A post shared on X claims eight mansions belonging to Ukrainian military officials burned down in Los Angeles, California. In Los Angeles, 8 houses belonging to Ukrainian military officials burned down during fires. The total value of the destroyed property reaches about $90 million. The mansions were purchased from April 2022 to February 2024 and belonged to […]

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'Appropriate and needed'

A post shared on social media purportedly shows a video of South African firefighters arriving in California.   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Anthony Green (@optimusgrind75) Verdict: False The video is from 2023 when South African firefighters arrived in Edmonton to assist with Canadian wildfires. Fact Check: Critical fire conditions are expected […]

'Let her personal judgment get in the way'

The government of Laos DPR recently turned a vast area of hills and tropical forests over to conservation with the establishment of Xesap National Park (NP). Aided by Western endowments and nonprofits, the establishment expands an already existing protected area to a total of 202,300 hectares, including the 49,000-hectare Pale area, which is thought to be […] The post New National Park Widens Protection of Legendary ‘Asian Unicorn’ Mountain Home appeared first on Good News Network.

Books Poetry 12 Poems That Celebrate the Thrill of a Fresh Start Thoughts on uncertainty and possibility at the start of a new year. By Holly Kybett Smith | Published on January 16, 2025 Photo by Jack Blueberry [via Unsplash] Comment 0 Share New Share Photo by Jack Blueberry [via Unsplash] We talk often about spring and autumn as seasons of turbulence; the times of year when changes happen, in nature and in our lives. But January—the month that plunges us, quite suddenly, from the comfortable malaise of the winter holidays into a bright sharp commitment to Be a Better Version of Ourselves—that’s when we are most personally in flux. We shed our skins in the New Year. We change, because the changing over of our calendars feels poignant, promising. It feels like The Right Time. A lot of people don’t love the start of a new year. Resolutions can be overambitious and hard to stick to. There’s pressure in a blank slate. But underneath that pressure, there’s also joy to be found in letting go of the past. In being able to tangibly draw a line under things and revel in the opportunity to start again. This month, I’ve collected twelve poems that celebrate that joy: the potential, the promise of becoming. “How Dark the Beginning” by Maggie Smith All we ever talk of is light—let there be light, there was light then,good light—but what I considerdawn is darker than all that… We’ve all heard the adage “it’s darkest before dawn.” It’s been worn almost to meaninglessness now, repeated again and again as a refrain against hardship. This tender poem by NYT-bestselling poet Maggie Smith (not to be confused with the beloved actress Maggie Smith, whom we sadly lost this year) takes the premise at its core and reconsiders it, questioning what darkness itself is allowed to represent. “New Year” by Carol Ann Duffy I drop the dying year behind me like a shawland let it fall. The urgent fireworks fling themselvesagainst the night, flowers of desire, love’s fervency… A new year dawns, the previous one comes to its end, and—while in many ways this can be a relief—it can also be hard to disentangle the past and present. Carol Ann Duffy’s nostalgia-tinged poem reflects on love at the moment the clock strikes, and illustrates the transience of memory: the ways that time is simultaneously linear and not. “Burning the Old Year” by Naomi Shihab Nye Letters swallow themselves in seconds.  Notes friends tied to the doorknob,  transparent scarlet paper,sizzle like moth wings… As we extricate ourselves from the previous year, there are a great number of moments we let go of, allowing them to sink into the past. Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem sets fire to the past, not vengefully or hatefully, but simply to make space for what’s to come. “My Hair Burned Like Berenice” by Ruth Awad My heart was valentwith possibility: I could be anyone now, half woman,half asterism. Fragmental as a new year. Patron saintof the rutilant and cindering… There’s something empowering about standing in a fire’s glow, knowing that every end gives way to beginning. Awad’s “My Hair Burned Like Berenice”is all short sentences, decisive and confident. Itrevels in the transformation of the self, the severance of that which doesn’t serve you. “won’t you celebrate with me” by Lucille Clifton won’t you celebrate with mewhat i have shaped intoa kind of life? And once the blaze has died away, we can consider what’s left behind. Lucille Clifton was a prestigious and prolific African American poet, whose work drew upon her lived experience as a Black woman. In this poem, she reminds us that she remained standing, despite everything the previous years had thrown her way: despite adversity and horror. She invites us to be proud of her, as we should. And in doing so, we can also look inward, consider our own lives, and the difficulties people continue to face in this difficult, often frightening world. “Winter Flowers” by Stanley Moss I wear a coat of hope and desire.I follow fallen maple leaves abducted by the wind.I declare I am a Not Quite, almost a nonentity.I fought for that “almost.”I lift up and button my collar of hope.I simply refuse to leave the universe… Yes, this one did appear in last year’s list of January poetry. I’m bringing it back once again because I think it has important things to say about remaining hopeful. The snow that blankets the landscape of this poem is a white, empty unknown, but through it flowers poke up, and the narrator trudges on. “Unleashed” by Leah Umansky There was a delay satisfying, a flash of  body of  beauty of  breath and beauty and breath and body and breath and breath and breath and then then then—the sense of my blooming before my self before my former self before the new self  stuttering before me… This poem returns to the figure of the new self emerging from the old. From the flash of whiteness that is snow or fire or daylight comes the fresh start, the opportunity worth marvelling at. “What Kind of Times Are These” by Adrienne Rich There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphilland the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadowsnear a meeting-house abandoned by the persecutedwho disappeared into those shadows… A gentle but meaningful poem, What Kind of Times are These follows its narrator on a journey “picking mushrooms at the edge of dread.” “Dance, Dance, While the Hive Collapses” by Tiffany Higgins Alas. There is still melody,rhythm, someone is streakingout in air, droningaround the phonograph, which is the groovedheart valve of the black vinyldivine who is winding this universe… Sometimes the forces stacked against us feel too numerous and powerful to be overcome. Sometimes we feel hopeless, insignificant, like nothing we do is going to matter. Through the lens of colony collapse disorder, Higgins reminds us that even in the face of odds that cannot be surmounted, there is beauty. There is joy. The hive may be collapsing, but there is still time to dance. “Dear Echo” by Kyle Dargan In the likely event of galactic calamity — our sun’s hydrogen reserves fused through,the star-turned-red-giant bloatingas do our corpses — you will require flames… On a personal and microcosmic scale, a new year can feel a lot like an apocalypse. So here is a poem about the end of the world. In searing verse, Dargan sets the scene, illuminating as he does so the cyclical nature of everything: how there is no end that doesn’t become the start of something else. (Maybe something better…) “A Map to the Next World” by Joy Harjo What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on themap. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leav-ing a trail of paper diapers, needles, and wasted blood.An imperfect map will have to do, little one… This fantastical poem guides its readers from one ruined world to another which might yet hold promise. But Harjo shows us that there is no such thing as simple and binary as beginning/end. Our fresh start—the fresh start of the new year—lies in us, in what we know and love and wish to nurture going forward. “Good Bones” by Maggie Smith Life is short, though I keep this from my children.Life is short, and I’ve shortened minein a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways… To finish, another poem by Maggie Smith. You may be familiar with this one already: it went viral in 2016, and has since been translated into numerous languages, set to music by various composers, and even been adapted into a dance troupe’s routine. There’s a good reason for this poem’s virality. Its message of stubborn, practical optimism resonated with many at the time and continues to do so today, reminding us that we are active players in the world we inhabit and the future is what we choose to make it. We don’t need to tear down our foundations: they are imperfect but solid. What we need to do is stay stubborn, and build. [end-mark] The post 12 Poems That Celebrate the Thrill of a Fresh Start appeared first on Reactor.

Thomas Jefferson’s resume is hard to beat. At 23, he was serving in the Virginia Colonial Legislature and, within a decade, he was in the Virginia governor’s mansion. He followed that up as ambassador to France, secretary of state, vice president, and a two-term president. From a lifetime of profound accomplishments, he chose three to list on his tombstone at Monticello. Today is the 239th anniversary of one of those accomplishments, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which he drafted in 1777 and the Virginia Legislature adopted in 1786. Remembering a past event can be worthwhile, but doing so here must rekindle a present commitment to this fundamental freedom. Jefferson left for France in May 1785, leaving the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in James Madison’s hands to get it over the legislative finish line. The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which disestablished the Church of England in Virginia, would prove to be one-half of what would soon be the First Amendment’s protection for religious freedom. Madison supplied the other half only a month later when he penned the Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments in opposing a bill to use public funds to support religious teachers. Madison argued that the right to exercise religion according to one’s “conviction and conscience” is “in its nature an unalienable right.” The Declaration of Independence, which Jefferson had drafted and signed in 1776, identified securing unalienable rights as the very purpose of government. At the Philadelphia Convention to draft the Constitution in the summer of 1787, Madison combined these two principles in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The Founding Fathers really wanted to prevent government from undermining the individual right to exercise religion. This required prohibiting the government from coercing religious belief or behavior and the conviction that the unalienable right to exercise religion is “precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society.”  By this time, writes professor Michael McConnell, “the American states had already experienced 150 years of a higher degree of religious diversity than had existed anywhere else in the world.” The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and the First Amendment represent the Founding Fathers’ desire to make that experience permanent. In his 1941 State of the Union Address to Congress, as World War II raged in Europe, President Franklin Roosevelt proposed “four essential human freedoms” that all people should have, including the “freedom to worship.” Seven years later, the United States signed the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, accepting the obligation to “promote respect for these rights and freedoms and … to secure their universal and effective recognition.” We are not keeping that commitment. In his 2010 Religious Freedom Day proclamation, for example, President Barack Obama said that the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom “was a statement of principle, declaring freedom of religion as the natural right of all humanity—not a privilege for any government to give or take away.” Yet his administration developed and got Congress to enact the Affordable Care Act with no apparent regard for its impact on religious freedom. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that employers provide free insurance coverage for abortifacient methods of birth control violates the right to freely exercise religion. When she was a senator, Vice President Kamala Harris supported a resolution asserting that “religious freedom is fundamental to the national character of the United States.” At the same time, she co-sponsored the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would prohibit any government from taking any action that could, even potentially, reduce the incidence of abortion. Last October, during her presidential campaign, Harris rejected any exemptions, even for religious liberty. Religious freedom, right here in America and around the world, is under attack. In 1941, the Supreme Court recognized that the unalienable right to exercise religion is “in a preferred position.” Today, at best, it is simply one of many considerations or competing ideas or, at worst, a negative cultural or social element that must be eliminated. Talk, as they say, is cheap; in Washington, it’s free and often worth little. Speeches, declarations, and proclamations are one thing, action is another. Do we still believe, as Congress unanimously said in 1998, that “the right to freedom of religion undergirds the very origin and existence of the United States”? Or that, as President Joe Biden said yesterday in his Religious Freedom Day proclamation, that “religious freedom is at the core of who we are as a nation”? If so, we should return to acting like it. The post Religious Freedom Day Must Be a Call to Action appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Chicago Just Keeps Waving That Red Flag at Trump's Immigration Bull

With H5N1 bird flu jumping into all sorts of animals, should cat lovers be concerned?