gg bet withdrawal time
I knew my daughter could hear: not just because she loved music, but because she had perfect rhythm. She punched her fists in the air like a human metronome, and brought a doughy heel to the ground precisely on each downbeat. I had thrown off the yoke of milestone-tracking months earlier, having become fixated on her inability to roll during the precise developmental week for rolling. So when she didn’t form consonants at the prescribed time, I made a deliberate choice to ignore it. It didn’t occur to me that deafness might not be a binary, and that certain vibrations and pitches – the downbeat of a song by toddler-music group the Wiggles, say – could be apprehended, while other subtle speech sounds might be snatched out of a sentence. So it was a couple of months after her first birthday when we discovered that our Botticellian baby had mild hearing loss, and two years after that when she lost almost all of her remaining hearing entirely. Like most hearing parents of deaf children, my first close relationship with a deaf person was with my child. Despite a relatively broad cultural education, I knew next to nothing about hearing loss or deaf culture. What little I had absorbed was an incomplete and almost entirely inaccurate patchwork of pop culture snippets – the mother’s horror when her baby doesn’t react to the fire engine’s siren in the film Mr Holland’s Opus (1995); Beethoven’s struggle to hear the first performance of his Ninth Symphony; the lift scene in Jerry Maguire (1996) where the loving boyfriend signs “you complete me” to his partner; Quasimodo’s apparent industrial deafness from the bells of Notre-Dame; and, worst of all, the appalling memory of my university housemate imitating a deaf accent for laughs. This bleak landscape of ignorance and misinformation is often the lookout from which parents begin making decisions, as deaf critics have rightly pointed out. But although I began educating myself belatedly, it didn’t take long for the calcified layers of assumptions and approximations to disintegrate. Chief among them was the unquestioned belief that hearing loss, for an early deafened person, is even a loss at all. In a recent interview with the news site Truthout , the deaf philosopher Teresa Blankmeyer Burke argues that the language of tragic loss seems particularly ill-fitting for a deaf child: “Some of us do not share this experience [of loss] at all, but only know what it is to be in our bodies as they have always existed.” News headlines about childhood deafness and hearing technology often slip into the “from deaf tragedy to hearing miracle” narrative, missing this crucial point about self-concept entirely. For many parents, this has intuitive clarity too. Absolutely smitten with my baby’s many tiny perfections, I had a stubborn sense that her deafness was not a pit she had fallen into, but just one of many extraordinary discoveries about her that I was making every day. It was a comforting certainty to cling to in the wee hours, when I was beset by a looping reel of terrors about the shadowy obstacles she would undeservedly face, and that I would be impotent to protect her from. Even accepting the reality of life’s vicissitudes, most of us hope for a relatively smooth course for our children. Unfettered sensorial access to the world being at the bottom of a hierarchy of wishes, and fundamental to the rest. The idea that so much was arbitrarily denied a baby so new to the world was, at times, almost impossible to withstand. F rom the moment of discovery of their child’s hearing loss, a parent finds themselves not only unmoored by circumstance, but adrift in a tempestuous cultural debate. While not exactly a global topic of dinner-table conversation, the battle for the identities and futures of deaf children is fiercely fought. Arguments drift down from academic journals to social media, where many new parents are washed ashore in the absence of a definitive source of information about their child’s future. Trying to reconcile the contradictory advice given by a new cast of characters – GPs, paediatricians, ear, nose and throat specialists, audiologists, speech therapists, disability insurance advisers, interested observers – I looked at Instagram to find some clarity in authentic, lived experience. Starting with a few anodyne hashtags, I initially found a bunch of mothers (differing in every respect, but always, always mothers) sharing inspiring stories about the lives of their deaf and hard-of-hearing children. Unlike the normative “blend-in-or-else” diktats of my 1980s childhood, this new world was a sea of diversity – confident smiles, “ Deaf Gain ” wallpapers, kids signing in slang, and proudly visible, brightly coloured hearing technology. I was buoyed up by this extraordinary community, and lifted yet again when my daughter’s metallic pink hearing aids arrived. She no longer had to jam her Wiggles keyboard to her ear to hear the music, and all of my hesitations and ambivalences were converted into happy certainties. But the tone of my feed shifted quite quickly. Gone were the mothers meticulously crafting Spider-Man hearing aid covers and Peppa Pig cochlear implant cases, and in their place were reels and posts that had a more political flavour. We had begun working with a speech-therapist using the LSL (listening and spoken language) or AVT (auditory-verbal therapy) approach, which aims to ensure children don’t miss the verbal data bombardment they need in early childhood to develop spoken language. This is essentially about optimising hearing technology – hearing aids or cochlear implants (CI) – so that a deaf or hard-of-hearing child can access the full range of speech sounds, and then using play-based games and activities that focus on listening and speaking (very similarly to traditional speech therapy for hearing children with speech delay). Historically, some exponents of this approach discouraged the use of sign, but not these days and certainly not in my experience. However, they do prioritise spoken language in the early years, recognising that sign languages can be tricky for hearing adults to attain with the necessary proficiency and syntactic complexity in the time a child needs them to. But what I had experienced as a genuinely caring, evidence-based and pragmatic attempt to empower deaf children and give them the widest set of options had been singled out as an example of “ audism ” by influential deaf and deaf-adjacent critics – a sinister assimilationist model with paternalistic colonial overtones and a complicated history. Critics argued that Alexander Graham Bell – the founding father of what is still one of the major LSL programmes in the US – was not so much a benevolent supporter of deaf children, but a eugenicist and “oralist” with grotesque views about deafness on a self-appointed mission to eradicate sign languages. There were traumatised adults distancing themselves from their parents entirely for forcing them, despite great difficulty, to listen, speak and lip-read. The teary-eyed social media phenomenon of babies with hearing aids and CIs being filmed hearing sound for the first time was disparagingly called “ inspiration porn ” or “switch-on porn” – the vulgar showboating of an arrogant hearing class determined to convert their perfectly deaf children into imperfectly hearing ones. Not only was it inaccurate (no hearing technology makes hearing easy or natural for deaf people), but it spoke of, at best, a normative desire to correct or fix something that was not in their view broken – only different. There were videos about so-called “ language deprivation ” – when a child is in effect linguistically starved because parents and providers incorrectly assume their aids or implants give them sufficient access to the subtle speech sounds around them. Through this lens, the speech therapy games we parents were playing weren’t cute or supportive – they were the pastel-coloured attempts of a hegemonic hearing overclass to turn their happy deaf children into unhappy hearing ones. On one level, I was very moved by these arguments, and it seemed fair to lend more weight to the opinions of those with lived experience of deafness than to those without. I began to wonder if I was compelling my non-consenting deaf daughter to “pass” imperfectly and at great personal cost in a hearing world, rather than empowering her to flourish easily by her own lights in the deaf one. While my husband was able to contextualise the deaf culture proponents as a small but noisy minority, I became ever more anxious and fixated on their arguments. And when my daughter progressively lost what remained of her hearing and cochlear implants were proposed, my wheels began to spin in the ethical mud. C ontrary to what many imagine, cochlear implants are not just fancy hearing aids. A hearing aid amplifies sound using the existing mechanisms and pathways of the ear, but the clarity of speech can tail off once hearing loss is in the severe to profound ranges, with things sounding a lot louder, but not necessarily clearer. A cochlear implant, by contrast, is an electronic device that creates the sensation of sound by bypassing the inner ear entirely and stimulating the auditory nerve with a set of electrodes. There is an internal component, with a magnet, a receiver and an electrode array that spirals around the cochlear (a biomimetic design inspired by a strand of grass curling around a shell’s spiral), and an external component with a microphone to pick up sound, with a processor to encode it. While hearing aids are relatively uncontroversial, the internal portion of a cochlear implant requires surgery, which entails risk. There is a significant period of rehabilitation as the brain learns to make sense of a totally new type of electronic input, and the external processor itself is slightly larger and more visible on the head. Deaf adults can of course make this decision for themselves, but increasingly the recommendations are for parents to implant their children in infancy as this generally produces the best outcomes. Even in the past few years, the age of recommended implantation for severely to profoundly deaf babies has dropped to nine months. Their astonishing success rate in aiding the understanding of speech has meant a new generation of deaf adults are emerging who do not use sign language in the way they would have done only a few decades earlier. While for some this is one of the great advances of modern medicine, for others it is a deeply worrying evolution. The new technological possibilities and their swift adoption have understandably caused widespread consternation in deaf communities globally. The future of their complex and rich visual languages is endangered by the developments, as well as the communities and ways of life that stem from them. These are genuine and valid concerns, and ones that are rarely addressed in moderate, bipartisan terms. There are also broader ethical concerns raised by surgical intervention of this kind on children whose lives are not threatened, and who are not in a position to request or consent. Why is the case of cochlear implantation so different from other parallel medical situations that a parent has to navigate? Why is it controversial in the way that an artificial limb or cornea transplant is not? Unlike the parent of a child with vision loss who pursues laser surgery in an uncomplicated way, the parent of a deaf child is implicated in a much larger politico-cultural struggle. To my outsider’s eyes, a lot of this was not the tangled snarl of identity politics, but seemed largely to stem from a fundamental disagreement over the metaphysics of deafness. Whereas the hearing world, hand in hand with the medical one, has conceptualised deafness as a sensory deficit that can be “restored” – albeit partially, temporarily and imperfectly – parts of the deaf world argue that this approach demonstrates an outdated pathologisation of difference. Happily, we live in an era where neuro- and other divergences are no longer seen as aberrations, but rather as part of a welcome heterogeneity of biology and perspective. Deaf critics and disability theorists thus pose the question: why does society want to frame deafness as a medical abnormality rather than a sensory difference? In their view, the medical model is the outward face of a punishing normative tyranny. Any deviations from the standard hearing model are ushered – either gently and kindly or violently and oppressively – back to the midline. Like the twisted “benevolent” logic of gay conversion therapies, even the so-called good intentions of parents and bystanders (as anti-racist campaigners have long argued) could perpetuate discrimination just as easily as the malign ones. The psychologist Harlan Lane went even further, arguing that deafness is actually more akin to an ethnicity than to a disability. If the same rights and protections apply here as to other cultural, religious and racial minorities, then the entire therapeutic landscape looks incredibly sinister. At its mildest, the mainstream model of improving a deaf child’s hearing becomes the enforced alteration of a member of a cultural and linguistic minority. And at worst, as with the cochlear implant, it is not only an invasive surgery that endangers and irrevocably changes a child, but also threatens the extinction of an imperilled language and the erasure of a cultural group. Lane likens the hearing parents of a deaf child to parents who adopt a child from a different racial background, arguing they have a similar responsibility to uphold the cultural mores and traditions of their child’s ethnic group. Tom Humphries, the deaf culturalist who coined the term “audism”, has a deeply cynical view of hearing parents, positioning them simply as legal “owners” of their deaf children, many of whom eventually “migrate” back to what he strongly implies is their true cultural home. He explicitly likens this pattern of ownership and return to that of African American enslaved people or Latin American populations under colonial rule. As a parent, this line of argumentation is jarring, to say the least. While it lies at the extreme end of the debate, many deaf critics have joined Humphries in arguing vociferously that hearing parents cannot be trusted to give informed consent on behalf of their child – surgical or otherwise. W ith these sorts of arguments informing a good deal of the public discourse around deafness, what is the hearing parent of a deaf child to think? And more importantly, how are they to act? The underlying assumption of CI critics seems to be that the neutral stance is to do nothing, and that any intervention at all requires moral licence. But doing nothing isn’t always neutral – most obviously in medical scenarios – and can be a malign act of withholding. There is a genuine moral dilemma here, because a parent must give informed consent one way or the other. Not acting while the child is young is potentially equally culpable. If the anti-CI arguments are not convincing, then it’s possible that their proponents have indirectly harmed the potential development of some children and their ability to flourish in the widest set of circumstances. Alongside the passionate critiques of Lane, Humphries and others, there is also considerable weight lent to the academics arguing quite the opposite – that denying a deaf child a cochlear implant is neglect. In the western world, where early paediatric implantation in severely to profoundly deaf children is considered to be the “ standard of care ”, making the choice not to implant could be seen as a radical decision to withhold a mainstream technology that most of a deaf child’s peers will be using. And what are the ethics of withholding when that technology has safety implications, and could enable the deaf child-then-adult to apprehend dangers to themselves or others? Footsteps in the dark, a window breaking, a car approaching on a quiet street, a fire alarm, a scream in the shopping centre, a baby crying in the next room – none would be audible to my daughter without an implant. And from a feminist perspective, she may need, as women always have done, a loud voice to shout, or to argue with her healthcare providers, or to advocate for herself in an emergency. The implant would provide her with a clearer pathway to power and impact in the world, and to positions of influence where she would be underrepresented both as a woman and as a deaf person. To refuse her a CI based on the arguments of Lane et al would be to use the future of an individual as a blunt weapon to achieve benefit for the broader deaf community. Now, this could open me up to the charge that it would be individualistic and anti-solidaristic to prioritise my daughter’s personal future at any expense. But there’s also a persuasive argument that what benefits the deaf individual is, when multiplied, what raises the collective. It strikes me that the more deaf people can participate actively in positions of power and influence, the better the outcome for deaf people en masse – and, as much as we may wish it wouldn’t, this entails having considerable proficiency in the primary mode of communication. In strictly utilitarian terms, a successful implant hugely expands the number of people a deaf person can communicate with – amplifying their perspective and connecting them in the hearing world, while not precluding their ability to communicate solely using the richness of sign language/s in the deaf one. For me, it is a version of the dilemma that plagues any other movement for systemic social justice. In my experience, this debate often arises in discussions among women too – there is a tension between our responsibility to unpick larger hegemonies and create opportunities for change, and our attempts to personally flourish within the world as it is now, however flawed. But there is a way to have a measure of both. I’ve begun to think of this as a sort of dialectical pragmatism – a way of holding two seemingly contradictory things in mind and moving forward in a way that works. Ultimately, I think it’s possible to want to create the conditions for the best life possible for our daughter, while simultaneously remaining conscious that she is having to bend painfully to fit a system that doesn’t speak for her the way it should. With so many strident either/ors bouncing back and forth, thinking more dialectically can bring clarity in other aspects of the debate too. We can then hold both that her deafness is perfect and does not need to be “fixed”, and that she may benefit from a helpful intervention just as I have from things such as glasses, medications or surgeries – all of which do not ultimately alter my dignity or identity. We can say both that there is justifiable concern from deaf adults who wish to safeguard their communities and languages from the evolution of hearing technology, and that there is a new generation of deaf voices with cochlear implants who haven’t entered the debate and will have their own perspectives. We can maintain a dislike for the tech-utopian view of CIs as a miraculous cure for a tragic affliction, and accept that they have proven to be an extraordinary, life-changing daily support to more than 1 million people worldwide. It’s OK to acknowledge that the hearing perspective is a muddy lens through which we view the world (and which leads us to valorise auditory pleasures in a way deaf people don’t), and also admit that it is fine to want to give your child the qualia of soaring strings and voices in the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth. But the fork in the road in front of us was not only binary, but time-critical. Forced into a nauseating either/or decision that would torment even the most level-headed parent, my husband and I eventually arrived at a bald piece of logic that wouldn’t burn away with challenge: the idea that there was only one option that contained a kernel of both options within it. Only one that really left her with any kind of agency. If she wishes to, in adulthood our daughter can have her cochlear implant removed and fully immerse herself in what is so clearly the rich, joyous, fulfilling deaf world. We plan to learn Australian Sign Language (Auslan) as a family, so that she will have an easy fluency and cultural connection with a community that will, I’m sure, become hugely important to her. But without full access to spoken English in the critical development window of her early years, she will probably never regain the nuances of spoken communication later on; something that is only a problem in that it will close doors that she may later wish were open, and chiefly – it wouldn’t be her choice to do so. She would be constrained by the boundaries of what she may later choose – and what in any other era or in parts of the world would certainly be her future – but to actively place the constraint on her now feels premature. She is three and three-quarters, and fluently reading early chapter books for pleasure. She knows more about the solar system and the workings of the digestive tract than I do, and her future seems as unbounded as her mind. So we made an excruciating decision that, to us, leaves the fewest limits to the scope of her life as possible, and places the decisions back in her hands, where they should be. Our neighbourhood pear tree is just beginning to rouse itself after winter, and my little girl has been emerging too – into a world of new sounds that were beyond the reach of her hearing aids. Yesterday she heard the tiniest, most pitiful bird chirp, and told me so excitedly, with a strong, clear voice. On a windy day she stopped, wide-eyed and said: “I hear the leaves rustling with my coch-le-ah!” with all the triumph she saves for brandishing treasures found on walks. We hold a both/and view here, too, and also celebrate the magic of her “quiet ears” and the unique perspective they afford her. When she removes her processor before sleep, it’s clear she is relieved to submerge into calm again. But she holds the dialectical promise of silence and sound at once – this time literally, insisting on gripping her processor tightly in her palm while she falls asleep. In this way she stands pragmatically astride both worlds. In silence, but with a hearing key right at hand; ready to unlock the blooming, buzzing cacophony of the world whenever she chooses. This essay first appeared under the title The Cochlear Question on Aeon.co Listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here .
Sarah Boone was sentenced to life in prison in an Orlando courtroom Monday afternoon for suffocating her boyfriend in a suitcase, bringing a nearly five-year legal saga to a close — for now. The sentence was handed down by Orange County Circuit Court Judge Michael Kraynick, who could have given Boone a minimum of 221⁄2 years for her second-degree murder conviction, at the end of a nearly two-hour hearing. Before the sentence was announced, Boone spent nearly 20 minutes addressing the court, saying the ordeal had renewed her faith in God. She said she blames herself for not ending her relationship with Torres sooner when he mistreated her, but that she still loves Torres and will see him again in the next life. She begged forgiveness from his family, who sat in the front row of the courtroom. “I think of him every day and still speak to him when alone in the rec yard,” Boone said. “I ask his forgiveness and that he looks for me at the gates of heaven so I can tell him how sorry I am endlessly and that I never stopped loving him.” Boone, 47, was convicted on Oct. 25 by a jury of five women and one man after about 90 minutes of deliberations. Boone initially told police Torres, 42, died the night of Feb. 23, 2020, in their Winter Park residence as a result of a drunken game of hide-and-seek gone horribly wrong. But her defense team later argued that she was an abused woman suffering from Battered Spouse Syndrome and killed Torres in self-defense. The trial delved deeply into Boone’s personal life, showing her often violent relationship with Torres as well as their frequent consumption of alcohol, which was described as central to their lives. At one point in her address Monday, Boone appeared to blame Torres’ family, causing Jorge’s mother and sister to temporarily leave the courtroom. “I also forgive the Torres family, his mother and father, foremost, also his two ex-wives, and daughters, all for knowing who Jorge was, capable of and had done in the past, his history of violence and where he learned it, then keep turning a blind eye when I would ask for help,” she aid. She also blamed the Internet, social media, online content creators and the media for making her a pariah. Prosecutor Dave Cacciatore Jr. said the lack of responsibility or remorse from Boone meant she didn’t deserve a lesser sentence. Torres’ mother, sister and daughter all spoke about how his death had impacted them. Family members of Jorge Torres, Jr. react at the sentencing of Sarah Boone in a courtroom of the Orange County Courthouse in Orlando, Florida, on Monday, December 2, 2024. Boone was sentenced to life in prison for murdering her boyfriend, Jorge Torres, Jr., in 2020 by suffocating him in a suitcase. (Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel) Sarah Boone, convicted of second-degree murder in the suffocation death of her boyfriend inside a suitcase in 2020, was sentenced Monday to life in prison. The stiff sentence capped a near-five-year legal saga in which Boone went through nine attorneys and proceedings were delayed 16 times. She had rejected a 15-year plea deal prior to trial. Read the story at OrlandoSentinel.com or in the News Extra section of today's e-edition. (Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel) Sarah Boone takes a seat as she takes the stand to read from a prepared letter during a sentencing hearing at the Orange County Courthouse in Orlando, Florida, on Monday, Dec. 2, 2024. Boone was sentenced to life in prison for murdering her boyfriend, Jorge Torres, Jr., in 2020 by suffocating him in a suitcase. (Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel) Judge Michael Kraynick hands down a sentence of life in prison during a sentencing hearing for Sarah Boone at the Orange County Courthouse in Orlando, Florida, on Monday, Dec. 2, 2024. Boone was sentenced to life in prison for murdering her boyfriend, Jorge Torres, Jr., in 2020 by suffocating him in a suitcase. (Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel) Sarah Boone makes an expression as she answers a question during her sentencing hearing at the Orange County Courthouse in Orlando, Florida, on Monday, Dec. 2, 2024. She was sentenced to life in prison for murdering her boyfriend, Jorge Torres, Jr., in 2020 by suffocating him in a suitcase. (Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel) Sarah Boone, left, carries a prepared letter that she read to the court during her sentencing hearing at the Orange County Courthouse in Orlando, Florida, on Monday, Dec. 2, 2024. She was sentenced to life in prison for murdering her boyfriend, Jorge Torres, Jr., in 2020 by suffocating him in a suitcase. (Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel) Sarah Boone takes the stand to read a prepared letter during a sentencing hearing at the Orange County Courthouse in Orlando, Florida, on Monday, Dec. 2, 2024. She was sentenced to life in prison for murdering her boyfriend, Jorge Torres, Jr., in 2020 by suffocating him in a suitcase. (Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel) Family members of Jorge Torres, Jr. react at the sentencing of Sarah Boone in a courtroom of the Orange County Courthouse in Orlando, Florida, on Monday, December 2, 2024. Boone was sentenced to life in prison for murdering her boyfriend, Jorge Torres, Jr., in 2020 by suffocating him in a suitcase. (Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel) His sister, Victoria, said that even five years later she still can’t shut a suitcase the entire way. His daughter, Anna, said she now has anxiety and depression, and her younger brother still wonders when he will see their father again. “Real love is missing. Sometimes when I look out the window, I’m waiting for him to come and say, ‘Mom, I love you,'” Torres’ mother said tearfully. Victoria and her mother embraced when Boone’s life sentence was announced. Several people spoke in Boone’s defense, including Diane Smith, a chaplain at the Orange County Jail, who said Boone enrolled in a Christian program there and has worked to do better over the past four years, including as a mentor to younger inmates. Boone’s bunkmate for about three years, Christina Piña, said she has been like a big sister to her. “[When] anybody need any help, or needed anything, they come to her, and even if they did wrong she would still go back and help them, and pray with them, and pray over them and everything,” she said. Lana Albert, a friend suffering from end-stage renal disease who Boone met online while in jail, appeared by Zoom from Minnesota to say that Boone offered to donate her a kidney. Boone’s attorney, James Owens, argued that Kraynick should give Boone less than the minimum 221⁄2 years for reasons including her mental illness. Forensic psychologist Dr. Julie Harper testified that the untimely death of Boone’s father when she was in high school affected her ability to form healthy relationships. Kraynick said an appellate attorney will be appointed for Boone. Owens says he believes there are good grounds for appeal and is meeting with Boone on Tuesday to discuss if they should file one. He is open to returning as Boone’s attorney if the appeals court grants her a new trial. She must appeal within 30 days.
Hezbollah fires about 250 rockets and other projectiles into Israel in heaviest barrage in weeksPhoto Gallery: Saturday in the SECIn a booster to Make in India, Dixon to form JV with Vivo India for manufacturing smartphones
MONTREAL - Canada's largest union is denouncing a statement by Quebec's labour minister, who suggested he might try to bring in legislation to give the province more power to end labour disputes. Read this article for free: Already have an account? To continue reading, please subscribe: * MONTREAL - Canada's largest union is denouncing a statement by Quebec's labour minister, who suggested he might try to bring in legislation to give the province more power to end labour disputes. Read unlimited articles for free today: Already have an account? MONTREAL – Canada’s largest union is denouncing a statement by Quebec’s labour minister, who suggested he might try to bring in legislation to give the province more power to end labour disputes. The Canadian Union of Public Employees is describing Jean Boulet as “the Grinch trying to steal the right to strike.” Boulet told CBC/Radio-Canada that he’s mulling changing the province’s labour code to allow the government to suspend a strike or lockout and impose arbitration. The legislation would be modeled on a similar law at the federal level that has been used to end strikes at Canada’s ports, railways and at Canada Post. Boulet told the outlet he’s also considering expanding the province’s list of essential services, which could prevent workers in some sectors from striking. His office did not respond for a request for comment. CUPE says the right to strike is protected under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and attempts to undermine it will be “inevitably” struck down in court. Winnipeg Jets Game Days On Winnipeg Jets game days, hockey writers Mike McIntyre and Ken Wiebe send news, notes and quotes from the morning skate, as well as injury updates and lineup decisions. Arrives a few hours prior to puck drop. “The right to strike is a fundamental right, a cornerstone of our democracy,” CUPE Quebec President Patrick Gloutney said in a news release. “Taking advantage of the holiday season to try to weaken it shows deep disdain for those who fight every day for fair working conditions.” This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 24, 2024. AdvertisementBuddy Cheff’s family has been raising cattle on a spectacular piece of the Montana landscape for five generations — about as long as the fictional Dutton clan, who are the center of the hit show “Yellowstone.” But Cheff isn’t the head of a politically powerful — and brutally ruthless — family with a spread the size of Rhode Island. He’s a 36-year-old father and husband who runs a small herd of about 100 cattle on his 600-acre ranch south of Ronan, Montana. Since taking over from his father nearly a decade ago, Cheff said he has “loved every second” of running his family’s ranch. But he “worries,” he said, about his future in rapidly changing western Montana. In part, that rapid change is a result of the show “Yellowstone” itself, Cheff said. The contentious dynamic depicted on Paramount Network’s series “Yellowstone” — between ranchers who are trying to maintain their way of life and out-of-staters who want to develop their agricultural land into new housing — is a real struggle. And it has been hastened by the spotlight the popular show has shined on Montana, Cheff said. “Everybody has seen ‘Yellowstone,’” he said. “They want the Montana lifestyle.” And more than 50,000 of them have come to get it since the show debuted in 2018. Their arrival has the in Montana’s cities and towns. It also has increased the cost of agricultural land — and made it more difficult for ranchers to access the wide-open spaces their cattle require. “I try to budget all the time and think about purchasing more ground,” Cheff said. But that’s a daunting prospect, as Montana’s population has grown, bringing in newcomers and driving up the cost of land. “We’ve had a lot of turnover on some of my neighbors in the area, small properties, and I think that increases the prices,” Cheff said. “Everybody buys it for a high price, and they ask a little more, which is understandable. “But it definitely hurts the local guys when they’re looking to grow or (for) more grazing or whatever. It’s harder. Those prices are just out of reach for us.” The romantic view of ranching portrayed in “Yellowstone” has contributed to a reordering of Montana’s ranching landscape for the state’s actual ranchers. While Cheff is committed to making it work in the Flathead, some of his fellow ranchers have set out for greener — or at least cheaper — pastures in eastern Montana, said Monty Lesh, a Miles City real estate and rancher who also serves as the Montana Stockgrowers Association’s Southeast District Director. “In the last five years, we’ve seen more interest from people from western Montana that are experiencing a lot of population growth,” Lesh said. “And they’re considering moving to this area because they can sell out up there for a lot of money and come down here and buy something else.” But that intrastate migration has started to decline, according to Lesh, in part because the cycle of new arrivals ramping up land prices has spread to more areas of the state. “That swap used to be fairly attractive,” Lesh said. “It’s not as attractive today because the land values here have increased from what they were like five years ago.” Those rising land prices in eastern Montana have combined with other economic forces that have undermined ranchers’ bottom lines. “The challenge has been the cost to operate,” Lesh said. “I mean, it’s been twofold. We had a rapid rise in interest rates, and most of agriculture is very capital-intensive — you know, uses a lot of capital and leverage to operate and expand. And then the other thing is just general operating expenses: fuel, insurance, labor, parts. Everything is significantly higher than it was four or five years ago.” But while the economics of agriculture have changed in eastern Montana, Lesh said one constant has remained: People are trying to make a living off the land, despite the challenges. “In our area here, the people that we deal with, 99% of them are farmers and ranchers,” Lesh said. “We don’t see a very large number of investor types buying properties. There are a few, but they are farmers and ranchers, maybe in other states, and they’re just diversifying their holdings by buying land in Montana. But it still stays in production. “They don’t come in and sell all the cows and want to raise elk or deer or whatever — recreation,” Lesh said. “They’re experiencing that a lot in central Montana and western Montana.” Some of the forces of change being felt by Montana ranchers have been gathering since well before “Yellowstone” aired its first episode. Gilles Stockton, 78, has seen a lot change in the half-century he’s raising cattle and sheep near the Fergus County town of Grass Range. He takes a long — and expansive — view of ranching, informed by his experience working in livestock policy development in Africa, the Middle East and other parts of the world. Stockton said the “biggest change” to U.S. ranching occurred in the 1980s as a result of deregulation during the Reagan administration that led to consolidation and that squeezed profit margins for ranchers. But in recent years, he’s seen ranches consolidate, and he’s seen them change hands. “My newest neighbor,” he said, “sold out from the Flathead region and bought the land right next to me. They’re fine people. They’re farmers and ranchers. ... They sort of ran away from the problems there in western Montana.” But Stockton, a district director with the Montana Cattleman’s Association, isn’t as enthused about everyone who has moved in. To the north of his ranch, the has amassed 138,000 acres of land and leased another 337,000 as it seeks to create one of the nation’s largest nature reserves and a home for free-ranging buffalo. To the south, Stockton’s neighbors are the Texas-based billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks, who have long drawn the for reducing public access to their vast landholdings in the West. Count Stockton among those who resent how the Wilks brothers have handled their massive, 200,000-acre since buying it. “They’ve essentially locked up the land and manage it for elk hunting for themselves and their rich buddies,” Stockton said. “Well, the overpopulation of their elk spills over into my land. But immediately after hunting season starts, all the elk retreat to the N Bar Ranch, and nobody, nobody can have access to them. “And the Wilks Brothers have got a number of smaller copycats surrounding,” Stockton continued. “So this, you might say, prime hunting region that runs from Grass Range to the Snowy Mountains is pretty much all now locked up by out-of-state, wealthy people.” Efforts to reach a representative of Wilks Ranch for comment were unsuccessful, but the Wilks Ranch touts its network of ranch holdings as “a top-of-the line cattle operation.” While Stockton said the hired hands who now work the N Bar “get along fine” with the neighbors, the owners have “iced out all the locals,” undermining the tradition and community that has long defined his part of the world. Stockton, who is “pretty much retired” himself, said he’s not sure if ranching can survive the change he’s seeing around Grass Range. “Without major policy change, I think it’s going to be a continual movement towards outsiders buying this country for recreational purposes,” Stockton said. “I know a lot of the existing ranchers are going to survive by leasing the grass from these out-of-staters. So they’ll be able to continue, sort of dwindling over time.” Jake Korell has been in the real estate industry for 56 years, but he said the demand for Montana’s agricultural land from out-of-staters doesn’t “make much sense,” even to him. “These prices are just hard to comprehend, for me, that people will pay that kind of money for this grassland out here,” said. “I don’t get it, but it’s selling.” And the typical Montana rancher has a hard time competing in a market like that, Korell said. In one case, he said, he had some graze land priced at $1,200 an acre. He said two neighbors made offers below the asking price, at a cost they could make back running cattle. “And the seller said, ‘I’m not selling for that price,’” Korell said. “So there you go. Yeah, they’re interested, but they’re priced out. And those are users. ... They’re having a hard time expanding, because to expand, it costs too much money. If it costs you a million dollars to add on to run another 40, 30 cows ... Does that work? No, it doesn’t work.” But it does work for ultra-wealthy, out-of-state, cash buyers who are looking to “park their money in dirt,” instead of in a bank — and who also get a piece of prime recreation land out of the deal, he said. “Now, somebody back East that’s got a $300, $400 million portfolio, that’s peanuts,” Korell said of ranches that are out of reach to locals. “‘And it’s got elk and bear and antelope and that’s stuff that I like to hunt. Hell, I’ll buy it. What the hell.’ That’s the type of buyer that buys those.” John Fahlgren said he sees the same thing in Valley County, where he is a county commissioner and rancher and where many ranch buyers aren’t relying on the property to produce any income. “They have the money to buy it outright and then rent it out, hold on to it, or maybe use it to come and hunt on it and that sort of thing,” said , a district director with the Montana Cattleman’s Association. “So (there’s) a lot of pressure on the price of land because of some of that outside-of-the-area money that comes in to join the glory of the ‘Yellowstone’ reality, so to speak.” Wally Congdon’s family has deep roots in Montana’s ranching community — and a lot of experience trying to adjust to the pressures that community has faced. Three decades ago, his family gave up land along the Clark Fork River’s Alberton Gorge and near Arlee, north of Missoula, and moved to Dell, in a remote area of southwestern Montana. So he knows firsthand what it’s like to try to outrun the forces of change. “What we didn’t count on when we did that was who our neighbors became,” Congdon said of his family’s move to Dell. “Paul Allen, Joachim Kepin, Peggy Rockefeller, Hewlett Packard, Remington Arms, British Petroleum. Want me to keep going?” Congdon has since pulled up stakes again, moving his operation back closer to the Clark Fork and Missoula. But he hasn’t been able to escape the specter of development. One of his hay meadows, he said, was recently “graded, bulldozed and leveled.” “It is no longer a meadow,” he said. “It’s all houses.” Congdon, a district director with the Montana Cattleman’s Association, laments all the pressure placed “on the customs, culture, history and heritage of the West, of agriculture.” For it to survive, he said, “We have to kind of rethink the economics of what that is and do it.” That may mean ranchers rely more heavily on public lands for grazing, pursue more sustainable practices and graze fewer cattle per acre, Congdon said. But some of those changes may already be underway as producers try to adapt to the state’s rapidly shifting landscape and shrinking herd. More than 2.6 million cows roamed Montana in 2017. This year, the count was down by nearly a fifth, to some 2.1 million head. Joel Schumacher, a Montana State University , said the drought conditions in 2021 and 2022 were the cause of this drop. With less precipitation, he said, there was “very little grass for forage and very low hay production, which meant the hay that was available was quite expensive.” “One of the main tools that farmers had was simply to sell down the size of their herd to match the amount of forage that they had available,” Schumacher said. “So that’s really what you saw.” With fewer cows available for sale, their price has shot up — and those strong prices, Schumacher said, “may be limiting how quickly herds are being rebuilt.” Nick Courville, who works a day job as an animal nutrition consultant and who operates a small ranch in Charlo, Montana, is among the producers who have taken advantage of strong cattle prices. This fall, he sold half his herd because there’s a “cash incentive right now” to do so, said Courville, who chairs the Montana Farm Bureau Federation’s Young Farmer and Rancher Committee. He’d like to build his herd back up, Courville said, but that’s hard, in part because of what he calls the “‘Yellowstone effect.’” While Courville says there are “far-fetched” elements to the show, he argues that it “put some light on some actual, real problems that we have.” “The battle between neighbors, I think, sometimes could be real,” he said. “The battle for land and people owning that agricultural landscape. The pretty views that we have, the clean water that comes with it, the beautiful tall grass that’s waving in the wind. “I mean, they want to buy it because they like that. And then they put a house on every 40 that we used to run cows on.” Get local news delivered to your inbox!
Percentages: FG .432, FT .724. Javascript is required for you to be able to read premium content. Please enable it in your browser settings.
- 上一篇：zbet casino
- 下一篇：wild rift streamers
