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Denali wolf (Photo courtesy of National Park service)

The state plans to suspend its largest wolf control program. The Upper Yukon Tanana area program, which has targeted wolves in an area of the eastern interior since 2004, is scheduled to cease after the 2017-2018 season.

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The States long running Upper Yukon Tanana wolf control effort is aimed at increasing Forty Mile caribou numbers for hunters by reducing the number of wolves on the caribou herds calving grounds, but Alaska Department of Fish and Game regional supervisor Darren Bruning said recent years field research indicates wolves are not the limiting factor.

Potential signs of nutritionallimitations were identified, including increased caribou birth rates and reduced calf weights, Bruning said.

A Fish and Game study published earlier this year said Forty Mile caribou grew from 13,000 in 1990 to over 50,000 at last count, but that the biggest growth was prior to wolf control. Since 2004, over a thousand Forty Mile area wolves have been shot from aircraft, under a state intensive management program thats cost millions of dollars. Bruning stresses the programs scientific value.

The information gained through the research activities associated with intensive management are the most valuable product of the program, Bruning said.

The Forty Mile area wolf control program demonstrates the problem with manipulating a complicated natural system, according to retired wildlife biologist Fran Mauer of Fairbanks. Mauer, a critic of predator control, said the state may find itself working in the opposite direction.

If a herd is reaching carrying capacity, its imperative to be ready to reduce the number of animals on the land to preventa precipitous collapse or crash, Mauer said.

Mauer, is frustrated that the state hasnt already curtailed the Forty Mile area wolf kill. Hunting can be used to thin the herd, but Mauer, said its ironic that the state may also end up relying on wolves to reduce the caribou to a sustainable number.

The concern is that weve already reached, or are approaching, carrying capacity, Mauer said. And if anything, we may need those wolves to help bring the herd down.

The Alaska Board of Game authorizes predator control based on Fish and Game recommendations. Board chairman Ted Spraker conceded wildlife management is not always a simple equation.

We all understand how complex and complicated these issues are, Spraker said. And it also takes time to understand if these trends are a one-year trend or is it just a blip. Or is this population moving up or down.

Spraker said environmental factors, like climate change, further complicate the situation. The state plans research over the next five years to look at what happens to Forty Mile caribou after wolf control ends. Wolves killed in the state program have included animals based in the Yukon Charley Rivers National Preserve.

While predator control took place outside of the preserve, it did have an impact on the population and the makeup of wolf packs within Yukon Charley, Spraker said.

Preserve Superintendent Greg Dudgeon said some of the wolves lost were part of a long running NPS study, which was halted due to the state wolf kill.

We did lose several years in what had been a 22-year-long for wolves with home ranges within Yukon Charley Rivers natural preserve, Dudgeon said. We wont get that back.

A recently published article on the Yukon Charley wolf study details impacts of state wolf control on wolves in the 2.7 million acre preserve. Dudgeon said Yukon Charley resumed wolf research this past winter, collaring seven animals to track.

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Interior wolf control program to end - Alaska Public Radio Network

As the discussions at the ANC's 2017 policy conference intensify, one of the controversial policy issues to receive more attention will be media transformation.

Admittedly, transformation has become a stalled cause as noted by Professor Jane Duncan, thereby vindicating to a certain degree the ANC's posture in this regard.

While the elevation of this policy by the ANC is laudable, the manner in which it is pursued may not yield desired outcomes.

It will in fact turn it into a grit coercive rhetoric, which may be covertly resisted by the private sector through ticking of boxes and fronting. This is because of the following reasons: ownership and control and racial focus.

While these elements are critical given the country's history resulting in the ownership and control of media in a few white hands - hence the four conglomerates in the print sector - the significant shareholding currently held by the unions, through their investment vehicles, has shown that mere changes in the racial makeup of ownership and control, and the board's appointment will not automatically bring about meaningful transformation.

Media organisations operate in a capitalist environment, which shape their conduct and behaviour, irrespective of their ownership and control.

Indeed ownership and control is a primary step, but it cannot be transformation in itself. Neither can it automatically result in achieving other elements such as language and content diversity.

These elements have their own complexities and they need different strategies of intervention. This will help in monitoring where progress is being made.

Again the obsession with ownership and control has led to a narrow approach focusing only on the private sector to the exclusion of public institutions such as PanSALB (Pan South African Language Board) and the MDDA (Media Development and Diversity Agency), who equally have a responsibility to develop African languages and media diversity in its various forms.

While transformation has been a fundamental post-apartheid media policy, it has never been clearly defined.

An adjective of radicalism has since been added to it, thus complicating it even further. In the absence of a clear definition, backed up by credible research and regular monitoring, meaningful transformation can only be rhetoric.

Media transformation should be understood for what it is. At times it is used as an instrument to unbundle monopolies.

This is a wrong approach. It is not necessary that monopolies are inimical to transformation. It is quite possible that monopolies can be used as a vehicle to pursue transformation.

Finally, timing is critical in policy making. While media transformation may have been part of SA's democratic path, the sudden noise made around it, compounded by the grit coercion, may be viewed as the ANC's frantic attempt to muzzle the media in view of power shift within and outside the party.

The ANC has been built on the art of ideological persuasion, not coercion, hence its broad church character. Therefore, its success in pushing these kinds of policies through will be determined by its ability to balance the art of persuasion and grit coercion.

Pursuing grit coercion may bring undesired results. Internally, it may bring about policy ambiguity and discord. Externally, it may be alienating to those moderate thinkers who would have been alliance partners in this regard.

Read more:
OPINION: Media transformation can be won through persuasion - SowetanLIVE

State media said Kim supervised the launch of Pyongyang's first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) Tuesday, which it says is powerful enough to reach the US mainland.

"With a broad smile on his face," Kim called on officials to "frequently send big and small 'gift packages' to the Yankees," KCNA reported, as it listed the technical successes of the rocket, identified by the North Koreans as a Hwasong-14.

The report said the missile was able to carry a "large-sized heavy nuclear warhead," and despite "extreme overload and vibration the nuclear warhead detonation control device successfully worked."

Among the elements being tested was a warhead tip "made of newly developed domestic carbon compound material" designed to withstand the extreme heat of re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere.

It added "the warhead accurately hit the targeted waters without any structural breakdown at the end of its flight."

North Korea said the missile flew on a steep trajectory, going 2,800 kilometers (1,741 miles) above the Earth, before splashing down in sea off the Korean Peninsula 930 kilometers (578 miles) from its launch site.

The missile was launched Tuesday from Panghyon, in North Pyongan province, and landed in the sea off the Korean Peninsula.

Claims of unbridled success by North Korea's state media need to be taken with a pinch of salt, said Melissa Hanham, a senior research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

"We can never take KCNA exclusively as a source because its so prone to embellishment, (and) the information it reports can never be confirmed.

"On the other hand, it's not out of the realm of possibility... I think its best to assume that they have successfully tested an ICBM. The reason they're sharing this technical data (through state media) is to prove that they have it," she said.

Hanham said analysts are now examining the images provided by North Korean state media, to look for similarities to previously launched missiles.

The Hwasong-14 tested on July 4 is similar to the Hwasong-12, which was test-fired in May, but perhaps with a larger engine configuration and an extra stage, a section of the missile that's released during flight. "The second stage looks like something we haven't seen before," she said.

While the test seems to have indicated the missile's range was at least 6,000 kilometers, Hanham said its maximum potential could be even further. "The scary thing is, (we don't know if) they even tested it to its full range," she said.

Based on analysis of its visible fuel and oxidizer tanks, it could hit as far away as Washington DC, though that class of missile is yet to be tested, she said.

David Wright, co-director and senior scientist at the global security program with the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), said North Korean rocket scientists seem to be making advances on multiple fronts.

"One of the things that's interesting, watching from a technical point of view, is that it has eight or nine different missiles in development in parallel," he told CNN.

"They're making progress and they have a lot of things in the workshop that they're putting together."

There is a growing consensus among analysts that North Korea has the ability to build a warhead that can fit onto a missile.

Five nuclear tests over the past 11 years suggest that the regime has indeed developed nuclear weaponry, and many analysts now believe that the miniaturization process is progressing rapidly.

If images released by KCNA in March 2016, showing Kim posing with what appeared to be a nuclear warhead, are to be believed, progress has indeed been made on this front.

The UCS' Wright thinks that while they may not yet have succeeded in producing a warhead capable of being attached to their new class of ICBM, the clock is ticking.

"The big question is whether or not they can build something that's both small enough and rugged enough to withstand the flight of a long range missile," Wright said.

"That could be a year or so. It's hard to tell. But it's clear that unless something changes that they're on their way to both a long range missile and a warhead to put on it.

"And I would argue that that's exactly why the United States needs to be finding a way to talk to North Korea to basically put a cap on this program."

Here is the original post:
North Korea state media celebrates 'gift' to 'American bastards' - CNN International

I just read a piece about racial attacks on American Sikhs published in the Los Angeles Times.

I am not sure it would have educated me adequately about the community if I was a non-Sikh born and raised in the United States.

It doesn't have to. In fact, no newspaper or TV story about communities can be expected to serve as an encyclopaedia on their evolution and philosophies.

More so in this Google age. No Wikipedia read can turn a reporter overnight into a science, diplomatic, military, space, financial or political expert, off her beat.

Google and Wikipedia, at best, offer them a decent opportunity to be factually accurate.

"Sikhism, which has roots in the Punjab region of northern India and eastern Pakistan, is the worlds fifth-largest religion," read the story in the Los Angeles Times, which is absolutely correct and so is every other line in the piece about attacks on the members of the American-Sikh community.

The reporter has done a great job. If I were to write a news report about Mormons, I too would turn to authoritative sources for my storytelling in order to be accurate. That's how gold-standard journalism works.

But it's a sheer myth circulated by PR agencies and PR-savvy individuals that mass media can be a vehicle to promote religions. In one of my previous blogs, I wrote in detail about the global deficit of expert reporting on faiths.

Religions in the lead don't turn to TV stations and other media outlets to build narrative. They control the narrative.

The global Sikh political power - Jagmeet Singh, Ontario MPP, launching his bid for Canada's New Democratic Party. Photo: Harmeet Shah Singh

And there lies the key.

During my last trip to North America, I had a chance to meet up with the who's who of the diasporic community.

Some of them were big legal brains, some top political leaders, some economists and some entrepreneurs.

Almost all of them exhibited a genuine desire to help the Sikh community back in India, in whatever way they could.

Ajaib Singh Chatha, a Brampton-based barrister, shared his passion about introducing moral education in Punjab's school curriculum.

The gentleman has already commissioned several books on morality, several of them contained short stories.

In Mississauga, barrister Harminder Singh Dhillon spoke fervidly about the struggle and rise of Sikh migrants in Malaysia.

At his plush suite-office in downtown Toronto, an elderly Sikh, who preferred not to be named, pulled out books depicting rare Sikh art in what was a stunning departure from his public image as an economist.

I am citing North-American Sikhs as examples because they thrived in what is perhaps one of the world's finest ecosystems.

But who I still missed meeting there was a Sikh running a thoroughly-professional media property.

I sat with some owners of bilingual newspapers and TV outlets, but none that I could look up to as a skilled professional. Most of them had real estate as their main business.

I am not really sure how many of them have employed how many journalists drawn from the media industry.

No wonder reporting from their outlets resonate thinly outside of the community audience, which too is limited to migrants from the 1960s onwards.

The diasporic Sikh story thus remains dependent on media houses managed by non-Sikh professionals.

The late Patwant Singh and Khushwant Singh were perhaps the only two Sikhs in independent India who were gifted with a rare ability to communicate compellingly with the world outside.

Among them, Khuswant Singh, for the record, called himself agnostic.

Why is it that the Sikhs have made a mark in every sphere other than communications?

Ajaib Singh Chatha, a Brampton-based barrister, shared his passion about introducing moral education in Punjab's school curriculum. Photo: Harmeet Shah Singh

Why is it that Sikh-controlled media, both in Punjab and in countries as advanced as Canada, has yet to come out of age?

Throughout their lifetime, the Gurus laid heavy emphasis on scholarly and intellectual pursuits. Compiled in Sri Guru Granth Sahib are writings not only of the six of the 10 Gurus but thinkers and philosophers of various other traditions.

Guru Gobind Singh had a galaxy of 52 poet/scholars in his court.

That's how the Sikh narrative developed in a hostile reign.

Sikhs in the modern world have invested in everything but in tools of information.

A local newspaper here or a TV/radio station there can at best be a means only for intracommunity networking.

Paid PR campaigns, press statements fizzle out of public memory, sooner or later.

Physical and ideological attacks on visible minorities are stemming from the eye of what I call a global storm of aggressive right wing.

The real power to counter it lies in the narrative. And for the narrative, you need to produce a new breed of Patwant and Khushwant Singhs - my Sikh metaphors for an irresistible talent in communications.

Also read: Why Khalistani narrative about Canada is a disservice to Sikhs

Original post:
Why global Sikh community needs to control its narrative - DailyO

Standing outon distributed platforms presents a brandingchallenge for publishers. News feeds are crowded, and people scroll fast. In aReuters experiment, most peopleremembered how they found a news story, but only 37 percent could recall the name of the news brand itself when coming from search, compared to 47 percent from social.

Its a crowded market, and theres lots of evidence to indicate that our audiences are not always aware that what theyre seeing on social platforms is produced by one publisher or another. We need to be much bolder on all this, said Mark Frankel, social media editor at BBC News.

Digiday asked five publishers Business Insider UK, The Times of London, The Sun, CNN and the BBC how theyre working on standing out. Here are the takeaways:

Make a quick impression BBC News, CNN, Business Insider, The Sun and The Times heavily brandposts and videos that go out on Facebook and Instagramto make sure people know the source within seconds of seeing them in their feeds. CNN wenta step further, incorporating the same red in its logo to specific words in the bodyof articles it runson Apple News, Facebook, Google AMP or Instagram.

Audiences see our signature red logo and know theyre getting verified, reliable news and information. That recognition becomes even more important in their feeds where there is little distinction among fact and fiction, said Mitra Kalita, vpof digital programming at CNN.

Business Insider has begun adding banners to some Facebook thumbnail posts, as doesthe Guardian, so thebrands travel whenever alink is shared outside of Facebook pages.

Making contentsynonymous with brand Publishers also are using content and tone to reinforce their brands. We try to inject as much personality as possible, particularly now that Facebook is algorithmically favoring [users] reactions, said Charles Clark, social media editor at Business Insider UK. Publishers need emotion and personality if they want their content and brand to travel.

Bustle is looking for an analytical, detail-oriented, self-starter who can leverage their problem solving abilities in a creative environment. Interested? Apply below.

Similarly, News UK tabloid paper The Sun favors videos that are positive, funny and inclusive when it posts to Facebook. We find that positivity is inherently more shareable, and I see our job with video on social to challenge peoples perception of The Sun, said Derek Brown, head of video at News UK.

Consistency across sub-brandsThe Sun has various sub-brands, such as fantasy football site Dream Team and Sun Fabulous, and each has its own style and tone. But for The Times, also owned by News UK,its more important to maintain thesame tone and techniques across the publications sites and verticals. Thats why all text on social posts are edited byTimes journalists to ensure the standard and tone is the same as the publication. They alsouse an in-house tool that pulls in the most shareable quotes into digital cards with a uniform tone and design.

They allow us to create images to go with articles where we dont have a lead image to pull out the most controversial opinions in comment pieces or the most shareable fact from the article, said William Park, social media editor at The Times.

Link:
'We need to be bolder': How publishers control their brand identity on social platforms - Digiday