Latest news with #NezPerce
Daily Mail
7 days ago
- Health
- Daily Mail
Parasitic sea vampire bites RFK Jr in health chief's bizarre new stunt
Robert F Kennedy Jr has found himself in another awkward situation involving animals. On a tour of the Nez Perce salmon hatchery in Idaho on Thursday, RFK Jr let a parasitic sea vampire, also known as a lamprey, bite his arm until the creature left a 'hickey' behind. The head of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) posted about the blood-letting adventure on X, writing 'Lampreys hickeys at the Nez Perce salmon hatchery' while showing off pictures of the experience. Lampreys are jawless fish that look like eels but are a completely different species. They have a round, sucker-like mouth full of sharp teeth that they use to latch onto other fish and suck their blood for nourishment. Not content with just one hickey, however, RFK Jr held the roughly two-foot-long lampreys as they sucked blood from both his arms, his wrists, and another person nearby. There is no medical or scientific reason for letting a lamprey bite him, leaving many to question the bizarre stunt. The animal's bites can cause injury, infections, or even significant blood loss with prolonged contact. They aren't used in any therapeutic treatments. One of the fish parasitic lampreys feed on in the wild are salmon, and Indigenous tribes in the Pacific Northwest consider the vampire-like fish a food substitute when salmon supplies run low. RFK's visit to the hatchery aimed at promoting the health and well-being of tribal communities by discussing the importance of traditional foods, like salmon and lampreys. The health secretary shared the images on his X account, where users many of his supporters applauded the move. 'Bro you wild. I like it though, keep it up,' one X user commented. Others welcomed RFK JR to Idaho, with one saying: 'Hey you are in my hood! Idaho is beautiful right?!' However, this is just one of several odd run-ins the HHS secretary has had with nature, and with parasites specifically. In 2012, it was revealed that RFK Jr had a worm in his brain that ate a portion of it before dying. The incident reportedly took place two years early, leading to brain fog and issues with short-term memory. RFK Jr let the creatures bite him on both arms and wrists and also let one bite another person standing nearby RFK Jr held multiple 2-foot-long lampreys during his Thursday visit to Idaho, where he promoted the health and well-being of tribal communities RFK Jr said during a 2012 court deposition while he was divorcing his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, that doctors initially thought he had a brain tumor. However, RFK Jr went for a second opinion before surgery and a doctor revealed that the supposed tumor had not grown and was likely a parasite. 'They said that this is almost certainly a parasite that got into your brain… it's a parasite that's very common in India where I had done a lot of environmental work,' RFK Jr said, according to CNN. The new health secretary was also at the center of controversy right before the 2024 election, after he confessed to dumping a dead bear cub in New York's Central Park. On August 4, 2024, RFK Jr posted a video on X that in 2014, he dumped the baby bear in the park after another car had hit the animal in the woods north of the city. The 71-year-old said he retrieved the cub from the roadside and had intended on skinning and eating the meat, but abandoned the plan due to travel plans with friends. Unfortunately for RFK Jr, he noted that his drunk friends talked him into staging an accident in the famous park, making it look as if the bear had died in the middle of Manhattan after being struck by a bicycle. The incident led a giant mystery that baffled local authorities after the bear's body was discovered by a dog walker in October 2014. RFK Jr did not suffer any penalties for illegally dumping the bear as the statute of limitations for that violation in New York had expired. Still, it led some to question the future member of the Trump Administration's fitness to serve, with critics calling the bear incident evidence of reckless behavior.
E&E News
13-06-2025
- Politics
- E&E News
Trump ends Columbia River deal years in the making
President Donald Trump's decision to exit a major settlement agreement in the legal battle over Pacific Northwest hydropower facilities and their impacts on endangered fish populations — and upend efforts to breach several dams in the region — drew praise from GOP lawmakers, but environmental groups, state officials and Democrats on Capitol Hill vowed not to abandon the deal's ambitions. Trump signed a memorandum Thursday ordering his administration to withdraw from the $1 billion 'Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement' reached in late 2023 with the Nez Perce, Yakama, Warm Springs and Umatilla tribal nations, as well as the states of Oregon and Washington. 'It is essential to protect Americans' ability to take full advantage of our vast natural resources to ensure human flourishing across our country,' Trump wrote in the memo titled 'Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Generate Power for the Columbia River Basin.' Advertisement The legal agreement adopted by the Biden administration halted a long-running legal battle over 14 dams in the Pacific Northwest, putting the lawsuit on hold for up to a decade while the federal government and plaintiffs weighed options for boosting imperiled salmon and steelhead trout populations, potentially including the removal of some dams.
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump spikes NW salmon agreement
Jun. 13—President Donald Trump is killing the sweeping agreement that pledged significant investments in salmon recovery and could have paved the way for breaching the four lower Snake River dams. In a presidential memorandum issued Thursday, Trump directed members of his cabinet to withdraw from a legal agreement between the Biden administration on one side and Columbia River Basin tribes and conservation groups on the other. That pact exchanged a pause in fish-versus-dams litigation for investments in salmon recovery, tribal renewable energy projects and studies on the best way to replace the hydropower, irrigation and commodity transportation made possible by the dams. While the agreement stopped short of sanctioning dam breaching, it was designed to lay the groundwork for the move. Trump titled his memo "Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Generate Power for the Columbia River Basin." "My Administration is committed to protecting the American people from radical green agenda policies that make their lives more expensive, and to maximizing the beneficial uses of our existing energy infrastructure and natural resources to generate energy and lower the cost of living," Trump said in the memo. He also rescinded Biden's executive order issued in September of 2023 that called for a "sustained national effort" to honor treaty commitments to the Nez Perce and other tribes by restoring Snake and Columbia river salmon and steelhead to healthy and abundant levels. Shannon Wheeler, chairperson of the Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee, said the move erases significant progress on the effort to save salmon and steelhead from extinction. The fish are central to tribal culture and economies throughout the basin and are cherished by many nontribal people as well. The nutrients they return from the ocean are viewed as important to inland aquatic ecosystems and the decline of chinook salmon in particular has been tied to the problems faced by endangered southern resident killer whales in Puget Sound. "This action tries to hide from the truth. The Nez Perce Tribe holds a duty to speak the truth for the salmon, and the truth is that extinction of salmon populations is happening now," Wheeler said in a news release. "People across the Northwest know this, and people across the nation have supported us in a vision for preventing salmon extinction that would, at the same time, create a stronger and better future for the Northwest." The deal between Biden and salmon advocates was expected to bring more than $1 billion in federal investments to help recover wild fish in the Snake and Columbia rivers and to help tribes develop renewable energy projects. The output from the energy projects would have been devoted to replacing power generated at the four lower Snake River dams. But the agreement was viewed by dam proponents as an unfair pact for which they had little input and one that threatened to upend river transportation and hydropower production. Dam supporters like Kurt Miller, executive director of the Northwest Public Power Association, cheered the move. A news release from his organization said keeping the dams "provides a lifeline for the Northwest's clean energy economy and its most vulnerable families." Miller and others claim the agreement was one-sided.
E&E News
13-06-2025
- Politics
- E&E News
Trump topples $1 billion Columbia River settlement deal
President Donald Trump declared Thursday that the federal government must pull out of a settlement agreement that had halted the long-running legal battle over 14 dams in the Pacific Northwest, reopening a fight over the future of fish populations in the Columbia River Basin. The White House said Trump signed a memorandum withdrawing from a $1 billion agreement that included the Nez Perce, Yakama, Warm Springs and Umatilla tribal nations, as well as the states of Oregon and Washington. The Biden administration signed off on the agreement in late 2023 following two years of negotiations and triggering the first of two five-year delays in the lawsuit. Advertisement The announcement is expected to throw the clash over hydropower and water flows in the Columbia River Basin — and the future of salmon and steelhead trout populations in the region — back into court. Tribes and conservation groups in the Pacific Northwest have pushed for the removal of four dams on the Snake River, saying those structures have contributed to the decline of native fish. As part of the settlement, the Biden administration signed off on studies of taking down the dams — an idea that congressional Republicans have denounced. But White House officials under former President Joe Biden emphasized that only Congress could authorize dam removals.
Epoch Times
06-06-2025
- General
- Epoch Times
Chief Joseph: Servant-Leader and Guardian of His People
Throughout the summer of 1877, a band of the Nez Perce tribe engaged in a 1,170 mil e-lo ng flight and running battle with forces of the U.S. Army. Driven from their homeland in the Wallowa Valley of northeastern Oregon Territory, and led by several chiefs, they fled across the Idaho T erritory. Men, women, children, and horses, crossed int o Montana as they sought escape across the Canadian border. Exhausted and hungry, and their numbers diminished by pitched battles, they made a final stand in the Bear Paw Mountains. They were still in Montana—only 40 miles from Canada. The American public followed this exodus through the newspapers of the day. Readers reacted differently to this war between U.S. troopers and Indians than to other conflicts fought in the Great Plains over the previous 40 years. Many Americans, including members of Congress and the soldiers engaged in these battles, came to admire the Nez Perce for their endurance, bravery, and humanity.
