World, US, Culture, Market, and Sci-Tech News Aggregation from MSM and Independent News
Listening to Gavin Newsom talk about “free and fair elections” is like listening to Yoko Ono sing. It just doesn’t sound right. In both cases, it’s very wrong.
But Newsom, born without the encumbrance of integrity, insists on lecturing Republicans about election integrity.
“Donald Trump and Greg Abbott played with fire, got burned — and democracy won,” the leftist California governor stricken with political delusions of grandeur gloated on X this week after a federal court panel in a 2-1 ruling blocked Texas from implementing a mid-decade revision to its U.S. House map. Republicans have appealed the decision, which the dissenting judge excoriated as “the most blatant exercise of judicial activism” he has witnessed in his 37 years on the federal bench.
Donald Trump and Greg Abbott played with fire, got burned — and democracy won.
This ruling is a win for Texas, and for every American who fights for free and fair elections. https://t.co/gyXPoVFMmC
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) November 18, 2025
That according to Vanderbilt University political science professor Josh Clinton, co-director of the Vanderbilt Unity Poll, which recently queried 1,033 adults from Nov. 7 to Nov. 10 about pressing higher education issues.
“They don’t want professors using the classroom to push political views, and they don’t want politicians trying to dictate what happens in higher education. People want education to be about education,” Clinton said in a news release regarding the results.
You just knew the moment President Trump posted remarks about a handful of Democrats engaging in sedition and treason on social media, along with the accompanying punishment for such acts, that the press was going to jump all over him for it.
From our watchtower here at the Media Research Center, we have identified a recent and nasty trend emerging from the Elitist Media. It’s called “Trumpwashing”: that phenomenon wherein the media withhold covering some Democrat scandal until President Donald Trump opines on it, with President Trump’s statement being covered as if it were the scandal, rather than the underlying and until now suppressed Democrat event.
The latest instance of a Trumpwashed scandal: the video, published by six Democrat members of Congress calling on members of the Armed Forces and Intelligence Agencies to disobey unspecified “illegal” orders. The media held their tongues on the video until Trump spoke up, and the rest is history.
As an evidentiary sample, we submit for your consideration the totality of the Trumpwashed report aired on NBC Nightly News (click “expand” to view full transcript):
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky vowed Friday that he would not “betray” his country as he publicly pushed back against a U.S. plan that would end the war on terms widely seen as favorable to Russia, even at the risk, he said, of alienating Washington.
In an address, Zelensky said he would present “arguments” and “alternatives” to the 28-point proposal drafted by the Trump administration, which stunned Kyiv and its European partners when details leaked earlier this week.
That draft plan, seen by AFP, would reportedly require Ukraine to cede territory, drastically reduce the size of its military, pledge never to join NATO and hold snap elections. Russia, meanwhile, would not only be allowed to keep the land its forces have seized but also receive sanctions relief and rejoin the G8.
A woman was set on fire on the train in Chicago by a man with 22 prior arrests.
“She had severe burns all over her upper torso and half of her scalp was burnt off. She was lucid and conscious and talking.”
No worries that silver-spooned landfill Pritzker says the state is safer than ever and he doesn’t need the National Guard.
We shouldn’t have to live like this.
A woman was set on fire on the train in Chicago by a man with 22 prior arrests
Meanwhile, JB Pritzker says his state is safe and he doesn’t need the National Guard.
We shouldn’t have to live like this. pic.twitter.com/a25chudC5k
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) has publicly beclowned herself for the second time in a week by falsely accusing several Republican politicians of taking money from “somebody named Jeffrey Epstein.”
“Folks who also took money from somebody named Jeffrey Epstein, as I had my team dig in very quickly—Mitt Romney, the NRCC, Lee Zeldin, George Bush, McCain-Palin,” Crocket declared on the House floor on Tuesday.
Federal campaign finance records show that Epstein donated primarily to Democrats, including two current sitting members of Congress, Delegate Stacy Plaskett (D-V.I) and Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), both of whom have retained the donations, despite scrutiny.
Even worse, newly released documents from Epstein’s estate include text messages between Plaskett and Epstein that show he advised her on what questions to ask President Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen during a 2019 congressional hearing.
France is pulling back diplomatic staff from Mali as the security situation in the country deteriorates under a jihadist-imposed fuel blockade. The move comes amid deepening concerns over the junta-led country’s shift toward Russian military support, which has done little to improve the security situation, according to French officials.
from www.france24.com
MOSCOW, November 21. /TASS/. Russia will react to the United States’ peace plan for Ukraine once it sees something concrete, refusing to comment on “conflicting” reports about it that have come out in the media, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
“I think that commenting on leaks that are contradictory and contain conflicting elements is pointless. When we have some official information, when we receive it via a relevant channel, naturally, we will always be open to work,” she told reporters.
“For several days now, Western media outlets have been releasing various leaks and drafts – whatever this could be called – with different details, in different sequences, under various labels,” she said, referring to the US plan. “We have official channels of communication with Washington. The Foreign Ministry has received no information, plans or drafts.”
KYIV: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s top security official denied on Friday (Nov 21) he had agreed to the outline of a Trump administration peace plan, after US officials said he had accepted most of its terms.
Washington has presented Kyiv with a 28-point plan that would endorse many of Russia’s main demands, requiring Kyiv to give up additional territory, cut back the size of its military and forever abandon hope of joining the NATO western alliance.
US officials said the plan was drafted after consultations with Rustem Umerov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, who served as defence minister until July and is a close ally of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
In an astonishing victory, 34-year-old state legislator Zohran Mamdani won New York City’s mayoral election. Defeating former state Governor Andrew Cuomo, who enjoyed strong backing from US President Donald Trump and the political establishment, Mamdani became the city’s first Muslim immigrant mayor and its youngest in more than a century. The democratic socialist’s victory sent shock waves through national politics, emboldening progressives across the country to run and to win on agendas as unapologetically ambitious as the moment demands.
Campaigning across the city, Mamdani reached out to various social groups, including African Americans, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, East Africans and South Asians, and especially the youth, many of whom had grown politically disengaged after the Democratic Party’s demoralising performance in recent years. He brought people back into the political process, mobilising voters who otherwise might have stayed home.
A United States federal judge has said the Trump administration must pause its deployment of National Guard troops to Washington, DC, a setback for the president’s push to send the military into cities across the country.
US District Judge Jia Cobb temporarily suspended the deployment in a ruling on Thursday, responding to a lawsuit filed by city officials who said Trump had usurped policing powers and was using the military for domestic law enforcement.
Ukraine burns through small drones like belts of ammunition — fed, fired, and reloaded. Piloted from behind the front lines, drones hunt on the battlefield. This summer, Ukraine’s drone production increased 900 percent to 200,000 per month from 20,000 the previous year. Costs, too, are ammunition-like: reconnaissance and first-person view drones cost in the low thousands, akin to 120mm mortar rounds and far cheaper than a $200,000 Javelin anti-tank missile. Despite limits to drone performance, the United States will certainly need more drones than it has now. Acquiring, maintaining, accounting for, and delivering drones exceeds what the U.S. Army’s supply system can do.
Relentless rains and floods have killed at least 41 people in central Vietnam since the weekend, while a search continues for nine still missing, state media reports.
The deluge has submerged more than 52,000 homes and left half a million households and businesses without power, according to reports. Tens of thousands of residents have been evacuated from the flood-affected regions.
Rainfall has exceeded 1.5m (5ft) in several areas over the past three days, even rising beyond the 1993 flood peak of 5.2m in some parts.
BELEM, Brazil — A fire briefly spread through pavilions being used for U.N. climate talks in Brazil and prompted evacuations Thursday on the next-to-last day of the conference, and officials said 13 people were treated for smoke inhalation.
Organizers said the fire was controlled in about six minutes. Fire officials ordered the evacuation of the entire site for the conference, known as COP30, and the venue remained closed for about seven hours following the fire.
Attendees trickled back into the COP30 venue after it reopened. Some posed for pictures in the nighttime glow of the signage at the entrance. Others returned to rooms further from the pavilions to resume negotiations or to retrieve belongings that had been left behind. Security staff were stationed behind metal barricades to keep people out of the pavilions and a curtain veiled off the area that the blaze had destroyed.
Untraceable 3D-printed gun found in local investigation; the dangers of ‘ghost guns’ WHIO TV
from news.google.com
The justice department is investigating how two Trump allies handled the investigation into whether California senator, Adam Schiff, committed mortgage fraud, according to a copy of a subpoena obtained by the Guardian and a person familiar with the matter.
The office of the deputy attorney general Todd Blanche is overseeing the inquiry, which appears to have developed as an offshoot of the main case into Schiff – a notable development since the justice department is essentially investigating activities of two close allies of the president.
A federal grand jury in Maryland, where prosecutors are investigating the mortgage allegations against Schiff, issued the subpoena to Christine Bish, an associate of federal housing finance agency (FHFA) chief Bill Pulte and a Republican congressional candidate in California.
A new report from OpenAI and a group of outside scientists shows how GPT-5, the company’s latest AI large language model (LLM), can help with research from black holes to cancer‑fighting cells to math puzzles.
Each chapter in the paper offers case studies: a mathematician or a physicist stuck in a quandary, a doctor trying to confirm a lab result. They all ask GPT-5 for help. Sometimes the LLM gets things wrong. Sometimes it finds a faster route to an already known result. But other times, with careful human guidance, it helps push the boundaries of what was previously known.
In one experiment involving how waves behave around black holes, GPT-5 worked through the math to independently produce results that had previously been shown to be correct, showing it was capable of doing this level of scientific calculation. In another project involving nuclear fusion, GPT-5 developed a model that accelerated the research.
While much of the history of life on Earth is written, the opening chapters are murky at best. On our ever-changing world, the older a rock is, the more it has changed, obscuring or even erasing evidence of ancient life. Beyond a hazy boundary of circa two billion years, in fact, this interference is so total that no pristine, unaltered Earth rocks are known to exist, making any potential sign of biology as clear as mud.
At least until now. In a study published on November 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group of researchers say they’ve leveraged artificial intelligence to follow life’s trail further back in time than ever before, using machine learning to distinguish the echoes of biology from mere abiotic organic molecules in rocks as old as 3.3 billion years.
The results could more than double how far back in time scientists can convincingly claim to discern molecular signs of life in ancient rocks, the study authors say, citing previous record-setting measurements involving 1.6-billion-year-old rocks.
Ukraine arms infantry with ammo that splits mid-flight to hit drones Euromaidan Press
from news.google.com
Serbians step up anti-government protests over Trump towers in Belgrade Financial Times
from news.google.com
Spanish court orders Meta to pay $550 million to digital media companies Reuters
from news.google.com
Earth’s magnetic field acts like a protective cocoon, shielding the planet from harmful charged particles racing in from the Sun and deep space. But over the South Atlantic, that shield has developed an unusually weak patch known as the South Atlantic Anomaly. Recent observations show that this anomaly is not only expanding but also shifting, raising concerns for satellites, spacecraft and scientific instruments that pass through the region. While everyday life on the ground remains unaffected, the anomaly’s rapid evolution is prompting NASA researchers to issue stronger warnings and step up monitoring.
The Democratic National Committee posted and then quickly removed a claim on X that President Donald Trump spent Thanksgiving with Jeffrey Epstein in 2017, based on an unconfirmed email from the convicted sex offender released in a House Oversight Committee probe.
White House records and media reports confirm Trump was at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, with family, staff, and military personnel that day. The incident, occurring amid ongoing Epstein document disclosures, prompted backlash from Trump supporters, who accused the DNC of spreading false information.
Journalist Andy Ngo spotted the deletion and pointed out the absurdity of the claims. “The official
@TheDemocrats X account tweeted out a lie from Jeffrey Epstein that President Trump spent Thanksgiving 2017 with him,” Ngo wrote.
The Satanic Temple (TST) has made quite a name for itself with its push for abortion. In 2023, they opened an online abortion clinic called the “Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Abortion Clinic,” and last year, they opened the “Right to Your Life Satanic Abortion Clinic” in Virginia.
TST, based in Massachusetts, has made it very clear that they view abortion as a religious right and a “sacrament.” In Idaho, they filed suit against the state’s anti-abortion laws on the grounds of religious freedom. According to the Idaho Statesman, the suit claimed “The ban extracted economic value from pregnant women’s wombs, in violation of the Fifth Amendment; effectively made pregnant women slaves, in violation of the 13th Amendment; gave unconstitutional preferences to rape victims, in violation of the 14th Amendment; and violated Idaho’s religious freedom statutes.”
Yesterday, a judge dismissed those claims.
Victory: Satan lost in Idaho! The Satanic Temple just lost its lawsuit claiming abortion is a “religious right.” Sorry, child sacrifice isn’t protected under freedom of religion.https://t.co/oBMs0ZrsOS
— Kristan Hawkins (@KristanHawkins) November 13, 2025
A religious organization that says it encourages benevolence and empathy challenged Idaho’s abortion ban after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. On Monday, the case came to a close.
“California’s redistricting scheme is a brazen power grab that tramples on civil rights and mocks the democratic process.”
The US Department of Justice has filed suit against California Governor Gavin Newsom and Secretary of State Shirley Weber, alleging that the state’s newly enacted congressional map violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
The legal challenge targets the redistricting framework created under Proposition 50, which shifted responsibility for drawing congressional districts from an independent commission to the state legislature. The new map favors Democrats in the upcoming 2026 midterms.
Facing a shortage of organs needed by tens of thousands of patients, scientists have been studying pig organs as a potential solution. Genetically modified to suit…
from www.realclearscience.com
Remember the 2011 Republican presidential debate when then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry blanked on one of the three federal agencies he campaigned on getting rid of if elected president? It was an unforgettable moment, particularly for Perry.
“And I will tell you, it’s three agencies of government when I get there that are gone: Commerce, Education and the, um, what’s the third one there?” he said, looking like a deer in headlights as the bright lights of the stage washed over him. He tried again. Nope.
RINO Mitt Romney tried to provide a lifeline.
“The EPA?” the former Massachusetts governor offered. Perry should have phoned a friend. “EPA, there you go,” Perry agreed, momentarily relieved. But the Environmental Protection Agency wasn’t the answer.
Perry tried one last time. “The third agency of government I would do away with — the education, the uh, the commerce and let’s see. I can’t the third one. I can’t. Sorry Oops.”