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Recent Articles
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The exodus of California tech billionaires from the Golden State to Florida Gold Coast
This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here. MIAMI and PALM BEACH, Fla. — Last December, a large coterie of Silicon Valley billionaires descended upon Miami to attend Art Basel, the ritzy, contemporary art fair that marks the end of the moneyed set’s yearly social calendar. Much of the buzz surrounded the spectacle of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, among the world’s richest men, docking his 466-foot, $450-million yacht, the Dragonfly, in Biscayne Bay while he stepped ashore to view the art installations. But the chatter pivoted quickly among a contingent of a dozen California billionaires. Weeks earlier a new ballot measure — backed by the SEIU-United… |
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Iran Prepares for US Attack as It Rejects Negotiations
Iran is not dancing toward the negotiating table out of fear; it is bracing for war while refusing to yield. Reports that Tehran is preparing for a possible U.S.–Israeli missile assault, even as it dismisses offers to talk, underscore a new kind of tension: fear without capitulation. That is not weakness, and it is not readiness in the traditional sense. It is a regime calculating its own survival amid an increasingly hostile international environment. This moment looks nothing like the hope-tinged diplomacy of past nuclear talks. Then, there were back channels, envoys meeting in hotel suites, whispered negotiations and, at times, fragile progress. Now the language is public posturing, threa… |
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ICE Murders Unarmed Woman in Minnesota
Feature Editorial An ICE agent stepped in front of a slowly moving vehicle, raised his firearm, issued a command, and then fired multiple rounds through the windshield. One of those bullets struck Renee Nicole Good in the face. She died at the scene. She was a mother of two. She was unarmed. She was not advancing. She was moving away. Everything that follows must begin there, because everything else—press statements, procedural language, institutional reflexes—exists to blur that moment until it disappears. This editorial is not about whether law enforcement work is dangerous. It is. It is not about whether officers must sometimes make split-second decisions. They do. It is not about whether… |
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Teen girl dies in sledding accident
Two teenagers died in separate winter recreation accidents hundreds of miles apart, leaving their communities reckoning with sudden loss during rare snowstorms. As vigils replace snow days, schools, families, and officials confront how quickly ordinary moments can turn fatal when unfamiliar conditions meet youthful risk. In Frisco, Texas, the first signs that something was wrong came not from police lights but from silence. On a street that had been filled hours earlier with teenagers sledding and laughing in freshly fallen snow, neighbors watched emergency responders gather near a tree at the edge of a residential road. By Sunday evening, word began to spread that a 16-year-old girl had die… |
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How to Write and Publish Science Fiction
Science fiction has always been a genre of defiance. From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, the best sci?fi stories refuse to accept the world as it is. They imagine what could be, what should be, and sometimes what must never be. Yet for the modern writer, the act of creating and publishing science fiction is itself a rebellion—against shrinking attention spans, against publishing monopolies, against the quiet pressure to write something “safe.” This is not a neutral craft. To write and publish science fiction today is to step into a contested space where art, commerce, and politics collide. 1. The Spark: Writing Against Gravity Every sci?fi story begins … |
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Three Family Lives Brutally Taken in a Single Night
The small Alabama town of Wilmer has been plunged into grief after the discovery of three lives brutally taken in a single night. Inside a modest home, investigators found a mother, her young son, and a pregnant teenager—all bound with zip ties, all slain in acts of chilling precision. The silence of that house now echoes with the weight of tragedy, a place once filled with love now marked forever by violence. It was a phone app alert that led loved ones to the scene, a digital whisper that revealed horror beyond imagination. Lisa Ferguson, 46, her 17-year-old daughter Keziah Luker, who was eight months pregnant, and 12-year-old Thomas Cordelle were each confined to separate rooms, their fin… |
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Trump announces 25 percent tariffs on European Union cars and trucks
United States President Donald Trump has said he will increase tariffs on automobiles from the European Union to 25 per cent. The announcement on Friday could jolt the world economy at a time when it is already fragile from the knock-ons of the US-Israel war with Iran. It came months after the US and the EU had forged a trade deal as Trump imposed sweeping reciprocal tariffs on trade partners across the world. The agreement set tariffs on most goods at 15 percent, lower than the 30 percent Trump had previously threatened. In a post on Truth Social, Trump accused the EU of “not complying with our fully agreed to Trade Deal”, without providing further details. Trump added that he “fully unders… |
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Explosive device thrown at protest outside NYC Mayor Mamdani home
The New York City Police Department (NYPD) has said that an “improvised explosive device” was thrown during a protest outside New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s home, with two men taken into custody. The statement on Sunday came a day after the incident outside the mayor’s residence, Gracie Mansion, where far-right, anti-Muslim demonstrators, led by activist Jake Lang, clashed with counterprotesters. NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said a preliminary analysis has found that the item thrown by a man at the protest was “not a hoax device or a smoke bomb”. “It is, in fact, an improvised explosive device that could have caused serious injury or death,” she said, adding that further analysis wo… |
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Hegseth says more US forces arriving in Middle East as Iran war ramps up
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said more United States forces are arriving in the Middle East, as the country’s war against Iran intensifies amid mounting concerns over the civilian toll of US-Israeli strikes. Hegseth said during a news conference at the Pentagon on Wednesday that the US-Israeli campaign against Iran was “just getting started”. “We are accelerating, not decelerating … More bombers and more fighters are arriving just today,” he told reporters, adding that the US would be using a “nearly unlimited” supply of 226kg (500lb), 453kg (1,000lb) and 900kg (2,000lb) bombs. The US and Israel, he said, would sow “death and destruction from the sky, all day long”. Hegseth’s combat… |
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The Epstein Files and the Machinery of Forgetting
Editorial The first instinct of power, when threatened, is not denial but delay. Delay until outrage exhausts itself, until headlines thin, until the public grows bored or distracted or numb. The newly unsealed Jeffrey Epstein-related documents land in public view with the weight of something both familiar and unfinished, a reminder not merely of a disgraced financier and the crimes that orbited him, but of how expertly the machinery of forgetting has been engineered. These files do not arrive as a revelation in the cinematic sense. There is no single smoking gun, no neat moral closure. Instead, they arrive like sediment, layer upon layer of testimony, allegation, recollection, and evasion. … |
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Children Kidnapped is The Everyday Horror We Pretend Is not Happening
Opinion | Editorial The words “Children Kidnapped!” should stop us cold. They should rip through the noise of daily life, louder than any headline about markets or elections. Yet somehow, they don’t. We scroll past them, we shake our heads, we mutter “how awful,” and then we move on. That is the scandal. Society has learned to absorb the shock of child abductions as if it were routine. The recent case of a school bus driver accused of kidnapping after allegedly veering off his route is not an isolated nightmare. It is a symptom of a deeper rot. Parents put their children on buses every morning, believing in the ritual of safety. Signs such as yellow paint, stop signs, and uniforms serve as r… |
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New Epstein file photos appear to show Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor on floor with woman
Photos included in newly released files on pedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein appear to show Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor crouched over a woman on the floor. In the undated images, the royal appears to kneel on the ground as he leans over an unidentified woman, while another angle shows the woman’s abdomen being touched. The images, among more than three million documents published by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) on Friday, have no captions and it is not known where they were taken. But they will likely put further pressure on Andrew, who has faced ongoing questions over his friendship with the late financier. The royal has always denied any wrongdoing. Other files revealed Andrew—str… |
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World faces food catastrophe if Strait of Hormuz disruption persists
A prolonged disruption in the Strait of Hormuz could result in a global food “catastrophe”, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has warned, as shipments of critical agricultural inputs remain blocked in the key waterway due to the US-Israel war on Iran. Food prices have not risen yet because existing stocks are absorbing the shock, the United Nations body’s chief economist, Maximo Torero, said in an interview on Monday, alongside David Laborde, director of FAO’s agrifood economics division. But if traffic through the strait does not resume, the shocks to energy and fertiliser markets will translate into higher commodity and retail prices later this year and into 2027, Laborde added. … |
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Why AI firm is taking on Trump administration
A row is simmering between the United States government and Anthropic, one of the tech companies that develops artificial intelligence (AI) tools for defence and civilian uses. According to recent reports, Anthropic’s Claude software was used in a US military operation, which resulted in the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro in January this year. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has given the company until Friday to loosen its rules about how its AI tools can be used by the Pentagon, or risk losing its government contract, The Associated Press and Reuters news agencies reported on Tuesday, quoting unnamed sources. But Anthropic is refusing to back down over safeguards which … |
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Audrey Hepburn Biography
Audrey Hepburn was a British actress and philanthropist who lived from 1929 until 1993. Hepburn was a big figure in Hollywood in the 1950s and 1960s. She starred in famous movies including Roman Holiday (1956), The Nun's Story (1956), and Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961). Later, Audrey Hepburn stopped acting and became a UNICEF ambassador. Audrey Hepburn was born in Belgium on May 4, 1929, to an English father and a Dutch mother. Because her father worked as an insurance salesman, the family moved a lot between England, Holland, and Belgium. Her parents split in 1935, in part because her father was a Nazi sympathizer. Audrey, who was six years old at the time, said subsequently that the divorce… |
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Foreign element caused recall of 90000 bottles of child ibuprofen
Federal regulators have ordered a nationwide recall of nearly 90,000 bottles of children’s ibuprofen after contamination was discovered in two production lots. The medicine, manufactured by Strides Pharma and distributed by Taro Pharmaceuticals, was pulled from circulation following complaints of “gel-like masses and black particles” in the liquid suspension. The Food and Drug Administration confirmed the recall earlier this month, classifying it as a Class II event—meaning the risk of serious harm is considered remote, but temporary or reversible health effects are possible. Parents are being urged to stop using the affected bottles immediately, which carry expiration dates of January 31, 2… |
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18-year-old girl killed in fiery crash
A a teenage girl was among the teens killed in a violent incident that occurred early Sunday morning. Near Farley, Missouri, on State Highway 45, an overturned automobile carrying 18-year-old Tessa Walker caught fire and killed her. The accident injured four other teenagers. Tessa Walker, a Park Hill School senior, was preparing to start her college career in the autumn at Northwest Missouri State. Besides being an accomplished athlete, Tessa was a hard worker in the classroom. She participated in track, girls' flag football, and volleyball. She participated in the AVID college-readiness program for all four years, and her dedication paid off with many awards, including academic scholarships… |
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Father Guns Down Mother In Front Of Daughter
A man used his vehicle to trap his former girlfriend before shooting her twice with a twelve gauge shotgun as their ten year old daughter watched, turning what began as a confrontation between former partners into a killing that has stunned the local community and left a child at the center of an unthinkable trauma. The woman had no clear path to escape once the suspect positioned his vehicle to block her movement. Witness accounts and charging documents indicate the shooting unfolded in front of the couple’s daughter, who saw her mother killed in broad daylight before emergency responders arrived at the scene. Authorities arrested the suspect shortly afterward. Prosecutors are expected to p… |
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Michael Caine Biography
When Michael Caine led a squad of English gangsters to participate in an ambitious heist of gold from Italy in the film "Italian Job" (1969), it became another famous film of the 1960s. Later on, the film was recreated, and it became famous for the chase scenes that included Mini Coopers. Although he was born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite, he chose the stage name Michael Caine later in his career. With a voice that is distinctly associated with the working class, Michael Caine is widely considered to be one of the most famous English actors of the post-war era. He has appeared in more than one hundred films. On March 14, 1933, Michael Caine was born in Rotherhithe, which is located in London, E… |
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China with its axis of authoritarians is only growing stronger under Trump
As Donald Trump prepares to depart for China to meet Xi Jinping, it is a moment for America’s traditional allies to reflect on a sobering fact: the balance of power is rapidly shifting against the United States. Since becoming president, Trump’s actions have fractured America’s alliance system just as Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have consolidated theirs. As if to underscore this, the Russian president will likely arrive in Beijing days after Trump. His will be a red carpet welcome. Donald Trump’s will be far more exposing – and we all know why. Instead of a mighty demonstration of American firepower, his Iran war has exposed huge vulnerabilities. And less discussed but no less consequentia… |