cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5248565

If you could walk the ocean floor off the coast of Cape Arago in Oregon in the summer, you’d find yourself in the mysterious green depths of a forest of kelp. Look up, and you’d see sunlight filtering through the fronds waving in the current; look down, and you’d see the plants anchored to an ocean floor covered with life. But if you walked a little bit farther, you’d come to a barren clearing, no sign of kelp or much else — just a carpet of purple sea urchin, a creature that is devouring kelp at an alarming rate.

The disappearance of kelp forests is widely felt here; gray whales have changed their foraging patterns, and the red abalone fishery in Northern California closed after swarms of urchins and warming waters destroyed more than 90% of the kelp forests there. In Oregon, a 2024 study by the Oregon Kelp Alliance found that over a 12-year period, the kelp forest off the coast declined by up to 73%, primarily due to an out-of-control population of purple sea urchins, which graze on the kelp. This system is out of balance largely owing to the absence of a keystone species: xvlh-t’vsh, which means “sea otter” in the Athabaskan language of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians. For more than 20 years, the Siletz Tribe has been working to reintroduce sea otters.

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5238783

Snip:

Reacting to the Israeli aggression, Brigadier General Abolfazl Shekarchi said, "Enemies should expect strong responses from the armed forces."

"The armed forces are fully prepared and will definitely respond forcefully to these actions."

"Retaliation will be decisive, and the Zionist regime and the United States will pay a very heavy price."

U.S. officials have been told Israel is fully ready to launch an operation into Iran, multiple sources told CBS News.

The U.S. anticipates Iran could retaliate on certain American sites in neighboring Iraq. This is part of the reason the U.S. advised some Americans to leave the region earlier Wednesday. The State Department ordered non-emergency government officials to exit Iraq due to "heightened regional tensions," and the Pentagon has authorized military family members to voluntarily leave locations throughout the Middle East, a defense official told CBS News.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5226450

When Jaike SpottedWolf saw empty lots on Tillman Street she envisioned a sacred space for Detroit’s Indigenous community — a powwow ground, smokehouse, garden, church, and gathering place. The Thečhíȟila Collective, which she co-founded to support community needs, hoped to buy the land for its listed price of $7,000.

“Making sure there’s a space for native youth, native elders for them all to come together if they want, that isn’t gatekept. That doesn’t exist for us in the city,” she said of the approximately 30,000 Native people living in metro Detroit.

But months after the group expressed interest in 4751 Tillman, the Detroit Land Bank Authority raised the price of the parcel, which included seven lots, by nearly 2,000% to $136,500 — putting it far beyond the collective’s budget and raising questions about how land is valued and who gets access to it in a city with deep histories of displacement.

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5144627

On the morning of February 11, Monica Caño received a knock on the door of her home in El Maíten, a small town on the Argentinian side of the Patagonian Andes. At her gate she found a team of security forces—over a dozen of them, masked and armed.

Bleary eyed and terrified, Caño wracked her brain for a reason why they might be there. Her husband, son, mother, father, and two sisters slept inside. A member of the Mapuche community, the largest Indigenous group in Argentina, Caño had felt tensions simmering since the election of Javier Milei in late 2023. Stories of desalojos or violent evictions had swept through Mapuche communities in Patagonia, and many Mapuche households and communities—lofs as they’re called in Mapudungun—were living in a constant state of anxiety and fear.

“‘I have a warrant,’ they told me. But I didn’t let go of the gate. Then a female officer was called over and I thought, she’s going to hit me. So I let go,” recalled Caño. “I thought: they’re going to destroy everything. They’re going to beat us. Why are they doing this? Why are they treating us this way?”

The raid was just one of 12 that happened that day, part of a larger war being waged against Argentina’s Mapuche communities. Since self-described “anarcho-capitalist” Milei assumed office in December 2023, he’s launched a relentless battle against inflation, higher education, and social services. But few know about his shadow war: a coordinated assault on Indigenous rights marked by escalating land evictions, state violence, and violations of civil rights.

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5205179

On 30 April, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun told Sky News Arabia that Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas had raised the issue of disarming Palestinian factions in Lebanon’s refugee camps at the emergency Arab Summit in Cairo in early March.

It was a remarkable revelation. The emergency summit’s goal was the reconstruction of Gaza. But Abbas had other priorities. Both before and in the weeks since the Arab summit, Abbas has criticized the armed resistance by Palestinian factions on several occasions, especially by Hamas, notably demanding that what he called the “sons of dogs” release the remaining Israeli captives in Gaza.

For decades, the Lebanese authorities have treated the Palestinian camps in Lebanon as armed hotbeds that could explode at any moment and have ignored Palestinian refugees’ human rights.

Instead of transcending this narrow approach, Abbas’ ​​visit reduced the Palestinian presence in Lebanon to only a security matter.

Why, and why now?

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5204608

Just below Greenland is a menacing stretch of water known as the Cold Blob. As the planet heats up, the Cold Blob remains a spooky outlier — positioned right above the area where the Atlantic Ocean’s so-called conveyor belt is supposed to switch back and head south.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, or AMOC for short, comprises an enormous system of currents that carries water and nutrients across the world and plays a large part in stabilizing the global climate. For years, scientists have warned that the AMOC was slowing down, possibly nearing collapse. The Cold Blob is the most immediately visible proof of its decline, likely a result of Greenland’s melting glaciers, but research on the deep water current’s strength over recent years has varied wildly

The stakes could hardly be higher. Should the current break down, the most frightening predictions describe a world thrown into chaos: Drought could destroy India, South America, and Africa; the Eastern Seaboard of the United States would see dramatic sea level rise; and an arctic chill would spread across Europe.

Part of what makes AMOC’s behavior so hard to forecast is that consistent monitoring of the current didn’t begin until 2004, so the historical data is limited. When researchers run models to examine AMOC’s behavior in the past, they sometimes get baffling results. “The new models aren’t working for AMOC,” said David Thornalley, a paleoclimatologist at University College London, who wasn’t involved with the latest research. “Some people would say we don’t 100 percent know what AMOC did through the 20th century.”

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5193822

More than 17,000 acres around the Klamath River in Northern California, including the lower Blue Creek watershed, have returned to the Yurok Tribe, completing the largest landback deal in California history.

The Yurok people have lived, fished, and hunted along the Klamath for millennia. But when the California gold rush began, the tribe lost 90 percent of its territory.

For the last two decades, the Yurok Tribe has been working with the nonprofit Western Rivers Conservancy to get its land back. The 17,000 acres composes the final parcel of a $56 million, 47,097-acre land transfer that effectively doubles the current land holdings of the Yurok Tribe.

The tribe has already designated the land as a salmon sanctuary and community forest and plans to eventually put it into a trust and care for it in perpetuity.

“No words can describe how we feel knowing that our land is coming back to the ownership of the Yurok people,” said Joseph James, the chairman of the Yurok Tribal Council, who is from the village of Shregon on the Klamath River. “The Klamath River is our highway. It is also our food source. And it takes care of us. And so it’s our job, our inherent right, to take care of the Klamath Basin and its river.”

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5190055

https://www.heraldousa.com/migracion/2025/06/05/policia-de-ny-detiene-por-error-a-turista-chilena-que-paseaba-en-ny-con-su-hija-de-12-anos-esto-sucedio/

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKdVik6vkmb/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC8pJx83cKQ

https://www.memesita.com/times-square-arrest-chilean-familys-nightmare-and-police-controversy/

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5182771

A federal judge issued an injunction Friday that further delays the transfer of Oak Flat, an Indigenous religious site in Arizona, to a multi-national company that would make it one of the largest copper mines in the world.

More than a week ago, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in the case, allowing a lower court order to stand that approved the transfer. The district court judge in Phoenix called for a 60-day delay to allow advocates for Oak Flat to review an upcoming U.S. Forest Service environmental impact statement.

The motions for the delay came from the San Carlos Apache Tribe and a coalition of organizations such as the Center for Biological Diversity, a local Sierra Club Chapter, and Arizona’s Inter-Tribal Association.

The struggle over Oak Flat’s future has been going on for a decade. The final environmental review was released during the first Trump administration, but then halted during the Biden administration. Back in April, the current Trump administration said it would reissue its environmental review, expected June 16.

The review is necessary for the transfer of the land to Resolution Copper, a project from Rio Tinto and BHP, multinational mining companies.

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5144990

May 22, 2025, was the last day of life as they knew it for the Bedouin community of Maghayer al-Deir, which until recently used to reside east of Ramallah, in the central occupied West Bank. The 24 Palestinian families who made up the community were forced to gather their belongings and leave their home in the eastern slopes of Ramallah overlooking the Jordan Valley. After three days of intense harassment and attacks on the community, Israeli settlers now have complete control over the little valley.

Since October 7, 2023, Israeli settlers have intensified their attacks on Palestinian rural communities in the West Bank, harassing, attacking, and completely displacing thousands of Palestinians. With each new displaced community, Israeli settlers gain control of more strategic areas for the expansion of established settlements or the establishment of new settler outposts.

According to Hasan Mleihat, spokesperson for the al-Baidar organization for the defense of Bedouin rights in Palestine, Israeli settlers have displaced 62 out of the 212 Bedouin communities in the West Bank since October 2023. These include 12,000 out of the roughly 400,000 West Bank Palestinian Bedouins.

“It is a wholesale ethnic cleansing campaign of exclusively Bedouin communities, which has been happening far away from the media’s attention,” Mleihat told Mondoweiss.

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5171302

With its cold climate, short growing season, and dense forests, Michigan's Upper Peninsula is known as a challenging place for farming. But a new Dartmouth-led study provides evidence of intensive farming by ancestral Native Americans at the Sixty Islands archaeological site along the Menominee River, making it the most complete ancient agricultural site in the eastern half of the United States.

The site features a raised ridge field system that dates to around the 10th century to 1600, and much of it is still intact today.

The raised fields are comprised of clustered ridged garden beds that range from 4 to 12 inches in height and were used to grow corn, beans, squash, and other plants by ancestors of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin.

The findings are published in Science.

"The scale of this agricultural system by ancestral Menominee communities is 10 times larger than what was previously estimated," says lead author Madeleine McLeester, an assistant professor of anthropology at Dartmouth. "That forces us to reconsider a number of preconceived ideas we have about agriculture not only in the region, but globally."

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