Wren

Adriana Del Orden started her detransition two years ago. As a lesbian, she has no regrets about the steps she took when she was younger to live as a man. Changing her gender and body over time has made her feel, in her words, powerful and magical.

“I just feel like such a power source. The transition, and then detransitioning,” she said. Del Orden is genderqueer, which means she doesn’t fit into a male and female binary. She enjoys expressing herself as a queer, masculine woman, as well as embracing her femininity. And although she is no longer a trans man, her masculinity brings her a lot of joy — especially since she was forced to repress it as a kid.

Self-stimulatory behaviors are often associated with autism, but in truth, these behaviors are part of the broader human experience. From infancy onward, we all engage in self-soothing or sensory behaviors that help us navigate our emotions and environment.

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.

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.

A row over the definition of the term “gender” threatens to bog down pivotal talks at the Cop30 climate summit.

Before the UN talks in Brazil, hardline conservative states have pushed to define gender as “biological sex” over their concerns trans and non-binary people could be included in a major plan to ensure climate action addresses gender inequality and empowers women.

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.

The Affair of the Sausages (1522) was the event that sparked the Reformation in Zürich. Huldrych Zwingli, pastor of Grossmünster in Zurich, Switzerland, spearheaded the event by publicly speaking in favor of eating sausage during the Lenten fast. Zwingli defended this action in a sermon called Von Erkiesen und Freiheit der Speisen (Regarding the Choice and Freedom of Foods), in which he argued, from the basis of Martin Luther's doctrine of sola scriptura, that "Christians are free to fast or not to fast because the Bible does not prohibit the eating of meat during Lent."

France is committing to help the Palestinian Authority draft a constitution for a future Palestinian state. French President Emmanuel Macron announced a joint constitutional committee after meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Paris yesterday. France also pledged $100 million for humanitarian aid in Gaza this year.

In the future, your clothes might come from vats of living microbes. Reporting in the Cell Press journal Trends in Biotechnology on November 12, researchers demonstrate that bacteria can both create fabric and dye it in every color of the rainbow—all in one pot. The approach offers a sustainable alternative to the chemical-heavy practices used in today’s textile industry.

“The industry relies on petroleum-based synthetic fibers and chemicals for dyeing, which include carcinogens, heavy metals, and endocrine disruptors,” says senior author and biochemical engineer San Yup Lee of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. “These processes generate lots of greenhouse gas, degrade water quality, and contaminate the soil, so we want to find a better solution.”

Known as bacterial cellulose, fibrous networks produced by microbes during fermentation have emerged as a potential alternative to petroleum-based fibers such as polyester and nylon.

The Department of Justice is appealing a federal judge's order requiring the White House to immediately begin providing American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation at its press briefings when President Trump or press secretary Karoline Leavitt are speaking.

In a court filing on Friday responding to U.S. District Judge Amir Ali's ruling, the Justice Department requested clarification on which types of events should have ASL interpretation available. The DOJ said it believes the services should be limited to regularly scheduled briefings and not other events where the president takes questions from the press.

Veronica and Charity Bowers, a young Christian missionary and her daughter, are killed when the Peruvian Air Force shoots down a small passenger plane in 2001. The plane had been mistaken for a drug smuggling plane and was shot down as part of a joint anti-drug agreement between the CIA and the Colombian and Peruvian governments.

President Donald Trump has made the Bowers’s deaths newly and urgently relevant since he began ordering the U.S. military to strike down alleged drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean in September 2025. By early November, the U.S. had launched a total of 17 strikes, killing at least 70 people, and those figures seem to grow almost by the day. The attacks are illegal under both U.S. and international law. The administration also provided no documentation of the alleged drug trafficking.

In Cuba, the power grid collapsed during Hurricane Oscar in October 2024, leaving 10 million people in darkness. When Melissa arrived, it struck the same fragile infrastructure that Cubans had barely begun to rebuild.

Haiti’s fragile situation before Hurricane Melissa cannot be overstated. The island nation was still reeling from years of cascading disasters – deadly hurricanes, political instability, gang violence, an ongoing cholera crisis and widespread hunger – with over half the population already in need of humanitarian assistance even before this storm hit.

This is the new reality of the climate crisis: Disasters hitting the Caribbean are no longer sequential. They are compounding and can trigger infrastructure collapse, social erosion and economic debt spirals.