Thank you, Jane Goodall

 

NY Times Obit 2 October 2025

"Jane Goodall, one of the world’s most revered conservationists, who earned scientific stature and global celebrity by chronicling the distinctive behavior of wild chimpanzees in East Africa — primates that made and used tools, ate meat, held rain dances and engaged in organized warfare — died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. She was 91.

Her death, while on a speaking tour, was confirmed by the Jane Goodall Institute, whose U.S. headquarters are in Washington, D.C. When not traveling widely, she lived in Bournemouth, on the south coast of England, in her childhood home.

Dr. Goodall with one of her research subjects at the Gombe reserve in the 1970s.Credit...

Dr. Goodall was 29 in the summer of 1963 when National Geographic magazine published her 7,500-word, 37-page account of the lives of primates she had observed in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in what is now Tanzania. The National Geographic Society had been financially supporting her field studies there.

The article, with photographs by Hugo van Lawick, a Dutch wildlife photographer whom she later married, also described Dr. Goodall’s struggles to overcome disease, predators and frustration as she tried to get close to the chimps, working from a primitive research station along the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika.

On the scientific merits alone, her discoveries about how wild chimpanzees raised their young, established leadership, socialized and communicated broke new ground and attracted immense attention and respect among researchers. Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist and science historian, said her work with chimpanzees “represents one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements.”

On learning of Dr. Goodall’s documented evidence that humans were not the only creatures capable of making and using tools, Louis Leakey, the paleoanthropologist and Dr. Goodall’s mentor, famously remarked, “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as humans.”

Long before focus groups, message discipline and communications plans became crucial tools in advancing high-profile careers and alerting the world to significant discoveries in and outside of science, Dr. Goodall understood the benefits of being the principal narrator and star of her own story of discovery.

In articles and books, her lucid prose carried vivid descriptions, some lighthearted, of the numerous perils she encountered in the African rainforest — malaria, leopards, crocodiles, spitting cobras and deadly giant centipedes, to name a few. Her writing gained its widest attention in three more long articles in National Geographic in the 1960s and ’70s and in three well-received books, “My Friends, the Wild Chimpanzees” (1967), “In the Shadow of Man” (1971) and “Through a Window” (1990).

Dr. Goodall’s willingness to challenge scientific convention and shape the details of her research into a riveting adventure narrative about two primary subjects — the chimps and herself — turned her into a household name, in no small part thanks to the power of television.

Dr. Goodall’s gentle, knowledgeable demeanor and telegenic presence — set against the beautiful yet dangerous Gombe preserve and its playful and unpredictable primates — proved irresistible to the broadcast networks. In December 1965, CBS News aired a documentary of her work in prime time, the first in a long string of nationally and internationally televised special reports about the chimpanzees of Gombe and the courageous woman steadfastly chronicling what she called their “rich emotional life.”

Dr. Goodall, Mr. van Lawick and their son, Hugo Eric Louis van Lawick, in the ABC special “Jane Goodall and the World of Animal Behavior: The Lions of the Serengeti.”Credit...ABC, 

In becoming one of the most famous scientists of the 20th century, Dr. Goodall also opened the door for more women in her largely male field as well as across all of science. Women, including Dian Fossey, Biruté Galdikas, Cheryl Knott and Penny Patterson, came to dominate the field of primate behavior research.

Most of Dr. Goodall’s observations focused on several generations of a troop of 30 to 40 chimpanzees, the species genetically closest to humans. She named some of them — Flo, Fifi, David Greybeard — and grew to know each of them personally. She was particularly interested in their courtship, mating rituals, births and parenting.

Dr. Goodall was the first scientist to explain to the world that chimpanzee mothers are capable of giving birth only once every four and a half to six years, and that only one or two babies were produced each year by the Gombe Stream troop. She found that first-time mothers generally hid their babies from the adult males, prompting frantic displays by the males — leaping and hooting that could last five minutes. An experienced mother, however, she discovered, freely allowed males and other females to view her infant, satisfying their curiosity, in a far calmer introduction.

In her many articles, books and documentaries, Dr. Goodall explored similar signal moments in her own life. In March 1964, after a nearly yearlong courtship, she married Mr. van Lawick. Three years later, she gave birth to Hugo Eric Louis van Lawick, her only child, whom she nicknamed Grub.

But even there she drew connections to her work in the field. She explained that her parenting philosophy and strategy were based on skills and values that she had learned from the chimpanzees, particularly the sure-handed matriarch of the troop, whom she named Flo. Nevertheless, she kept Grub in a protective cage while she was in the forest with him: She feared that he might be killed and eaten by the chimps.

Dr. Goodall’s ability to weave scientific observation with the story of her own life produced a powerful drama filled with characters of all ages, sexes and species. She once told a scientific meeting that her work would have had far less resonance scientifically or emotionally if she had just referred to the proud and confident chimp known as David Greybeard by a number, as was the usual practice.

In the 1970s, Dr. Goodall began to spend less time observing chimpanzees and far more time seeking to protect them and their disappearing habitat. She made known her opposition to capturing wild chimpanzees for display in zoos or for medical research. And she traveled the world, drawing large audiences with a message of hope and confidence that the world would recognize the importance of preserving its natural resources.

The 1970s were also a period of upheaval in her personal life. In 1974, she divorced Mr. van Lawick and soon afterward married Derek Bryceson, the director of national parks in Tanzania. He died of cancer in 1980, a time she later said was perhaps the most difficult of her life.

She established the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977. It evolved into one of the world’s largest nonprofit global research and conservation organizations, with offices in the United States and 24 other nations. Its Roots and Shoots program, launched in 1991, teaches young people about conservation in 75 countries.

In honor of her work, Tanzania in 1978 designated the Gombe Stream Reserve a national park. Dr. Goodall’s institute maintains a research station there that attracts students and scientists from around the world. In 2002, the United Nations named Dr. Goodall a Messenger of Peace, the U.N.’s highest honor for global citizenship.

Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall was born in London on April 4, 1934, and grew up in Bournemouth as the older of two girls of Margaret Myfanwe (Joseph) Goodall, who was known as Vanne, and Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall.

Her mother was an author and novelist who wrote under the name Vanne Morris-Goodall. Her father was an engineer who raced cars for a time. The couple divorced after World War II. Vanne Goodall accompanied her daughter to the Gombe reserve at the start of Dr. Goodall’s famous study in 1960 and was a leading character in much of her daughter’s writing.

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Dr. Goodall was a child when her father gave her a stuffed monkey doll that she named Jubilee. Credit...Jane Goodall Institute

As a little girl, Jane adored Tarzan’s Jane, Dr. Doolittle and a little stuffed monkey doll, a gift from her father that she named Jubilee. Indeed, in her public appearances, Dr. Goodall almost always described her scientific findings and her international renown as a fortunate convergence of her childhood love of animals and Africa with her inquisitive and adventurous nature.

In 1956, after finishing a course in secretarial school and taking several jobs in London, she received a letter from a friend whose family owned a farm near Nairobi, Kenya. The friend invited her to join her.

Dr. Goodall jumped at the opportunity. Booking passage on a freighter to Africa, she arrived in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, on her 23rd birthday. She was soon introduced to other expatriate Englishmen and women in Nairobi as well as to Dr. Leakey, at the time a prominent but not yet internationally renowned archaeologist.

Seven weeks after her arrival, she began work as Dr. Leakey’s secretary and assistant. Dr. Goodall accompanied him that summer to the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, a three-day trip over trackless wilderness, where he was in the early phases of excavating early human remains. He often talked about his interest in stationing a researcher on Lake Tanganyika to study a troop of wild chimpanzees that lived there.

“He was squatting beside the red earth mound of a termite nest, and as I watched I saw him carefully push a long grass stem down into a hole in the mound,” she wrote. “After a moment he withdrew it and picked something from the end of it with his mouth. It was obvious that he was actually using a grass stem as a tool.”

Recognizing the contributions she was making to science, the University of Cambridge accepted her into its doctoral program in 1961 without an undergraduate degree. She was awarded her doctorate in 1965.

Dr. Goodall wrote 32 books, 15 of them for children. In her last book, “The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times” (2021, with Douglas Abrams and Gail Hudson), she wrote of her optimism about the future of humankind.

It was a message she continued to spread in her frequent public speaking engagements around the world, traveling some 300 days a year into her last decades, according to her institute. When she died on Wednesday, she had been scheduled to speak to students in Pasadena, Calif., and to participate in a tree-planting ceremony in an area that had been ravaged by wildfires.

Her many awards include the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal, presented in 1995, and the Templeton Prize, given in 2021. In 2003, Queen Elizabeth II named her a dame of the British Empire. In January, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honor, by President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

She is survived by her son; her sister, Judy Waters; and three grandchildren.

In July 2022, Mattel released a Jane Goodall doll as part of its Barbie-branded Inspiring Women series. The doll, with blond hair and dressed in a tan field shirt and shorts, is made of recycled plastic. It honored the 62nd anniversary of Dr. Goodall’s first visit to the Gombe reserve.

“Since young girls began reading about my early life and my career with the chimps, many, many, many of them have told me that they went into conservation or animal behavior because of me,” Ms. Goodall once said in a CBS News interview. “I sincerely hope that it will help to create more interest and fascination in the natural world.”

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David Horsey is the Best!!! He nails it each and every time.

David Horsey is an American editorial cartoonist and commentator. His cartoons appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer from 1979 until December 2011 and in the Los Angeles Times since that time. His cartoons are syndicated to newspapers nationwide by Tribune Content Agency.

 

Understanding the Coming Premium Apocalypse - American Health Care Becoming Unaffordable!!

                                          Article by Paul Krugman - 29 September - 2025

    Why health insurance is about to become unaffordable

"I’m writing this quickly, because of travel: If all goes well, I’ll be somewhere over the Atlantic when this post goes up. But I thought I’d write something about what Democrats are demanding as their price for avoiding a federal government shutdown, why I think that’s the right issue, and why Republicans probably won’t agree.

Even though the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, has been in effect for more than a decade, I’m not sure how many people understand how it works. So let’s review the basics.

The ACA rests on two legs. It was supposed to be three, but Republicans sawed off one of them, the requirement that you buy insurance or face a penalty. But it has still done a lot of good. By the end of the Biden administration, the percentage of Americans without health insurance was lower than it has ever been:

Source: KFF

Part of this improvement was due to an expansion of Medicaid — which will face savage cuts under the One Big Beautiful Bill, but not until after the midterms. However, the other main piece of the ACA, subsidized insurance plans offered on government-run exchanges, will take a body blow in a few months unless Republicans do something totally uncharacteristic — provide help to Americans who need it.

The way the ACA works is that insurance companies are prohibited from discriminating based on medical history — they have to offer the same plans, at the same prices, to healthy people and less healthy people. They can’t charge you more if you have a preexisting condition. The goal of that prohibition is to make sure that health care is available and affordable to those who need it most.

However, just prohibiting discrimination based on medical history works very badly unless backed by additional measures — states that have tried it know this from bitter experience. If everyone pays the same premiums, people who are currently healthy tend not to buy policies, so that insurers face a bad risk pool. This means high premiums, which leads to even more healthy people dropping out, which makes the risk pool even worse. So you end up with a “death spiral” in which very few people buy insurance unless they get it through their employer.

The ACA, however, coupled the prohibition on discrimination with subsidies that cap premiums at a certain percentage of your income (on a sliding scale that depends on how high your income is.) These subsidies make it possible for lower-income Americans to afford insurance. They also, crucially, encourage healthy people to stay in the market, holding overall premiums down. As I said, there was also supposed to be a penalty for going uninsured. But even without that penalty, the system turns out to mostly work.

The original, 2010 version of the ACA was, however, underpowered. The subsidies were too small, and they cut off suddenly for people whose income rose above a relatively low threshold (400 percent of the poverty line.)

What the Biden administration did was to make the subsidies more generous and also end the cutoff. The invaluable Charles Gaba has a table showing the differences:

Source: Charles Gaba

In this table, “% FPL” means income as a percentage of the federal poverty line. The two right columns show the caps on premiums net of subsidies under the original ACA and under the enhanced version introduced by Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

Now comes the key point: Biden had very limited political room for maneuver, since he only had 50 Senators and couldn’t afford to lose a single vote. So he was constrained by the most conservative Democrats — basically Joe Manchin — and while they were willing to expand the ACA subsidies, they did so only on a temporary basis, extending through 2025.

Now the enhanced subsidies are about to expire, and the financial hit to many Americans will be apocalyptic. Gaba estimates what will happen to the insurance premiums net of subsidy for different groups in different states. Here, for example, is what will happen in Ohio:

Many people will face huge increases in their insurance costs. And these increases will be magnified by the effects on the risk pool: some healthy people will be dropping out, raising premiums for those who remain.

In other words, millions of Americans will soon be screaming about unaffordable health care.

In a way, I’m surprised that Republicans didn’t decide to keep the enhanced, Biden subsidies in place for another year, just to delay the pain until after the midterms. But they didn’t, probably because they have such a strong aversion to helping Americans in need that they couldn’t even bring themselves to play cynical politics on the issue.

This aversion to doing anything decent is why the government will probably shut down Wednesday. For Republicans need Democratic votes to keep the government open, and Democrats have made retaining enhanced subsidies their price for cooperating.

What will happen then? I have no idea. But I think the Democrats made the right choice when they made health insurance premiums — rather than, say, tariffs — their key demand.

Why? Because doing so puts the onus for rising premiums squarely where it belongs — on Republicans. If Democrats weren’t putting this issue front and center, the usual suspects might be able to convince many voters that someone else — immigrants, Antifa, George Soros, whatever — was responsible for their soaring health costs. That will be much harder now.

Again, I have no idea how this will play out. But it looks to me as if Democrats have chosen good ground on which to make their stand.

Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin - Says What is Needed to be Said at the United Nations.

 Ireland’s Taoiseach Micheál Martin delivered one of the strongest addresses at the 80th United Nations General Assembly, condemning Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide and denouncing atrocities in the West Bank. 

He called out starvation used as a weapon of war, vowed accountability for war crimes, and reaffirmed Ireland’s recognition of Palestine.

POWERFUL SPEECH: Finland President Speaks Out on Ukraine, Gaza, & Urgent Need for UN Reform

 Wonderfully stated.

Jimmy Kimmel, Somber but Defiant, Defends Free Speech in Return to ABC

Wonderful! 

Totally Insane UN Address - ‘Your Countries Are Going to Hell’: Trump Airs His Grievances at the U.N.

 

In a meandering address, President Trump rebuked global institutions and complained about immigration, environmentalists, windmills and more.

By Luke Broadwater

Reporting from the United Nations in New York

"He accused environmentalists of wanting to “kill all the cows.” He personally insulted the Muslim mayor of London. He bashed allies and foes across the globe. He questioned whether the United Nations should even exist.

“What is the purpose of the United Nations?” President Trump asked a gathering of the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, in a meandering, 56-minute speech that extended nearly four times as long as his allotted time limit.

“I’m really good at this stuff,” Mr. Trump said. “Your countries are going to hell.”

In his remarks, Mr. Trump lectured the United Nations and other countries about how they are failing and aired a list of grievances. Those included but were not limited to: a malfunctioning escalator at the U.N.; his not winning a renovation contract at the United Nations during his time as a real estate developer; windmills; other countries’ immigration policies, which he claimed were leading them to ruin; and the way Brazil is being run.

The White House had billed Mr. Trump’s address to the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly as a chance for the president to lay out his vision for how America should wield its power abroad.

But Mr. Trump’s teleprompter malfunctioned early on, and while he appeared to be reading the speech, he often broke into ad-libs.

There was some policy discussed. He announced a new effort to enforce the biological weapons convention that would use “A.I. verification,” and said he wanted “a cessation of the development of nuclear weapons.”

Mr. Trump also issued a new warning: that the U.S. military would continue to play the role of judge, jury and executioner in killing suspected drug smugglers operating in international waters. “We will blow you out of existence,” he warned anyone moving drugs out of Venezuela.

But he spent nearly a quarter of his speaking time attacking efforts to address climate change.

Mr. Trump undermined the scientific consensus on climate change, saying it was “made by stupid people.” He celebrated the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and “clean, beautiful coal.” He talked about American energy exports and added that “the United States has been taken advantage by much of the world, but not anymore.”

And Mr. Trump called climate change the “greatest con job” ever perpetrated on the world and claimed environmentalists are out to eliminate America’s cows.

“‘No more cows — we don’t want cows anymore.’ I guess they want to kill all the cows,” Mr. Trump said.

He briefly turned to the topic of religion, falsely claiming that Muslim leaders in the West are planning to institute Shariah law, while proclaiming Christianity to be the “most persecuted religion on the planet.”

According to the White House, Mr. Trump had always planned to target “globalist institutions” in his speech. Since taking office, he has made drastic changes to America’s approach to foreign policy.

He has largely eschewed the use of nonmilitary “soft power,” severely cutting foreign aid and dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development. He has declined to pay for more aid to help Ukraine fight off Russia’s invasion or try to put any limits on Israel’s broadened military campaign in Gaza. And he has told strongmen leaders of other countries that the United States would no longer sit in judgment of them.

Several close U.S. allies issued what amounted to a reprimand this week of his go-it-alone vision, joining most of the U.N. body in recognizing Palestine as a state and risking the ire of the president, who has adamantly opposed such a move.

The president, for his part, has made it clear he wants little to do with much of the U.N. mandate. He has withdrawn the United States from the U.N.’s Human Rights Council, and ordered a review of America’s role in the organization. The Trump administration clawed back $1 billion in funding for the U.N. and informed Congress of its intent to cut another $1 billion, adding to a funding shortfall at the United Nations.

But at the same time, Mr. Trump has inserted America into peace negotiations in conflicts across the globe, including the war in Gaza. The president has also shown a willingness to use a quick show of force, as he did when he ordered airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Mr. Trump, who is in open pursuit of a Nobel Peace Prize, trumpeted his role in bringing about several peace agreements or cease-fires during his speech, including a deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan and Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Then he argued he was doing, as a side job, what the U.N. should. “Sadly, in all cases, the United Nations did not even try to help in any of them,” he said, adding that “all I got from the United Nations was an escalator on the way up that stopped right in the middle.”

He claimed that all the United Nations does is write “strongly worded letters” and speak in “empty words.”

“It’s sad I had to do these things instead of the United Nations doing them,” he said.

Also on his schedule Tuesday were meetings with António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general; President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine; President Javier Milei of Argentina; and President Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission. He was also meeting with the leaders of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan.

The meeting with the leaders of predominantly Arab or Muslim countries comes at a pivotal time for the war in Gaza, as Israel’s military pushes into Gaza City and the country faces allegations in a U.N. inquiry of carrying out a genocide. And it will come with the stark absence of Palestinian leaders, as the Trump administration has denied visas to Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, and his delegation.

Arab countries have created their own proposal to rebuild Gazaand turn it into part of a future Palestinian state, without Hamas in government. Some of the United States’ longest-standing allies, including Australia, Britain and Canada, now recognize Palestine as a state. Mr. Trump has argued that such a designation rewards Hamas and harms efforts to reach a peace agreement with Israel, and he has cast doubt on any eventual two-state solution.

Mr. Trump has also insisted that he wants humanitarian aid to flow into Gaza and lamented the “real starvation” there. But the president has not publicly sought to stop the military push by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel or challenge him to restore pathways for aid.

During his speech, Mr. Trump bashed the U.S. allies who were recognizing a Palestinian state. He said those countries should instead unite around a message to Hamas: “Release the hostages now.”