Polar bears on Norwegian islands fatter and healthier despite ice loss, scientists say
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2l1xpz03no
Polar bears on Norwegian islands fatter and healthier despite ice loss, scientists say
By Victoria Gill
January 29, 2026
Scientists expected the opposite, but polar bears in the Norwegian Arctic archipelago of Svalbard have become fatter and healthier since the early 1990s, all while sea ice has steadily declined due to climate change.
Polar bears rely on sea ice as a platform from which to hunt the seals that they rely on for blubber-rich meals. The bears’ fat reserves provide energy and insulation and allow mothers to produce rich milk for cubs.
Researchers weighed and measured 770 adults in Svalbard between 1992 and 2019 and found that bears had become significantly fatter.
They think that Svalbard bears have adapted to recent ice loss by eating more land-based prey, including reindeer and walruses.
The discovery, published in Scientific Reports, was particularly puzzling because of the impact of climate change in Svalbard.
During the same period that this research was carried out, global temperature rise has increased the number of ice-free days per year in the region by almost 100 – at a rate of about four days each year.
“The fatter a bear is the better it is,” explained lead researcher Dr Jon Aars from the Norwegian Polar Institute.
“And I would have expected to see a decline in body condition when the loss of sea ice has been so profound.”
Walruses have been officially protected in Norway since the 1950s, after they were hunted to near extinction. That protection has boosted their numbers, and apparently provided a new source of fatty food for polar bears.
“There are a lot more walruses around [for them to hunt] these days,” said Aars. “It is also possible that they are able to hunt seals more efficiently.”
He explained that, if seals have smaller areas of sea ice available to them, they will congregate in those smaller areas, presenting easier collective pickings for bears.
While this is unexpected good news for these Arctic predators, the researchers think it is unlikely to last.
As the sea ice continues to decline, bears will have to travel further to access hunting grounds, using more energy and depleting precious fat reserves.
The charity Polar Bears International points out that Svalbard’s polar bears were some of the most heavily-hunted in the world, until international protections were introduced in the 1970s.
Experts think the new findings could be linked to the population recovering from that hunting pressure. That, combined with an increase in the number of walruses – and of reindeer – in recent decades, appears to have provided the bears with a temporary boost.
Dr John Whiteman, chief research scientist at PBI said the results were “positive in the short term”.
“But body condition is only one piece of the puzzle. Other recent research on these bears found that more ice-free days reduced survival in cubs and in subadult and old females.”
Elsewhere in the Arctic, climate change is having a very different effect on polar bears.
There are 20 known sub-populations of polar bears across the Arctic.
In Canada’s Western Hudson Bay, where the most southerly and best studied bears live, a decline in the population has been directly linked to warming temperatures.
Whiteman added that that the long-term picture for polar bears was clear – they need sea ice to survive.
“Ice loss ultimately means bear declines, but [this study shows] that the short-term picture can be very region-specific.”
“In the long term,” he told BBC News, “if ice loss continues unchecked, we know the bears will eventually disappear.”
New York Times: “More than a week before federal agents killed Mr. Pretti, a Minneapolis nurse, different agents pushed him to the ground after he spit at them and broke a taillight on their S.U.V.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WR-oVRTMveo
Original: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/us/alex-pretti-kicking-ice-vehicle-video.html
Archive: https://archive.ph/P7k03
Videos Show Alex Pretti in Confrontation With Agents 11 Days Before His Death
More than a week before federal agents killed Mr. Pretti, a Minneapolis nurse, different agents pushed him to the ground after he spit at them and broke a taillight on their S.U.V.
Hundreds of Greenlandic women and girls were forcibly given contraception between 1960 and 1991, report says
Hundreds of Greenlandic women and girls were forcibly given contraception between 1960 and 1991, report says
September 9, 2025
COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — More than 350 Greenlandic Indigenous women and girls, including some 12 years old and younger, reported that they were forcibly given contraception by Danish health authorities in cases that date back to the 1960s, according to an independent investigation’s findings released Tuesday.
The Inuit victims, many of them teenagers at the time, were either fitted with intrauterine contraceptive devices, known as IUDs or coils, or given a hormonal birth control injection. They were not told details about the procedure, or did not give their consent.
The victims described traumatic experiences that left some with physical side effects, ranging from pain and bleeding to serious infections.
The governments of Denmark and Greenland officially apologized last month for their roles in the historic mistreatment in an apparent attempt to get ahead of the highly anticipated report, which covered 488 times when a woman was given forced contraception between 1960 and 1991.
Nearly 150 Inuit women last year sued Denmark and filed compensation claims against its health ministry, saying Danish health authorities violated their human rights. Danish authorities last year said as many as 4,500 women and girls — reportedly half the fertile women in Greenland at the time — received IUDs between the 1960s and mid-1970s.
The alleged purpose was to limit population growth in Greenland by preventing pregnancies. The population on the Arctic island was rapidly increasing at the time because of better living conditions and better health care.
Greenland took over its own health care programs on Jan. 1, 1992.
Centuries of dehumanizing policies
The investigation’s conclusion comes as Greenland is in the headlines alongside U.S. President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly said he seeks U.S. jurisdiction over Greenland. He has not ruled out a military force to take control of the mineral-rich, strategically located Arctic island.
The leaders of Denmark and Greenland say the island is not for sale. Denmark’s foreign minister recently summoned the top U.S. diplomat in the country for talks after the main national broadcaster reported that at least three people with connections to Trump have been carrying out covert influence operations in Greenland.
Greenland, which remains part of the Danish realm, was a colony under Denmark’s crown until 1953, when it became a province in the Scandinavian country. In 1979, the island was granted home rule, and 30 years later Greenland became a self-governing entity.
The forced contraception of Indigenous women and girls was part of centuries of Danish policies that dehumanized Greenlanders and their families.
The policies included the removal of young Inuit children from their parents to be given to Danish foster families for reeducation and controversial parental competency tests that resulted in the forced separation of Greenlandic families.
The report’s findings
The investigators received reports from 354 Greenlandic women who were between 48 and 89 years old when they spoke to authorities for the independent investigation, which began June 1, 2023 following a media outcry.
Almost all victims were between 12 and 37 years old at the time. One girl was under 12, but her exact age was not made public in Tuesday’s report due to anonymity concerns. The vast majority of the procedures occurred in Greenland.
Most of the women reported a single incident, while eight women said they were forcibly given contraception at least three times.
Bronx building Mamdani used to showcase new housing commish’s talents has 200 violations – after favored nonprofit ran it into the ground
Bronx building Mamdani used to showcase new housing commish’s talents has 200 violations – after favored nonprofit ran it into the ground
By Rich Calder
January 11, 2026
A Bronx apartment building Mayor Mamdani showcased to highlight the talents of his new housing commissioner, Dina Levy, has racked up nearly 200 unresolved violations, The Post has learned.
The 102-unit building at 1520 Sedgwick Ave. in Morris Heights as of Saturday had a staggering 194 open housing-code violations dating back to 2016 — including 88 “Class C” violations considered “immediately hazardous.”
They included rat and roach infestation; broken doors and refrigerators; and mold, records show.
Mamdani visited the affordable-housing complex best known for being the birthplace of hip-hop on Jan. 4 to introduce Levy, 54, a longtime tenants’ rights advocate and former state housing honcho, as his new Housing Preservation and Development commissioner.
He gushed how Levy — who grew up the silver-spooned daughter of two high-powered DC lawyers – has non-profit experience in building and overseeing affordable housing, a perfect fit for his leftist housing agenda that seeks to replace private landlords wherever possible.
Levy, who will make $277,605 a year as HPD commissioner, helped facilitate a 2011 deal for nonprofit Workforce Housing Advisors to buy and rehab the Sedgwick Avenue complex from private landlords.
Levy did this with help from a $5.6 million HPD loan she and her own nonprofit, the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, brokered to stabilize the building’s finances and maintain its “affordable” rental status, recalled Mamdani.
“Dina will no longer be petitioning HPD from the outside,” the mayor touted. “She will now be leading it from the inside, delivering the kind of change that can transform lives.”
However, the 59-year-old building isn’t the success story Mamdani and Levy claim it to be, The Post found.
It has more than double the dangerous “Class C” violations racked up at 85 Clarkson Ave., a dilapidated, privately owned 71-unit complex in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, Mamdani showcased three days earlier as a poster child for everything he believes is wrong with the city’s publicly-subsidized housing stock.
Tenants told The Post conditions were better under the old, private landlord.
“I have been here over 20 years, and I preferred it when it was under private management because they used to screen people in and out of the building,” said Mordistine Alexander, among the dozens of tenants at 1520 Sedgwick whose homes have open HPD violations.
Alexander, 49, who has rented her three-bedroom apartment since 1999, said the unit routinely lacks heat and hot water, its bathroom and kitchen facades are crumbling and windows need to be replaced
She said she’s been without a kitchen light for months — despite asking for fluorescent light bulbs to be replaced since October.
And she said she had to take care of fixing a major rodent problem in the unit herself because she “couldn’t wait any longer” for Workforce Housing Group to respond.
“Since [the nonprofit] took over, the building has deteriorated. They lack porters. No one is maintaining it, and the complaints fall on deaf ears – especially if you complain a lot,” said Alexander, adding she wishes Levy never won her fight to turn the building over to the nonprofit.
Yet Mamdani wants more complexes like the Sedgewick Avenue building. He supports Stalinesque legislation designed to control how private property is sold so that more nonprofits can oversee rent-stabilized apartments.
“You have to laugh at the hypocrisy,” said Councilwoman Joann Ariola (R-Queens). “These nonprofits are proving themselves to be little more than taxpayer-funded slumlords, and this blatant double-standard is all part of the administration’s planned attack on private ownership in New York City.”
Like Cea Weaver, the much-maligned lefty boss of Mamdani’s newly created Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, HPD Commissioner Levy grew up in privilege.
She is the twin daughter of lawyer Ed Levy and his late civil-rights attorney wife Mary, who owned multiple properties, including a townhouse in historic Georgetown they sold in 2023 that is currently worth $1.4 million. She has said she is a native of affluent Maplewood, NJ.
Levy, a Delaware University graduate, has been a rebel-rousing, radical tenant advocate for decades, even spending time in the slammer as a young organizer.
“It was cool,” Levy once told Crain’s New York Business of her 1997 Dallas arrest for criminal trespassing at a run-down affordable-housing complex. “I got really hooked.”
Levy boasted in the 2011 interview that her “rough, caustic style” irks landlords.
The Sedgwick Avenue site has more open HPD violations than roughly three-quarters of the privately owned, rent-stabilized buildings in NYC — but Mamdani is “too focused” on pushing the abolition of private property, said Kenny Burgos, a former Bronx assemblyman who heads the New York Apartment Association that represents landlords of rent-stabilized units.
Nonprofit-managed housing “consistently run higher violation counts despite having government-backed loans and [being eligible to avoid] paying property taxes, so they should have a lot more freed-up cash to make these buildings run efficiently, and yet are unable to do so — even with good intentions and no goal of profit,” added Burgos.
Workforce Housing Group did not return messages, but the HPD defended Levy’s involvement in the sale of the Sedgwick Avenue building to the nonprofit group.
“When the building was at risk of being purchased by a predatory buyer, Dina Levy organized alongside the tenants and kept the building affordable,” said agency spokesman Matt Rauschenbach.
“And now the building is undergoing an $8 million preservation renovation to improve conditions and make sure it is a safe, affordable place for the tenants who live there to call home.”
Mamdani’s new tenant advocate wants to seize private property
Original: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/01/06/mamdani-weaver-mayor-nyc-housing/
Archive: https://archive.ph/u7MhS
Mamdani’s new tenant advocate wants to seize private property
Socialists keep dreaming of collectivism, as New Yorkers suffer from unserious housing policy.
Editorial board
January 6, 2026
It didn’t take long for the warmth of collectivism to heat up the debate around home ownership in New York City. In one of his first actions as mayor, Zohran Mamdani relaunched the Office to Protect Tenants and appointed Cea Weaver as its director. Weaver, a fellow member of the Democratic Socialists of America, has claimed homeownership is a “weapon of white supremacy” and clamored to “seize private property!”
How Weaver plans to navigate the little problem of constitutionally protected property rights is left unclear. But in the words of the mayor on election night, “there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.” It’s sad but unsurprising Weaver has taken a place in Mamdani’s administration, years after she was reportedly passed over for a spot on the City Planning Commission because of opposition on the city council. “Guess it’s easier to name a communist to a position that doesn’t require confirmation,” said New York State Assembly member Kalman Yeger (D).
Mamdani was elected in November to tackle affordability, but his opening moves suggest the housing crisis will worsen under his leadership as he works to expand rent controls and prioritizes socialist platitudes over serious housing policy. A news conference on his first full day in power, when he announced Weaver’s appointment, was held outside 85 Clarkson Avenue: a rent-stabilized apartment building in Brooklyn whose owner, the Pinnacle Group, is currently involved in a bankruptcy case.
Having toured the apartments, Mamdani witnessed for himself the eroding pipes, busted floorboards and poor maintenance – all common consequences of rent controls wherever they are tried. As we have repeatedly warned, capping what landlords can charge tenants, especially below market rate, leads to unlivable accommodations and a broader rise in average rent costs. It does not lead to cheaper, nicer rental options.
Mamdani is also launching “Rental Ripoff” hearings — an opportunity for tenants in the five boroughs to publicly level their grievances against “bad” landlords in the court of public opinion. A far cry from a housing court, these Chavismo-style stunts will do nothing to help New Yorkers struggling to make rent.
Mamdani and Weaver might enjoy fantasizing about a collective utopia without property rights. In reality, renters are going to be left fending for themselves as they navigate ever-dilapidating housing conditions.
Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog 