By JESSICA DAMIANO, Associated Press

If I asked you to name a holiday flower, my guess is poinsettia, amaryllis or paperwhite would be the first to come to mind. But there’s another, underused seasonal plant that deserves attention.

Allow me to introduce you to cyclamen.

There are roughly two dozen species of the perennial plants, some with rounded leaves and others with heart-, kidney- or ivy-shaped foliage. Some boast white or silver marbling or speckles on their leaves.

But their flowers are the main attraction. Available in white and shades of pink, red and purple, the houseplants boast unusual, upside-down flowers with delicate, backward-curved petals –- and they bloom only in winter.

Place cyclamen plants in a spot that provides soft or indirect light, such as in front of an east- or north-facing window, or to the side of a brighter one. These plants do not like the heat; they thrive best at temperatures that hover around 60 degrees.

Cyclamens also like humidity, so consider growing them in a bathroom or placing pots on a rimmed pebble tray to which you’ve added water, but not so much that the pebbles float. As the water evaporates, it will create a humid microclimate around the plant.

Watering is a balancing act. Too much, and the plant’s roots will rot. Too little, and they’ll droop. Your best bet is to water cyclamen through the drainage hole at the bottom of its pot, placing it in a shallow bowl of water until the soil is lightly saturated, then removing the pot from the bowl and allowing it to drain before returning it to its home perch.

Take care not to splash the plant’s crown — the juncture between the bottom of the main stem and the roots — with water. It is highly susceptible to rot.

Provide a monthly dose of a balanced houseplant fertilizer diluted to half-strength when the plant is in its growing phase.

Stop watering and fertilizing as soon as the plant’s leaves turn yellow, which signals that it’s preparing for dormancy. Moving it to a cool, dark room will help the plant during this phase. Most, if not all, of the leaves will die and drop; you can trim off any that remain.

Brush off a bit of soil from the top of the plant’s tuberous root to expose it to air while it’s dormant. This will help prevent rotting.

Your cyclamen will look dead during summer, but will show signs of new life in the fall. When you spot new growth, cover up the top of the tuber with potting mix. Then move the plant back into bright, indirect light, and resume watering and fertilizing for another round of cheerful holiday blooms.

Jessica Damiano writes weekly gardening columns for the AP and publishes the award-winning Weekly Dirt Newsletter. You can sign up here for weekly gardening tips and advice.

For more AP gardening stories, go to https://apnews.com/hub/gardening.

By KIRSTEN GRIESHABER, Associated Press

DRESDEN, Germany (AP) — When pastry chef Tino Gierig is asked what the famous Dresden stollen tastes like, his eyes sparkle and his voice rises to an enthusiastic sing-song as as he describes the rich delicacy filled with raisins and other dried fruits.

“Stollen tastes like Christmas, like family, like tradition, like hominess, peace, serenity,” the 55-year-old said as he lovingly kneaded his buttery yeast dough before folding in golden raisins in his Dresdner Backhaus bakery.

Bakers in the eastern German city of Dresden have been making stollen for hundreds of years and it is now a treasured Christmas tradition. It is usually cut on the first weekend of Advent — the four-week period leading up to Christmas — and served with coffee and Christmas cookies.

After baking several loaves of stollen in his Dresden bakery in November, Gierig picked off some slightly burned raisins from the top, brushed the pastry with butter, sprinkled granulated sugar on top, and in a final touch dusted it with powdered sugar.

The 55-year-old is precise in his baking, and also particular about how to define his hand-baked Christmas specialty: “It’s a heavy yeast dough, it’s not bread, it’s not cake. It’s a pastry that is only made for the Advent season.”

In Germany the desert is often called Christstollen, and to Gierig it looks “like Christ Child wrapped in swaddling clothes.”

“This kind of baking has a lot to do with symbolism,” Gierig said.

A protected brand

While Gierig’s description sounds like an ode to Christmas baking and the creation of stollen in particular, stollen is also big business with an organization that is dedicated to protecting and promoting the brand.

The Dresden Stollen Protection Association awards a coveted golden quality seal as a certificate of authenticity to bakeries that fulfill certain conditions and which are located in or near Dresden. The products are checked every year to make sure they fulfill all the expectations of the association.

According to the strict rules, stollen must be made with heaps of butter – at least 50% of the flour content – as well as a generous load of golden raisins, candied orange and lemon peel as well as some sweet and bitter almonds. The addition of margarine, artificial preservatives or artificial flavors is not allowed.

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The Dresdner Christstollen is additionally protected by European Union rules that stipulate where and how it needs to be produced, just like Lübecker Marzipan from the northern German city of Lübeck, Schwarzwälder Schinken ham from the Black Forest, or Aachener Printen gingerbread from the western German city of Aachen.

Nonetheless, the bakeries, which have often been run by the same families for many generations, can add their own mix of spices and flavors. They usually include include vanilla and cardamom, and sometimes tonka beans, cinnamon, nutmeg or cloves.

“There are just so many flavors from all over the world in there that have blended together, making it simply a wonderful symbiosis,” Gierig said.

In 2024, more than 5 million loaves were sold, about 20% of which were exported. Austria and Switzerland are the main countries of export, but Gierig says he also sells many stollen online to customers in the United States.

When stored in a dry, dark and cool place, the specialty keeps for many weeks.

A tradition with roots in the Middle Ages

While today’s recipes are fancy in ingredients and elaborate in preparation, Dresden stollen’s medieval origins are humble.

Stollen was first mentioned in a document in 1474 on an invoice from the city’s Christian Bartolomai Hospital, according to the association.

However, at that time, it was not yet considered a Christmas delicacy, but a fasting pastry that consisted only of flour, yeast and water.

Butter was not allowed until Pope Innocent VIII in Rome granted a special request by Elector Ernest of Saxony to lift the butter ban in 1491. From then on, stollen bakers have been also allowed to use more substantial ingredients.

While some of the more exotic spices were hard to get during the Communist decades in East Germany, stollen was among the most coveted delicacies in the country. Even Germans living in post-war capitalist West Germany were always hoping to get an original Dresden stollen package for Christmas from their brethren in the East as none of the stollen made in the west came anywhere close to the original.

The U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources has launched an investigation into three environmental groups and is seeking evidence of “collusion” between the groups and the Biden administration to reintroduce a ban on mining within the same watershed as the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

On Monday, the committee sent letters to the Center for Biological Diversity, Earthjustice and the Wilderness Society requesting documents and communications between the groups and Biden’s U.S. Forest Service and Department of the Interior.

The letters were signed by Reps. Pete Stauber, R-Minnesota, the chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources; Bruce Westerman, R-Arkansas, the chairman of the Committee on Natural Resources; and Paul Gosar, R-Arizona, chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.

“The Committee is keen to discover the details of (the groups’) backroom roles in the cancellation of the Twin Metals leases and the Superior Withdrawal, particularly given tax-exempt environmental groups’ continued pressure to oppose mining in northern Minnesota and otherwise negatively influence America’s natural resource and energy priorities,” the letters said.

Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, responded in a letter Thursday, which he shared with the Duluth News Tribune.

“Your ‘investigation’ is in actuality an abuse of power, inappropriately weaponizing government powers against law-abiding American citizens in a clumsy attempt to intimidate them,” Suckling wrote. “The center is not and cannot be intimidated.”

A spokesperson for Stauber did not respond to the News Tribune’s request for comment.

Earthjustice declined to comment for this story, and the Wilderness Society did not respond to the New Tribune’s request for comment.

The Republican congressmen said “at least one of” the groups held “off-the-book meetings” with Biden administration officials at the Interior Department ahead of its decisions to cancel two federal mineral leases for Twin Metals and ban mining for 20 years on 225,000 acres of Superior National Forest within the Rainy River Watershed, which is shared with the BWCAW, over concerns mining would pollute the wilderness area.

Earthjustice then represented groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity and Wilderness Society, intervening in a lawsuit to support the Biden administration’s actions, the congressmen wrote.

“At the very least, these meetings created a serious appearance of impropriety; more likely, these meetings violated ethical standards and evidence potentially improper relationships between (the Center for Biological Diversity) — and other similarly radical groups — and the Biden administration,” the letter to the Center said.

The Biden administration’s moves effectively killed Twin Metals’ plans to build an underground copper-nickel mine, processing plant and dry-stacked tailings storage facility on the edge of Birch Lake and upstream of the BWCAW.

But the Trump administration has said it will reverse the Biden administration’s actions to limit mining in the Superior National Forest and return Twin Metals leases.

Suckling wrote that the Center for Biological Diversity “had no meetings with any federal officials about the proposed Twin Metals mine while our lawsuits about the matter were active.

“I’m sure you know this already since your letter tellingly doesn’t refer to the existence of any such meeting,” Suckling wrote. “Nor, quite curiously, does it describe any specific center action as potentially violating any specific law or regulations.”

In an email to the News Tribune, Suckling said Twin Metals met with the officials “at least 18 times during its suit” and pointed to other connections, including high lobbying expenses by Twin Metals and the fact that during the first Trump administration, President Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka and Jared Kushner, rented a Washington home owned by Chilean billionaire Andronico Luksic, whose family controls Antofagasta, the Chilean global mining giant that owns a 100% interest in the Twin Metals project.

“So if the House wants to investigate actual suspicious influence, it should focus on Twin Metals,” Suckling said.

Twin Metals declined to comment.

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By April Dembosky, KQED, KFF Health News

When doctors told her they had to remove her tongue and voice box to save her life from the cancer that had invaded her mouth, Sonya Sotinsky sat down with a microphone to record herself saying the things she would never again be able to say.

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“Happy birthday” and “I’m proud of you” topped the phrases she banked for her husband and two daughters, as well as “I’ll be right with you,” intended for customers at the architecture firm she co-owns in Tucson, Arizona.

Thinking about the grandchildren she desperately hoped to see born one day, she also recorded herself reading more than a dozen children’s books, from the Eloise series to Dr. Seuss, to one day play for them at bedtime.

But one of the biggest categories of sound files she banked was a string of curse words and filthy sayings. If the voice is the primary expression of personality, sarcasm and profanity are essential to Sotinsky’s.

“When you can’t use your voice, it is very, very frustrating. Other people project what they think your personality is. I have silently screamed and screamed at there being no scream,” Sotinsky said recently, referring to rudimentary voice technology or writing notes by hand before she chanced upon a modern workaround. “What the literal you-know-what?”

Fighting invasive oral cancer at age 51 forced Sotinsky to confront the existential importance of the human voice. Her unique intonation, cadence, and slight New Jersey accent, she felt, were fingerprints of her identity. And she refused to be silenced.

While her doctors and insurance company saved her life, they showed little interest in saving her voice, she said. So she set out on her own to research and identify the artificial intelligence company that could. It used the recordings Sotinsky had banked of her natural voice to create an exact replica now stored in an app on her phone, allowing her to type and speak once again with a full range of sentiment and sarcasm.

“She got her sass back,” said Sotinsky’s daughter, Ela Fuentevilla, 23. “When we heard her AI voice, we all cried — my sister, my dad, and I. It’s crazy similar.”

‘Your Voice Is Your Identity’

It took close to a year for doctors to detect Sotinsky’s cancer. She complained to her orthodontist and dentist multiple times about jaw pain and a strange sensation under her tongue. Then water began dribbling down her chin when she drank. When the pain got so intense that she could no longer speak at the end of each day, Sotinsky insisted her orthodontist take a closer look.

“A shadow cast over his face. I saw it when he leaned back,” she said, “that look you don’t want to see.”

That’s when she started recording. In the five weeks between her diagnosis and surgery to remove her entire tongue and voice box — in medical terms, a total glossectomy and laryngectomy — she banked as much of her voice as she could manage.

“Your voice is your identity,” said Sue Yom, a radiation oncologist at the University of California-San Francisco, where Sotinsky got treatment. “Communication is not only how we express ourselves and relate to other people, but also how we make sense of the world.”

“When the voice is no longer available, you can’t hear yourself thinking out loud, you can’t hear yourself interacting with other people,” Yom said. “It impacts how your mind works.”

People who lose their voice box, she added, are at higher risk for long-term emotional distress, depression, and physical pain compared with those who retain it after cancer treatment. Close to a third lose their job, and the social isolation can be profound.

Most laryngectomy patients learn to speak again with an electrolarynx, a small battery-operated box held against the throat that produces a monotonic, mechanical voice. But without a tongue to shape her words, Sotinsky knew that wouldn’t work for her.

When Sotinsky had her surgery in January 2022, AI voices were still in their infancy. The best technology she could find yielded a synthetic version of her voice, but it was still flat and robotic, and people strained to understand her.

She got by until mid-2024, when she read about tech companies using generative AI to replicate a person’s full range of natural inflection and emotion.

While companies can now re-create a person’s voice from snippets of old home movies or even a one-minute voicemail, 30 minutes is the sweet spot.

Sotinsky had banked hours reading children’s books aloud.

“Eloise saved my voice,” Sotinsky said.

Now she types what she wants to say into a text-to-speech app on her phone, called Whisper, which translates and broadcasts her AI voice through portable speakers.

Most doctors and speech therapists who work with head-and-neck cancer patients don’t realize AI software can be used this way, Yom said, and with their focus on saving lives they often don’t have the bandwidth to encourage patients to record their voices before they lose them in surgery.

Health insurance companies likewise prioritize treatments that extend life over those that improve its quality — and typically avoid covering new technologies until data proves their actuarial value.

Sotinsky and her daughter spent months wrangling with claims adjusters at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona, but the insurer refused to reimburse Sotinsky for the $3,000 she spent on her initial assistive speaking technology.

“Apparently, having a voice is not considered a medical necessity,” Sotinsky quipped, her AI voice edged with sarcasm.

Sotinsky now pays the $99 monthly fee for her AI voice clone out-of-pocket.

“While health plans cover both routine and lifesaving care, assistive communication devices are typically not covered,” said Teresa Joseph, a spokesperson for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona. “As AI provides opportunities to impact health, we imagine that coverage criteria will evolve nationally.”

Research Might Lead to Insurance Coverage

Sotinsky resolved to use her newfound voice to help others regain theirs. She stepped back from her work in architecture and built a website detailing her voice banking journey — voicebanknow.com. She tells her story at conferences and webinars, including an oncology conference in Denver that Yom organized for 80 scientists.

One doctor who attended, Jennifer De Los Santos, was so inspired by hearing Sotinsky’s voice that she began laying the groundwork for a clinical trial on the impact AI technology has on patients’ communication and quality of life. That type of research could generate the data health insurers need to measure actuarial value — “and therefore justify coverage by insurance,” said De Los Santos, a head-and-neck cancer researcher and professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

Breast cancer survivors faced a similar battle in the 1980s and ’90s, she added. Insurers initially refused to cover the cost of breast reconstruction after a mastectomy, calling the procedure cosmetic and unnecessary.

It took years of patient advocacy and carefully crafted data showing reconstruction had a profound impact on women’s physical and emotional well-being before the federal government mandated insurance coverage in 1998.

Both De Los Santos and Yom said research data on AI voice clones will likely follow a similar path, eventually proving that a fully functioning, natural-sounding voice can lead to not only a better life, but a longer one.

In recent months, Sotinsky’s AI voice literally helped save her life. Her cancer had resurged in her lungs and liver. Her voice allowed her to communicate with her doctors and participate fully in developing the treatment plan. It showed her just how “medically necessary” having a voice is.

She noticed that doctors and nurses took her more seriously. They didn’t tune out the way people often did when she relied on her more robotic, synthesized voice. It seemed they saw her as more fully human.

“If someone can only communicate using a few words at a time, and not elaborate and interface more fully, it’s natural that you can’t detect that they have more depth of thought,” she said. “Being able to dialogue with my care team in a more seamless way is vital.”

While doctors successfully treated her latest round of cancer, Sotinsky, now 55, said she is confronting her odds in a new way, facing the reality that she will likely die much sooner than she wants.

All over again, she realized how crucial her voice is for maintaining perspective on life and a sense of humor in the face of death.

“I tend to forget and think I am fine, when in reality, this is forever now. Emotionally, you start to get cocky again, and this was like, Whoa, b****, we ain’t playing. This cancer is real,” Sotinsky said, typing her next phrase with a mischievous grin.

“Sarcasm is part of my love language.”

This article is from a partnership with KQED and NPR .

©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.