Maymont's tiny black bear turns 20
Maymont's Little Bear celebrated his 20th birthday over the weekend with some apples and honey.
Why it matters: Due to his chronic conditions, he likely wouldn't be alive today if he was left in the wild.
Catch up quick: The American black bear has been with Maymont since May 2006, after the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources rescued him from a highway near Roanoke.
Little Bear is smaller than average due to his dwarfism and symptoms that mimic Addison's disease, Maymont spokesperson Melissa Abernathy tells us.
Those symptoms can include chronic fatigue and joint pain, which Abernathy says Maymont helps manage with medication.
That also means that his companion Big Bear, who is about his same age, is almost 100 pounds heavier than him (476 pounds vs. 384).
Fun fact: Abernathy tells Axios that Little Bear and Big Bear have a "big bro/little bro" relationship and that Little Bear's favorite napping spot is on the cliff.
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Chicago Tribune
24 minutes ago
- Chicago Tribune
Aurora exhibit explores impact of 9/11 terror attacks: ‘It's really powerful'
An exhibit focusing on the impact of the attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, is running now through Sept. 13 at the Aurora Regional Fire Museum in downtown Aurora. The exhibit called 'America United: The Days After 9/11' was created by the Children's Museum of Oak Lawn which, according to Brian Failing, executive director of the Aurora Regional Fire Museum, 'reached out to us and offered to share the exhibit.' The display features pieces from two metal beams recovered from the World Trade Center site in New York City that was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. While the exhibit includes a timeline of the day's events, its focus is on what came after: the emotions, resilience and acts of unity that followed, according to a press release about the display. Two interactive tables prompt visitors to the exhibit to reflect on themes of compassion, community and what it means to be American, the release stated. Failing said the new exhibit is one of the most powerful the museum has ever featured. 'It puts a different spin, a different dimension on 9/11, something that really is meaningful to all of our visitors whether they were impacted by it or are too young to remember it,' Failing said. 'There's something about seeing the beams and having a conversation about that day.' The pieces of the beams themselves are not overly large, Failing said, 'but the weight is substantial.' A special welcoming ceremony was held at 2 p.m. on Monday where members of the Aurora fire and police departments escorted the exhibit to the museum, where it was received by the Aurora Fire Department Honor Guard. 'It's just so impactful seeing it and how something that we know is from the World Trade Center and seeing how it's twisted – words can't even describe it,' he said. 'It's really powerful. It really shows how important physical artifacts are to museums and just showing and remembering,' he said on Tuesday. 'For me, when this happened, I was in fourth grade and was maybe 9 years old. Yesterday I stood looking at it with my daughter who is just 3 years old and I was just thinking – I was in fourth grade and remembering where I was. It's amazing how objects can just evoke those memories.' Jim Levicki, public safety media manager and information officer for the Aurora Police Department, said the exhibit, though small, is 'awe inspiring when you see it.' 'It's pretty cool to see a piece of history,' he said. 'When I was there Monday, I turned to one of the firemen and asked, 'Were you working on 9/11?' and he said he was a high school senior. I was a police officer then and was on duty that day and this, to me, is a reminder there are people out there who don't even know what this was. It was like me reading about Pearl Harbor. 'It's important that people never forget the things that happened that day and the impact they had on the country moving forward,' Levicki added. 'Everybody just had a moment of pause when they saw it and realized what exactly it was.' As the weeks go by, Failing said he hopes that visitors will experience 'the power of artifacts and having this direct piece from history.' 'We always say, 'We will never forget,' but this is also about all the things the exhibit can convey and the stories it can tell and the conversations that can be had,' he said. The Aurora Regional Fire Museum is at 53 N. Broadway in Aurora and is open from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. For more information on the exhibit, go to
Atlantic
26 minutes ago
- Atlantic
‘No One Can Offer Any Hope'
Every month or so I get a desperate message from a 25-year-old Afghan refugee in Pakistan. Another came just last week. I've written about Saman in the past. Because my intent today is to write about her place in the moral universe of Elon Musk and Vice President J. D. Vance, I'll compress her story to its basic details: During the Afghan War, Saman and her husband, Farhad (they requested pseudonyms for their own safety), served in the Afghan special forces alongside American troops. When Kabul fell in 2021, they were left behind and had to go into hiding from the Taliban before fleeing to Pakistan. There the couple and their two small children have languished for three years, burning through their limited cash, avoiding the Pakistani police and Taliban agents, seldom leaving their rented rooms—doomed if they're forced to return to Afghanistan—and all the while waiting for their applications to be processed by the United States' refugee program. No other country will provide a harbor to these loyal allies of America, who risked everything for the war effort. Our country has a unique obligation to do so. They had reached the last stage of a very long road and were on the verge of receiving U.S. visas when Donald Trump came back into office and made ending the refugee program one of his first orders of business. Now Saman and her family have no prospect of escaping the trap they're in. 'The stress and anxiety have become overwhelming,' Saman wrote to me last week. 'Every day I worry about the future of my children—what will become of them? Recently, I've developed a new health issue as well. At times, my fingers suddenly become tight and stiff—almost paralyzed—and I can't move them at all. My husband massages them with great effort until they gradually return to normal. This is a frightening and painful experience … Please, in this difficult time, I humbly ask for your help and guidance. What can I do to find a way out of these hardships?' I've brought the plight of Saman and her family to members of Congress, American activist groups, foreign diplomats, and readers of this magazine. No one can offer any hope. The family's fate is in the hands of Trump and his administration. George Packer: 'What about six years of friendship and fighting together?' And, after all, their story is just one small part of the suffering caused by this regime. A full accounting would be impossible to compile, but it already includes an estimated several hundred thousand people dead or dying of AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria because of the elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development, as well as the starvation of refugee children in Sudan, migrants deported to a Salvadoran Gulag, and victims of domestic violence who have lost their shelter in Maine. In the wide world of the regime's staggering and gratuitous cruelty, the pain in Saman's fingers might seem too trivial to mention. But hers is the suffering that keeps arriving in my phone, the ongoing story that seems to be my unavoidable job to hear and tell. And sometimes one small drama can illuminate a large evil. Since reading Saman's latest text, I can't stop thinking about the people who are doing this to her and her family—especially about Musk and Vance. As for Trump, I find it difficult to hold him morally responsible for anything. He's a creature of appetite and instinct who hunts and feeds in a dark sub-ethical realm. You don't hold a shark morally responsible for mauling a swimmer. You just try to keep the shark at bay—which the American people failed to do. Musk and Vance function at a higher evolutionary level than Trump. They have ideas to justify the human suffering they cause. They even have moral ideas. Musk's moral idea goes by the name longtermism, which he has called 'a close match to my philosophy.' This reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism seeks to do the greatest good for the greatest number of human beings who will ever live. By this reasoning, the fate of the hundreds of billions of as-yet-unborn people who will inhabit the planet before the sun burns it up several billion years from now is more urgent than whether a few million people die of preventable diseases this year. If killing the American aid programs that helped keep those people alive allows the U.S. government to become lean and efficient enough to fund Musk's grand project of interplanetary travel, thereby enabling human beings to live on Mars when Earth becomes uninhabitable in some distant era, then the good of humanity requires feeding those aid programs, including ones that support refugee resettlement, into the woodchipper. Refugees—except for white South Africans —aren't important enough to matter to longtermism. Its view of humanity is far too large to notice Saman, Farhad, and their children, or to understand why America might have a moral obligation to give this family a safe home. Longtermism is a philosophy with a special appeal for smart and extremely rich sociopaths. It can justify almost any amount of hubris, spending, and suffering. Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency mogul who is serving a 25-year sentence for fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering, was a longtermist. It isn't clear that Musk, during his manic and possibly drug-addled months of power in the Trump administration, applied moral reasoning when hacking at the federal government. His erratic behavior and that of his troops in the Department of Government Efficiency seemed driven more by destructive euphoria than by philosophy. But in February, on Joe Rogan's show, Musk used the loftiest terms to explain why the cries of pain caused by his cuts should be ignored: 'We've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it's like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide. The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.' Here is another category of the long view, with an entire civilization in place of the planet's future inhabitants. Musk's sphere of empathy is galactic. In its cold immensity, the ordinary human impulse to want to relieve the pain of a living person with a name and a face disappears. Vance once called himself 'a proud member of both tribes' of the MAGA coalition—techno-futurists like Musk and right-wing populists like Steve Bannon. But when Vance invokes a moral code, it's the opposite of Musk's. The scope of its commitment is as narrow and specific as an Appalachian graveyard—the cemetery in eastern Kentucky where five generations of Vances are buried and where, he told the Republican National Convention last summer, he hopes that he, his wife, and their children will eventually lie. Such a place is 'the source of America's greatness,' Vance said, because 'people will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.' Politically, this is called blood-and-soil nationalism. Religiously, Vance traces his moral code to the Catholic doctrine of ordo amoris, the proper order of love: first your family, he told Sean Hannity of Fox News, then your neighbor, your community, your nation, and finally—a distant last—the rest of humanity. But Vance's theology is as bad as his political theory. Generations of Americans fought and died for the idea of freedom in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War II, and other conflicts. And Christian doctrine does not say to keep out refugees because they're not your kin. Jesus said the opposite: To refuse the stranger was to refuse him. Vance likes to cite Augustine and Aquinas, but the latter was clear about what ordo amoris does not mean: 'In certain cases, one ought, for instance, to succor a stranger, in extreme necessity, rather than one's own father, if he is not in such urgent need.' From the March 2022 issue: The betrayal It's a monstrous perversion of both patriotism and faith to justify hurting a young family who, after all they've suffered, still show courage and loyalty to Vance's country. Starting from opposite moral positions, Musk and Vance are equally indifferent to the ordeal of Saman and her family. When empathy is stretched to the cosmic vanishing point or else compressed to the width of a grave, it ceases to be empathy. Perhaps these two elites even take pleasure in the squeals of bleeding-heart humanitarians on behalf of refugees, starving children, international students, poor Americans in ill health, and other unfortunates. And that may be a core value of these philosophies: They require so much inventing of perverse principles to reach a cruel end that the pain of others begins to seem like the first priority rather than the inadvertent result. Think of the range of people who have been drawn to MAGA. It's hard to see what political ideology Elon Musk, J. D. Vance, Glenn Greenwald, Glenn Loury, Nick Fuentes, Bari Weiss, Lil Wayne, Joe Rogan, Bill Ackman, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Kanye West have in common. The magnetic pull is essentially negative. They all fear and loathe something more than Trump—whether it's wokeness, Palestinians, Jews, Harvard, trans people, The New York Times, or the Democratic Party—and manage to overlook everything else, including the fate of American democracy, and Saman and her family. But overlooking everything else is nihilism. Even if most Americans haven't abandoned their private sense of empathy, many don't seem terribly bothered by the rancidness of their leaders. I confess that this indifference astonishes me. It might be the ugliest effect of Trump's return—the rapid normalization of spectacular corruption, the desensitization to lawless power, the acceptance of moral collapse. Eventually it will coarsen us all.
Axios
an hour ago
- Axios
House GOP expands its investigation of Biden's health
House Republicans are expanding their investigation into President Biden's health with a new tranche of requests to interview top White House aides, including former Chief of Staff Ron Klain and senior advisor Anita Dunn. Why it matters: House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-Ky.), citing Axios' reporting, noted that Klain, Dunn and the other aides whose testimony he is seeking made up the ex-president's inner circle. Axios' Alex Thompson and CNN's Jake Tapper, in their new book "Original Sin," implicate what they dub Biden's "politburo" in a coordinated campaign to hide details of Biden's deteriorating health from public view. Biden's spokespeople have pushed back on the claim that there was a cover-up around his health, arguing that he was mentally and physically capable of serving as president through the end of his term. Driving the news: In addition to Klain and Dunn, Comer sent letters requesting testimony from former deputy chief of staff Bruce Reed, senior advisor Mike Donilon and counselor Steve Ricchetti. "The Committee requests your testimony to evaluate your eye-witness account of former President Biden's decline," Comer wrote in each letter. Comer said the aides must agree by June 11 to testify before his panel in July — or else he will subpoena them. Zoom out: Comer sent letters last month requesting testimony from Biden's personal physician, Kevin O'Connor, as well as former White House officials Neera Tanden, Anthony Bernal, Annie Tomasini and Ashley Willians. Many of those aides were also mentioned in "Original Sin" as being part of a select group who had up-close access to the president. Comer said in an interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity that "our staff attorneys have been communicating with their attorneys" and that he expects each of the ex-officials to testify voluntarily. What they're saying: " These five former senior advisors were eyewitnesses to President Biden's condition and operations within the Biden White House," Comer said in a statement.
