Latest news with #DaveBilinski
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
The Saga Of RFK Jr., Dr. Oz, And The Possibly Infectious Canadian Ostrich Wobble
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has brought us so much, including sext scandals, bulls**t citations (more on that below), and admittedly bad medical advice. Now, the gravelly voiced political scion wants to bless us with flightless birds that are quite possibly infected with a deadly virus. The birds in question are about 400 ostriches that are currently living on a farm in Canada's western British Columbia province. (I was today years old when I learned that a group of ostriches is apparently called a 'wobble.') This particular wobble was hit with a bird flu epidemic last last year that claimed the lives of 69 ostriches. Not very nice. Given concerns that bird flu, or H5N1, has spread to humans and could cause a major outbreak, officials in Canada have ordered the owners to kill the surviving members of the wobble. (I am taking every opportunity I can to use the word 'wobble' here because I find it inherently amusing.) Karen Espersen and Dave Bilinski, who run Universal Ostrich Farms — which is home to the aforementioned wobble — have pushed back and argued that studying the birds could be beneficial. Most veterinarians and experts do not agree with this take, and the Canadian courts have not either. The fact scientists see the wobble as a public health threat has not deterred the Canadian right, which has turned the ostriches into something of a cause célèbre. Over on Facebook (of course), Esperson has styled herself as a 'digital creator' and 'leader in the ostrich industry in Canada.' In between making posts about sleeping among the possibly infected birds, Esperson has tried to amp up her support. 'We need people to come and surround our farm,' Esperson wrote on May 13. The call to action has apparently resulted in flag-waving busloads reminiscent of the anti-COVID-mandate trucker convoy protests that galvanized the Canadian right prior to its losses in this year's elections, which were widely seen as a referendum on President Trump. It also inspired some members of the Trump administration to get involved in yet another example of their efforts to connect with the global right wing. Last week, Kennedy sent a letter to Canadian officials urging them to spare the wobble and study it. Dr. Mehmet Oz, the former reality television star who is Trump's administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, took things a step further and offered to house the animals on his massive Florida ranch. So far, Canada has seemingly remained unmoved by these appeals. For her part, Esperson has tried to co-opt liberal-coded language to bring them on board. Her posts about the standoff included one meme with a bold declaration: 'I IDENTIFY AS OSTRICH' — Hunter Walker A preview of what Republicans are up against as they prepare to wrestle the Big, Beautiful bill through the Senate. A look at the Trump administration's often comically misguided reliance on AI. A suggestion that we take the long view on society's recent lurch toward ultranationalism and isolationism. 'We're all going to die,' Sen. Joni Ernst reminds us. Let's dig in. The Senate is preparing to take up the House-passed reconciliation package starting next week. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) will have to coordinate opposing demands for changes to the bill from the senators in his caucus, just as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had to in the House. Some are asking for more spending cuts than what the House bill included in order, they say, to shrink the amount by which the bill would increase the deficit. Others are unhappy with the cuts to Medicaid and the rollback of the Biden-era clean energy tax cuts. Thune can only lose three votes, so he will have to walk a fine line to find a compromise for those in his caucus. But he will also have to avoid making major changes to the package, because those changes would then have to be voted on again by the House. Any change could backfire, breaking the delicate balance on which Johnson spent weeks building the bill. So far, it is unclear if Senate Republicans will hold committee markup hearings or take the package straight to the Senate floor, where senators would still have the opportunity to make changes. Markup hearings would also mean Democrats could force the members on each committee to take uncomfortable votes on amendments they propose to specific provisions, getting Republicans on the record for their stance around the unpopular cuts to the safety net programs. 'Why would we subject ourselves to a whole bunch of amendments from Democrats when the Republican members in various committees certainly have all the opportunity… to have their say without needing to go through the brain damage of an official markup?' Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) said according to Punchbowl. We will know more in the coming days, but considering the pushback House Republicans received from the public during their hearings, Senate Republicans could very well skip that step and avoid the spectacle. — Emine Yücel In mid May, the Trump administration rolled out its 'MAHA report,' a purported effort to get to the bottom of America's poor health outcomes. The report was cast as a collaboration between various Cabinet secretaries and advisors, including, of course, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the secretary of Health and Human Services. As you likely already know, it now appears that an AI chatbot was among the report's true authors. The DC news outlet NOTUS first determined on Thursday that many of the studies referenced in the report don't exist. The report misstated the findings of others. In some cases, the report cited real researchers, but claimed they had authored papers or come to conclusions they had not. The Washington Post soon sought an answer to the obvious question, and found Chat GPT appears to be at least partially to blame. Some of the URLs cited, the Post found, include 'oaicite,' a marker inserted into citations generated by OpenAI, the company behind Chat GPT. This isn't the first time the administration has turned to AI to help it complete its work on time, a move more expected of high school students than advisors to the president. DOGE reportedly used a Meta AI model to review federal workers' Elon Musk-demanded lists of the five things they had done that week. Trump's mathematically unsound 'liberation day' tariffs were widely speculated to be the work of artificial intelligence, making use of a formula that many AI chatbots recommend. 'A number of X users have realized that if you ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Grok for an 'easy' way to solve trade deficits and put the US on 'an even playing field,' they'll give you a version of this 'deficit divided by exports' formula with remarkable consistency,' the Verge reported. (Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick tried to laugh off the possibility AI was involved during a Face the Nation interview.) Tech CEOs flood us with increasingly dire warnings of what their products will do to our society: AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white collar jobs in five years, Anthropic's CEO claimed in a round of media appearances this week. But, for now, it appears these products are not quite ready to replace government experts. At least, not with the prompts administration officials have been giving them. — John Light We might have imagined that, with the rise of the internet and the ability to communicate with anyone, anywhere, we'd move toward a more open, dynamic world. Yet, in 2025, the opposite appears to be the case: a cycle of contraction. In the United States, the Trump administration is clamping down on immigration in the name of border security, safety and 'Western values.' Italy's right-wing government recently restricted immigration, paring back its long-standing Jure Sanguinis policy through which someone — me, for example — could claim citizenship by demonstrating an unbroken chain from my great-grandpa, who emigrated to America, to myself. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz's Cabinet this week announced its intent to abolish a fast-track-to-citizenship program in an attempt to restrict migration into Germany. Earlier this month, the UK's Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced the desire to end what he called the 'failed experiment in open borders.' Where to begin? Border security is a fraught issue and the concerns are not exclusive to the right, as Starmer illustrates. But, in the end, we all lose. The demonization of immigrants in the name of safety, or the even greater canard of 'protecting culture,' only serves to weaken the human spirit. It becomes more difficult to share wisdom and learn about the rich and glorious constellation of lifeways that exist. We doom people to lives they don't want to live and foreclose opportunities that may exist elsewhere. It's easy to forget that the 'nation state' as we conceive of it didn't exist until the 16th century. The indigenous peoples of America used to range for hundreds of miles, learning from and trading with others. It's not a given that the world will move, linearly, toward greater and greater interconnectedness and integration, as many predicted just a decade ago. As technological innovation expands our abilities to communicate and to travel, this thinking went, the world should get smaller. Cultures should synthesize and understanding of the other should deepen. But that progress — a word some may take issue with — is anything but linear. If you pick a point in time long ago and compare it to today, it may appear that way. But hidden within the millennia and centuries and decades are cycles of greater and lesser freedom of movement and greater and lesser acceptance of other cultures. In many ways, recent years see us trending toward a more static, staid way of life. I tend to believe these things are cyclical, this trend won't last forever. But that doesn't necessarily help in the short run for those of us alive right now. — Joe Ragazzo 'Well, we're all going to die.' That was Sen. Joni Ernst's (R-IA) response this week when she was confronted by constituents shouting at her during a town hall that cuts to Medicaid and SNAP would cause people to die. The Iowans were, of course, referring to the reconciliation package that the House passed last week, adding additional, last-minute Medicaid cuts to appease House Freedom Caucus members who were threatening to sink the bill without steeper cuts to shrink the amount by which the bill would increase the deficit. Ernst's response received raucous pushback from the crowd. 'For heaven's sakes. For heaven's sakes, folks,' Ernst continued. 'What you don't want to do is listen to me when I say that we are going to focus on those that are most vulnerable. Those that meet the eligibility requirements for Medicaid, we will protect. We will protect them.' But, as we've been reporting, the massive cuts in the bill will lead to millions losing their health care coverage. — Emine Yücel
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Yahoo
RCMP speak to protesters at B.C. ostrich farm, warn of possible arrests as bird cull looms
RCMP visited a B.C. ostrich farm on Wednesday, where dozens of people have gathered to protest the ordered culling of 400 birds, which a federal judge ruled last week could go ahead. The farm's owners have been fighting the order from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) since December, when some of their birds first tested positive for avian flu. On Wednesday, four officers, some wearing uniforms identifying them as liaison officers, visited Universal Ostrich in Edgewood, B.C., while reporters from CBC/Radio-Canada were on site. The farm's owners, Karen Espersen and Dave Bilinski, listened to the officers from behind a fence, surrounded by a few dozen of their ostriches, while police spoke to Espersen's daughter Katie Pasitney, who has been acting as a spokesperson for the farm. About 20 protesters of the few dozen on site also gathered to speak to the police and livestream the police told protesters and the farm's owners that they want whatever happens at the farm to be lawful and peaceful, with one officer saying that if protesters want to be arrested, police "don't want anyone to get hurt." The officer said they want people's right to protest respected, but if arrests begin, they want it to happen "peacefully." Pasitney, whose parents own the farm, told the officers in the meeting that lasted less than an hour that "people are on edge," as she asked police not to bring weapons onto the property. An unidentified officer was asked when the cull might happen but said he had "no idea." The CFIA has said it will be moving froward with the cull despite the local regional district passing a motion saying it will not accept the birds' carcasses at local landfills until the CFIA conducts more tests on the birds and makes those results public. Universal Ostrich says 69 of its birds died during an avian flu outbreak earlier this year, but argues the remainder are healthy and do not pose a risk. The CFIA, though, says it must kill all birds in infected flocks due to the risk of avian flu mutating and passing back and forth between domestic and wild bird populations, potentially impacting human health. "The CFIA will begin the humane depopulation and disposal of birds at the infected premises with veterinary oversight. Operational plans and dates will not be shared with the public in advance," the CFIA said in a statement. "We have a duty to protect Canadians from the serious potential risks that avian influenza presents to our people and our economy." That position was upheld by a federal court judge last week who ruled the CFIA has the authority to make complex decisions based on scientific and economic priorities. The agency said Saturday that under the Health of Animals Act, if an owner refuses to meet the depopulation requirements the CFIA could move forward itself or use a third-party contractor and potentially withhold part or all compensation normally due to owners. The court decision says the farm could be compensated up to $3,000 per ostrich, potentially representing a payout of about $1.2 million if all of the roughly 400 birds are culled.
CBC
21-05-2025
- Politics
- CBC
RCMP speak to protesters at B.C. ostrich farm, warn of possible arrests as bird cull looms
Social Sharing RCMP visited a B.C. ostrich farm on Wednesday, where dozens of people have gathered to protest the ordered culling of 400 birds, which a federal judge ruled last week could go ahead. The farm's owners have been fighting the order from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) since December, when some of their birds first tested positive for avian flu. On Wednesday, four officers, some wearing uniforms identifying them as liaison officers, visited Universal Ostrich in Edgewood, B.C., while reporters from CBC/Radio-Canada were on site. The farm's owners, Karen Espersen and Dave Bilinski, listened to the officers from behind a fence, surrounded by a few dozen of their ostriches, while police spoke to Espersen's daughter Katie Pasitney, who has been acting as a spokesperson for the farm. About 20 protesters of the few dozen on site also gathered to speak to the police and livestream the conversation. WATCH | Protesters, RCMP visit Universal Ostrich: People gather at B.C. ostrich farm to protest order to cull flock of birds 1 hour ago Duration 2:52 The remote community of Edgewood, B.C., finds itself at the heart of a dispute. Demonstrators began gathering this weekend at Universal Ostrich farm, to protest the order to cull a flock of 400 ostriches. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency ordered the cull because two dead birds tested positive for the avian flu in December. The police told protesters and the farm's owners that they want whatever happens at the farm to be lawful and peaceful, with one officer saying that if protesters want to be arrested, police "don't want anyone to get hurt." The officer said they want people's right to protest respected, but if arrests begin, they want it to happen "peacefully." Pasitney, whose parents own the farm, told the officers in the meeting that lasted less than an hour that "people are on edge," as she asked police not to bring weapons onto the property. An unidentified officer was asked when the cull might happen but said he had "no idea." The CFIA has said it will be moving froward with the cull despite the local regional district passing a motion saying it will not accept the birds' carcasses at local landfills until the CFIA conducts more tests on the birds and makes those results public. Universal Ostrich says 69 of its birds died during an avian flu outbreak earlier this year, but argues the remainder are healthy and do not pose a risk. The CFIA, though, says it must kill all birds in infected flocks due to the risk of avian flu mutating and passing back and forth between domestic and wild bird populations, potentially impacting human health. "The CFIA will begin the humane depopulation and disposal of birds at the infected premises with veterinary oversight. Operational plans and dates will not be shared with the public in advance," the CFIA said in a statement. "We have a duty to protect Canadians from the serious potential risks that avian influenza presents to our people and our economy." That position was upheld by a federal court judge last week who ruled the CFIA has the authority to make complex decisions based on scientific and economic priorities. The agency said Saturday that under the Health of Animals Act, if an owner refuses to meet the depopulation requirements the CFIA could move forward itself or use a third-party contractor and potentially withhold part or all compensation normally due to owners. The court decision says the farm could be compensated up to $3,000 per ostrich, potentially representing a payout of about $1.2 million if all of the roughly 400 birds are culled.
CBC
15-04-2025
- Health
- CBC
Avian flu cull order for B.C. ostrich farm to be reviewed in court today
Social Sharing A Federal Court judge will begin hearing arguments Tuesday in the case of a B.C. ostrich farm which has been ordered to cull its entire flock over avian flu concerns. Universal Ostrich is located on a rural road near Edgewood, in B.C.'s West Kootenay region, an approximately 175-kilometre drive east from Kelowna along a winding highway. Its entire flock of about 400 birds was ordered culled in February by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency after H5N1 avian flu was detected in December — but the farm managed to get its birds a stay of execution until the court could rule on the merits of the cull order. The two-day hearing, which is set to be conducted virtually starting Tuesday, is the latest development in a case that has pitted public opinion in favour of the birds against officials who say that a cull would be in the best interests of public health. WATCH | Ostriches get stay of execution: Court pauses cull order on B.C. ostriches ordered killed over avian flu fears 2 months ago Duration 2:31 Universal Ostrich's owners have argued that its birds have achieved herd immunity after a few dozen died in December, and its birds do not pose a public health risk — even as the agency argues that depopulation is required regardless of the remaining birds' immunity status. "The National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease (NCFAD) identified that the current HPAI infection in these ostriches is a new variant of the virus not seen elsewhere in Canada," a CFIA spokesperson wrote in a statement sent to CBC News last month. "Continued transmission of avian influenza virus in animals and sporadic cases in people may increase the chance of changes to the virus itself that could lead to a human-to-human transmission scenario and/or more severe strains of avian influenza virus for humans." The CFIA pointed to the first case of H5N1 avian flu in a B.C. teen last November, as well as a death attributed to the virus in the U.S., as proof the virus can cause severe disease. "Under Canada's stamping out policy, all domestic birds at an infected premises are depopulated to control the risk of further spread," the spokesperson wrote. The federal Health Ministry has also expressed support for the cull, saying the CFIA's legal team has asked for an expedited hearing and decision from the courts. Birds not being bred for meat The farm's operators have said that a small percentage of its around 400 birds — 69 in total — have died of avian flu. But they say the rest of the flock has not shown any symptoms of the disease for months. Indeed, Universal Ostrich says its birds are being studied as part of a partnership with Japan's Kyoto Prefectural University, which has previously made headlines for its work with ostrich eggs and detecting COVID-19. Supporters say a cull fails to account for the specifics of the situation being faced by the farm's owners, Karen Espersen and Dave Bilinski, who have raised some of the birds facing death for decades. The risks of flu spread from the ostriches is minimized, according to the farm's owners, because Universal Ostrich does not sell its birds for meat, and they cannot fly. "What's at stake? It's our food security. It's our agricultural industry," Katie Pasitney, Espersen's daughter and farm spokesperson, told CBC News ahead of the court hearing. "Our ostriches are just a catalyst in the movement for some change and correction of policy." WATCH | Ostriches faced widespread cull: Ostrich farm faces Feb. 1 cull 2 months ago Duration 1:40 Katie Pasitney of Universal Ostrich introduces some of her Facebook followers to the ostriches who have been ordered killed by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency after avian flu was detected at the farm. The cull order and officials' assertions about the infected birds have become a flashpoint for a set of supporters who view the order to kill the birds, who can live for 30 or even 40 years, as an example of government overreach. Tensions have been high, with the RCMP saying they were investigating after one of the farm's ostriches was shot and killed on March 21. Ultimately, the CFIA's original cull order on Feb. 1 was halted by Federal Court Justice Michael Battista, who said he was satisfied by the arguments made that the farm would suffer "irreparable harm" should the cull have gone ahead, and that it had raised reasonable questions about whether a cull was necessary in the first place.
