Independent Media

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?

Content warning.

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.

“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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.)

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

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.

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).

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.”