Independent Media

The Greek government recently announced the creation of a special police force for Roma communities, a move that has raised alarm among civil society groups and rights advocates. Roma in Greece are not officially recognized as a minority; they are and wish to be known as Greek citizens. Yet, this legal ambiguity leaves them without the protections offered to other recognized minority groups.

The power went out at about 5.30 that morning. It was knocked out all day; there were power lines and trees down across the roads. The first day of school was scheduled to be the very next day. I was at work. Teachers were getting their classrooms ready to welcome kids.

This was August, the middle of hurricane season. There was a big hurricane passing a couple hundred miles south of Hawaii. There were hurricane-force winds down in town. We had volleyball practice; we had enough daylight to practise in the gym. During practice, at about 3.30pm, I received a call from a parent at the school. She said: “Ryan, there’s a fire in town. We’ve lost our house. We barely got out alive.” Theirs was one of the first houses to go.

Happy World Toilet Day!

No, that's not a joke.

November 19 is World Toilet Day — declared by the U.N. in 2001. The goal is to call attention to the 3.4 billion people who live without "safely managed sanitation" and the more than 300 million people who engage in "open defecation" — doing their business in the great outdoors.

The pecan nuts that look like little brown footballs are actually the seed that starts inside the pecan fruit – until the fruit ripens and splits open to release the pecan. They are usually the size of your thumb, and you may need a nutcracker to open them. You can eat them raw or as part of a cooked dish.

The pecan derives its name from the Algonquin “pakani,” which means “a nut too hard to crack by hand.” Rich in fat and easy to transport, pecans traveled with Native Americans throughout what is now the southern United States. They were used for food, medicine and trade as early as 8,000 years ago.

The article cited for the native american history is gated. Here is a free/no sign-in version: https://www.mediafire.com/file/jfxb3lz2z7wz8s1/abrams-nowacki-2008-native-americans-as-active-and-passive-promoters-of-mast-and-fruit-trees-in-the-eastern-usa.pdf/file?dkey=6m7x0kxz45m&r=458

A Senate committee has voted ten to one to pass sweeping amendments to the government’s Bill S-2, ending what’s known as the second generation cut-off and implementing a one-parent rule, that allows anyone with status under the Indian Act to pass their legal identity and rights on to their children.

If bird flu is airborne, the government’s current biosecurity-based strategy cannot protect farms on its own. A poultry vaccine likely would have stemmed the damage from this outbreak, experts told me. Yet while other countries have curbed infections through vaccination, the U.S. has not authorized those efforts amid political and economic pushback.

The USDA told me it didn’t investigate whether the wind contributed to the outbreak’s spread.

Here’s how I used genetic markers, satellite imagery, property records, trade notices, wind simulations and Google Street View to do the work USDA did not.

Slovenia’s government has been accused of turning Roma neighbourhoods into “security zones” after the passing of a law giving police powers to raid and surveil homes in so-called “high-risk” areas.

At midnight on Monday, the country’s parliament backed the “Šutar law”, named after Aleš Šutar, who was killed in an altercation with a 21-year-old Romany man after rushing to a nightclub after a distress call from his son.

The incident outside the LokalPatriot club in Novo Mesto, in south Slovenia, last month led to huge street protests, police being stationed in Roma neighbourhoods and the resignation of two ministers.

Twenty years ago, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush signed the first “stand your ground” law, calling it a “good, common-sense, anti-crime issue.”

The law’s creators promised it would protect law-abiding citizens from prosecution if they used force in self-defense. Then-Florida state Rep. Dennis Baxley, who cosponsored the bill, claimed – in the wake of George Zimmerman’s controversial acquittal for the killing of Trayvon Martin – that “we’re really safer if we empower people to stop violent acts.”

This year, SIECUS’ Legislative Mid-Year Report tracked more than 650 bills introduced in statehouses, finding that about 25 percent of them aimed to restrict access to quality sex education. That marks a 35 percent increase from the previous year, a surge empowered by a White House under the influence of Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s controversial blueprint for President Donald Trump’s second term. What’s more is that SIECUS’ 2025 State Report Cards, which grade states on their sex education policies, paint a bleak picture. Over a quarter of states get Fs because of their failure to provide significant support for sex education.

The most powerful Republican in Wisconsin stepped up to a lectern that was affixed with a sign reading, “Pro-Women Pro-Babies Pro-Life Rally.”

“One of the reasons that I ran for office was to protect the lives of unborn children,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos told the cheering crowd gathered in the ornate rotunda of the state Capitol. They were there on a June day in 2019 to watch him sign four anti-abortion bills and to demand that the state’s Democratic governor sign them. (The governor did not.)

China has sent its coast guard through the waters of the Senkaku islands and military drones past outlying Japanese territory as Beijing ramps up tensions over the Japanese prime minister’s remarks on Taiwan.

Law and Kaur presented their latest research part of York University’s Annual Critical Femininities Conference this summer. During the research, Law ran two different focus groups–one for sex workers and one for students- in which participants mapped their sexual experiences. Instead of focusing on consent, or sexual assault, Law had her research participants, all of whom identified as women, mapped their sexual experiences while trying to measure willingness (or the lack thereof) and reward (or it’s opposite, harm).

For decades, the image of gun ownership in America was white, rural and Republican, but that's been changing, according to gun clubs, trainers, Second Amendment advocates and academic researchers.

They say more liberals, people of color and LGBTQ folks have been buying guns for years and particularly since Trump's reelection in 2024. This story was based on more than 30 interviews. David Phillips is on the training team of the Liberal Gun Club, which has chapters in more than 30 states and provides a haven for liberals to train and learn about guns. He says club membership has grown from 2,700 in November to 4,500 today. Requests for training, he says, have quintupled.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents fanned out across Charlotte on Saturday, making arrests along Charlotte's immigrant-heavy Central Avenue and South Boulevard corridors. The arrests preceded a protest Saturday afternoon in uptown, where hundreds condemned the crackdown and the deployment of federal immigration agents.

On Sunday morning, CBP Commander Greg Bovino said in a social media post that agents had arrested 81 people so far, "many" of whom have criminal histories. He said the agency will release more information about people who were arrested on social media.

The chemtrails theory has circulated since 1996, when conspiracy theorists misinterpreted a U.S. Air Force research paper about weather modification, a valid topic of research. Social media and conservative news outlets have since magnified the conspiracy theory. One recent study notes that X, formerly Twitter, is a particularly active node of this “broad online community of conspiracy.”

In Tehran, only 1mm of rain has fallen this year, a once-in-a-century event (the capital’s average annual rainfall between 1991 and 2000 was 350mm). All this comes on top of five previous years of drought. The second half of November is normally the snow season in the capital.

Snow cover has decreased by 98.6% nationwide compared with the same point last year, and in Tehran the daily temperature has been a balmy 20C. The price of bottled water has escalated and limits are being placed on purchases.

It’s happened to you countless times: You’re waiting for a website to load, only to see a box with a little mountain range where an image should be. It’s the placeholder icon for a “missing image.”

But have you ever wondered why this scene came to be universally adopted?

The British Army is the only military in Europe that still recruits 16-year-olds.

That’s how old Hamish* was when he joined last year. As is required of all 16- and 17-year-old sign-ups, who are legally still children but are given the titles of ‘junior soldiers’, he moved into the residential Army Foundation College Harrogate in the north of England to begin his military training.

“In the first couple of weeks, it’s brilliant,” he said of his early days in the army, explaining that most teenage recruits “see it as a brilliant way of earning money”, particularly “if you haven’t really got any GCSEs”.

Epstein’s influential friends, however, weren’t all household names. The documents also reveal details of Epstein’s unusually close relationships with scientists, academics, and philanthropists — and how he had a cozy arrangement with members of the media who got juicy tips from Epstein and did little critical work about him.

One reporter with whom Epstein connected frequently was Landon Thomas Jr., a financial journalist at the New York Times. Thomas exchanged dozens of emails with Epstein between 2015 and 2018, years after the financier’s conviction for soliciting a minor.

In the immediate aftermath of David Szalay’s book Flesh winning the Booker prize, one feature of the novel stood out: how often the protagonist utters the word “OK”.

The 500 times István grunts out the response is part of a sparse prose style through which the British-Hungarian Szalay gives the reader few insights into the inner workings of a man whose fortunes rise and fall.

But however inarticulate István is, the fact a story about a working-class man from eastern Europe won one of the biggest literary prizes in the world has started a debate about masculinity in literature in 2025.

Grijalva’s signature came as Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released three emails by the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, in which he referenced Donald Trump. In one email from 2019, Epstein wrote that Trump “knew about the girls.”

Newly released Jeffrey Epstein emails have cast further doubt on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s account of when he cut ties with the child sex offender and his denials about meeting his accuser Virginia Giuffre.

In March 2011, four months after he later claimed to have ended his relationship with Epstein, the former prince told him and the convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell: “I can’t take any more of this,” in response to allegations put to him by the Mail on Sunday.

Like most mathematicians, I hear confessions from complete strangers: the inevitable “I was always bad at math.” I suppress the response, “You are forgiven, my child.”

Why does it feel like a sin to struggle in math? Why are so many traumatized by their mathematics education? Is learning math worthwhile?

Sometimes agreeing and sometimes disagreeing, André and Simone Weil were the sort of siblings who would argue about such questions. André achieved renown as a mathematician; Simone was a formidable philosopher and mystic. André focused on applying algebra and geometry to deep questions about the structures of whole numbers, while Simone was concerned with how the world can be soul-crushing.

Both wrestled with the best way to teach math. Their insights and contradictions point to the fundamental role that mathematics and mathematics education play in human life and culture.

Matthew Locke sued Hubbard County Sheriff Cory Aukes, Chief Deputy Scott Parks and Hubbard County after the sheriff and his deputy used pain compliance techniques on Locke in an attempt to remove him from a protest. According to Locke’s suit, the techniques amounted to an excessive use of force.

The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals decided 2-1 to reverse the decision of U.S. District Judge Wilhelmina Wright, who dismissed the case on the grounds that pain compliance techniques are not prohibited by any existing case law.

The appeals court deemed the techniques excessive and reversed the district court’s ruling, returning the case to the district court, where it will now go into discovery.

On the night of the raid, heavily armed federal agents zip-tied Jhonny Manuel Caicedo Fereira’s hands behind his back, marched him out of his Chicago apartment building and put him against a wall to question him.

As a Black Hawk helicopter roared overhead, the slender, 28-year-old immigrant from Venezuela answered softly, his eyes darting to a television crew invited to film the raid. Next to Caicedo, masked Border Patrol agents inspected another man’s tattoos and asked him if he belonged to Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang that the Trump administration has designated a terrorist group.

Until that moment, Caicedo’s only interaction with law enforcement in his two-and-a-half years in the United States had been a traffic stop two weeks earlier for driving without a license or insurance, according to the records we reviewed. Chicago police had run a background check on him and found no prior arrests, no warrants and no evidence that he was in a gang. Caicedo said he had a pending asylum application, a steady job at a taco joint and a girlfriend whose daughter attended elementary school across the street.

None of that mattered. The U.S. government paraded him and his neighbors in front of the cameras and called their arrests a spectacular victory against terrorism. But later, after the cameras had gone, prosecutors didn’t charge Caicedo with a crime. They didn’t accuse him of being a terrorist. And after a brief hearing in immigration court, the government sent him back to the country he had fled nine years earlier.