. That bond… is nothing like you could imagine.”
“They’re so lucky that they can live out their golden years in this amazing place. We should all be that lucky, as human beings, we should be that lucky,” Volunteer Rennie Rankin added. “Every time I walk in the door, I think about that. Wow, this is how I should live out my last days.”
Jakubcak notes that Marty’s Place is more than just a sanctuary, it’s a family. “That family consists of our dogs, our staff, and our volunteers,” she said. “Everybody that’s here truly embraces the dogs and truly cares about them like they’re their own personal dogs.”
Of course, Marty’s Place isn’t alone in its appreciation for the gifts of love and companionship older dogs bring their owners. Steve Greig, heartbroken over the passing of his own pet, went on to become a serial adopter of senior pooches as part of the healing process. “They’re just wiser animals, he’s said. “These dogs know who they are and it’s easy to develop a relationship with a person or pet who knows who they are.”
Meet the bull who thinks he’s a horse, and who’s even known for his show-jumping skills.
SWNS
Sabine Rouas met Aston five years ago when she started helping out at a nearby cow farm.
She formed a close bond with the newborn calf, then called M309, and convinced the farmer to let her buy him.
43-year-old Sabine raised little Aston alongside her pony Sammy, now 10. She began noticing the baby cow was picking up the tricks she was teaching her new horse.
He quickly mastered trotting, galloping, stopping, going backwards, and turning around on command. He was even responding to Sabine’s voice, just like a horse.
Despite weighing 1.3 tonnes, it took just 18 months to teach him to leap over one-meter high horse jumps in the dressage ring—with Sabine on his back.
Now the pair attend fêtes and horse shows around Europe where they get to show off Aston’s skills.
Sabine, from Verdun in France, said, “I joke that he’s the man in my life, but we are really close.
“I have had him since he was a baby, taking care of him since the very early days. I think that bond is one of the reasons behind his talents.”
As for the audience’s when Sabine rides Aston at shows? “We get a good reaction. Mostly people are really surprised and initially they can be a bit scared because he’s big—much bigger than a horse.
“Even people working in farming are sometimes really scared around him. Most people, even farmers, don’t like to get too close to cows with horns. But once they see his real nature, and see him doing the exercises, they often say ‘oh he’d really quite beautiful’.”
(WATCH beautiful Aston in the video below.)
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Finnish research has discovered the functional ability of older people is much better today, compared to people of the same age three decades ago.
Katinka Bille, CC license
This finding was observed in a study conducted at the Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences at the University of Jyväskylä.
The study compared the physical and cognitive performance of Finnish people between the ages of 75 and 80 nowadays with those of people the same age in the 1990s.
“Performance-based measurements describe how older people manage in their daily life, and at the same time, the measurements reflect one’s functional age,” says the principal investigator of the study, Professor Taina Rantanen, in a statement.
Among men and women between the ages of 75 and 80, muscle strength, walking speed, reaction speed, verbal fluency, reasoning and working memory are nowadays significantly better than they were in people at the same age born earlier. In lung function tests, however, differences between cohorts were not observed.
“Higher physical activity and increased body size explained the better walking speed and muscle strength among the later-born cohort,” says doctoral student Kaisa Koivunen, “whereas the most important underlying factor behind the cohort differences in cognitive performance was longer education.”
Postdoctoral researcher Matti Munukka continues, “The cohort of 75- and 80-year-olds born later has grown up and lived in a different world than did their counterparts born three decades ago. There have been many favorable changes.
“These include better nutrition and hygiene, improvements in health care and the school system, better accessibility to education and improved working life.”
The results suggest that increased life expectancy is accompanied by an increased number of years lived with good functional ability in later life. The observation can be explained by slower rate-of-change with increasing age, a higher lifetime maximum in physical performance, or a combination of the two.
“This research is unique because there are only a few studies in the world that have compared performance-based maximum measures between people of the same age in different historical times,” says Rantanen.
“The results suggest that our understanding of older age is old-fashioned. From an aging researcher’s point of view, more years are added to midlife, and not so much to the utmost end of life. That’s hopeful news for us all.
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Landscapes along the Li River amid the South China Karst - credit, Sam Beasley via Unsplash
The megacities of China have seen a remarkable fall in most markers for air pollution, as well as in associated deaths.
According to a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded study from the journal Lancet, across all 33 of the Middle Kingdom’s provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities there have been reductions in air particulates related to fuel-burning and cooking oil, as well as in ozone depleting substances.
By the numbers, the fall has been around 9% in air particulates since 1990.
Given that 81% of Chinese citizens still live in areas where air pollution exceeds acceptable levels under WHO Air Quality Guidelines, this reduction of particulates equates to a life-saving change for people across the country.
In 2017 compared in 1990, 60.6% fewer people have been dying per year based on a broadly defined set of conditions resulting from air pollution—translating to hundreds of thousands of lives.
One of the largest contributors to air pollution in China is from personal households: wood and coal burning for cooking purposes takes its toll, and currently represents a larger share of pollution after years of substantial public investment in the clean energy sector, and in advisory boards that address particulate matter pollution generated by power generation.
Lancet cites a recent analysis of public health and pollution policy strategies in 74 key Chinese cities, and averaged the declines in airborne particulate matter at around 33.3% from 2013-2017.
The unique policy structure of federal and municipal government allows greater flexibility for pollution control, and a 2019-2030 Healthy China Action Plan is already being implemented to control the use of solid fuels in household cooking—which is one of the largest sources of airborne pollution in the country.
This initiative will hopefully save even more lives and lead to cleaner and cleaner air for the most populous nation on Earth.
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In a remarkable showing of civic unity, one that proves even publicly traded, infinite-growth oriented firms understand moral responsibility, UK companies have returned or denied claims to £215 million ($275 million) in funding, which was either to given to them in error, or went unused as part of Britain’s coronavirus stimulus plan.
According to data from the UK’s version of the IRS, the HMRC, these returned funds came from 80,500 separate employers including some very large firms.
Under the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS), also known as the furlough scheme—a term which describes the placing of a worker on leave for a lower percentage of their overall salary—the government has granted £35.4 billion ($45.2 billion) in total payments to businesses so far.
“HMRC welcomes those employers who have voluntarily returned CJRS grants to HMRC because they no longer need the grant, or have realized they’ve made errors and followed our guidance on putting things right,” HMRC said at the time, according to the BBC.
Property developers Redrow and Barratt-Taylor Wimpey have both returned all the furlough money they have so far claimed. Other firms to do so include Games Workshop, the distribution giant Bunzl, and the Spectator magazine, which all together are worth around £1.5 billion ($1.92 billion) a year.
Swedish furniture giant Ikea also gave back the furlough money they originally claimed, saying they didn’t need it.
Department stores Primark and John Lewis, as well as supermarket chain Sainsburys, have also shown civic support for the world’s most comprehensive and generous coronavirus relief program.
They have refused to collect £1,000 ($1,277) bonus payments for each furloughed employee they bring back and keep employed through the holiday season.
In Primark’s case this total amounted to £30 million ($38 million) alone.
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Quote of the Day: “Who are we but the stories we tell ourselves—about ourselves—and believe.” – Scott Turow
Photo: by Deniz Altindas, cropped
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In 1982, a wealthy businessman quietly set up a philanthropic foundation. His goal was to secretly give away his entire fortune. Now, 38 years later, he has achieved his goal at the age of 89.
The Atlantic Philanthropies
Chuck Feeney made his money in the duty-free shopping business, building a nestegg of $8 billion over the course of his life.
The Irish-American is known for his frugality and humility. Despite his riches, he does not own a car. He rents a small apartment, he flies economy class, and he owns only one pair of shoes.
The co-founder of the Duty-Free Shoppers Group managed to keep his charitable activities hidden from the public for 15 years, until his identity was revealed to the public in 1997 when he sold his shares in the company.
He continued to keep a low profile until 2005, when the opportunity came along to do some good with the publicity.
The New Jersey-born businessman decided to cooperate in journalist Conor O’Cleary’s writing of his biography, with an eye toward promoting ‘giving while living’ to other wealthy people. In 2007, former Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern launched the book at Trinity College Dublin.
This week, Feeney’s foundation, The Atlantic Philanthropies, finally ran out of money.
The elderly businessman told the Guardian that he was very happy with “completing this on my watch.” He urged other super-rich folks not to wait until after they have passed away to experience the joy of giving away their fortunes.
In explaining what motivated his generosity, the duty-free shopping mogul said “Wealth brings responsibility. People must define themselves, or feel a responsibility to use some of their assets to improve the lives of their fellow humans, or else create intractable problems for future generations.”
Feeney has donated $3.7 billion to higher education institutions, including close to $1 billion to Cornell University alone, where he studied for free under the GI Bill after serving in the Air Force during the Korean War.
He has also donated $870 million to various human rights groups, and $1.9 billion to fund various projects in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, where he helped found the University of Limerick.
Feeney’s grandparents came to America from County Fermanagh in the North.
In addition to its direct financial impact, the businessman’s charitable actions inspired Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to establish the “Giving Pledge” for the world’s richest people.
Those who take the pledge commit to giving at least half of their fortune away to charity.
Expressing his admiration for what his friend has accomplished in his life, Buffett said that Feeney is “my hero and Bill Gates’ hero—he should be everybody’s hero.”
(WATCH Chuck Feeney’s Story Below On The Atlantic Philanthropies.)
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September is harvest time in North Dakota. Like his neighbors, farmer Lane Unhjem was hard at it—until the unthinkable happened. When Unhjem’s combine caught fire, he went into cardiac arrest.
Unhjem was airlifted to a hospital in Minot where his condition was reported to be stable, but it was clear he wouldn’t be climbing back into the driver’s seat of a combine harvester anytime soon.
With 1,000 acres of crops yet to be harvested, Unhjem and his family were looking at taking a huge financial hit.
That’s when family, friends, and neighbors stepped in to help.
After word of Unhjem’s predicament got out, it was all hands on deck—or in this case, all hands on combines, grain carts, and semi-trucks.
“I talked to a couple of farmers, got their equipment, and then other people just started calling and we had equipment offered from all over the place in the county, and their workers to go with it,” family friend Jenna Binde said in an interview with KFYR TV News.
In all, about 60 farmers joined the effort, setting aside their own harvests to get Unhjem’s durum wheat and canola crops in their respective bins in a record time of seven hours.
While definitely pleased by the outcome, Binde wasn’t in the least surprised that the community pulled together when one of their own was in need.
“Everybody knows the Unhjems, and they’re good people…” she said.
“[It’s] just kind of the farming way of life, too. You help your neighbor out when they need it and don’t expect anything in return.”
“Sowing kindness reaps its own rewards” is a fine sentiment, but seeing it in action is just the sort of heartening harvest we all could use a lot more of these days.
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There are a lot of reasons why diet, sleep, and exercise patterns may have been interrupted during the coronavirus lockdowns. Getting back into routines can be more difficult than starting them in the first place.
But with scientists adding many common health problems linked with diet and lifestyle to the list of COVID-19 morbidity factors, the time has never been better to make some changes and improve your eating habits and physical activity.
Always with a light heart, we’re calling it the Covid “19,” and here are some strategies — mental, dietary, and physical—for renewal and focus to help you tackle the post-lockdown pounds.
1) Understand Your Limitations
This is the foundational characteristic of any diet or lifestyle plan, because in essence we are all different. Our willpower is a depletable chemical resource, which many studies have demonstrated, and exercising it makes it more difficult to exercise it in the future.
Therefore, always try and keep in mind how making one choice will affect the rest of the day, and don’t set a trap for yourself to fall in when you come home from a tough day at work (don’t leave the healthy eating until dinner, for example).
2) Have A Clear Path To Success
Having clear, simple, attainable goals as opposed to lofty and difficult ones will increase not only the likelihood of success, but the chances you’ll continue to work to achieve them when faced with challenges.
Large challenges are not only difficult to achieve, but can bring you down and make it harder to reach simpler goals; a sort of “what’s the point of doing __ when I can’t do __?” mindset sinks in.
Instead, pick smaller targets to build confidence when starting a weight-loss journey “I’m always going to have a serving of vegetables with dinner,” is a great place to start.
3) Be Your Own Best Boss
Geri Weis-Corbley
The best boss or teacher you’ve ever had was able to both richly congratulate you on your successes, and work out what went wrong and give a constructive way to push you towards the next level.
You are your own boss at the end of the day when it comes to eating right, sleeping enough, and exercising, so try and behave like the best boss you ever had both when you do something wrong and more importantly when you do something right, as celebrating success is often more important for staying positive on your weight-loss journey.
4) Be A Source Of Positivity
An English study showed that the act of perceiving barriers to making healthy eating choices had a detrimental effect on participants’ ability to eat healthy foods regularly.
As Eric Idle said while hanging from the cross in Monty Python’s “The Life of Brian,” “always look on the bright side of life,” which we and evidently dietary researchers, wholeheartedly agree with.
Focus instead on what you can do: “I can cook more, I can use more local ingredients, I can help my kids eat more healthy foods, I can take up a sport.”
5) The “Friction and Fuel” Effect
According to an interview published in Livestrong with Allison Grupski, PhD, director of behavior change strategies and coaching at Weight Watchers—dietary and lifestyle habits become harder to follow when there is “friction” in your life and not enough “fuel.”
Friction refers to anything that makes your choices more difficult, for example when you or a loved one bring junk food into the house, or when you leave your gym clothes in the dirty laundry.
In contrast, fuel is anything that makes making the right choice easier, such as setting your exercise clothes out for the morning, listening to healthy eating podcasts, or preparing a smoothie the night before.
6) Cooking Substitutes
All manner of common products used in cooking—especially in baking, have a replacement, and learning these replacements can be especially valuable when pursuing healthy eating and lifestyle habits.
For baking, cooking oil like peanut or canola oil can be replaced with all kinds of mashed fruits and vegetables, including avocado, canned pumpkin or butternut squash puree, mashed banana, applesauce, and even skinned-plums.
For dairy, cut the butter and replace it with things like yogurt in various fat contents depending on how much binding molecules you need in your dish.
For pasta, look no further than the Spiralizer or another product that can turn things like zucchini into noodles. Don’t look at this as an insult to Italian classics, as Italians cook with vegetable pasta all the time.
For flour, you can use ground almonds or an ancient grain like spelt, also ground up to reduce carbs and increase fiber.
7) (If You Have Time) Eat Most Of Your Vegetables With Breakfast
For many working people, especially parents, breakfast might be the most leisurely meal of the day. If you work from home, even more so. We described earlier that it’s more difficult to make healthy eating choices in the evening or at night when you’re tired and worn out, so take advantage of the free time and eat most of your vegetables with breakfast!
This way you don’t have to do it later when you’re tired and don’t feel like peeling carrots or chopping cabbage.
Start with a skillet of hot olive oil and add five vegetables (spinach, kale, brussel sprouts, peppers, olives, avocado, bean sprouts, zucchini, parsley, onions, chard, anything really) until they’re wilted and soft. Then add meat or eggs, and voila—you’ve fulfilled most of your daily nutrient demands.
8) Adopt A Time-Restricted Feeding Schedule
Pioneered by scientists like Dr. Satchin Panda, based on his research with restricted hours of feeding in mice which demonstrated that the more time spent in a fasted state increased the mice’s resistance to the obesogenic effects of a fat/sugar rich diet, it’s becoming rather popular to adopt a 14/10 or 16/8 hour eating paradigm.
In such a paradigm, one spends 16 hours fasting, for example during the hours of 8PM to 12PM the next day, and this demonstrates not only a reduction in habitual calorie intake, but improvements in blood markers for things like diabetes—even without changes to the standard American diet.
Shutterstock licensed
9) It’s Not Always About the Sweat—But Consistency
Gyms are full of fitness enthusiasts who love to sweat, but getting in a good workout is not always about busting your bum on the elliptical machine. Rather it’s about consistency.
A week filled with five one-hour low-intensity workouts, or five 30-minute medium-intensity workouts, is more valuable than a week with one or two exhaustive, knee-shaking workouts that make you feel weak and vulnerable.
This is a strategy called snacktivities. It was developed by the University of Loughborough under a multi-million grant from the UK’s National Health Service to create a public health campaign that focused on getting sedentary office workers moving around in a way that didn’t necessarily involve a lengthy visit to the gym.
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In a first-of-its-kind discovery, reindeer herders in the frozen tundra of the Russian Arctic find the “mummified” remains of an Ice Age cave bear.
Discovered on Bolshoy Lyakhovsky island in the Siberian Republic of Sakha, the bear was found encased in ice so that all its organs—even its nose—were still intact, allowing scientists the rare opportunity to study the extinct animal in exquisite detail.
Radiocarbon dating to discover the age of the remains has not been completed, but early suggestions seem to suggest they are around 39,000 years old.
Scientists at the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, Russia, who are giddy over the discovery, said that, until now, only skulls and bones of the cave bear—a slightly-larger predecessor to the modern brown bear—have been found.
“Today this is the first and only find of its kind—a whole bear carcass with soft tissues. This find is of great importance for the whole world,” said the university’s Lena Grigorieva, one of Russia’s leading experts in Ice Age species.
Another scientist, Maxim Cheprasov from the Mammoth Museum laboratory in Yakutsk, told the Siberian Times that “a scientific program for its comprehensive study will be prepared,” so that more is known about how the animal lived.
“We will have to study the carcass of a bear using all modern scientific research methods—molecular genetic, cellular, microbiological and others.”
Coincidentally, a well-preserved cave bear cub of the same species (Ursus spelaeus) was recently found separately.
One of the classic examples, like the woolly mammoth, from the Late Pleistocene era’s megafauna, the cave bear originally got its name because most of its bones were found in caves.
Having no natural predators, scientists have long hypothesized that death during hibernation, a period which during the last Ice Age would have been long indeed, was the most common cause of mortality.
Climate change, and human-caused extinction have both been suggested as the major cause of the animals disappearance as recently as 15,000 years ago.
Permafrost melts in Siberia, according to the Times, have revealed major discoveries in the field of paleontology, such as the preserved carcasses of mammoths, woolly rhinos, Ice Age foals, and cave lions.
A lonely pensioner who put up a poster asking for friends after his wife died has been inundated with thousands of calls and emails from people who want to be his pal.
SWNS
Tony Williams received so many emails they crashed his inbox. He’s also had hundreds of phone calls from new friends around the world.
People from America, Germany, Holland, Australia, Egypt, India, and Japan have been in touch inviting him on road trips to the U.S. or for an afternoon drinking gin and tonics.
Others have offered Tony, a retired 75-year-old physicist, lunches, phone calls, and for their kids to adopt him as a grandfather.
Tony, from Alton in England’s East Hampshire, said, “The love and compassion people have shown has actually brought tears to my eyes. People have sent me the most delightful emails.
“They’ve sent me pictures of their kids, their pets, told me about their aspirations and telling me they are thinking of me.
“I got an email from a local teacher asking if children in her class could write me letters. I got in touch with her straight away and said it would be delightful. I would love that.
“People have been phone from Canada and the States. One lady phoned up and said if I get on a plane sometime she would pick me up and show me her area of Florida… It’s just been gorgeous.
“When I started responding they were coming in thick and fast. I would say about four or five a minute.
“The thing is, I can’t respond now, as my email account seems to have crashed. A red message came up saying there was some sort of error and it needs to be reset.”
Tony and late wife Jo moved to Alton last year so Jo could be closer to her sister, Beryl.
SWNS
But he said he was left without anyone to speak to after his wife Jo, 75, passed away in May, just nine days after she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
They were unable to have children and he said he often sat at home willing the phone to ring—”but it never does.” Tony has spoken of feeling “cursed” by loneliness.
Without any family nearby, Tony put two adverts in his local newspaper looking for a friend to chat to, but didn’t get any replies.
In a bid to find a pal to listen to music with, or just chat in the garden, Tony had business cards made to hand out when he went to the supermarket or out for a walk.
He handed out dozens without receiving a call back, so he decided to put a poster up in his window asking for pals.
SWNS
Now, after spending a summer “waiting for the phone to ring,” Tony has been swamped by the responses.
He is enjoying chatting on the phone to strangers—now friends—from around the world, and plans to meet up with his new pals once Covid restrictions allow.
Quote of the Day: “Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.” – Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933-2020)
Photo: by Saad Chaudhry
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A Supreme Court hero, and all-round wise woman, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on Friday at the age of 87 surrounded by family at her home in Washington, D.C.
She was the second woman justice to serve on the highest court in the land—a pioneer in her field, when there were few females in the halls of legal offices or law schools. But there were other reasons we will always remember her.
1) She proved that mothers get things done—and then some.
RBG showed that being a mother can prove an advantage and not an impediment to a woman’s professional life.
In a 2016 essay for the New York Times, she wrote that she believed her success at Harvard and Columbia Law School—where she graduated joint first in her class in 1959—was actually down to having an infant to care for.
“My success in law school, I have no doubt, was in large measure because of baby Jane. I attended classes and studied diligently until 4 in the afternoon; the next hours were Jane’s time, spent at the park, playing silly games or singing funny songs, reading picture books and A. A. Milne poems, and bathing and feeding her.
“After Jane’s bedtime, I returned to the law books with renewed will. Each part of my life provided respite from the other and gave me a sense of proportion that classmates trained only on law studies lacked.”
Despite coming out of law school with top grades, no law firm in New York City would hire Ginsburg, who was, by then, a mother of two.
She began teaching at Rutgers and Columbia. Those positions gave RBG the opportunity to advocate for women’s rights. She forged a name for herself that led to her 1980 appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington D.C. Thirteen years later, President Clinton nominated her for the Supreme Court.
As one of nine, Ginsburg was known as the “Great Dissenter.” She had special neckwear that she donned, even calling one her Dissent Collar.
The cases on which Justice Ginsburg dissented weren’t trivial: She spoke up on matters of affirmative action, employment discrimination, access to abortion, and controlling political campaign spending.
She demonstrated how, when you believe something’s wrong, to use your voice.
3. She showed there’s value in stoicism.
In an interview with legal academic Jeffrey Rosen, published in the Atlantic, she spoke of ignoring ‘useless emotions’.
“My mother’s advice was, don’t lose time on useless emotions like anger, resentment, remorse, envy. Those, she said, will just sap time; they don’t get you where you want to be.”
“One way I coped with times I was angry: I would sit down and practice the piano. I wasn’t very good at it, but it did distract me from whatever useless emotion I was feeling at the moment. Later, I did the same with the cello. I would be absorbed in the music, and the useless emotion faded away.”
Perhaps that’s why RBC loved listening to classical music all her life—even during her famous workouts.
The late justice was never interested in being the loudest, showiest person in the room.
In fact, those who knew her described her as a quiet, “almost retreating” woman with a soft voice.
So what drove her? Her advice to others gives a clue. “Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”
5. She had hope for the future.
Speaking with Rosen in late 2019, she said, “Our country has gone through some very bumpy periods. But, I’ll tell you the principal reason why I’m optimistic: It’s the young people I see.
“My lawyer granddaughter, my law clerks, are determined to contribute to the good of society. And to work together. So the young people make me hopeful.
“They want to take part in creating a better world. Think of Malala. Think of Greta Thunberg in Sweden. What is she, 15, 16? Yes, I’m putting my faith in the coming generations.”
Paralympian Anastasia Pagonis’ remarkable success story began when she lost her vision at age 14. Granted, it’s a tough age for any teen, but dealing with a life-changing disability made things even more challenging.
Guide Dog Foundation
“It took me about eight months to kind of regroup myself,” she told TODAY, “and then I got it in my head, ‘Okay, I’m blind. Now what am I going to do with my life?’”
A Long Island native, Pagonis practically grew up in the water. She’d taken up competitive freestyle swimming just a few months prior to going totally blind. While she excelled at the sport even with limited vision, an “abusive team” atmosphere prompted her to quit competition.
Losing her sight so close on the heels of giving up the pastime she loved took a heavy emotional toll. After months of therapy, the tenacious teen was ready to get back in the swim—only swimming wasn’t enough for Pagonis. She wanted to compete.
Guide Dog Foundation
Now she was faced with another dilemma. “Nobody wanted to train the blind girl,” she recalled in an interview with TEAM USA. “I ended up after about eight months finding an amazing coach who was willing to train me and actually put on blackout goggles to try to figure out a way for me to swim.”
By the age of 16, Pagonis was earning a reputation as a fierce competitor, taking two gold medals at the World Para Swimming World Series in Australia. Even with her newfound sense of accomplishment, Pagonis was reticent at first to tap into social media.
When Pagonis realized her experiences and positive outlook might be a boon to others, however, she eagerly donned the mantle of role model. “I want to help people the way that I needed help,” Pagonis told TEAM USA. “I started doing Instagram and social media and was soon getting a bunch of (direct messages) and replies saying, ‘Wow you really helped me get through little things,’ or, ‘I was getting bullied in school and you helped me get through that,’ or, ‘You let me know how much I was worth.’”
Back in the water, Pagonis was truly in her element. “It’s my happy place,” she told TODAY. “It’s the place where I feel like I don’t have a disability and I feel like that’s the only place where I feel free. When I dive in the water, it’s just me in the pool and I feel such a connection with it.”
While she didn’t know it yet, earlier this year, her happy place was about to get a whole lot happier thanks to some other New York athletes.
The New York Islander’s Puppies With Purpose Program (founded in conjunction with the nonprofit Guide Dog Foundation) was about to have its first graduate, an adorable Labrador retriever named Radar. And who better to team the pup up with than fellow Long Islander Pagonis?
Due to the pandemic, Pagonis and Radar began their initial training at her home. On August 19, they were ready to take on the world together. “I’m so lucky to have Radar,” Pagonis told GNN. “He has given me my independence back and is my partner in crime!”
That independence has allowed Pagonis to take her place as a resident athlete at Colorado’s Olympic Paralympic Training Center with a goal of competing in the Tokyo 2021 games. “This was a huge and scary decision for me,” Pagonis tweeted. “But sometimes you need to take a leap of faith because if you don’t try, you don’t know. Always follow your dreams.”
Ask little kids what they want to be when they grow up and chances are you’re in for some high-flying answers like astronaut, helicopter pilot, or maybe even paratrooper.
Julia Wehkamp
Ask 3-year-old Wolfgang Reader (“Wolfy” to his friends and family) about his future plans, and you’ll quickly discover this tyke’s aspirations are a lot more down to earth.
His obsession? Garbage trucks and the men who drive and load them. In fact, the precocious preschooler has his own fleet of toy garbage trucks to play with.
Up until recently, due to the pandemic, Wolfy was spending most days at home rather than with his classmates. His favorite day of the week was Friday—trash collection day, of course.
Friday mornings, Wolfy eagerly waited for his beloved garbage trucks to make their run up his street. Under his parents’ supervision, according to CBC, Wolfy became something of a mascot to the trash collectors.
To Wolfy, these men are superheroes. Two of them, D.J. and Drew, became his particular pals, earning him and his trash posse the nickname of the “Wolfpack.”
Julia Wehkamp
With family in COVID-19 lockdown, Wolfgang’s parents knew they weren’t going to be able to throw him a big birthday party. Instead, they told him he could invite a couple of friends over for cake.
Wolfy’s ideal guest list was obvious. “Drew and D.J.!” he decreed.
Since her son’s birthday fell on a Wednesday rather than a Friday trash collection day, his mom Julia Wehkamp doubted the Wolfpack would RSVP with a yes. However, with a little help from Wolfie’s grandmother, who’d sent a letter to the City of Toronto detailing the little boy’s devotion to his garbage truck buddies. Unbeknownst to the family, Wolfy’s birthday wishes were about to come true in spectacular style.
On the morning of September 9, four bright green garbage trucks, horns honking, rolled their way up the street to the delight of the ecstatic birthday boy and his stunned family.
“The boys came bearing gifts, howling out their windows and took time to play with Wolfie,” Wehkamp posted to her Facebook page. “He even got to honk the horn! Does it get any better!?”
D.J. was unfortunately out of town, but Drew and several other trash collectors climbed down from their rigs to help Wolfy celebrate. After showering the little boy with trash-related gifts, sharing cake, and playing with toy trucks for close to an hour, Wolfy’s garbage collecting heroes drove off to their other appointed rounds.
Wolfy’s mom, more than a little impressed, summed up her feelings, saying, “These are really kind gentle souls who are full of positive, good energy. These men are ideal role models.”
While it’s clear the friendship means the world to Wolfy, the bond he shares with his Wolfpack holds a special significance to them as well. “It means a lot because, it’s the children you know,” Drew told CBC News.
“They’re the next generation to come, so seeing them enthusiastic about something even as simple as what we do in our everyday lives brings meaning; shows the importance of what everyone does in society. It just makes me feel good.”
(WATCH the CBC video of Wolfy and the pack below.)
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Dolphin by John Georgiou, CC license / Hong Kong by Bady Abbas
Another animal is being seen in a dense metropolitan area—this time in Hong Kong, as the Chinese white dolphin, or the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin, has been seen in the normally dense waterways around the city.
Dolphin by John Georgiou, CC license / Hong Kong by Bady Abbas
The lack of ferry traffic resulting from the coronavirus shutdowns have allowed the animals to make their dramatic re-appearance in the Pearl River Delta that connects busy Macau with even-busier Hong Kong.
Sightings have increased 30% since March from last year when only 52 of the estimated 2,000 dolphins entered the waters around the cities, allowing scientists like Lindsay Porter, a marine biologist at the University of St. Andrews, a rare opportunity to study the charismatic aquatic mammal.
Dropping microphones into the water, she and her team have discovered the dolphins have adapted far more rapidly than might be expected to the dip in delta traffic.
Porter explained to Reuters that local governments haven’t yet made a very serious effort to protect the dolphins, largely relying on marine parks where boat traffic is limited but not banned.
However, Porter has hope that the speed of recovery of the population in just this brief reprieve since COVID-19 would mean that any serious conservation strategy would turn the decline into a comeback.
Cities across the world have been noticing the presence of more wild animals in their streets and canals since the COVID-19 shutdowns have come into effect, from dingoes in Australian cities to fish in the Venice canals.
Quote of the Day: “The automatic things you do are basically those things that keep you from doing the better things you need to do.” – Bill Murray (turns 70 today)
Photo: by Morteza Yousefi
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quote of the Day page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
It’s hard to imagine that the infernos burning in the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges in California and Oregon would be good for anything—but for the native black-backed woodpecker it’s the best of times, and necessary for them to continue their transformative practices on the forest.
US Fish and Wildlife Service, CC license
Relentlessly drilling holes in the sides of fire-hardened trees in pursuit of insects, they create ready-made shelters for dozens of different animal species, who eat fire-retardant plants seeds and distribute them hither and yon in their droppings; thus allowing the forest to regenerate.
This amazing avian is just one of an entire web of plant and animal species who have evolved around the necessity of seasonal fires. The woodpecker deliberately seeks fire-damaged forests out in search of their favorite food: the larvae of the black fire beetle, which have evolved heat-sensing organs to find which trees are still warm from fires to lay their eggs in.
Indeed both of these species have evolved to interact with the pine forests of the Northwestern United States, where the trees have thick coatings of resin-soaked bark that protect them from high-intensity blazes.
“Woodpeckers are ecosystem engineers,” Teresa Lorenz tells National Geographic. A wildlife biologist with the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station in Olympia, Washington, she has tracked black-backed woodpeckers in the forests of the Cascade Range, where this year’s fires have burned catastrophically.
“Many small animals, from chipmunks to flying squirrels to mountain bluebirds and wood ducks, compete for the woodpeckers’ vacated nests because they are so protected from the elements and other predators. We wouldn’t have swallows, swifts, or bats without woodpeckers.”
Out of 180 species of woodpecker on earth, the black-backed is not the only one who has adapted to thrive in fiery forests.
The red-cockaded woodpecker is a fire specialist living in the opposite corner of the US from the black-backed, and relies on low-intensity burns through the undergrowth of the longleaf pine forests of the southeast and mid-Atlantic.
This fire-loving woodpecker almost disappeared after clear-cut logging reduced its home range—from Texas in the west, to Florida in the south, to New Jersey in the north—to just 3% of its original forest cover.
But like a phoenix bird rises from the ashes, its listing as one of the first additions to the Endangered Species Act saw the red-cockaded come back from a population collapse that most scientists concurred would have led to its extinction.
39 separate recovery populations have increased their numbers by 40%, and an updated recovery plan is being formulated with the aim of a potential removal from the list.
A housing-sector collapse
Like the black-backed woodpecker, the red-cockaded population creates thousands of nesting cavities in trees, which all manner of animals compete to occupy after the bird abandons them.
To date, 27 species of vertebrates as well as many invertebrates, have been found living in the small hollows. With the collapse of the red-cockaded population, the longleaf pine forests experienced a real estate crisis.
This is compounded by the fact that this particular woodpecker creates their hollows in living, not dead, trees a task that requires immense time and labor such that the bird will leave the nest to its descendants much the way humans do with their houses, and therefore don’t produce more than a few in their lifetime.
This arduous task requires a particular tree, and males and their offspring have been known to continuously inhabit the same tree hollow for 30 years. The typical tree is a pine of 75-years or older — large enough to contain a hollow for several birds.
These kinds of trees grow in forests created by low-intensity fires—the kind that were deliberately set by Native Americans hundreds of years ago, and the kind which forest managers today have had to set as part of the red-cockaded’s recovery plan, which also included drilling artificial nesting holes which they would almost always occupy.
This discovery, made in the 80s by scientists at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, would become an invaluable strategy after Hurricane Hugo obliterated 90% of the longleaf pine forests in South Carolina’s Francis Marion National Forest.
Like a woodpecker version of Katrina, 475 breeding woodpecker couples lost their homes. To give them a helping wing, the Forest Service drilled 2,800 holes in remaining trees.
“South Carolina now has over 1,400 clusters of woodpeckers,” reads a report on Hugo and the woodpecker effort from the FWS. “Where there were 1,900 cavity trees prior to Hugo, there are 5,800 today. Areas of the state that haven’t seen birds in over four decades now have them moving in.”
They will always need prescribed burns and artificial nesting holes, but the red-cockaded woodpecker, like the black-backed, are examples of how resilient nature is, and that even a blazing forest inferno is used by species to flourish, whether for food or shelter.
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In November 2019, I saw my immediate future as I had known it for several years: after working for 10 months, stashing away some money, it was time to travel the world.
But the times were changing, and as it was with Bilbo Baggins, warning his nephew in Lord of the Rings, so it was with me: “You step out onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no telling where you’ll be swept off to.”
Arriving in Namibia in December to trek among sand dunes, I met an intriguing Italian woman always with three young children flitting about her. It was for their diversion that one morning on the beaches of the city of Swakopmund, she asked if I would have dinner with the four of them. This dinner consisted of a bizarre cast of characters, and led to a strange enough little game of flirtation between she and I which prompted me to follow the four of them back to the capital of Windhoek.
The woman, Mara, began visiting Namibia after she became a sponsor, contributing money for school and living expenses, through a remote adoption program 4 years prior. She had been making annual visits there to visit the kids, Barack, Augusto, and Otilie.
There was a strength in the way she cared for those children—who were not hers and whom she saw so irregularly. It drew me to her, such that when she invited me to visit her in Italy she had only to wait 37 hours before a picture of my flight receipt arrived in our WhatsApp chat.
Northern Italy – and a rumor from China
The story of Mara and I will always remain indelibly linked to the now-infamous virus for several important reasons, but when I arrived in the Milan airport on January the 15th, the rumor of a new SARS epidemic in China could not have been less interesting to me.
More interesting was the fact that Mara, a disciplined Italian lawyer, welcomed a vagabonding American writer wearing jungle clothes, whose boots hung by their laces from his rucksack, where he stowed souvenirs from Ghana (and unbeknownst to him at the time, an overly-ripe, exploded mango).
This recipe for relationship disaster took a turn for the even less advisable when we immediately moved in together in a studio apartment in a small village around 45 minutes from Milan.
Things progressed tentatively until we planned a spontaneous trip to Venice, arriving on the 28th of February—the opening day of Carnival, the theme of which was “Love, Games, and Folly,” strangely enough.
As colored barges floated fire and acrobats down the canals, I felt like 2020 would be a really amazing year. And then COVID-19 hit…
A group of tourists had just arrived from China in the famous city carrying SARS-CoV-2 which torched a devastating pandemic that spread throughout Italy’s elderly like a California wildfire.
My friends, neighbors, and Mara’s family, all went through several stages of denial, noting that most of those dead were very old people or those with cancer — my neighbor Carlo added that the average age of patients who died from COVID-19 was higher than the average age of death among Italians.
But, it became worse and worse, and slowly the reality sunk in that this was not something the old, dysfunctional, indebted Italian bureaucracy was capable of containing. And so some of the strictest quarantine measures on Earth came down upon us, right as my tourist visa was expiring.
Too unnerved by tales of a 3.4% mortality rate to buy a plane ticket home, I remained in Italy until it got so bad that, even in the countryside, we were prohibited from going 200 meters beyond our front door — Bilbo would be appalled — while masks were required at all times, even in the middle of an open field.
The best worst year ever
Our proximity forced us to learn to understand one another. But, I remember one monumental fight where I was certain that it was over, only to open my laptop and discover I could not continue my travels — I could go nowhere, since nowhere was operating flights to and from Italy.
The storm would eventually pass, but, meanwhile, Mara and I, unlike many of her civil clients who had sought divorce during the lockdowns, had grown closer. What was required when trapped all day at home during a quarantine isn’t so different from what is required to forge a healthy marriage, I reckon.
COVID-19 created and enforced the conditions for our love to grow into a partnership that is now pending international recognition.
At the time of this writing, an uptick in summer holidaying across the country, specifically the reopening of nightclubs, brought about a small outbreak in Sardinia of around 270 cases which swelled the national number of new cases to around 1,500 per day, but little else in the country of 60 million. The once-empty streets of places like Verona, Naples, and Milan, are bustling with shoppers, diners, and travelers from all across Europe. Life has returned to normal.
Mara and I got married in her hometown on the August 31st and—with airline tickets ready to visit my Virginia home for my brother’s wedding in October, and again at Christmas—2020 will be, for me personally, a year that will be very hard to beat.
READ more travel articles from Andy Corbley at his website World At Large...
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A group of U.S. Senate Republicans have authored an amendment to an energy and manufacturing bill that would launch a transition away from hydrofluorocarbons, (HFCs) a class of chemical refrigerant that is considered a potent greenhouse gas.
Introduced by Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman climaR-WY, Ranking Democrat Tom Carper D-DE, and Senator John Kennedy R-LA, the language amends the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act of 2019 to require the reduction of production and consumption of HFCs by 30% every four years until 2036.
Used in home and office air conditioners across the country, HFCs produce a greenhouse gas effect many hundreds of times stronger than CO2. While they were originally created to replace another chemical coolant that was found to deplete the ozone layer, they’ve now been singled out as a powerful driver of the climate crisis.
“This amendment brings us one step closer to implementing an HFC phase down and reaping the substantial economic benefits associated with this transition to new refrigerant technologies,” said President and CEO of the Air Conditioning Heating and Refrigeration Institute Stephen Yurek in a statement.
According to an article in the Washington Post, the AHRI is just one of a handful of think tanks, like the National Association of Manufacturers, and corporations like Honeywell, that believe the transition from HFCs would not only help the environment, but also allow a new dimension of market innovation and competition to spur growth in a sector that Congress describes as contributing almost $200 billion annually to the economy through the employment of almost 800,000 people.
All 197 member states of the UN already ratified the 1987 Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting substances, and 102 have signed on to the 2016 Kigali Amendment that added HFCs to the list of controlled-substances after they were found to have a very high global-warming potential.
There’s a sense that if the U.S. aligns its policy with the Kigali Amendment, it will make the economy more competitive abroad, since the removal of HFCs from American-made goods would allow more products to be exported to countries already in line with Kigali.
The Montreal Protocol is one of the United Nations’ true success stories, with the world having phased out 98% of all ozone-depleting substances—to repair the ozone hole that restored the earth’s UV sun shield, essential to our health.
The ozone layer restoration has prevented an estimated 2 million deaths a year from skin cancers like melanoma, and 135 million gigatons of CO2 and equivalents from entering the atmosphere.
The bill is still in committee, but with Republican support, it stands a decent chance of passing the Republican-controlled Senate when it comes up for a vote later this year, with GOP author John Barrasso hoping to pass it quickly to the President’s desk before Congress adjourns in January.
“This amendment would spur billions of dollars of economic growth in domestic manufacturing and create tens of thousands of new jobs, all while helping our planet avoid half a degree Celsius in global warming,” Sen. Tom Carper said in a statement. “At a time when we could all use some good news, this is great news for our economy and our planet. Let’s get it done.”
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39 separate recovery populations have increased their numbers by 40%, and an updated recovery plan is being formulated with the aim of a potential removal from the list.
