The Senate on Thursday voted to repeal Biden-era protections for a contentious wilderness area in Minnesota, sending the question to President Trump’s desk. The Senate voted 50-49 to overturn a Biden-era move to block mining in an area around Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Trump is likely to sign the measure, which has already passed the House,… Source link
Deep in Kielder Forest, on the northern side of the vast Kielder Water stands Silvas Capitalis, a giant, two-storey timber head, one of the most striking of the 20 sculptures tucked between the pines. It’s an eerie sight, almost shocking; its mouth ajar, as if astounded by all it sees. It’s my first visit to Kielder, and my face has been wearing a similar expression since I stepped out of the car at the lakeside trying to take in the scale of the landscapes unfolding around me. Kielder doesn’t look like England – at least, not the England I know. For a start, it’s vast; 250 sq miles (648 sq km), with 158m trees, mostly sitka spruce conifers planted by hand. And even though it’s a plantation, there’s a wilderness feel that reminds me of Finland or Canada; a great swathe of nature at its most intense. It’s a working forest, involving 500 full-time jobs (not including tourism) and 2026 marks the centenary of the very first plantings, when the UK was in need of …
In early 2023, Hunter Doohan got a text out of the blue from Bryan Cranston. Doohan, best known for his work in Netflix’s Wednesday, had played Cranston’s son on the Apple series Your Honor. Now Cranston wanted to know if he could share Doohan’s number with Cranston’s Breaking Bad co-star Aaron Paul. For Doohan, a die-hard Breaking Bad fan, the answer was an emphatic yes. Doohan and Paul had never met, but the pair had a connection beyond Cranston: Doohan played a younger version of Paul’s character in Apple’s Truth Be Told. Paul was producing a small indie called The Wilderness, and wanted to get in touch with Doohan about the lead role. The feature takes place in Utah at a wilderness retreat for teen boys who struggled with addiction. The program is led by an enigmatic program director, James (Sam Jaeger), who may have dark intentions. The feature is partially inspired by personal experiences of writer-director Spencer King, who asked Paul to arrange an introduction. King and Doohan hit it off, with the actor …
It can be challenging to understand how far or close we live to freedom. Brian McLaren uses the metaphor of the Israelites’ exodus from Egyptian enslavement in order to bring our attention to our own enslavement. “The truth is we are all on a wilderness journey out of some form of slavery.” The Israelites wandered in the wilderness for 40 years in search of freedom. The wilderness is an appropriate metaphor for lack of familiar terrain and loss of a reliable direction. Our wilderness is made up of seduction, denial, delusion, and rationalization. Seduction often draws us away from ourselves toward something that appears comforting and/or arousing. However, the promise is often a shimmer of reality, as Odysseus discovered and was willing to ignore. Having sex with a Siren would result in his being turned into a pig. The example is an appropriate metaphor for the direction seduction can take, bringing us to our pig nature. Denial simply cancels what is real, while delusion creates a counterfeit version of reality. “I’m not simply avoiding working. …
Read more about the Democrats who might run for president in 2028 here. In May 2001, at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, a 19-year-old freshman named Peter Buttigieg asked David Gergen, a Harvard professor and horse whisperer to five presidents, a question that he might have reserved for himself, a couple of decades later. Peter (he had not yet transformed into “Pete,” let alone “Mayor Pete”) said he loved The West Wing but could feel the idealism reflected in the show slipping away from politics in real life. “The presidency has now devolved into what’s called ‘the MBA White House,’ or ‘the corporate model,’” he said, with the plaintive tone of a child asking about the spirit of Christmas. “Is that magic really gone forever?” Last summer, by the shore of the Grand Traverse Bay in northern Michigan, I told Buttigieg that I remembered that kind of fresh-faced idealism from my own time as a Harvard student. It was earnest; it was ambitious; it kind of made me want to barf. Lust for power—that, I understood, …
LOS ANGELES (RNS) — To drive the streets of Altadena now, a little over a year after the Eaton Fire, is to be confronted by acres of dirt — and greenery. The last of the charred debris was removed in August, and thanks to record-breaking winter rainfall, weeds and wild grasses have claimed many of the cleared lots. The Eaton Fire was among the most devastating fires in California history, killing 19 people and destroying more than 9,400 structures in this racially and economically diverse suburb of Los Angeles. More than a dozen of those buildings were houses of worship — like Masjid Al-Taqwa, Altadena’s first mosque. Jihad Abdus-Shakoor, whose parents helped found Masjid Al-Taqwa in the 1970s, spent much of his life within its walls. Today, all that remains of the mosque are its parking lot and street sign. Abdus-Shakoor feels some relief at seeing rubble removed, but seeing the empty land is also “another blow,” he said. “You’re glad the city is cleaned up, but the finality of looking at dirt is a …
