| — | Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty (via philosophybits) |
npr:
On a frigid morning in January 2000, Oyutan Gonchig rose at first light to check on his animals. A blanket of snow — over a foot deep — had fallen in the night. He shoveled himself out of his ger, a felt-covered tent traditionally used by semi-nomadic herders. The temperature was minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit, the kind of cold that freezes your eyelashes and stiffens your joints.
Stepping over the threshold and into this blindingly white world, he noticed it was eerily quiet outside.
“Everything was covered by snow. There was no way to distinguish the sheep trails,” he remembers. “There were corpses.”
A dozen dead animals — his animals, sheep and goats he had raised from birth — had collapsed in the snow. Those still alive were struggling to find grass beneath the snowdrifts, piled high by the biting wind. He felt horrified, and helpless.
“Some of the surviving animals were trying to find something to eat but couldn’t,” he recalls. “It was very difficult to see this.”
The Deadly Winters That Have Transformed Life For Herders In Mongolia
Photos:
Relief of Anubis
The black jackal Anubis reclines on a shrine, a sash tied around his neck and a golden flail supported by his hind leg, waiting to greet Merneptah, detail of a wall carving from the Tomb of Merneptah (KV8). New Kingdom, 19th Dynasty, ca. 1292-1189 BC. Valley of the Kings, West Thebes.
Photo: egyptbyshuey
Northern tamandua (Tamandua mexicana)
The northern tamandua is a species of tamandua, an anteater in the family Myrmecophagidae. They live in tropical and subtropical forests from southern Mexico, through Central America, and to the edge of the northern Andes.The northern tamandua is a medium-sized anteater with a prehensile tail, small eyes and ears, and a long snout. Like other anteaters, the northern tamandua is highly adapted to its unusual diet. The tongue is long, extensible, and covered in sticky saliva able to pick up ants and termites. In addition to its diet, and unlike the giant anteater, the northern tamandua is also adapted to an arboreal lifestyle. The muscles of the toes and the presence of a tough pad on the palms makes the forefeet prehensile, enabling them to grip onto projections as it climbs. Northern tamanduas are mainly nocturnal, but are also often active during the day, and spend only around 40% of their time in the trees. If provoked, they can prop themselves up on their hind legs and tails using a tree or rock for support, and lash out with their claws.
photo credits: Katja Schulz, José R., Dirk van der Made
Poor puppy
She suddenly stopped the car when the headlights illuminated the figure of a dog. “Mommy!” the little girl yelled, leaning over her mum’s seat and pointing at the silhouette that stood in the middle of the road “Poor puppy, he is lost! Can we take him home?”
/Only prayers can save you from what is out in the woods /
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npr:
Methamphetamine, an illegal drug that sends the body into overdrive, is surging through the United States. Federal drug data provided exclusively to NPR show seizures of meth by authorities have spiked, rising 142% between 2017 and 2018.
“Seizures indicate increasing trafficking in these drugs,” says John Eadie, public health coordinator for the federal government’s National Emerging Threats Initiative, part of the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas program. “So if seizures have more than doubled, it probably means more than double trafficking in methamphetamines. And with that go additional deaths.”
Overdose deaths involving meth and other psychostimulants did rise last year — by 21% (to 12,987 from 10,749 in 2017) — according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Deaths from cocaine and fentanyl were up too. But overdose deaths dropped overall because of a decline in the number of fatalities tied to pain pills.
Read the full story here
