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Beef is one of America’s most beloved foods. In fact, today’s average American eats three hamburgers per week.

American diets have long revolved around beef. On an 1861 trip to the United States, the English novelist Anthony Trollope marveled that Americans consumed twice as much beef as Englishmen. Through war, industry, development and settlement, America’s love of beef continued. In 2022, the U.S. as a whole consumed almost 30 billion pounds (13.6 billion kilograms) of it, or 21% of the world’s beef supply.

Beef has also reached iconic status in American culture. As “Slaughterhouse-Five” author Kurt Vonnegut once penned, “Being American is to eat a lot of beef, and boy, we’ve got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that’s why you ought to be glad you’re an American.”

In part, the dominance of beef in American cuisine can be traced to settler colonialism, a form of colonization in which settlers claim – and then transform – lands inhabited by Indigenous people. In America, this process centered on the systemic and often violent displacement of Native Americans. Settlers brought with them new cultural norms, including beef-heavy diets that required massive swaths of land for grazing cattle.

As a food historian, I am interested in how, in the 19th century, the beef industry both propelled and benefited from colonialism, and how these intertwined forces continue to affect our diets, culture and environment today.

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Millions of bison once roamed the grasslands, until colonialism nearly wiped them out. Now, Indigenous people are bringing them back and restoring balance to their homelands

My Métis ancestors hunted and lived relationally with Buffalo, and I can envision how the prairies must have looked hundreds of years ago when millions roamed freely from Alaska’s boreal forests to the western grasslands of Mexico, across the continent from Banff to the eastern Appalachian Mountains. Then colonizers nearly wiped them out, part of a deliberate genocidal effort to starve the Indigenous nations of the plains.

Now, there are far fewer Buffalo to be seen, but Indigenous communities are working to rematriate them to the grasslands. Rematriation, a concept advanced by the late Sto:lo author Lee Maracle, is the process of restoring lands and cultures, done with deep reverence to honour not only the past and present but also the future, and rooted in Indigenous law.

The Buffalo Treaty, signed in September 2014 by eight nations, now has more than 50 signatories and includes 11 articles emphasizing co-operation, renewal and the restoration of Buffalo populations. This cross-border collaboration aims to return Buffalo to their rightful wild status, as they are currently considered “domestic” due to their historical confinement, a word that hardly suits their ancestral legacy.

Buffalo don’t care about borders, and yet, there are rigid regulations in place that stop their movement. The treaty envisions ecological corridors that will allow Buffalo to migrate and roam freely, similar to elk, bears, deer and moose. These corridors are essential for maintaining genetic diversity, supporting the vast ecosystem dynamics of the plains, preserving cultural and spiritual connections for Indigenous peoples and ensuring the long-term viability of bison populations by preventing overgrazing and disease outbreaks.

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• The WAP Complex of protected areas that straddles the border region of Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger is one of West Africa’s most important protected areas and a haven for many iconic endangered species.
• Servals, caracals and African wildcats are also found in the WAP Complex, but almost nothing is known about their status, distribution, ecology or threats.
• Covert surveys of medicine markets in the region have found serval and caracal skins, though it’s not known if the skins originated within the WAP Complex.
• The presence of jihadist militants in the region severely impacts conservation and research, particularly in the Niger and Burkina Faso portions of the complex.

In the border region between Benin, Niger and Burkina Faso lies a network of protected areas that form one of the largest intact wildernesses in West Africa. The W-Arly-Pendjari (WAP) Complex is a mosaic of gallery forests, savannas and riparian habitats, and the last refuge for many of the region’s most iconic species, including West African lions (Panthera leo leo), savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana) and cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus).

With conservation focused on these threatened and beloved species, it’s easy for the small cats to get lost. There are three species of small cats — servals (Leptailurus serval), caracals (Caracal caracal) and African wildcats (Felis lybica) — in the WAP complex. Though all three have a conservation status of least concern on the IUCN Red List, there are few hard facts about their numbers in the WAP Complex or West Africa. With continuing insecurity plaguing the region, and little money for small cat research, these species risk falling even further into obscurity.

At the heart of the WAP Complex lie three strictly protected areas: Pendjari National Park in Benin, Arly National Park in Burkina Faso, and W Regional Park, which straddles the Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger border region. Together, these parks, along with adjoining hunting zones, wildlife reserves and areas under other forms of protection, cover 34,000 square kilometers (13,100 square miles). The core area, about half of it, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Over the past few years, the region has been plagued by insecurity. Jihadist militants are entrenched in the Burkina Faso and Niger portions of the complex, with violence increasingly spilling over into Benin. Conservation work has become difficult and dangerous, though South Africa-based organization African Parks, which manages Pendjari National Park and the Benin portion of W, still carries out some biomonitoring activities, says Jacques Kougbadi, marketing and communications coordinator for African Parks.

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It appears another "gigaleak" has gone down, involving Nintendo. According to sources online, it appears that Game Freak has been hacked, resulting in internal data from the company being leaked to the public. Those involved in the hacking community or those within general Pokemon related groups are claiming that while they will not be discussing or dissecting the specifics within the leak, it initially is being claimed that there is a total of 1TB of data.

This allegedly includes the source code for Pokemon Platinum, source codes for Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver, beta builds of Pokemon Black and White 2, beta builds of Pokemon X and Y, and potential internal codenames for upcoming Pokemon projects. Within it are mentions of an online Pokemon game, a collaborative project between Game Freak and Studio ILCA, the potential code name of the Nintendo Switch 2 being "Ounce", and a project named Gaia, which may be the next generation of Pokemon titles.

By slammer

Unlimited Hurricanes on the first world

Seized from here

Maskwacis, Alberta, Canada - Nadalie Lightning stares out of her living room window praying to wake up from what she describes as a nightmare. In the early hours of August 30, her 15-year-old grandson Hoss Lightning Saddleback was shot and killed by Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers after what the RCMP describe as a “confrontation” in the nearby city of Wetaskiwin.

Nadalie is devastated by the loss and struggling to understand how a call for help turned fatal. On the night of his death, Hoss had initially reached out to his grandmother in desperation.

"He was calling me that night. I missed 18 calls," Nadalie revealed, her voice breaking with emotion as the screen on her phone showed her grandson’s attempts to contact her. "He texted me right here at 1:01am, 'Can you come pick me up?' And then it's just, 'I called the police.'"

She had been the one who had always told her grandson to call the police if he was ever in trouble. According to an RCMP release, it was Hoss who had called them, believing people were following him and trying to kill him.

That afternoon members of the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team (ASIRT) showed up at her doorstep asking Nadalie to identify her grandson, one of a string of Indigenous people to have died during interactions with police in Canada since late August.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, the former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations RoseAnne Archibald, expressed her frustration at what she emphasised was a longrunning issue.

"[The First Nations have] been sounding the alarm bell for a long time - for many, many years,” Archibald said. “This has happened time and time again. They’re just trying to kill us off, it’s maddening. Is that the first way they deal with us, is violence towards us?”

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The Empresa de China ("China enterprise") was a long-time projected conquest of China by the Spanish Empire. Proposed repeatedly through the 16th century as a natural culmination of the conquest of the Philippines, it involved the invasion and assimilation of the Ming dynasty by a coalition that would include Spaniards, Portuguese, Filipinos and Japanese from the Toyotomi regency, as well as potential masses of Chinese allies.

Military conquest of China appeared viable by the reports of Christian missionaries and ambassadors, who described the Ming population as demobilized, inefficiently administered and easy to sublevate against their own governors, offering a situation similar to those of the Aztec and Inca empires where control of the territory could be wrested away. Once conquered, the plan included mass evangelizing activities and the promotion of mestizaje between Iberians and Chinese, hoping to turn China into a source of strength to extend Hispanic control and Christianity across all of Asia. In a best case scenario, the Spanish Empire could aspire to form an oriental theater in the Ottoman–Habsburg wars.

The enterprise was formulated by several figures of the Hispanic Monarchy, but its main driving force would be a sector of the Society of Jesus led by Alonzo Sánchez, who clashed against other churchmen over the Vitorian legitimacy of a new conquest. King Philip II allowed in 1588 the founding of an official council, the Junta de la Empresa de China, but the failure of the Spanish Armada the same year caused the project to be abandoned. The invasion of China briefly resurfaced later, with a new project to topple the Toyotomi regency and conquer Japan with the help of its own native uprising, potentially including Tokugawa Ieyasu, after which the Japanese armies would be used against China.

"Dude just conquer the Ming dynasty and half of Asia so you can open a new front against the ottomans"

Giant Canada geese, so ubiquitous today in cities across the country, were once considered extinct. What can we learn from watching them up close?

In the opening minutes of Karsten Wall’s short film, Modern Goose, a flock of geese arrives in a cacophony of honks, barks, cackles and splashes, as it touches down in a human-made pond behind an outlet mall. The ruckus blends with the hum of traffic as they waddle under the neon glow of billboards and parking lot lights, picking at patches of grass and dodging vehicles in the drive-thru lane.

It’s a scene that would feel familiar in most Canadian cities, where geese have become ubiquitous to daily life. As it happens, these geese are Winnipeggers, descendants of a historically significant flock once thought to have disappeared altogether.

“A lot of people in the cities consider them pests, but then a lot of people go to Fort Whyte to watch the migration,” he says. “It was important to me to just let people sit and appreciate their amazing flying abilities, their migration abilities and how well they’re actually doing.”

There are other aspects of goose life that are relatable to humans. They mate for life (with just a 15 per cent separation rate, according to a Canadian field naturalist study titled “Divorce in Canada Geese”), raise their young together and migrate as a family. When female geese mature and find mates, they return to the place they were hatched to build nests of their own.

With today’s geese so abundant, it’s difficult to imagine a world without them.

But at the turn of the 20th century, unregulated hunting, egg collection and habitat erosion had nearly wiped out North America’s goose population and the giant Canada goose was thought to have disappeared altogether.

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The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is arguably one of the most important non-state actors in modern West Asia. While fighting a brutal guerrilla war against the Turkish government, it has also managed to inspire Kurdish movements in Syria, Iraq and Iran, as well as Iran’s non-Kurdish protesters. In a region where many parties are nakedly sectarian, the PKK has gone from Marxist-Leninist nationalism to a form of radical-democratic “libertarian municipalism” inspired by the late anarchist thinker Murray Bookchin.

For better or worse, the PKK exists today only because the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), a now-obscure Palestinian force, agreed to shelter some Kurdish exiles in the 1980s. That experience in the Palestinian camps permanently affected the worldview of the PKK’s founding generation. Not only did the PKK learn how to fight a guerrilla war, it also walked away with a strong sense of internationalism.

In fact, some of the PKK’s founding figures spent time in an Israeli detention camp as prisoners of war. Old issues of the party magazine Serxwebun tell the remarkable story of the “Beaufort Castle Heroes,” a group of Kurds who had been training at a Palestinian base in Lebanon when they were captured by Israeli forces in June 1982. (Serxwebun means “independence” in Kurdish.) New Lines is reporting much of their story in English for the first time.

The June 1984 edition of Serxwebun features drawings and poetry from the prisoners, including one Iranian Kurdish fighter. The Iranian Kurd, codenamed Sami, recalled being beaten by an Israeli interrogator who shouted, “You came to kill Jews, you’re lying … Kurdistan, Turkistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Arab, you are all antisemitic, we will kill you all.”

The PKK was just one of many foreign fighter contingents in Lebanon. (Sami was captured alongside a Bangladeshi fighter, and another Serxwebun article mentioned the presence of an Iranian from the left-wing People’s Fedai Guerrillas.) At the time, the Palestinian movement was the international leftist cause celebre, and leftists understood it to be part of an unbroken chain of Third World liberation struggles.

“If you know Vietnam, you know Kurdistan … a new Vietnam in our hearts,” Sami wrote in a poem. “To the defenseless prisoner in Diyarbakir, to the leaf on the tree in Vietnam, to the living being in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the orphan baby in Sabra and Shatila.”

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Extra reading: PKK Internationalists in the Palestinian Resistance