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After logging bans, Australia turns to “forest thinning”. Does it reduce fire risk?
(news.mongabay.com)
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Idaho Council on Indian Affairs votes to draft letter urging state lawmakers to protect Medicaid
(ictnews.org)
Laura Guido
Idaho Capital Sun
Originally published on Idaho Capital Sun.
TheIdaho Council on Indian Affairs on Wednesday voted to draft a letter urging state budget writers to protect Medicaid, including Medicaid expansion, and exempt Native American tribal members from further cuts.
The council includes legislators and Idaho tribal representatives and advises the governor, Legislature and state agencies.
Michael Steele, a policy analyst for the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, asked the council to support the program, especially for the state’s Native American residents. He noted that the federal government reimburses 100% of Medicaid services costs for tribal members.
“The past year that I’ve worked for the Shoshone-Bannock Tribe, I’ve seen firsthand the importance of Medicaid,” Steele said. “I see individuals on a weekly, sometimes daily basis, just walking past my office. Many of them are vulnerable children, elders or other tribal members that are really suffering … The need is staggering, and Medicaid saves lives.”
Steele noted that treaty responsibilities between U.S. and tribes call for the provision of health care to tribal members, and some of that responsibility had been delegated to states through Medicaid.
He said that 54% of tribal members living on Fort Hall Indian Reservation are enrolled in Medicaid, and that funding from Medicaid represented 82% of the Tribal Health and Human Services budget.
Donna Thompson, of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, suggested that other tribes identify the percentage of their members who use Medicaid.
The council voted unanimously to draft the letter. Rep. Brandon Mitchell, R-Moscow, noted that he’d want to see it before he put his name on it.
Idaho budget committee members have been weighing cuts this year to balance budget; some have eyed Medicaid
The 2026 legislative session has been characterized by budget cutting, as the state entered the year with revenues coming in below projections.
The state budget writers on the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee, known as JFAC, have already approved $131 million in across-the-board cuts to nearly every agency for the current fiscal year, which ends June 30. The committee also voted to adopt an additional $143 million in additional permanent cuts for the next fiscal year.
Those cuts exempted the Medicaid program. However, Gov. Brad Little in his proposed budget called for $22 million in Medicaid cuts for the next fiscal year, although it’s up to the Legislature to determine how to reduce the budgets. The proposal includes reductions in services considered “optional,” under federal Medicaid regulations, such as those for in-home care for people with disabilities and dental coverage for adults.
No legislative proposal has emerged yet this session, but some lawmakers have eyed cutting Medicaid expansion to reduce costs. The Medicaid expansion program was approved by Idaho voters in 2018 via a ballot initiative to expand Medicaid eligibility to those who fell in the gap between earning too much for traditional Medicaid and those who didn’t qualify for premium tax credits to afford private insurance through the state health care marketplace.
The post Idaho Council on Indian Affairs votes to draft letter urging state lawmakers to protect Medicaid appeared first on ICT.
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Amelia Schafer
ICT
MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin – Growing up in Arizona, Lizz Tsosie-Stachura said she wasn’t always a fan of tea. But in 2010, things changed for the Diné and Lenca woman as she had her first taste of Teavana tea and realized just how tasty it can be.
“Once I realized there was actually good tea out there I started exploring more,” she said. “Back then finding loose leaf tea was hard. … Any time I saw it, I would buy it. Since then, I knew I had a passion for tea. It just sparked something inside of me.”
Even after Teavana closed in 2018, Tsosie-Stachura said she continued to nourish her newfound love of tea.
Liz Tsosie-Stachura poses for a photo at a Tootsie’s Tea pop-up sale in Milwaukee. She plans to open her storefront in spring 2026. (Photo courtesy of Liz Tsosie-Stachura).
Now in 2026, Tsosie-Stachura is preparing to open her brick and mortar business, Tootsie’s Tea, just west of downtown Milwaukee. The business’ name comes from a frequent mispronunciation of her maiden name, Tsosie, which is a Navajo name.
“People would always pronounce it Tootsie or Too-saucy,” she said. “So I said, ‘If I’m going to start a business, I’m going to call it Tootsie’s Tea.’”
Tea blends are hand crafted by owner Lizz Tsosie-Stachura from the Tootsie’s Tea kitchen in Milwaukee. The storefront is expected to open in the spring of 2026. (Photo by Amelia Schafer, ICT)
Created in December 2020, Tootsie’s Tea has also brought her closer to her culture, she said. She didn’t grow up drinking Navajo tea. Many elders, including those in her family, had felt too ashamed of their culture to drink it, she said.
“They come from a generation where they had to be ashamed of who they were,” she said. “So they didn’t always share these traditions and cultures.”
Navajo tea, ch’ilgohwéhí’deí in the Navajo language, is created using the cota plant (Thelesperma filifolium), which is native to Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado and Nevada. For generations, Navajo families have boiled the plant to make tea and dye.
The end product is a natural remedy for colds as it reduces mucus and is caffeine free.
When her family did drink Navajo tea, it was usually around Christmas as a treat, she said. As she got older and grew more interested in tea, Tsosie-Stachura said, she wanted to reclaim the traditional staple drink for herself and her family.
“It’s almost created, like a bond within my family,” she said. “I’m hearing stories from them that I’ve never even heard before, just about [my relatives] being a toddler and remembering going harvesting with their parents … just different memories of that and then it actually even motivated my aunt to go and harvest them and give some to me.”
In December 2024, Tsosie-Stachura said, she decided to open a storefront for Tootsie’s Tea, which has been operating as an online business since its creation.
Starting a tea company has brought her closer to her family and the local Indigenous community, she said. Right now, as she’s still preparing for Tootsie’s Tea’s grand opening, Tsosie-Stachura said she’s sold tea at local Indigenous markets and gets many of her ingredients from local Indigenous farmers.
With a grant from Feeding America, she was able to buy her own food processor, allowing her to quickly craft blends in the business’ kitchen area. Tsosie-Stachura creates all her blends herself, meaning she picks individual ingredients based on flavor profile and health benefits.
A jar of harvested plants for Navajo Tea sits in the kitchen at Tootsie’s Tea in Milwaukee, waiting to be individually packaged and sold. (Photo by Amelia Schafer, ICT)
The brand incorporates traditional staples like cedar into different blends, one of which being the Blood Orange Forest Tea blend, crafted with orange, hibiscus, rose hips, rooibos, cedar, blood orange, Door County Cherry, sage, basil and lingzhi.
Cedar has been used by Indigenous people for generations. Due to its antibacterial properties, many tribes smudge with cedar to cleanse bacteria or illness from a space or boil the leaves down as a tea to be drunk by the sick.
“I really love the curiosity that a lot of people have with my teas,” she said. “I love when they’re like repeat customers. That makes me so happy that they don’t just try it, but they come back for more.”
Loose leaf tea creates a stronger, more flavorful cup, she explained. Ground tea found prepackaged in grocery stores often contains a very small amount of the actual ingredients, leading to a more watered down flavor, often lacking essential nutrients.
By working with loose leaves, Tsosie-Stachura said she’s able to more effectively control the end product. It also allows for quality control when it comes to ethically sourcing ingredients.
“I don’t want to discount or discredit any box tea at all, but I think that when I do buy tea from other, smaller places or smaller batches, I feel that energy,” she said.
Right now, her products are sold in 3.5-inch glass jars or in 1-pound mylar bags. Tsosie-Stachura offers a buy-back program for glass jars, helping promote recycling and an environmentally friendly business model.
With a new machine, Tsosie-Stachura said she’ll soon be able to create her own tea bags with recyclable film. Many big-name, boxed tea bags have been found to contain as much as 11.6 million microplastics and are often non-biodegradable.
Tootsie’s Tea owner Liz Tsosie-Stachura was able to purchase two new food processing machines using a grant from Feeding America. (Photo by Amelia Schafer, ICT)
Tsosie-Stachura said she purchases ingredients from Indigenous foragers whenever possible and makes sure ingredients are harvested in a good way – ethically with good intentions and by giving thanks to the plant. Several of her suppliers harvest on the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa reservation and Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa reservation.
“I’m still looking for more [to buy from],” she said.
The business is also about giving back to the community, she said. Tsosie-Stachura’s tea will be featured throughout the year in Feeding America, elder food boxes. Through the program, boxes of healthy food are distributed to Indigenous elders throughout Wisconsin. Additionally, 15 percent of her business’ profits will go back into the Milwaukee community.
The storefront will feature a community gathering space. Tsosie-Stachura said she plans to hold elders’ tea parties in the room and various community events. With a citywide Indigenous population estimated around 10,000 people, there are few opportunities or spaces for gathering for Native people in Milwaukee, she said.
“I definitely feel like there’s a community, but there isn’t so much a gathering place,” she said. “I hope that I can have a gathering place.”
Tsosie-Stachura expects to open Tootsie’s Tea’s storefront in spring 2026.
The post Serving up Indigenous tea in Milwaukee appeared first on ICT.
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Federal investigators and tribal police discovered two sets of human remains while searching a rural area of the Chickasaw Nation.
The remains have not yet been identified, but families have been notified, according to a Bureau of Indian Affairs news release.
The discovery followed a large-scale joint-operation between the Bureau of Indian Affairs Missing and Murdered Unit and the Chickasaw Lighthorse Police Department alongside several other federal and state agencies. They were looking into the disappearance of Molly Miller, a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, and Colt Haynes. Miller was 17 at the time of her disappearance and Haynes was 21.
The pair was last seen in Overbrook, Oklahoma on July 8, 2013, according to the BIA’s Missing in Indian Country page.
As of 2024, Oklahoma is ranked second in the nation for missing and murdered Indigenous people, according to the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
There are currently 87 missing American Indian and Alaska Native people in Oklahoma, according to the database. The database reports 920 missing American Indian and Alaska Native people nationwide.
On Feb. 18, search teams discovered the two sets of remains in an area between Oswalt Road and Pike Road and Long Hollow Road roughly two hours south of Oklahoma City. Remains were collected by the FBI Evidence Response Team and Oklahoma Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for examination and identification.
The search covered more than 1,000 acres of land in Love County, Oklahoma, which borders Texas. This area had not previously been searched for the pair according to investigators.
Anyone with information related to this investigation is encouraged to contact the BIA-MMU anonymously at 1-833-560-2065, emailing OJS_MMU@BIA.gov or text BIAMMU to 847411.
The post Human remains uncovered during missing and murdered unit search in Oklahoma appeared first on ICT.
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Jonathan Mertzig was wary when Madison rolled out a fleet of 62 electric buses in the fall of 2024. The city had tested a few of them four years earlier, and it had not gone well. Winter in Wisconsin gets mighty cold, and batteries do not like the cold.
“Operationally, they were a nightmare,” said Mertzig, a member of the Madison Area Bus Advocates. “Every time you got on one there would be an alarm going off. You never knew when one was going to die in the middle of the road.”
Cities across the country have experienced similar growing pains while electrifying public transit. A study conducted in Ithaca, New York, found that range can plummet by about half when the mercury hits 24 to 32 degrees Fahrenheit. That makes Madison, which sees an average of 18 days below zero each year, a tough proving ground. Riders like Mertzig, who experiences severe migraines and avoids driving, need the buses to run no matter what.
This time, they’ve done just that.
Metro Transit, which provides about 9.1 million rides annually, installed overhead chargers on key routes, allowing buses to quickly top off at several stops. Improved battery capacity also lets them go further between plug-ins. The real test came January 23, when the temperature dropped to -4 F, shutting down the University of Wisconsin-Madison — but the buses kept running.
That said, the rollout has not gone flawlessly. Last year the transit agency apologized when the overhead charging system malfunctioned, sidelining buses. In January, maintenance issues forced it to reduce service on two routes, but officials insist cold weather was not a factor.
Just a few years ago, electric buses routinely faltered in cold conditions, reinforcing doubts about whether they could replace diesel and natural gas-burning fleets in northern cities. Now, with better batteries and strategically placed chargers, Madison is at the forefront of a small but growing number of cities testing whether those doubts still hold. Making the technology work through a long Midwestern winter could reshape how others approach electrification. Some 3.6 million commuters nationwide rely upon buses to get around. With transportation accounting for roughly 28 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, transit agencies are looking for alternatives to polluting machinery that creates a particular health risk around bus stops. Madison is among more than 100 U.S. cities that have pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Electric buses are key to that goal.
Metro Transit’s first experiment came during a broader effort to launch a system that could carry more riders with lower emissions. The city rolled out three electric buses — which cost $1.3 million and were funded in part through a federal grant — in 2020 to see how they’d do in daily service. Although the pilot introduced Madison to zero-emission transit and helped build institutional know-how, the Proterra buses were dogged by battery and maintenance issues. The city has since purchased coaches built by New Flyer.
“We had no real success with Proterra,” said Joshua Marty, the agency’s facilities manager. Beyond the range challenges, his team had trouble sourcing parts and maintenance from the company, which declared bankruptcy in 2024.
Batteries have gotten significantly better in the short time since Madison decided to go electric. “Energy density has been increasing at roughly 7 percent per year over the last decade,” said Eric Kazyak, a mechanical engineer and professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. That boost has helped the 60-foot buses become the workhorses of Madison’s fleet. They work the city’s Bus Rapid Transit lines, and fill in on popular routes near the university campus.
A Metro Transit bus parked beneath an pantograph “quick charger” at the end of the line. Just 15 minutes during regularly scheduled layovers allows each coach to travel as far as 258 miles a day.
Photo courtesy Metro Transit.
Buses that work Route A — which runs east-west across the city — can stay out for most of the day because they recharge during routine layovers at each end of the run. The driver settles beneath an overhead pantograph “quick charger” for about 15 minutes. That boost allows each coach to travel as far as 258 miles a day. By the time it reaches the end of the line, the battery has dropped by 15 to 20 percent — a gap the charger refills in as many minutes. At night, the fleet returns to a dedicated depot with 16 slightly slower, but still plenty zippy, quick chargers.
The north-south Route B does not yet have overheard charging hardware, so buses trundle around for four hours before returning to the depot with roughly 25 percent on their battery. The city plans to add pantographs to the route at some point, a move that would nearly double the time those rigs spend carrying passengers. Still, even the coldest winter days don’t reduce range by more than 10 percent compared to a balmy summer afternoon.
Between 60 and 70 percent of the fleet is typically running at any given time, with the rest in for maintenance and cleaning or being used to train drivers — a figure that Cody Hanna, the transit agency’s transit maintenance manager, said is unaffected by weather. The biggest challenge has been getting parts for the buses, which are more complex than their diesel counterparts and trickier to diagnose when something goes sideways. “With an electric bus, it could be an inverter, it could be a motor, it could just be a bad wire, could be a bad sensor,” he said. “There’s so many different things that are talking to each other.”
While on-route charging has been a boon for Madison, it could be cost-prohibitive for smaller cities. “This is a really good idea,” said Max Zhang, a mechanical engineer and professor at Cornell University who led the study in Ithaca. “At the same time there’s also cost issues. Those charging stations, my understanding is they’re not cheap.”
Pantograph chargers typically cost roughly the same as the $1.5 million that Madison spent on each bus. Yet they might have actually saved the city money. Without them, Hanna said, Metro Transit would need to triple the number of buses running on Route A from 18 to 54.
Those tradeoffs are playing out at a moment of federal retrenchment. The Trump administration has sought to curb electric bus investment. An analysis by the nonprofit advocacy organization Transportation for America found that only 3 percent of federal “low or no emission” program grants awarded last year went to zero-emission buses.
Nonetheless, other frigid cities, including Minneapolis and Duluth — once a poster child for the technology’s failures — are expanding their clean energy fleets, and Milwaukee has embraced on-route charging.
But Mountain Line in Missoula, Montana, might be furthest down the road. Although it doesn’t get as frigid there as it does in Madison, the city experiences a week or two of temperatures below zero each year. Missoula also sits in a valley, trapping diesel exhaust. It began the transition toward electrification in 2018, and has since replaced about 90 percent of its fleet — putting the city well ahead of its goal of being entirely electric by 2034.
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Jordan Hess, the transit agency’s CEO, began working with electric buses in 2016 as transportation director at University of Montana. Back then, the buses would recharge on the route much like those in Madison. Missoula’s coaches have batteries big enough to complete runs without topping off. It also helps that Mountain Line, like Metro Transit in Madison, uses diesel-powered heaters to keep passengers warm.
“They’re a little bit like chickens,” Hess said of the buses. If the temperature falls below zero, “they start squawking. You start taking precautions, and you start thinking about heat. I think of electric vehicles the same. [It] can get pretty darn cold before you have a lot of problems.”
The buses have also brought changes for operators. Shanell Hayes has driven diesels and electrics in her three years with Metro Transit. Last winter, while returning to the depot to recharge, the lumbering bus suddenly topped out at 35 mph, then 20, and then just 2. She pulled over to wait for a supervisor, who followed her the last mile to the bus barn. It took an hour, testing her faith in the technology. Still, she likes how the behemoths handle snowy, icy conditions. Regenerative braking uses the motor to help slow the vehicle, sending power otherwise lost as heat back to the battery. It allows for a lighter touch on the brake pedal.
“I just take my foot off the gas and just allow it to slow down on its own,” Hayes said. “That way I can use my brake minimally without sliding.”
Rabbit Roberge was in his first week driving when he pulled up to a pantograph charger at the western end of Route A on a cold January morning. He drives a Toyota Prius, so he’s familiar with regenerative braking and the benefits of electric propulsion. He’s a fan of the tech. “They’re smoother,” he said of the buses. “They’re not as loud. They’re just all-around nicer to drive.”
Riders, too, seem to have embraced the change, though there have been challenges. Susanne Galler, who has been riding regularly since giving up her car in 2000, was still getting around on crutches after a bike accident in 2024 when she noticed that most of the seats in the e-buses require a step up to reach them. She also has seen one bus require a tow, and another that died at a stoplight. Still, she considers the transition to zero-emissions machinery as a “positive step.”
Kira Breeden, a doctoral student at the university, regularly takes the Route A to campus, particularly when it’s too nasty to ride her bike. She finds the buses to be dependable.
“I think it’s a really good system,” she said. “I’ve heard occasionally people complain about the timeliness of buses, but I’ve never had any issues, except for one snowstorm my first year, which makes a lot of sense, because it was dumping snow.” That storm occurred in March 2024, before the electric fleet rolled out, so it was probably a diesel bus that left her stranded. It’s a reminder that cold weather can sideline any machine.
Support for this story was provided by The Neal Peirce Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting journalism revealing ways to make cities and their surrounding regions work better for all people.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Electric buses are passing a brutal cold-weather test in Wisconsin on Feb 23, 2026.
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