Independent Media

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.

Envision a time when hundreds of spacecraft are exploring the solar system and beyond. That’s the future that NASA’s ESCAPADE, or Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, mission will help unleash: one where small, low-cost spacecraft enable researchers to learn rapidly, iterate, and advance technology and science.

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.”

Russia unleashed a massive combined attack on Kyiv early Friday, sparking fires and scattering debris across many districts of the capital, mayor Vitali Klitschko said. At least 11 people were injured as emergency crews responded to multiple strikes, he said in a statement.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

Anticipation is building among sumo fans in Japan as they wait to discover if the country’s first female prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, will defy centuries of tradition and step into the sumo ring to present a trophy later this month.

KYIV and KHARKIV, Ukraine — Maryna Mytsiuk spends her free time at a shooting range outside Kyiv, hyper-focused on hitting her targets. She’s got to practice. She’s waiting for a call that, any day, will send her to war.

“There have definitely been things that have concerned me in the last little while with the premier’s leadership and it’s stuff that I needed a lot of answers to and each caucus meeting I get a few more answers as we go along,” he told the CBC. “It’s still up in the air for me in terms of what I’m willing to do.”

Washington, D.C., November 7, 2025 | The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) has filed a motion for a preliminary injunction in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose Division, asking the court to halt enforcement of California’s Assembly Bill 715 (AB 715) before it transforms public school classrooms into censored spaces for discussions about Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East. This motion is part of the Prichett et al. v. Newsom et al., Case No. 5:25-cv-9443, the constitutional challenge ADC announced earlier this week.

For decades, the United Nations has intervened in Haiti in a bid to address persistent political, economic and security crises. To date, all attempts have failed.

When 17-year-old David was put in isolation for fighting in juvenile detention in Tennessee, it made him want to fight even more. “I couldn’t do anything but do pushups and get mad and think about stuff. It makes you want to come out and put your hands on somebody,” the teen, who was using a pseudonym because he is a minor, told the nonprofit news outlet MLK50.

The supreme court on Monday rejected a call to overturn its landmark decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

As the first American pope, Leo XIV has largely avoided speaking out about domestic politics in the United States.

Imagine walking out of a Walmart, Target or Costco. As you push your large shopping cart to your car, you ask yourself: Did I really need all that stuff?

Over 5000 fossil fuel lobbyists were given access to U.N. climate summits over the past four years, a period marked by a rise in catastrophic extreme weather, adequate climate action and record oil and gas expansion. “This is climate obstruction at work,” says Nina Lakhani, senior climate justice reporter for The Guardian US. She notes that lobbyists attend climate conferences to “promote false solutions like carbon based carbon markets, carbon capture and storage — these market based solutions which are not going to save the planet.”

Texas Rep. Nate Schatzline’s energy was palpable as he gazed out from the video on the computer screen, grinning ear to ear, the sleeves of his white dress shirt rolled up.

More than a dozen NGO rescue vessels operating in the Mediterranean have suspended communication with the Libyan coastguard, citing escalating incidents of asylum seekers being violently intercepted at sea and taken to camps rife with torture, rape and forced labour.

ISLAMABAD — This fall saw Pakistan’s first-ever campaign to administer the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, which protects girls from cervical cancer. The vaccine is highly effective, according to global health groups, and is routinely administered in some 150 countries.

Environmental activists partied outside the San Francisco Ferry Building on Friday to celebrate the decommission of a Southern California oil rig.

Drax power plant has continued to burn 250-year-old trees sourced from some of Canada’s oldest forests despite growing scrutiny of its sustainability claims, forestry experts say.

The province of Manitoba has filed notice that it intends to fight a proposed class action lawsuit against it over birth alerts, arguing that the plaintiff in the case waited too long to sue.

In Sudan, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces said Thursday they’ve agreed to a U.S.-backed ceasefire proposal to end more than two years of a devastating war with the Sudanese military. The truce was brokered by a U.S.-led group of mediators known as the Quad, made up of negotiators from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Hundreds of thousands of civilians facing famine remain trapped in the city of El Fasher in Sudan’s North Darfur region after it was seized by the RSF. Sudan’s war has triggered what the U.N. describes as the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, with millions of people displaced.

Scholars have found that the constant, often conflicting and at times false information coming out of the White House and shared via social media posts and the conventional news media causes members of the public to see truth and fact as relative and makes them more likely to dismiss those who disagree with them as untruthful. This leaves doubt about what’s real and what isn’t.

Last week and over the weekend, Licensed Practical Nurses (LPN), Health Care Aides and many other health care workers represented by the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE) at public facilities throughout the province voted 98 per cent in favour of striking if a collective agreement can’t be reached in mediation.

How does one monitor a conflict zone on the brink of civil war, especially in a region which is difficult to access, experiences frequent internet shutdowns and where misinformation is common? In this guide, we outline the open source tools and methods we can use to evidence what is really happening in many such conflict settings.

Seven lawsuits filed in California state courts on Thursday allege ChatGPT brought on mental delusions and, in four cases, drove people to suicide.

President Donald Trump and officials in his administration say National Guard troops are needed in “War ravaged” Portland, Oregon, to protect a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement office that he described as being under siege.

James Dewey Watson was an American molecular biologist most known for co-winning the 1962 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for discovering the structure of DNA and its significance in transferring information in living systems. The importance of this discovery cannot be overstated. It unlocked how genes work and gave birth to the fields of molecular biology and evolutionary phylogenetics. It has inspired and influenced my career as a scientist and as director of a bioinformatics and functional genomics research center.

ROME, Nov 5 2025 (IPS) – Ehmudi Lebsir was 17 when he trudged more than 50 kilometres across the desert to stay alive. Half a century on, the Sahrawi refugee still has not gone home to what was then Spanish province of Western Sahara.

This week, President Trump threatened to send the U.S. military into Nigeria for not doing enough to protect Christians. For years, Nigeria has struggled to curtail violence across the country, from international terrorist groups to disputes between farmers and herders. But now, its leadership must face threats from both its internal adversaries and the White House. Nick Schifrin reports.

This week marks a turning point in the UK’s approach to violent porn. The government has announced it will make publishing or possessing pornographic depictions of strangulation or suffocation – often known as “choking” – illegal. This bold move could transform the porn that appears on porn sites and social media platforms.

Reports of sometimes deadly encounters with brown bears and Asiatic black bears are being reported almost daily ahead of hibernation season as the bears forage for food. They have been seen near schools, train stations, supermarkets and at a hot springs resort.

On an unseasonably warm day in June, hundreds of people holding Palestinian and Irish flags spilled over the sidewalks outside Westminster Magistrates Court in central London. The crowd had gathered in support of Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, the 27-year-old member of Irish-language hip-hop group Kneecap charged by the British government with a terror offence for holding up a flag from the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah at a concert last year.

A new study provides evidence that negative attitudes toward sexually expressive people may apply to adults of all ages, rather than being a bias specifically aimed at older adults. The research also suggests that an individual’s sensitivity to disgust can influence these judgments differently depending on whether they are evaluating a man or a woman. The findings were published in The Journal of Sex Research.

A string of US-style lobby groups with deep ties to fossil fuels are “duping” unsuspecting members of the public by falsely claiming to represent “ordinary Australians”, one of the nation’s top misinformation experts has warned.

When the Trump administration gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement access to a massive database of information about Medicaid recipients in June 2025, privacy and medical justice advocates sounded the alarm. They warned that the move could trigger all kinds of public health and human rights harms.

People who regularly use ayahuasca, a traditional Amazonian psychedelic drink, may have a fundamentally different way of relating to death. A new study published in the journal Psychopharmacology indicates that long-term ayahuasca users tend to show less fear, anxiety, and avoidance around death—and instead exhibit more acceptance. These effects appear to be driven not by spiritual beliefs or personality traits, but by a psychological attitude known as “impermanence acceptance.”

With turnout breaking recent records, voters flocked to the polls in early voting and on Election Day Tuesday. While some absentee and mail-in votes have yet to be counted and the Board of Elections will certify results later, initial counts by neighborhood show where New Yorkers showed up for Democrat Zohran Mamdani, Republican Curtis Sliwa and independent candidate Andrew Cuomo.

Teen Vogue staffers have taken to social media to share the news they’ve been laid off, just as Condé Nast announced the outlet will be “joining Vogue.com, a transition that’s part of a broader push to expand the Vogue ecosystem.”

“May Day 2028 will be the defining moment of our generation,” United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain declared in a recent Jacobin essay.

Dick Cheney, the former vice president and one of the key architects of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, died Monday at age 84. Cheney served six terms in Congress as Wyoming’s lone representative before serving as defense secretary under President George H.W. Bush, when he oversaw the first Gulf War and the bloody U.S. invasion of Panama that deposed former U.S. ally Manuel Noriega. From 1995 to 2000, Cheney served as chair and CEO of the oil services company Halliburton, before George W. Bush tapped him as his running mate. As vice president, Cheney was a leading proponent of invading and occupying Iraq, which killed hundreds of thousands of people and destabilized the entire region. Dick Cheney also steadfastly defended warantless mass surveillance programs and the use of torture against detainees of the so-called war on terror. We speak with The Nation’s John Nichols, author of multiple books about Cheney, who says the neoconservative leader had a “very destructive” impact on the world.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil — October 28, 2025, will be remembered as one of the saddest episodes in recent Brazilian history, especially for residents of the state of Rio de Janeiro. At least 121 people were killed in the deadliest police operation in the country’s history.

“Workers across Alberta have begun the process of organizing a general strike after the province legislated an end to the teacher’s strike using the notwithstanding clause, according to the Alberta Federation of Labour.

Back in the heady 1990s and 2000s, word on the street was that a drink or two a day, especially red wine, was good for health. “Everyone loved that story,” says Anya Topiwala, a psychiatric researcher at the University of Oxford.

San Francisco — Halloween march and rally at ICE court counters tyranny with costumes and joyous protest, but a with very serious message

LONDON — Ten people remained in hospital on Sunday, nine of them with life-threatening injuries, after a mass stabbing attack spread fear and chaos on a London-bound train in eastern England, British police said. Two suspects were in custody and police said they were working to find a motive.

Every week of 2025 seems to bring a new health headline, whether it’s about climbing autism rates, changing vaccination recommendations or unexpected cancer risks.

PARIS — Two more suspects were charged on Saturday in the Louvre jewel heist case, three days after their arrests. A total of four people are now being held and charged with stealing $100 million worth of royal jewels from the Paris museum two weeks ago.

The International Space Station is one of the most remarkable achievements of the modern age. It is the largest, most complex, most expensive and most durable spacecraft ever built.

The first thing most people recall about Nathan Gill is his imposing height.

The Trump administration’s upcoming proposed regulation would make two hugely consequential changes to the Social Security Administration’s disability system, according to four SSA officials with knowledge of the plans. First, it would modernize the job listings that Social Security’s disability adjudicators and judges use to decide if there’s work available in the U.S. economy that a manual laborer could do despite physical impairments — like a low-skilled desk job at a computer or driving for Uber or DoorDash. Second, the new rule would almost entirely remove age as a criterion, in most instances making a 50-plus-year-old like Tincher no more eligible for assistance than a 20-something.

Dictionary.com has crowned a set of numbers as its 2025 word of the year.

For centuries the supernatural, and Halloween in particular, have been contested territory. Folklorists have interpreted Halloween as a relic of pre-Christian Celtic beliefs, when the turn of the seasons was thought to weaken the membrane separating the living and the dead. Some Christian evangelicals, especially in the US, view it as a sinister and sinful celebration of the occult. There’s also the perennial complaint that it’s nothing more than a recent, brash American import.

Like haunted houses? Scientists do.

As Pax Americana ends, a multipolar order is emerging. The history of Southeast Asia holds lessons for what’s to come.

Approximately 460 patients and their companions were killed in a horrific massacre at a hospital in el-Fasher, Sudan, on Tuesday, the UN reports, amid a takeover of the North Darfur capital by Rapid Support Forces (RSF) this week.

The Blackfeet Nation in Montana is preparing to feed the people during the government shutdown by distributing buffalo meat and organizing an elk hunt. In Rapid City, South Dakota, Lakota are organizing mutual aid. In North Dakota, the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Nation is keeping all its food programs going, with hot meals and bagged lunches, and making sure children, elderly and college students don’t go hungry. On the west coast, an Indigenous restaurant owned by Crystal Wahpepah, Kickapoo, is serving up free bison tacos for young ones and elders in Oakland, California.

Slung across Chenab river canyon, the Chenab bridge is by all accounts considered a modern engineering marvel. Two decades in the making, it is at once a post-card moment, a monument to ingenuity, and a symbol of progress—everything one would expect from the biggest, strongest, best, and most challenging project for Indian Railways since 1947.