The young mother had behaved erratically for months, hitchhiking and wandering naked through two Native American reservations and a small town clustered along Northern California’s rugged Lost Coast.

But things escalated when Emmilee Risling was charged with arson for igniting a fire in a cemetery. Her family hoped the case would force her into mental health and addiction services. Instead, she was released over the pleas of loved ones and a tribal police chief.

The 33-year-old college graduate — an accomplished traditional dancer with ancestry from three area tribes — was last seen soon after, walking across a bridge near a place marked End of Road, a far corner of the Yurok Reservation where the rutted pavement dissolves into thick woods.

Her disappearance is one of five instances in the past 18 months where Indigenous women have gone missing or been killed in this isolated expanse of Pacific coastline between San Francisco and Oregon, a region where the Yurok, Hupa, Karuk, Tolowa and Wiyot people have coexisted for millennia. Two other women died from what authorities say were overdoses despite relatives’ questions about severe bruises.

The crisis has spurred the Yurok Tribe to issue an emergency declaration and brought increased urgency to efforts to build California’s first database of such cases and regain sovereignty over key services.

https://apnews.com/article/health-california-san-francisco-native-americans-mental-health-01ba9914f9147156ee777e4a9a5b59bc

Nursing homes and other long term care facilities have lost a record number of residents and staff to COVID-19 – representing about a quarter of all COVID deaths in this country.

Now, the industry is suffering through a historic staffing shortage, further exacerbated by omicron. Workers have quit in record numbers since the pandemic started. And during the worst of omicron many frontline staff had to stay home because of breakthrough infections.

"Quite frankly, it's been pretty brutal here," says Nathan Schema, president and CEO of the Good Samaritan Society, a large non-profit provider of long-term care in the country, with facilities in 23 states. From Washington to Florida and from Maine to California, facilities and staff are struggling.

Of Good Samaritan's 15,000 staff, several hundred tested positive for COVID-19 during the worst part of the surge, Schema says, putting them into contingency staffing across the organization. "In some of our more rural communities, it doesn't take, but, one or two nurses to be out with COVID to really create a tough situation."

Absences and staffing shortages leave those still showing up for work carrying the burden.

"You can see it in people's eyes – the tiredness, the exhaustion," says Jenna Szymanski, a nurse at the Good Samaritan Society's Luther Manor in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. "All the staff, I think, are pretty burnt out right now."

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/02/22/1081901906/the-pandemic-pummeled-long-term-care-it-may-not-recover-quickly-experts-warn
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Reminding you that understaffing and crappy pay in these places DID NOT start with Covid!

In December, as Columbia Public Schools headed into winter break, students and teachers got word that they'd be returning — post holiday — without a mask mandate. This was at the height of the omicron variant surge, and Quinn Felts, a sophomore at Hickman High School, got an uneasy feeling that stuck with him through the break.

The 15-year-old has never known high school to be what's often invoked as "normal." When the COVID-19 pandemic began, he was still in eighth grade.

The last time he left his middle school building, he didn't realize he was leaving for good.

"I didn't even say goodbye to any of my teachers," Felts recalls. "They said it was going to be a two-week break."

He spent a lonely summer distanced from friends, before his high school career began in hybrid mode: partially online, partially in person.

"We kind of alternated days," Felts explains. "Like, a group of people would go Monday, and then another group of people would go Wednesday, and then we'd go back Friday. So in between those days they could sanitize."

But every day on campus was a mask day.

https://www.kcur.org/arts-life/2022-02-20/what-can-missouri-kids-do-when-politics-interfere-with-school-safety-they-can-walk-out
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(As an aside, my dad was a grad of the original Hickman High School, 1936. So was Sam Walton)

Heading into the third year of a wearying pandemic, America's health care workers report significant levels of burnout, even anger about the complications of politics and rising incidents of abuse from patients and their families.

But three-fourths of them still say they love their jobs, an exclusive USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll of doctors, nurses, paramedics, therapists and others finds. It is a show of resilience, not without some costs, among those who have been on the front lines of fighting COVID-19.

"The pandemic has actually made me realize how important this career is, and how I really do make a difference," said Christina Rosa, 33, a mental health counselor from central Massachusetts who has had to close her office and see patients remotely. "I still love it."

Even so, one in four report they are likely to leave the health care field in the near future, an exodus that would represent an enormous loss of medical expertise. Half say they are burned out. One in 5 report feeling angry.

"We're trying to help people here and we are getting verbally and physically abused for it," said Sarah Fried, 53, of Santa Clara, California.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/02/22/covid-health-care-workers-poll-pandemic-burnout/6844789001/

For China’s star athlete Eileen Gu, “either-or” isn’t in her vocabulary.

Born to a Chinese mother and American father, the 18-year-old skier grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area while straddling the Pacific. While in the U.S., she took piano, surfing, and skiing lessons. Come summer, she’d travel to Beijing to study for the Mathematical Olympiad and the SAT.

Years later, she’d find herself in the same city representing China at the Winter Olympics and at the center of a debate over her nationality and identity. “When I’m in the U.S., I’m American, but when I’m in China, I’m Chinese,” she has often said.

Gu’s evident rejection of identifying with only one nation has angered some critics. Though the Olympian has so far deflected questions about her dual citizenship—which is not recognized in Chinese law—conservative outlets have called her a “traitor” to the United States. In an interview last week, ex-UN ambassador Nikki Haley urged the skier to pick a side. “You’re standing for freedom or you’re standing for human rights abuses. There is no in-between,” the former Trump appointee said.

The badgering Gu has faced about her citizenship is a shared sentiment for many who don’t fit into a binary.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kb7ye/eileen-gu-olympics-dual-nationality-china-us
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Of course Nimrata Randhawa is on the other side, pretty much ignoring her ancestry if not outright denying it

About an hour has gone by: time to take the gefilte fish and carrots out of the boiling water. In another pot, I've got potatoes and pickles simmering in stock and brine; I stir in a hefty dollop of sour cream to cut the acidity and top the soup with a sprinkling of fresh chopped dill. Tomorrow, I'll be cooking a leek frittata for breakfast and schnitzel breaded with matzo meal for dinner.

I'm swimming in shtetl nostalgia – Ashkenazi Jews have been making versions of these recipes for decades. Gefilte fish (an appetiser made from poached fish), for example, has been a favourite since they first settled on the banks of the German Rhine in the 11th Century.

But there's a key difference. I'm making vegetarian versions of these dishes. And, in doing so, I know I'm closer to the traditions of my ancestors than I would be with the stacked pastrami sandwiches that have become the standard-bearer of Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine.

For my Ashkenazi ancestors, the towers of meat you can find at the Jewish deli were nonexistent. Instead, their kitchens would be full of fresh, regional and seasonal vegetables, an assortment of pickles and, if they were lucky, some dairy. Meat and fish were expensive rarities until the industrialisation of meat production in the early 20th Century. That's why the gefilte fish I'm making now is a vegetarian imitation adapted from a century-old recipe using a purée of salsify (oyster plant), cashews and onion mixed with eggs and matzo meal, shaped into disc-like quenelles for poaching, then topped with one sliced carrot and sinus-clearing horseradish.

Instead of veal, the schnitzel is a cut of celeriac root covered in flour, egg wash and matzo meal that browns after a few minutes on a hot skillet – as instructed by an 84-year-old recipe.

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220221-a-return-to-vegetarian-jewish-cuisine

About an hour has gone by: time to take the gefilte fish and carrots out of the boiling water. In another pot, I've got potatoes and pickles simmering in stock and brine; I stir in a hefty dollop of sour cream to cut the acidity and top the soup with a sprinkling of fresh chopped dill. Tomorrow, I'll be cooking a leek frittata for breakfast and schnitzel breaded with matzo meal for dinner.

I'm swimming in shtetl nostalgia – Ashkenazi Jews have been making versions of these recipes for decades. Gefilte fish (an appetiser made from poached fish), for example, has been a favourite since they first settled on the banks of the German Rhine in the 11th Century.

But there's a key difference. I'm making vegetarian versions of these dishes. And, in doing so, I know I'm closer to the traditions of my ancestors than I would be with the stacked pastrami sandwiches that have become the standard-bearer of Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine.

For my Ashkenazi ancestors, the towers of meat you can find at the Jewish deli were nonexistent. Instead, their kitchens would be full of fresh, regional and seasonal vegetables, an assortment of pickles and, if they were lucky, some dairy. Meat and fish were expensive rarities until the industrialisation of meat production in the early 20th Century. That's why the gefilte fish I'm making now is a vegetarian imitation adapted from a century-old recipe using a purée of salsify (oyster plant), cashews and onion mixed with eggs and matzo meal, shaped into disc-like quenelles for poaching, then topped with one sliced carrot and sinus-clearing horseradish.

Instead of veal, the schnitzel is a cut of celeriac root covered in flour, egg wash and matzo meal that browns after a few minutes on a hot skillet – as instructed by an 84-year-old recipe.

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220221-a-return-to-vegetarian-jewish-cuisine

A boozy version of Mountain Dew is making its debut in Tennessee, the popular drink's proud home state.

Fans 21 and older can get their hands on HARD MTN DEW starting Tuesday from the Boston Beer Company. It's the same citrusy taste with 5% alcohol by volume.

The drink will be available first in stores in Tennessee, where it was first bottled in the 1940s as a companion to bourbon, plus Florida and Iowa.

https://www.knoxnews.com/story/money/business/2022/02/22/hard-mtn-dew-seltzer-hits-tennessee-stores-5-percent-alcohol/6891615001/
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The stuff already rots your teeth and your brain, now your liver?

Mexican government officials have fired back at Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), after he accused the country of “undermining the rule of law.”

“If he praised me, I might start thinking we weren’t doing things right,” Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Friday. “But if he says we are wrong, well that for me is something to be proud of.”

He said Cruz’s criticism was “expected” given their political differences, the Dallas Morning News reported.

The exchange followed the senator’s criticism of the country over recent killings of journalists and politicians there, with Cruz describing “deepening civil unrest in Mexico and the breakdown there of civil society, the breakdown of the rule of law.”

Mexico’s ambassador to the U.S., Esteban Moctezuma Barragán, also responded to Cruz, publishing an open letter to him on Thursday.

In his letter, Barragán said that at least Mexico’s political candidates accept defeat when they lose elections.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ted-cruz-mexico-comments_n_6212c7ace4b0f2c343f6259c
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Rafaelito may find himself persona non grata in Cancún

Words mean everything to 13-year-old Amelia Blackney.

At a younger age, Amelia was most definitely a "she." The Santa Rosa, California, resident was born a girl, raised as a girl and socialized with friends as a girl.

Somewhere along the way, Amelia's feelings about gender identity started to change. Instead of identifying as a girl, Amelia began to feel different. About six months after turning 12, Amelia was ready to lean into a new life. The young person celebrated with new pronouns: they/them.

"I didn't feel like a girl, but I never really felt like a boy, so I had to find something that was in the middle of both," Amelia said. "I settled on pronouns that didn't represent a gender but instead put me between two genders. That way it's like I'm not a part of any gender or I can be both genders at the same time. My pronouns now put me at a place where I can decide between different genders. That feels right."

Amelia, who now identifies as nonbinary, isn't the only young person changing pronouns these days; across the country tweens and teens are embracing nongendered iterations of these familiar words.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/19/health/pronouns-guide-for-parents-wellness/index.html