Independent News

The political crisis in the United States today is the consequence of economic processes that have been underway for generations. The rise of fascism is not a fluke brought about by the demagoguery of a single individual, but the logical outcome of profit-driven capitalism.

The neoliberal order paved the way for this by deepening the gulf between the rich and poor, militarizing policing in order to preserve those disparities, and creating a downwardly mobile population desperate for scapegoats. In a globalized economy, politicians cannot mitigate the impact of capitalism on their constituents without investors taking their business elsewhere.

Consequently, “left” parties have consistently failed to deliver on their promises, while reactionary parties have pulled public policy and permissible discourse steadily to the right—with centrists serving as a sort of ratchet preventing policy and discourse from shifting back.

Bill 9, or the Protecting Alberta’s Children Statues Amendment Act is a blatant attempt on the part of the United Conservatives Party (UCP) to control the bodily autonomy of trans individuals. It creates artificial narratives and problems surrounding the queer community to distract from the legitimate issues impacting the whole province.

U.S. District Judge Sharion Aycock in August ordered Mississippi to redraw the map, which was enacted in 1987, concluding the current configuration dilutes the power of Black voters. The Friday ruling gives the Mississippi Legislature until the end of its 2026 regular session to redraw the map.

By 2027, global AI data centers could consume up to 1.7 trillion gallons of water each year. And, as reported in Essence, water’s only the beginning:

“Data centers’ enormous energy demands often lead to the construction or expansion of nearby fossil fuel-powered plants. This introduces air pollutants such as nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde, which worsen respiratory conditions like asthma… Additionally, pressure on local power grids can lead to increased electricity costs, deepening energy insecurity for families already struggling to make ends meet.”

In drought-prone or water-stressed areas, the risk is even greater, with the diversion of billions of gallons of water to cool AI servers “threatening not only household water access but entire ecosystems,” according to the Essence report.

By studying the plants foraged by these rats, I learned not only about the important scientific and commercial plants in the garden, but also about the food and medicine the family were eating and using, including imported snacks such as peanuts and Brazil nuts, which were not grown in the garden but could have been purchased in Philadelphia.

Five months earlier, some of the visiting aides had celebrated USAID’s destruction over cake and speeches in Washington. With that job done, they’d embarked on a world tour of half a dozen cities, including the Kenyan capital. They were granted special permission to fly business class “to help ensure maximum rest and comfort,” according to an internal memo. Thornton alone received authorization to expense more than $35,000 in taxpayer money for the trip. The plan was to conduct exit interviews with USAID’s top experts, who were being forced out of the agency amid the administration’s stated commitment to austerity.

When the U.S. embassy in Nairobi learned of the visit, officials there arranged the dinner with a goal in mind. It would be their last opportunity to explain, face-to-face, the catastrophic impact of Trump’s drastic cuts to foreign aid.

A lot of them have a long history of really deplorable conditions. And a lot of times, they shut down only to reopen and detain a different population. It's just this continual cycle and conditions never get better," Ghandehari added.

NPR identified at least 16 shuttered facilities across a dozen states that have reopened as Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers since President Trump took office in January. Most were state or federal prisons, though some had been ICE detention centers. Almost all the properties were owned or operated by private prison companies, and many had a troubled past.

In her written response, Segal has refused to answer the questions, stating only: “The Envoy declared any conflicts of interest as required”.

Segal has also refused to directly answer whether she still has any role in the ECAJ(Executive Council of Australian Jewry,) or, if not, when she finished all her roles at the ECAJ.

Segal was the President of the ECAJ, for four years until 2023, which critics say is a major conflict and should have disqualified her from the Antisemitism Envoy role.

The two main warring parties are the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

The SAF is the nation’s official military. Prior to the civil war, it was responsible with enforcing the border, protecting the country from foreign entities and maintaining internal security. As of April 2023, the SAF had an estimated force of up to 200,000 people.

Consumers often have no way of knowing if the medications they are taking came from factories that used dirty water, were infested by insects or birds, or were outright banned from shipping drugs to the U.S., but then granted special exemptions to do so anyway.

Six women who were drugged and raped or sexually assaulted by the same Denver cardiologist filed a lawsuit against Match Group Tuesday, accusing the world’s largest dating app company of “accommodating rapists across its products” through “negligence” and a “defective” product.

The women, backed by four law firms, said that by allowing known abusers like Stephen Matthews to remain on its apps, Tinder and Hinge, even after they are reported for rape, the company fostered a breeding ground for “sexual predators.”

The hack was reportedly carried out by a western-based group called ShinyHunters, according to the website BleepingComputer, which first reported the incident. The site reported that the data included premium members’ email addresses, search and viewing activity and location. The data consists of 201m records related to premium members.

The website added that the Canadian-owned Pornhub had received an extortion demand from ShinyHunters about the hack. The Reuters news agency on Wednesday also claimed to have spoken to a ShinyHunters member in an online chat who was demanding a payment in bitcoin to prevent the publication of data and delete it.

Pornhub said in a statement on its website that premium users had been affected by an attack on Mixpanel, a company that had provided data analytics to the publisher. Pornhub said a “select” number of users had been affected and that it had stopped working with Mixpanel in 2021, indicating the data is not recent.

Sexism, as in the case of Jansen, can erupt when party loyalty is shattered. Women politicians are subject to harsher media coverage generally, including misogynistic innuendos and direct assaults on their fidelity that exploit societal views on sexuality. For example, Le Devoir reported that an unnamed source alleged that a member of the national assembly who switched parties was so uncontrollable that her husband had to be persuaded to get her to calm down and work as part of a team. In particular, the misogyny that Jansen encountered online echoed the mass media vitriol that Belinda Stronach endured in 2005.

The frames questioning Stronach’s integrity and credibility, along with punditry about how her move would stoke cynicism about politics, were by far the most intense of any of the cases we examined. Conservatives were fed message lines that she had been a no-show at parliamentary committee meetings and that she was trying to get out of paying her leadership campaign debt. Pundits discussed how she had left her romantic partner, Peter MacKay, the Conservatives’ deputy leader, who had sympathized in private yet was loyal to the leader in public. After the news broke, MacKay allegedly compared her to a disloyal dog. Male callers to talk-radio shows labelled her a “political harlot” and the “Benedict Arnold of Canadian politics,” while a prominent female columnist tagged her as a “treacherous wench” and a “political whore.” A Journal de Montréal cartoon depicted Stronach as a sex worker. She received death threats, and security guards were assigned to her children at school.

The united left’s candidate, Jeannette Jara, from the Communist Party, came out on top in the first round, but without a clear majority. The Communist label still has a scarecrow effect in Chile: she had no chance of winning, despite her overtures to the populist candidate who arrived third, Franco Parisi.

Kast promises an iron fist on immigration and security issues. Emboldened by the behavior of Trump and Millei, he has promised to deploy the army to the borders to combat illegal immigration, to carry out mass expulsions of undocumented Venezuelans and Colombians, and to build more prisons, following the example of Nayib Bukele’s El Salvador.

In the early 1700s, Isaac Newton’s followers turned abstract theory into public performance and cultural fashion.

At the time, Cartesian philosophy dominated intellectual life. Newton’s 1687 book “Principia Mathematica” proposed a new worldview of gravity, optics and motion, but the mathematics was so dense that few could grasp it.

Although Newton himself was a recluse, a circle of zealous Newtonian men of science, described by historians as devoted disciples and even evangelists for Newton’s natural philosophy, took his new theories on the road. These itinerant lecturers performed experiments and spectaculars in London coffeehouses and aristocratic salons, demonstrating Newtonian physics. They sold tickets, pamphlets and even branded scientific instruments so audiences could reproduce these marvels at home.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has proposed changes that would see an expansion in the use of reverse-onus provisions for bail, purportedly for violent and repeat offenders. Reverse onus shifts the burden onto the accused to demonstrate why they should be released, rather than requiring the Crown to justify detention. The plan would tighten release conditions and limit the application of the current principle of restraint.

Polling from Abacus Data shows that nearly 80 per cent of Canadians believe it is too easy for people accused of serious crimes to be released on bail. When asked which policies would most reduce violent crime over the long term, 62 per cent of respondents selected stricter bail rules and increased enforcement.

The volunteer, tasked with security for the march and later identified as Matt Alder, saw Gamboa assembling a legally owned, legally carried AR-15-style rifle near the march in downtown Salt Lake City on June 14. Alarmed, Alder called for another volunteer security guard before drawing a concealed handgun. As Gamboa tried to rejoin the march, Alder opened fire, hitting Gamboa and killing Ah Loo.

Immediately after the shooting, police arrested Gamboa on a murder charge. The arresting officer claimed that Gamboa’s actions had created the situation that caused Alder to fear for his life and the lives of others, prompting Alder to open fire.

As a result Gamboa was blamed for Ah Loo’s death for having “acted under circumstances that showed a depraved indifference to human life, knowingly engag[ing] in conduct that created a grave risk of death and ultimately caused the death of an innocent community member,” according to a police statement.

Gamboa was held without bail for five days under suspicion of committing a violent felony. Police briefly detained Alder but did not take him into custody.

On Sunday evening, police were also investigating reports of an explosive device near the beach. New South Wales Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon confirmed an improvised explosive had been found in a car.

ASIO head Mike Burgess said Australia’s terrorism threat level remained at “probable”. This means there is a greater than 50% chance of an onshore attack or attack planning in the next twelve months. “I don’t see that changing at this stage,” Burgess told reporters in Canberra on Sunday night.

Soon after the shooting began, horrific vision emerged on social media of people shot dead or injured, as well as footage of incredible acts of bravery from passersby trying to thwart the attack.

One video shows a bystander tackling a gunman from behind, wrestling his gun from him. Others were performing CPR on the injured on the beach.

He awarded the deceased state honours to “add eternal lustre” to their bravery.

“All of you, both officers and soldiers, displayed mass heroism overcoming unimaginable mental and physical burdens almost every day,” Kim said.

The troops had been able to “work a miracle of turning a vast area of danger zone into a safe and secure one in a matter of less than three months”.

Images released by KCNA showed a smiling Kim embracing returned soldiers, some of whom appeared injured and in wheelchairs, at the ceremony in Pyongyang on Friday.

Born in Shanghai to a Korean father and Chinese mother, Choy moved to New York City at 14. There she became involved with the Black Panther Party and local activism. While attending Manhattanville College she joined the Newsreel, later Third World Newsreel, an activist filmmaker collective that produced and distributed films highlighting key social movements of the late 1960s. She directed documentaries on the 1971 Attica prison uprising (“Teach Our Children”), the lives and inhumane conditions of women’s prisons (“Inside Women Inside”), the growing activism and organizing of 1970s New York Chinatown (“From Spikes to Spindles”) and other social issues.

Choy is best known for the award-winning “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” which tells the story of the murder of Chinese-American autoworker Vincent Chin. The documentary was one of the first films to delve into the impacts of anti-Asian racism and hate crimes in the United States.

The executive order declares that it is the policy of the United States to produce a “minimally burdensome” national framework for AI. The order calls on the U.S. attorney general to create an AI litigation task force to challenge state AI laws that are inconsistent with the policy. It also orders the secretary of commerce to identify “onerous” state AI laws that conflict with the policy and to withhold funding under the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program to states with those laws. The executive order exempts state AI laws related to child safety.

In the past, transgender rights advocates and Democratic members of Congress have asked federal agencies to loosen these restrictions, which would make it easier for trans people to access the hormone as part of gender-affirming care.

But Wednesday’s panel was clear in its singular focus: how testosterone could improve cisgender men’s health.

“Testosterone therapy is safe, effective, and preventive,” said Dr. Helen Bernie, an associate professor of urology at Indiana University, where she directs the school’s male sexual and reproductive medicine program. “Testosterone is still regulated as if it were a dangerous performance-enhancing drug. … Because of this outdated classification, many physicians fear prescribing it or even screening for it.”

The anniversary Monday of Assad's ouster by opposition fighters was preceded by days of celebration beforehand with fireworks and drivers waving flags and honking horns in celebration late into the night.

At the main mosque in the Midan district of Damascus Monday, worshippers filed out from dawn prayers shortly after the moment celebrated as the exact time Assad lifted off from Damascus under Russian protection on Dec. 8, 2024. He and his wife Asma remain in exile in Russia.

At first, I think, you know, we’ve been living with a question for so long, even that goes long before this war started, and it’s been life under and inside, you know, a state of, like, where surveillance is constant. You know, it’s automated, and it’s largely invisible. And as a reporter, I’ve seen, like, a lot of coverage focusing on weapons and airstrikes and technology, but I think much less attention was paid to the systems that decide who is seen and how they’re doing this, in effect, to the human life and the civilian population in Gaza, and how they’re categorizing people, and how quickly and deadly life-and-death decisions can be made. And so, that was the reason I wanted to understand what that feels like from the inside.