Independent Media

Congress requires the Pentagon to support the scouting program's Jamboree, a gathering of thousands of young scouts held every three or four years. The U.S. military lends trucks, ambulances and medical teams, and puts on aviation and skydiving demonstrations, all at no cost to the Scouts. For the military, it's both a training exercise and an opportunity to recruit highly motivated, civic-minded kids.

But the law includes an exemption: the Secretary of Defense can withhold support  if he determines providing it would be "detrimental to national security."

Drafts of a report to Congress obtained by NPR show Hegseth invoking that clause — accusing Scouting America of fostering "gender confusion."

His memo to the House and Senate Armed Services committees argues the Scouts have strayed from their mission to "cultivate masculine values." It also claims that with international conflicts and a tight budget, sending troops, doctors and vehicles to a 10-day youth event would harm national security by diverting resources from border operations and protecting U.S. territory.

While McCarthy focused on allegedly disloyal government officials and media journalists, other self-pronounced protectors of the nation sought to warn naive members of the public. Defense Department pamphlets like “Know Your Communist Enemy” alerted Americans against being duped by Communist Party members skilled in deception and manipulation.

Virulent anti-communists denounced what they viewed as inherent weaknesses of postwar American society, with a clearly political bent. Republicans asserted that cowardly, effeminate liberals were weakening the nation’s defense by minimizing threats both home and abroad.

Even accounting for the usual exaggeration inherent to polemical writing, Anthony Koch’s latest essay on the role of the state in “manufacturing” culture is, in my judgement, radical.

By way of background, following on recent political trends in the U.S. and elsewhere, a group of young Canadian conservatives has come to characterize themselves as the “New Right” and set out a series of arguments against, among other things, Ronald Reagan and classical liberalism and in favour of culture-war politics and a greater propensity towards statism.

While their critiques of the excesses of identity politics and other aspects of progressive governance resonate a great deal, their prescriptions—including a heavy emphasis on state-engineered cultural narratives—do not.

Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20251125162731/https://thehub.ca/2025/11/21/six-reasons-why-a-state-imposed-conservative-culture-is-a-terrible-idea/

Grubb was the fourth Franklin County law enforcement officer to be indicted in the death of a Black person since 2020, and the second prosecuted by a special prosecutor — an increased effort in recent years to avoid potential biases between police officers and prosecutors.

“We thank the grand jury, but we insist that this is but a step, not the conclusion, of our collective journey towards justice for Ta’Kiya and her unborn daughter,” Sean Walton, the attorney for Young’s family, wrote in a statement at the time of the indictment.

A private school in Manila launched Nov. 18 a new academic center aimed at reshaping the negative perception of China at a time of ongoing tensions and widespread public distrust toward Beijing.

The opening of the new Philippine-Chinese Studies Center at Diliman College followed a large gathering of overseas Chinese citizens at the Century Park Hotel in Manila in October, opposing Taiwan independence while promoting unification with the mainland.

Chinese Embassy Charge d’Affaires Zhiyong Zhou was present in both events.

The new Center hopes “to overcome the extent of Filipino public ignorance” and generate “real empirical knowledge essential to promote mutual understanding,” said the Center’s director Rommel Banlaoi, a Chinese-educated security scholar.

In Colombia, armed groups are battling for control of territory vital to the drug trade, including coca fields, and illegal mining and arms routes.

In remote and marginalised rural parts of the country, communities are more vulnerable to pressure from armed groups, who are luring children away through bribes and coercion.

Documented cases of child recruitment into armed groups rose from a few dozen in 2021 to more than 600 in 2024, according to figures from a government watchdog. It is a figure experts say vastly underestimates the real toll as many families stay silent, afraid of the consequences if they speak out.

Landry, a former police officer and sheriff’s deputy who served as Louisiana attorney general until 2024, has blasted early release programs as an insult to crime victims, insisting that anyone who is convicted in Louisiana should serve the entirety of their sentence. He pushed Republican lawmakers to eliminate parole entirely for those arrested after Aug. 1, 2024, and to impose strict eligibility requirements for those already in prison.

But this year the same Legislature tossed all of that aside for one category of prisoner: immigrants without legal status. With mass deportations a key policy priority for President Donald Trump, Republican-led state and local governments have taken aggressive steps to deliver. In May, Landry signed an order seeking to “crack down on criminal illegal aliens” by granting the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections and other state agencies the authority to conduct certain Immigration and Customs Enforcement duties. In June, Louisiana lawmakers created an expedited “alien removal process” through the special parole panel that passed with little notice during the last legislative session.

Fuentes is a 27-year-old livestreamer with openly antisemitic views. He has called Adolf Hitler both “awesome” and “right.” But he has become impossible for the Republican Party to banish, despite repeated attempts by some party leaders.

This dynamic reveals how fringe ideologies operate differently today compared to the mid-20th century, when institutional gatekeepers – political parties, law enforcement, the media – could more effectively contain extremist movements.

And through their 21st-century methods of communication and operation, Nick Fuentes and his followers – the “Groypers” – have managed to get what their 20th-century predecessors could not: widespread awareness and political influence.

Oddly, one of the most revealing things in the GLBT Historical Society’s new exhibit is an overwrought denunciation of Black drag queens dating from all the way back in 1893. One Dr. Charles H. Hughes of St. Louis (clearly incensed) had his note published by a medical journal of the era.

It states, in part:

"I am credibly informed that there is, in the city of Washington, D.C., an annual convocation of negro men called the drag dance, which is an orgy of lascivious debauchery beyond pen power of description."

Having been blindsided by Washington’s initiative, Ukraine’s European allies published their Kyiv-friendly plan on Sunday. It says negotiations over territory should take place after a ceasefire is agreed and should start from the line of contact – the existing frontline.

Sanchez was first indicted in October on charges of “corruptly concealing a document or record” as a standalone case, but the new indictment merges his charges with those against the other defendants, likely in hopes of burying the First Amendment problems with the case against him under prosecutors’ claims about the alleged shooting.

It’s an escalation of a familiar tactic. In 2023, Georgia prosecutors listed “zine” distribution as part of the conspiracy charges against 61 Stop Cop City protesters in a sprawling RICO indictment that didn’t bother to explain how each individual defendant was involved in any actual crime. I wrote back then about my concern that this wasn’t just sloppy overreach, but also a blueprint for censorship. Those fears have now been validated by Sanchez’s prosecution solely for possessing similar literature.

The anti-Chinese sentiment reflects broader anxieties about China's expanding economic footprint in Kyrgyzstan, experts say.

Around a quarter of the $873 million in foreign direct investment that entered the country in 2024 came from China.

Last Tuesday should have been an ordinary workday for 20-year-old Amber Czech, who worked as a welder at a manufacturing facility in Cokato, Minnesota.

She loved her craft and taught welding at her old high school on days she had off. But she was also a rarity. Women make up just 6 percent of welders in the country, and, as with other male-dominated occupations, it came with the risk of isolation and bullying.

The term “mail-order bride” dates back to the 19th century, when so-called frontier brides advertised themselves in newspapers to single men in the American West. After the Civil War, when large numbers of men had died on the East Coast, some women saw migrating to the frontier to marry someone sight unseen as a way to secure stability. That narrative still lingers today in Western novels and films.

The modern international matchmaking industry, however, took shape in the 1970s, when catalogs of mostly Filipino women’s photos and addresses were sold to American men. After being pen pals, men would travel to the Philippines to meet and decide whether they wanted to get married. Some scholars consider this a form of human trafficking, but that has been challenged by other scholarship.

Lopez had met her three friends through the Free Birth Society (FBS), a business that promotes freebirth. Unlike home birth – birth at home with a midwife in attendance – freebirth means giving birth without any medical support. FBS promotes a version widely seen as extreme, even among freebirth advocates: it is anti-ultrasound, which it falsely claims harms babies, downplays serious medical conditions and promotes wild pregnancy, meaning pregnancy without any prenatal care.

FBS was founded by ex-doula Emilee Saldaya, and most women find it through its podcast, which has been downloaded 5m times, its Instagram account, which has 132,000 followers, its YouTube, with nearly 25m views, or its bestselling The Complete Guide to Freebirth, a video course co-created by Saldaya with fellow ex-doula Yolande Norris-Clark, available for download from FBS’s slick website. Analysis of FBS’s financial records by Stacey Ferris, a forensic accountant and academic at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, suggests it has generated revenues exceeding $13m since 2018.

In late October 2025, as much as US$2 billion vanished from a digital marketplace. This wasn’t a hack or a bubble bursting. It happened because one company, Valve, changed the rules for its video game Counter-Strike 2, a popular first-person shooter with a global player base of nearly 30 million monthly users.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has made a dramatic about-face in the agency's position on the relationship between vaccines and autism.

The CDC's website now says a link between vaccines and autism cannot be ruled out. That's a reversal from the CDC's longstanding stance that there is no link.

The change comes even though a connection between vaccines and autism has long been debunked by a large body of high-quality research. But Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long promoted the discredited claim.

Current and former IHS clinicians told ProPublica the changes threaten vaccine uptake in Navajo communities and have left medical practitioners who serve this population feeling censored.

“It seems to me that they’re trying to put up barriers,” said Harry Brown, a physician and epidemiologist who left IHS in 2016 and now works for a tribally operated health facility in North Carolina. In a 26-year career with IHS, he said, he had never encountered an effort to stifle public health campaigns or restrict what medical providers said publicly about vaccines.

Aside from Brown, the health care providers who spoke with ProPublica didn’t want their names used, concerned it could endanger their jobs. One physician said the new IHS restrictions on vaccine-related speech factored into her decision to leave the agency this year.

“I can’t keep people safe,” she said in an interview just before she quit. “I don’t have any of the words anymore to say anything I need to say.”

When can people sue companies for failing to keep their personal data safe?

In 2021, the Supreme Court held that plaintiffs suing in federal court must point to a common-law analogue for any intangible harms they allege—or else be barred for lack of standing. Since then, circuit courts have diverged on when the harm stemming from data breaches resembles one traditionally recognized under common law. One recurring question is what to do when the leaked information is neutral rather than compromising or salacious. Is the harm of having a driver’s license number wind up in shady corners of the internet close enough to the traditional injury of, say, having an affair splashed across the front page of the newspaper?

“This year, these deaths are punctuated by a political movement and powerful politicians who have fanned the flames of hate and are driving our trans siblings even further to the margins of society,” said Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign. “Every anti-equality politician, from Donald Trump and his cabinet, to those in Congress and state legislatures, needs to see these numbers, see these names and faces, and see the cost of the cruelty they have greenlit.”

In 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee subpoenaed 10 screenwriters and directors to testify about their union membership and alleged communist associations. Labeled the Hollywood Ten, the defiant witnesses – Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott and Dalton Trumbo – refused to answer questions on First Amendment grounds. During his dramatic testimony, Lawson proclaimed his intent “to fight for the Bill of Rights,” which he argued the committee “was trying to destroy.”

They were all cited for contempt of Congress. Eight were sentenced to a year in federal prison, and two received six-month terms. Upon their release, they faced blacklisting in the industry. Some, like writer Dalton Trumbo, temporarily left the country.

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According to media reports, the sweeping 28-point proposal closely resembles demands made by Moscow soon after its full-scale invasion in early 2022. It was reportedly drawn up by Russian and US officials, with support from Donald Trump. Kyiv was not consulted. One European diplomat said they only learned of the plan when they turned on the news.

It envisages Ukraine giving up the northern part of the Donbas region, which it controls, to Russia, and cutting the size of its army in half. Ukraine would also be forced to relinquish its long-range weapons, used to strike military targets inside Russia.

"We all know the trope of the starving artist," said researcher Gwendolyn Rugg, "But there's actually surprisingly little reliable data out there to back this up."

Rugg, a senior research scientist for NORC at The University of Chicago, a nonpartisan research organization, is the lead author of a new report on artists' lives and their livelihoods. Researchers surveyed more than 2,600 artists nationwide from across disciplines and working arrangements. They were asked a range of questions on everything from housing, the hours they work and health benefits to how they make money. The study was funded by the Mellon Foundation.