标签： North America

In an inspiring tale of youthful entrepreneurship and environmental stewardship, 13-year-old Mahra Hamad Al Naqbi from Ras Al Khaimah has become the youngest Emirati to achieve international acclaim in beekeeping. Her journey began at age 10 when she installed her first two beehives in her family’s backyard, embarking on a path that would lead to multiple global awards and the establishment of her own honey brand, Asal Al Mahra.

Mahra’s methodical approach to apiculture started with formal training courses where she mastered hive structures, bee behavior patterns, and honey production techniques. What began as a cautious family experiment—with parents initially concerned about bee stings—evolved into a fully-supported enterprise as her expertise grew. From those initial two hives, her operation expanded to 35 colonies by 2025, requiring innovative solutions for seasonal honey production across multiple emirates.

The young apiarist demonstrates remarkable business acumen, strategically planning her operations years in advance. She transports her hives to specialized locations depending on the honey variety—utilizing sidr tree farms in Abu Dhabi for premium winter honey and managing logistical arrangements with local beekeepers. Each hive contains eight frames capable of producing 10-12 kilograms of honey under optimal conditions.

Mahra’s achievements include prestigious awards from the Paris Honey Awards and London Honey Awards, where she made history as both the first Emirati and youngest-ever winner. She has also earned the Sheikh Mansoor bin Zayed Cultural Excellence Award’s top honor. Beyond commercial success, she serves as a ‘Bee Ambassador’ conducting educational sessions in schools and institutions to promote sustainable beekeeping practices and pollinator conservation.

Despite international recognition, Mahra maintains her academic commitments while continuing to expand her expertise. Her future ambitions include conducting scientific research on bee behavior and honey production, demonstrating that her passion extends far beyond commercial success. Her story represents a new generation of Emirati youth blending traditional practices with modern environmental consciousness.

In an extraordinary display of political theater, American protest movements have embraced absurdist costuming as strategic resistance. The phenomenon reached viral prominence in October when immigration agents in Portland sprayed crowd control chemicals into the protruding snout of an activist’s inflatable frog costume—an image that quickly symbolized the escalating tensions between demonstrators and federal authorities.

This incident catalyzed the transformation of amphibian imagery from far-right symbol to left-wing protest icon. The frog costume, initially spotted in Portland’s quirky protest culture, has since proliferated across demonstrations from San Diego to Boston, and internationally in Tokyo and London. The unexpected adoption represents a remarkable reclamation of symbolic imagery in America’s political landscape.

Professor LM Bogad of UC Davis, a Guggenheim Fellow specializing in performance art, identifies this as ‘tactical frivolity’—a calculated strategy using humor to challenge authority. ‘It makes it look worse if you respond with violence to someone in a ridiculous costume,’ Bogad explains, noting how absurd imagery creates ‘irresistible’ visual narratives that disarm opponents while attracting media attention.

The frog’s political journey traces back to Pepe, a cartoon character created by artist Matt Furie that was co-opted by alt-right communities during the 2016 election. Once deployed as a symbol by white supremacists and notably retweeted by Donald Trump himself, Pepe’s association with extremism prompted Furie to attempt reclaiming his creation through legal battles and even killing off the character in comics.

Portland’s protest culture, with its unofficial motto ‘Keep Portland Weird,’ provided fertile ground for symbolic transformation. The city’s tradition of eccentric demonstrations—featuring nude cyclists, public yoga, and 80s-style aerobics—created an environment where inflatable dinosaurs, unicorns, and axolotls join frogs as instruments of political theater.

Operation Inflation, a Portland-based collective, has institutionalized this approach by distributing over 350 inflatable costumes to protesters nationwide. Co-founder Brooks Brown draws parallels to Civil Rights Era strategies: ‘Our job is to build a different stage, and to force them onto ours.’ The group explicitly aims to counter the administration’s narrative of protesters as violent mobs through deliberate absurdity.

This methodology extends beyond American borders, resembling tactics used by Serbia’s Otpor movement against Milosevic and the coded use of Winnie the Pooh imagery by critics of Xi Jinping. As Bogad notes: ‘Authoritarians don’t like to be laughed at. Without even giving a speech, you are undermining the authoritarian script.’

The legal system has taken note: a federal judge’s dissenting opinion specifically referenced protesters’ ‘well-known penchant for wearing chicken suits, inflatable frog costumes, or nothing at all’ when challenging the characterization of Portland as a ‘war zone.’

What emerges is a sophisticated understanding of symbolic warfare in the digital age—where memes become battlegrounds, costumes become rhetorical devices, and the most effective resistance might just come wearing webbed feet and bulging eyes.

Annette Dionne, the final surviving member of the world’s first known surviving quintuplets, has passed away at age 91, marking the end of an extraordinary chapter in Canadian history. The Dionne Quints Home Museum confirmed her death, celebrating her lifelong advocacy for children’s rights that emerged from her controversial childhood experience.

Born in 1934 during the Great Depression’s peak in Ontario, Annette and her four identical sisters—Yvonne, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie—achieved immediate global celebrity status as medical miracles. Their unprecedented survival captured international imagination, leading to Hollywood feature films, magazine cover appearances, and commercial endorsements ranging from toothpaste to syrup.

The Ontario government’s controversial intervention saw the infants removed from their family and placed in a specially designed compound known as “Quintland,” which operated as a public exhibition site attracting thousands of tourists. For years, the children lived under constant observation with minimal parental contact, creating a childhood devoid of normal privacy and family bonds.

Following their return to parental custody, three sisters—Annette, Cécile, and Yvonne—initiated legal proceedings against the Ontario government in their adulthood. The landmark 1998 settlement awarded them approximately C$3 million in recognition of the exploitation and unusual circumstances they endured during their formative years.

Annette outlived all her siblings, including her four quintuplet sisters and nine other Dionne children. Her passing represents the closing of a significant historical period that sparked important conversations about child protection and ethical treatment of minors in extraordinary circumstances. The Dionne Quints Museum continues to preserve their legacy as both a medical marvel and a cautionary tale about childhood commercialization.