cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/80468

Earlier this year, ocean conservation advocates celebrated what seemed like a major milestone: 10 percent of the Earth’s oceans had been officially designated as protected marine protected areas.

In theory, this meant that world leaders had successfully implemented varying degrees of fishing restrictions and regulations across a tenth of the oceans’ surface area in an attempt to reduce pressures on ecosystems and help them thrive. It also signaled progress toward a United Nations goal, known as 30×30, to conserve 30 percent of the planet’s land and ocean area by 2030.

But new research in the journal PNAS suggests that the 10 percent figure is misleading. It found that only a small fraction of implemented marine protected areas, or MPAs, are actually making a substantial difference for the ecosystems they’re supposed to protect — largely due to low compliance with fishing restrictions. Conservatively, the authors estimated that just 2 percent of the oceans are covered by MPAs where ecosystems are recovering.

The research raises questions about the broader 30×30 approach, which focuses on a protected area’s’ square mileage rather than their efficacy. The authors said there’s a need to think beyond area-based conservation metrics and consider what’s really happening to aquatic life.

“There’s this large disconnect between what we think is effectively protected globally, which is now 10 percent of the oceans, and what’s actually effectively conserving marine ecosystems underwater,” said Ella Clausius, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Tasmania and the lead author of the paper.

The conservation world’s focus on this approach emerged in the early 2000s. At a U.N. meeting in 2002, world leaders agreed to establish networks of MPAs, but without setting a target for how much ocean they should cover. Two years later, at a meeting of the Convention for Biological Diversity, the U.N.’s major treaty on protecting life on Earth, countries introduced a quantitative goal, formally agreeing to conserve “at least 10 percent of each of the world’s ecological regions,” in large part through protected areas. A subsequent meeting in 2010 updated the goal to protect 10 percent of the oceans specifically by 2020. When that goal was missed, 30×30 became its successor as part of a broader agreement called the Global Biodiversity Framework.

Angelo Villagomez, a senior fellow focusing on Indigenous-led conservation policy for the Center for American Progress, said the reason countries have rallied behind a quantitative, area-based target is straightforward: “It is easy to measure and communicate.” Scientists understood this simplicity to be critical for securing political support for conservation, and at the time this outweighed concerns that, for example, MPAs would be created in remote areas that didn’t have much biodiversity to begin with, or that governments would create “paper parks” without implemented conservation measures.

Fast-forward to today, however, and it’s worth asking whether the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on MPAs annually actually are helping marine life. Are these designations increasing fish populations? Or just the percentage of ocean area covered by them?

To answer this question, Clausius’ team created a pair of models. The first used real-world observational data from protected and unprotected shallow reefs to estimate the effects of several hundred protected areas on marine biomass. The researchers then linked those effects to four measurable characteristics of such locations — level of protection, compliance with fishing regulations, size, and age — and used those relationships to estimate conservation effects for the majority of the world’s MPAs that lack observational data.

Their results suggested that only a fifth of the area currently covered by MPAs is actually “ecologically effective,” which they defined as contributing to a doubling in fish biomass. This is partly because so few areas offer full protection from fishing, which scientists say is necessary to deliver the best conservation benefits, and partly due to poor management in other areas. Indeed, Clausius said violations of fishing restrictions are so widespread that it’s not uncommon to see compliance officers breaking the rules. They visit protected areas and then cast fishing lines off the back of their boats, she said. “They know they can get the big fish there.”

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Clausius and her team’s findings add weight to longstanding criticisms of the effectiveness and equity of 30×30, particularly its emphasis on the size of MPAs. Callum Roberts, a marine conservation professor at the University of Exeter in the U.K., offered two alternative metrics to focus on: Each area’s level of protection from fishing and other commercial activities, and its “stage of establishment,” ranging from proposed to actively managed. Another researcher, Bruce Mann, with the South African Association for Marine Biological Research, suggested a framework called NEOLI, which describes five characteristics of MPAs — “no-take, enforced, old, large, and isolated” — as appropriate indicators of MPA effectiveness.

Of course, those are still just proxies for what conservationists ultimately want to measure: ecosystem health. But it’s hard to come up with a universal metric for this, according to Clausius, because ecosystems differ so dramatically and face different threats. Fish biomass might be appropriate for areas struggling with overfishing, but it wouldn’t be as useful a metric for MPAs primarily intended to protect against deep-sea mining.

Villagomez defended 30×30 as a useful political pledge. “It has elevated environmental protections to the highest levels of government around the world,” he said. “It’s unlocked millions of dollars of funding. Leaders of countries all around the world agree that we need more ocean conservation, better conservation, and that we need it faster than ever.”

But he agreed with other experts who argue that 30×30 has contributed to a problematic focus on the size of an area. One alternative he’s been developing for the U.S. would prioritize “beloved ecological areas and coastal habitats” in each of the 35 coastal or Great Lakes states and territories — areas that are close to where people live and recreate, in contrast to what he’s described as “large, distant, isolated protected areas.”

George Branch, an emeritus biology professor at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, said the 30×30 target is “overambitious,” and that at this point it may be more helpful to improve the effectiveness of existing MPAs than to add more.

Another reason to think beyond 30×30 is the need for better ocean management everywhere. “We can’t just do whatever we want in the other 70 percent of the oceans,” Clausius told Grist. In areas where total fishing bans aren’t appropriate, whether for cultural, subsistence, or commercial reasons, there are still ways to protect ecosystems from pollution and overexploitation, such as by setting science-based catch limits or restricting coastal development.

“It needs to be a global oceans picture,” Clausius added.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Marine protected areas aren’t as protected as you think on Sep 23, 2026.

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chili chee burgers and fries.

i wish you a wonderful day and that you think about when you deserve a treat.

Apparently this is the full text...

This chart offers a reminder of how dependent the U.S. economy's growth is on the data-center buildout. Rising borrowing costs threaten those investments.

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp-500-nasdaq-09-02-2026/card/one-great-chart-the-u-s-economy-ai-jSUnMuhe71BUTSgVJmVt

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The problem is when they react poorly to our contribution, we internalize the error as our own flaw rather than recognizing we picked shitty people to socialize with.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/81493

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRASIL - As Trump funds influencers to manipulate the Brazilian election, he is getting help in his quest from Elon Musk, who is blocking accounts that post critiques of the Bolsonaro-Trump alliance. This week, the National Conference of Bishops of Brasil lost access to its X account.

​Polling shows that Catholics, 57% of all Brazilians, consistently support Lula. Meanwhile, evangelicals, who for decades have received heavy financial backing and missionary support from US-based right-wing evangelicals, make up 27% of all Brazilians and consistently back Bolsonaro.

​On Thursday, polling released by Datafolha found Catholics backing Lula by 45% to 33%, while evangelicals backed Bolsonaro by 47% to 27%.

​This week, the fight between evangelicals and Catholics intensified after it emerged that some of Flavio Bolsonaro’s allies wanted to end Brasil’s practice of celebrating the Saint Day of the patron saint of Brasil, Nossa Senhora Aparecida, a Black saint, as a national holiday in Brasil, a move designed to decrease the influence of the Lula-friendly Catholic Church.

​Globo TV initially reported that Flavio Bolsonaro told evangelicals in the past that he supported his allies' move to remove Saint Day as a national holiday. However, Flavio Bolsonaro has denied backing the measure, but Catholics and members of Lula’s team have used the controversy to reaffirm their commitment to Catholicism in Brasil.

​Yesterday, Brazilian first lady Janja Lula took to Instagram to post a photo of Lula holding up an image of the saint with the message, “Nossa Senhora Aparecida, patron saint of Brazil, look over us!”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Janja Silva (@janjalula)

​As controversy swirled around defending Nossa Senhora Aparecida, the National Conference of Bishop of Brasil’s X account was suddenly shut down.

“The Communications Office of the National Conference of Bishops of Brasil (CNBB) reports that it is experiencing difficulties accessing the institution's official account on the X platform, @cnbbnacional,” the office said in a statement to the press.

​In recent weeks, the National Conference of Bishops of Brasil had used its X account to denounce foreign election interference and defend Brazilian national sovereignty.

​On social media this week, Dom Orlando Brandes, Archbishop Emeritus of Aparecida, declared in an eulogy celebrating the saint that the Church denounced outside interference in Brazilian elections.

​“We will defend our sovereignty,” said Brandes on social media this week. “No outside power—whoever it may be—should rule here. This is our sovereignty, this is our home, this is our homeland.”

​X did not comment on why it had blocked the National Conference of Bishops of Brasil from its account. However, the conference told the press on Saturday that it was in contact with X and trying to regain control of its account.

​“The CNBB (National Conference of Bishops of Brasil) has already contacted the platform's support team and is carrying out the necessary procedures to recover access to the profile,” said the Conference in a statement on Friday. “The requested information and proof regarding account ownership and management have already been submitted.”

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Otherside Picnic

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/80317

The food chain you learned about in school isn’t the full picture. Yes, the rat eats your garden crops, the ermine snags the rat, and the eagle picks off the ermine. But that linear story misses a whole lot of nuance. Parasites like ticks and intestinal worms feed on the eagle and ermine. When those predators die, ants and other scavengers devour their carcasses. Oh, and rats are known to eat their own babies, so they’re predators of themselves.

Capturing the extraordinary complexity of species interactions has been a time-honored — and time-consuming — process of scientists getting out in the field and spying on birds’ nests, for instance, to see what the parents feed their young. Less romantically, they’ve had to sift through scat for the bones of prey animals.

Now they’ve got an even more powerful — and far less smelly — tool in the form of a citizen science project called Who Eats Whom. It taps into the nonprofit social network iNaturalist, which identifies species in photos that people upload and geotag. You can search for “brown rat,” for example, and find an image of an American ermine carting one off near Monty Drive in Ottawa, Canada. If that’s not metal enough for you, search for “red-tailed hawk” to see the raptors laying waste to snakes and squirrels all across the United States.

Who Eats Whom isn’t just engrossing — it could help inform conservation efforts on a rapidly warming planet. So far, it’s incorporated 17,000 interactions involving 5,700 species in more than 100 countries. “That’s just kind of the power of crowdsourcing,” said ecologist Bradley Allf, who developed the platform while at North Carolina State University but is now at Colorado State University. “You can generate a ton of valuable information in a way that you can’t if you’re just an individual scientist trying to follow snakes around and hope they eat something while you’re watching them, or waiting for them to poop and be able to take their scat.”

While the database literally offers snapshots in time, the idea is to amass data over the coming years, revealing how ecosystems are transforming alongside the planet as a whole. “Even if we look back, say, five years ago, there have been a lot of changes in the feeding patterns of these animals,” said Aditi Mallavarapu, a computer scientist at North Carolina State University and co-author of a new paper describing the work in the journal PLOS Biology. “So not only looking at what is being observed, but also noticing what is not being observed.”

Who Eats Whom, then, is more than a repository of captivating photos. If you click on “Interactive Food Web” at the top right of the site, it brings up a sprawling web of interactions. Search again for “red-tailed hawk” and you’ll see a plethora of small mammals that people have photographed them predating. (Arrows pointing to a species indicate the food going into it.) Look even closer and you’ll find that one of its meals, the American robin, eats the common buckthorn and yaupon holly.

And let’s not forget the pollinators. Search for “Western honey bee” in the interactive food web and you’ll see that it — among many other insects — ends up in the belly of the goldenrod crab spider, an absolutely gorgeous, ghostly white arachnid. But notice also all the plants that the bee feeds on — honeysuckles, thistles, buttercups — and helps reproduce by spreading their pollen around. “There’s all kinds of complicated ways that energy moves through real food webs, and we’re trying to document that messiness as much as we can,” said Allf, who is also the lead author of the new paper.

Who Eats Whom offers plenty of surprises. People have snapped New World vultures dining on all manner of carcasses, from wild boars to raccoons to groundhogs. On a beach in California’s San Luis Obispo County, though, at least one of the birds found itself a baby white shark, which had likely been stillborn.

With so many smartphone-wielding folks wandering beaches and forests and deserts, ecologists have gained an army of invaluable allies. “The biggest challenge is really data acquisition, because there’s so many species and so many interactions out there,” said Peter Roopnarine, curator of invertebrate zoology and geology at the California Academy of Sciences, who wasn’t involved in the project. “They sometimes can be ephemeral — like it happens once in a lifetime of a species, and that’s it. And they’re dispersed all over the place.”

By better understanding who eats whom, scientists and conservationists can better protect species. As the planet rapidly heats, species are marching toward the relative coolness of the poles. This is reshuffling ecosystems and changing how species interact. With a platform like Who Eats Whom, normal people with smartphone cameras may well be the first to document the arrival of a new animal in their area. “It’s obviously super engaging, I think, for the people who are participating,” said Rebecca Johnson, director of the Center for Biodiversity and Community Science at the California Academy of Sciences, who wasn’t involved in the project. “It gives you a new way of thinking about your nature observations that you might share.”

At the same time, invasive species — most notoriously, things like the lionfish — are shaking up ecosystems the world over. Left unchecked, hungry invaders can decimate native species, which may already be weakened by skyrocketing temperatures and worsening droughts. “We need to know who’s being consumed by these invasive species,” Roopnarine said, “and are there species on that menu that we really need to be worried about?”

To properly protect species in this topsy-turvy world, conservationists can’t just set aside some land or sea and call it a victory. They also need to ensure that carnivores and omnivores have the prey they usually hunt, and herbivores have the plants they usually graze. “Species don’t just need space — they don’t just need a habitat,” Allf said. “They need the relationships that allow them to survive.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why scientists want your photos of wildlife eating lunch on Sep 22, 2026.

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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/81492

This story was originally published by Alaska Beacon.

Yereth Rosen
Alaska Beacon

Fish are central to Alaska’s economy, Indigenous cultures and identity.

With critical salmon runs in Alaska rivers struggling, commercial operators squeezed by higher costs and stiffer market competition, fish are now at the center of the hard-fought campaign for Alaska’s U.S. Senate seat.

For Democratic challenger Mary Peltola, who is seeking to unseat incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, the fishing issues are deeply personal.

She is Yup’ik, grew up in rural Western Alaska on the Kuskokwim River and, as she has explained many times, has been fishing since she was 6 years old.

“I’m the only candidate on this stage who’s an Alaskan fisherman. Fish is in my blood, earned over generations on the water,” she said at the Sept. 12 fisheries-focused debate held by the Kodiak Chamber of Commerce.

Sullivan is emphasizing his record after 12 years in the Senate, which he said resulted in 63 bills signed into law so far, many of which concern fisheries, and has secured generous appropriations for agencies that support the industry, like the U.S. Coast Guard.

“Our fishermen deserve relentless focus and action, not just talk,” he said at the Kodiak debate.

According to the information clearinghouse govtrack.us, Sullivan was the prime sponsor on 31 bills that have been signed into law during his tenure. Over his career in the Senate, he has been a cosponsor of more than 1,800 pieces of legislation, according to congress.gov, the  online database for the nation’s legislative branch.

In comparison, Peltola was the prime sponsor of two bills that were enacted during her two years in the House, though her bills were converted into provisions that passed as parts of larger legislation, according to govtrack.us. During her tenure, which started with a special election victory in 2022, she was a cosponsor of 348 pieces of legislation, according to congress.gov.

Battle over bycatch

At the top of the Peltola-Sullivan fish fight is the hot-button issue of bycatch, or the interception of salmon and other nontarget species in the nets deployed by the huge trawling vessels that harvest pollock and other groundfish species in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska.

Many in Alaska blame the poor conditions of certain salmon runs and declines in halibut and crab stocks, at least in part, on trawler bycatch. The issue has divided fishery sectors and regions.

For Peltola and Sulivan, the fight over trawl bycatch has been particularly bitter, with attacks on each others’ characters.

As Peltola and her supporters describe it, Sullivan is in the pocket of out-of-state industrial fishing corporations that contribute to his campaign but hurt Alaskans.

“CASHING IN. . .WHILE ALASKANS PAY THE PRICE,” says the website of a political action committee backing Peltola. “Dan Sullivan is looking out for his rich donors – and it’s costing us.”

As Sullivan and his supporters describe it, Peltola, is dishonest, unaccomplished and, despite her Yup’ik heritage, has sold out to Lower 48 liberals.

“When you don’t have a record to run on, YOU BUILD YOUR CAMPAIGN ON LIES,” says a special Sullivan campaign website called peltolalies.com. It features images of two prominent New York Democrats, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

The prominence of the fish debate in this year’s Senate race is unusual, said Brett Watson, a University of Alaska Anchorage economist and natural resource expert.

Watson, affiliated with UAA’s Institute of Social and Economic Research, has been working on Alaska natural resource issues for about a decade. “I don’t recall a time over that period where these issues have played such a central role in a statewide or federal campaign,” he said.

He believes that the intensity of the fight over trawlers and bycatch may reflect larger social trends that go beyond fish.

There is widespread skepticism of large corporations, sentiment that coincides with specific concerns of people like Indigenous subsistence fishers on the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers and some broader concerns about the environment, he said.

“It’s been kind of an emerging theme in populist-type politics maybe over the last 10 years or so that combined with, obviously, issues related to bycatch: subsistence harvest, sport harvest, commercial harvest, etcetera,” he said. “It has increased that issue’s salience to the level that we see it at today. I wonder if that’s maybe the secret sauce here.”

Gunnar Knapp, a retired UAA economist and emeritus ISER professor who is considered the dean of Alaska fishery economics, said he has also been struck by the role the issue is playing in the campaign.

“I think everybody agrees, certainly including these two candidates, that bycatch is undesirable, particularly of halibut and salmon,” Knapp said.

But in the heat of the campaign, “it’s harder to hear what either candidate is specifically saying,” he said.

Peltola, who is reviving her past “Fish, Family, Freedom” campaign slogan, is using some tough rhetoric.

She calls for full ban on factory trawlers, ships that combine harvests with onboard processing at sea, though she has also been careful to distinguish between out-of-state operators, not small Alaska-based operators.

“Our fight is not against small and mid-size boats that keep communities like Kodiak strong. It’s against the out of state corporate greed that leads to wanton waste and damage to our sea floor,” she said at the Kodiak debate this month.

Sullivan has been touting his official actions over the years, most prominently a bill he introduced this year that cleared the Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday.

In one of his trademark “Hey Alaska” videos, posted Wednesday on social media, Sullivan called his Bycatch Reduction Act “the most comprehensive trawl bycatch reduction bill, really, ever.”

“This is a really important issue we’ve been working on for a long time in different areas,” Sullivan said in the video, which shows him exiting a hearing room and talking as he walks — similar to his other “Hey Alaska” videos. “This bill I think’s going to have a hugely positive impact for Alaskan communities for our fishermen, for our Native populations.”

The bill is among several actions that Sullivan points to as his work to reduce bycatch.

He also takes credit for the first-ever numerical caps on chum salmon bycatch in the Bering Sea pollock fishery that the North Pacific Fishery Management Council approved in February.  He “went to the council last year to get the Western Alaskan chum bycatch limit implemented,” he said at the Kodiak debate. “That was another area where I was leading.”

Peltola sponsored her own bycatch bill. Two years ago, she introduced the Bycatch Reduction and Mitigation Act of 2024, which Sullivan did not support at the time.

There are areas of overlap between the Sullivan and Peltola bills, notably financial support for bycatch-reducing technology. But Peltola’s bill prioritized smaller operators, with vessels under 65 feet qualifying for the funding. Sullivan’s bill has no such priority.

Peltola’s bill drew opposition from trawling associations, indicating that it was tougher on the industry than Sullivan’s bill, which has drawn less significant industry opposition. Industry groups had objections to certain parts of Sullivan bill as opposed to the call in 2024 for Peltola to withdraw her bill entirely.

Much of Peltola’s advocacy for bycatch limits focused on her efforts to update the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, the main law that governs seafood harvests in the nation’s federal waters.

Those efforts predate her election to Congress, and they have been largely from the perspective of subsistence harvesters in Indigenous communities in Western Alaska — like her own family — rather than the commercial industry.

As executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, she articulated those concerns at a 2021 subcommittee hearing of the U.S. House Resources Committee.

“We are only trying to feed our own families. We’re down to 20% of what we historically harvested. We do not contribute anything to the gross domestic product or ex-vessel value. We’re just trying to feed our families,” Peltola said at the hearing.

Peltola led the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission from 2017 until 2022. The organization focuses on tribal comanagement, research, rural advocacy and fish conservation. At the time Peltola testified in 2021, House members were considering bills sponsored by the late U.S. Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, and U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, D-California, to update and reauthorize the Magnuson-Stevens act.

The act passed initially in 1976. It established the 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone in which foreign-flagged vessels are prohibited from harvesting fish. It has been periodically updated through reauthorization, including with a name change that honors the late U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska. But the last time that happened was 2006.

When Peltola was in the House, she joined with Huffman to try to pass reauthorization bills. Their legislation had provisions to protect subsistence users.

One such provision would have added tribal seats to both the North Pacific Fishery Management Council and the Pacific Fishery Management council, which has jurisdiction over U.S. West Coast waters. Her approach, as detailed in past bills, would also enshrine protection of subsistence — the traditional harvests for personal consumption — as a duty of the councils. On bycatch, there were provisions in the bill she cosponsored for expanded use of salmon-protection technology and for removal of the phrase “to the extent practicable” in the wording concerning bycatch controls.

Sullivan, however, has warned that an election victory by Peltola would, by helping Democrats take control of the body, elevate the power of senators from Washington state, where the trawling industry is based. He referred obliquely to Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the committee that oversees fishery policy.

“My opponent would empower a Seattle, Washington-based senator to be the next chairman of the Commerce Committee. Any opportunity to get bycatch bills passed, including mine, would be automatically undermined if you had the chairman of the Commerce Committee being from Washington State,” he said at the Kodiak debate.

Knapp said the logic of Sullivan’s argument “cuts a little each way.”

If Democrats win a majority in the Senate, “Alaska might want to have a Democrat in there, influencing how that works, rather than somebody who’s shut out from it,” Knapp said.

Regardless of who is in leadership, bycatch is a concern in all coastal states. In areas from New England to Hawaii, bycatch is described as a major problem. Fishery managers, fish harvesters and conservationists are engaged in numerous projects to prevent incidental harvests of different types of fish, birds, mammals and sea turtles.

Even in Washington, where large trawling companies are based, there are conflicts over bycatch occurring in the West Coast groundfish harvests. Bottom trawling, the practice of using nets at the sea floor, is banned in internal Washington state waters and in most of the federal waters off Washington, Oregon and California. In Alaska, where bottom trawling does occur in a small percentage of state waters a bill that would have banned the practice in state waters failed to pass the Alaska Legislature this year.

International issues

Sullivan and Peltola also clash on the international aspects of Alaska’s fisheries.

Sullivan is a Marine veteran who has made national defense a major focus of his 12-year tenure in the Senate.

At the Kodiak debate, he took full credit for keeping Russian fish out of U.S. markets, saying his achievement in office included “single-handedly banning Russian seafood imports.”

Knapp said Sullivan deserves some credit for the import ban on Russian seafood that competes with Alaska seafood.

“There have been several issues that are related to Russia, and that, certainly Sullivan has worked hard to address these,” Knapp said.

But the import ban was a group effort, and it was rolled out in stages.

In 2014, President Barack Obama, along with the European Union, imposed sanctions on Russia because of that country’s annexation of Crimea. In 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, President Joe Biden issued an executive order banning all imports of Russian seafood into the U.S. In 2023, Bident used a follow-up executive order to close a loophole that had allowed Russian-origin fish to get to U.S. markets through third-party countries, mostly China, where that fish was processed.

The executive order achieved goals spelled out in legislation sponsored by both candidates. Sullivan and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, sponsored a bill in the Senate that would close the China-processing loophole, and Peltola joined with Rep. Garret Graves, R-Louisiana, in sponsoring a House version.

Alaska’s seafood industry has been battered in recent years by several forces that put it into a “tailspin,” as one state legislative leader put it in 2024. Among the contributing factors have been glutted markets for salmon and other fish, low prices, high costs, climate change-related stock declines and other problems, including problems with salmon markets. The industry lost an estimated $1.8 billion from 2022 to 2023, according to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration analysis.

Russia played only a small part in that, Knapp said.

“What you might call ‘Gunnar’s Rule No. 1 of Salmon Markets’ is that, any given time, there’s about a dozen different factors affecting the salmon market,” he said. That includes exchange rates, tariffs, farmed fish production, the size of runs in Bristol Bay and other Alaska sites and myriad other factors, he said.

Sullivan has also singled out China as a threat to Alaska because of what he described as unsustainable fishery practices.

At the Kodiak debate, he cited his work on illegal and unreported fisheries occurring in international waters. A bill Sullivan cosponsored with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and numerous members from both parties addresses what is known as “illegal, unreported and unregulated” fishing, or IUU.

The Fighting Foreign Illegal Seafood Harvest Act, or FISH Act, passed the Senate in March. It is awaiting final action in the House.

But to Knapp, who listened closely to the Kodak debate, Sullivan’s attacks on China were a bit surprising.

“I was puzzled by what he was referring to,” Knapp said.

Unlike Russia, which is a direct competitor to Alaska, China is a “major market opportunity for all kinds of seafood.”

Watson had similar observations.

China is “not just a place where we send our fish to be reprocessed. That is an opportunity for a new final demand market,” he said. Incomes in China are rising, making Alaska seafood potentially attractive to consumers there, he said.

President Donald Trump’s tariff war with China has disrupted efforts to achieve that, however.

“It’s really when China retaliates against us that causes the most acute pain for the industry,” Watson said.

China in 2023 and 2024 was the largest buyer of raw Alaska fish by volume, but almost all of that was for processing and shipment elsewhere, according to the most recent annual seafood industry report by the McKinley Research Group.

Tariffs pose big problems for the Alaska seafood industry, the report said. “Alaska seafood’s reliance on global markets leaves the industry acutely vulnerable to the direct consequences of new U.S. import tariffs and, even more so, the indirect consequences of retaliatory actions by trade partners,” it said.

So far, Sullivan has steadfastly supported Trump on tariff policies, even diverging on that subject from Murkowski, his Alaska colleague.

He continues to align himself with Trump. On his campaign website is a photo of himself standing with the president and giving a thumbs-up sign. And Trump is planning to travel to Alaska to campaign for the incumbent senator.

Peltola and the Alaska Democratic Party have faulted Sullivan for his support of both tariffs and the U.S. war in Iran. Those international actions have jacked up costs of fuel and other necessities, pinching fish harvesters and all Alaskans, she argues.

“We are being priced out of petroleum, and we’re being priced out of our lives in Alaska, because of the war in Iran,” she said at the Kodiak debate.

Budgets, jobs and climate change

The Peltola campaign and the Alaska Democratic Party are tying Sullivan to another Trump policy that has been unpopular among fishing-dependent Alaskans: slashes to fishery science and the federal workforce that performs it.

At the Kodiak fisheries debate, Peltola criticized Sullivan for supporting “draconian” cuts to NOAA through an initiative led by billionaire Elon Musk.

The “Department of Governmental Efficiency,” or DOGE, imposed cuts that compromised NOAA’s ability to gather information needed to manage fisheries sustainably, she said.

“We are flying blind without the surveys and the research that NOAA does,” she said at the Kodiak event.

The cuts also affect the National Weather Service, putting Alaskans in danger, she said.

“We live and die by federal agencies and the federal employees who keep those agencies going,” she said. Sullivan “went right along with all these DOGE cuts, mowing down federal employees that we rely on.”

As of the end of 2025, Alaska had lost 101 NOAA employees, according to the state Department of Labor and Workforce Development. That was part of a Trump administration purge that resulted in a federal workforce in Alaska that was about a tenth smaller at the end of 2025 than it had been at the start of the year, according to the department’s analysis.

Watson, who has partnered with NOAA experts for several years, said he has felt the impacts personally. “Many of my contacts that I had prior to 2025 no longer work at the various NOAA offices for which I collaborated with,” he said.

NOAA is not the only fishery-related federal agency in Alaska sustaining deep cuts.

The U.S. Forest Service, which is also responsible for fishery research and habitat-protection work, suffered deep cuts as well, according to the state analysis. In recent years, the Tongass and Chugach National Forests provided habitat for about a quarter of Alaska’s commercial salmon harvests, as well as habitat for sport and subsistence harvests, according to a Forest Service study. But the agency lost 180 employees in 2025, according to the state analysis.

In March, Sullivan spoke favorably about the DOGE initiative at his annual speech to the Alaska Legislature. In that address, he said the DOGE cuts were “making some noble progress” in reducing the national debt.

Musk, through his political action committee, is supporting Sullivan’s re-election campaign and those of other Republicans in close Senate races in other states.

While Sullivan’s critics have blasted him for his strong allegiance to Trump, the senator  has repeatedly characterized his ties to the president as beneficial to Alaska.

When it comes to fisheries, that resulted in the Trump administration creating an Office of Seafood in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Sullivan said at the Kodiak event. That seafood office was created in connection with a 2025 Trump executive order aimed at achieving “American seafood dominance.” Much of the executive order directs federal agencies to loosen environmental protections to allow for bigger commercial seafood harvests.

A plan to enshrine the Office of Seafood in the Agriculture Department is proposed in a wide-ranging farm bill pending in Congress, Sulivan said. He took credit for that: “I wrote a lot of this to help our fishermen,” he said.

Sullivan has also defended his record on NOAA funding.

At the Kodiak debate, he said he is “a strong supporter of our surveys” and was able to help secure an additional $10 million in the last budget for NOAA to conduct those. He spoke about supporting over $100 million over the years for NOAA’s ocean acidification research.

He said he “provided pushback on the Trump administration on surveys as it related to the Oscar Dyson,” a NOAA research vessel.

DOGE-related firings put Oscar Dyson operations in jeopardy last year. But the ship managed to conduct its 2025 surveys and is operating again this year. It will go on hiatus after this season and be upgraded through a $95.4 million contract awarded by NOAA in June of 2025, for which Sullivan, at the Kodiak debate, took credit.

The Trump administration has consistently sought to make deep cuts to NOAA, but Congress as a whole has resisted those.

The Congressionally approved budget for the current fiscal year includes $6.17 billion for NOAA, $1.67 billion above what the Trump administration had requested. That total was about the same as the previous year’s appropriation, though a reduction from the year before, according to Congressional records.

The Trump administration is still pushing for deep cuts at NOAA.

The administration’s request for the coming fiscal year proposes a $4.54 billion budget for the agency, with elimination of several programs important to Alaska fisheries and coastal communities. Among those are the National Estuarine Research Reserves System, which operates in Kachemak Bay, and the national Sea Grant program, which is important to the University of Alaska. The administration is seeking to cut spending on several other programs related to fisheries, including the marine observer program and a 20-year-old program that provides funding for technology to reduce fishery bycatch.

The Trump administration’s plans for NOAA reflect the president’s approach to climate change. He has repeatedly dismissed it as a “hoax.”

In contrast, both Sullivan and Peltola indicated in a lightning round during the Kodiak debate that they believe climate change is a problem for Alaska fisheries.

To Knapp, Trump looms over the Peltola-Sullivan contest.

“At stake in this election are vastly different ideas about the direction of the country and, and in particular, about the direction that President Trump is taking us,” Knapp said.

Even though he finds the debates about fishing interesting, Knapp said he hopes voters will consider more pressing issues.

That is true in the gubernatorial race, where there are stark differences in candidates’ approaches to budgets, education and other broad subjects. And it may be even more so in the Senate race, which could tip the national balance of power, he said.

“The issues are so much bigger than our Alaska fisheries,” he said.

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that Sullivan’s bill to reduce bycatch received less industry pushback than Peltola’s, rather than no significant industry pushback.

The post Pitched battle for Alaska’s Senate seat is enveloped in a fight over fish appeared first on ICT.

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From DHH's long-winded keynote at Rails World 2026. He was bragging that Hey's backend is so efficient because it's written in Rust (which he hates and refuses to read).

New fuel-economy standards, which President Trump said he finalized Saturday, would kill a federal effort to speed the transition to electric vehicles.

Electricification is the one thing that could make the price of gas irrelevant for Americans

Archived copy of the article

The model said it looks like her! If she was just being kind or not, either way that's my happy place!

Timelapse: https://bsky.app/profile/ballshapedman.bsky.social/post/3mwhezotl622i

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/81452

Elected Democrats—and even the Senate's top Republican appropriator—blasted President Donald Trump late Friday for rescinding nearly $1 billion in congressionally approved spending that the White House deemed "wasteful and harmful" through a legally contested process.

In a statement announcing what was targeted, the administration celebrated funding cuts for what it called "pro-illegal immigration programs," a "nefarious" Department of Justice subagency, a program that "propagates America Last climate alarmism," an office that promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)—or "discrimination, and radical woke ideologies"—and more.

House Budget Committee Ranking Member Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) responded in a statement that "Donald Trump knows he can't get these cuts through Congress, so he is illegally making them through the back door."

"Trump's actions are a blatant attack on Congress' constitutional power of the purse," he added. "It is exactly why we need to pass my Congressional Power of the Purse Act and stop any president from illegally overriding Congress."

The Associated Press reported that "under federal law, Congress has 45 days to review the president's proposed spending cuts before they take effect. But Trump made that all but impossible by announcing them with just five days left in the federal fiscal year and the House out of session through the November election."

Senate Budget Committee Ranking Member Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) stressed on social media that "a pocket rescission is an illegal line-item veto. It is the president saying that he and he alone will convert a bipartisan spending bill (that has been signed into law) into a partisan spending bill. He is canceling the lines of spending he doesn't like."

"This violates the core separation of powers embedded in our Constitution in which it is the Congress, not the president, who decides what programs are designed and at what level they are funded," he continued. "Republican colleagues said they would never let this happen. Well, here it is. They should ask themselves: 'How would I like to have a Democratic president canceling out the Republican flavored programs he or she doesn't like in a bipartisan spending bill that has been signed into law?' If they have any integrity or any spine, they will join us in ending this practice."

Noting that the cuts will impact everything from critical health research, to combating the international illicit narcotics trade, Senate Appropriations Committee Vice Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) declared: "This is theft from the American people, plain and simple. These are funds Congress has delivered on a bipartisan basis and should be helping people—not cut off by a president more focused on building a ballroom than investing in families."

She specifically called out Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought—a co-author of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led blueprint for a right-wing overhaul of the federal government, who was recently condemned as an "unelected shadow president" by the House Democrat who introduced impeachment articles against him. According to Murray, "Every Republican who voted for these bills should be furious because Vought is saying their votes don't count."

Murray also pointed out that during negotiations for the recently enacted stopgap spending legislation, "Democrats fought to include language to prevent the Trump administration from once again usurping Congress' power—but for the second time in a year, Republicans refused to take common sense action and prevent this from happening."

"While Trump spends tax dollars on ads promoting himself, Congress needs to reassert its powers to help people, and it's past time Republicans join us in that fight," she argued. "Russ Vought's message to Congress is that your votes don't count, and your laws are optional. It is now time for my Republican colleagues who said they would never let this happen to stand up and join us to stop this, and remind this administration this is not how this works."

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) emphasized the impact of the administration's move, saying that "Trump is gleefully eviscerating programs and protections that help hardworking American families live a safe and healthy life, all while he continues to punish them with skyrocketing gas and grocery prices."

"With this rescissions package, the Trump administration is illegally stripping nearly $1 billion in critical funding that supports kids, K-12 students, small businesses, and health and clean air research," he highlighted. "Americans are crying out for relief."

"Instead of ending his Iran War and tariff chaos that are driving up costs, Trump is rolling out the red carpet for our adversaries while stealing funds meant to help American families," he added. "Senate Democrats will challenge Trump's illegal cuts at every turn and continue the fight to help American families, lower healthcare costs and secure our communities."

The administration's rescission announcement came less than six weeks away from the midterm elections. Democrats aim to win majorities, while Trump's Republican Party is fighting to keep control of both chambers of Congress. One of the nationally watched races is that of Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine).

As some congressional Republicans cheered the Friday action, Collins put out a statement denouncing it. She said that "without warning or consultation, Congress just received an $810 million package of pocket rescissions from the administration," which she called OBM's most recent attempt "to undermine Congress' constitutional power of the purse."

"This move shows that OMB intentionally withheld these funds for months to execute this unlawful cancellation of appropriations that were approved on a bipartisan basis and signed into law," Collins continued. "Not only is the delay itself an impoundment that was not reported to Congress, but also it is a usurpation of Congress' appropriations powers. OMB is an agency of the executive branch. It does not get to decide which programs are worth funding."

"The independent Government Accountability Office has concluded that pocket rescissions are unlawful and not permitted by the Impoundment Control Act," she added. "Any effort to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval is a clear violation of the law. I will work with my colleagues to address these illegal actions."

While some Democrats had called for their Republican colleagues to make such promises, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) fired back at Collins on social media, writing that "Senate Republicans had chance after chance to stop Trump's illegal seizure of taxpayer money. Time after time, they pledged allegiance to Trump instead of to citizens. And he'll keep rolling them if the Senate doesn't change hands."

So did Troy Jackson, the former Democratic Maine Senate president running to unseat Collins. He said that "Susan Collins voted for Trump's pick to lead the OMB. Now she’s surprised he's doing exactly what he promised to do? She's the appropriations chair who voted with Trump 96% of the time. Expressing concern isn't enough. Mainers see through the bullshit."

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said they are investigating a multistate outbreak of E. coli infections potentially linked to Sierra Nevada Graziers raw milk cheese.

Thirteen people in nine states have been sickened in the E. coli outbreak, including eight who were hospitalized and three who developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, a potentially serious complication of E. coli infection that presents with bloody diarrhea and fever, according to the CDC. No deaths have been reported, the FDA said.

States with E. coli cases linked to raw milk cheese include California, Colorado, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon, Tennessee and Utah.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.zip/c/linux@lemmy.ml/p/1856095/linux-kernel-developers-consider-adding-agents-md-to-help-guide-ai-llm-agents