AllSides' Shaping the Narrative series analyzes how media bias influences overall homepage coverage of select topics. This part focuses on how media bias affects coverage of International News, including coverage of Israel-Hamas and Ukraine-Russia conflicts.

The oldest published version of the melody to the “Alphabet Song” was in 1761. However, because it’s the same melody as “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” it's hard to trace it to its original composer.The “Alphabet Song” is so deeply entrenched in American culture that it almost seems sacrilegious to change a piece of music that’s one of the first most of us ever learned. But after all these years, some educators are altering the classic melody so that there is a variation when the letters L-M-N-O-P are sung.This change shocked popular TikTokker Jessica Skube, who documents life raising 7 children with her 2.6 million followers. Nearly 10 million people have watched her video revealing the significant change, and it’s received over 56,000 comments since first being published in late 2020. @jesssfamofficial Just to add to your 2020 ?? because distance learning wasn’t enough!!! @ms_frazzled #abcsong #lmno #wtf #momsoftiktok "You guys, I have huge, huge, huge, huge, huge news,” Skube told her followers. "I have a fifth grader, a fifth grader, a fourth grader, a third grader, a third grader, a first grader, and a preschooler and I just got news that the ‘Alphabet Song’ is changing." She then sang the updated version of the song. @farmerlovesphonics ⭐️ This might be controversial, BUT this is the best way to sing the alphabet song to avoid letter names being combined…the dreaded “elemenop” or “YNZ”. Practice daily. Point to the letters as you sing it to build letter recognition. #alphabet #abcsong #alphabetsong #letternames #scienceofreading #teachers #parents #newalphabetsong The big reason for the change is that people learning English, whether young kids or those who speak it as a second language, often get confused because L-M-N-O-P can sound like one letter, “elemenopee." So, the new version breaks up that part of the alphabet, making the letters easier to understand. There has been a "surge" in the number of students learning English as a second language over the past decade, so it only makes sense to alter the song to help them learn the fundamentals of the language.Gif of boy giving a thumb's up with caption "very cool" via Giphy It’s believed that this new version of the song was first created by a website called Dream English in 2012.This article originally appeared two years ago.

Awkward. The post The Police song Sting tried to destroy: “I hated that song so much” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Only in America can the government reach a $38 trillion debt during a shutdown. The debt sprinted from $37 trillion to $38 trillion in a month and nine days — record time for a trillion-dollar leap outside of the coronavirus pandemic. That more than half of this period overlapped with the closure of the federal government exposes both the lie of “shutdowns” and the precariousness of the predicament in which Americans find themselves. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Budget and Economic Outlook report to begin the decade did not even forecast a $37 trillion debt until the 2030s. Barely halfway through the 2020s, we have sped past that stop sign. “The federal government is still shut down,” began an NPR.com headline on Thursday, hours after the Associated Press reported on the $38 trillion debt reached, quietly, on Tuesday. Of course, the federal government never really shut down. The Post Office still delivers credit card applications that promise 50,000 frequent flyer miles in exchange for a 22 percent annual rate, Pell Grants continue to enable universities to raise tuition past the affordability of normal Americans (which necessitates more Pell Grants), the USS Gerald R. Ford sits off Croatia and not in a scrapyard, Yellowstone opened today as it does every day, and 74 million Americans received Social Security checks this month. Very little of our government shut down. Some government employees went on furlough. All citizen tax dollars remain hard at work. Very little of our government shut down. Much of it must. Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget points out that “we’re on course to spend $1 trillion just on interest payments on the national debt this year, exceeding our spending on our national defense. Something has to give — and eventually it will, whether we are prepared for it or not.” The Pete Peterson Foundation notes that “net interest payments … over the next decade, are projected to average $1.4 trillion per year.” Think about that. The federal government paid $1.2 trillion to service the debt during the fiscal year that just ended (net interest payments totaled about $900 billion). The U.S. government pays more in interest on its debt than all but about a dozen other nations in the world pay for their entire budgets. The larger our annual deficits grow, the more the interest payments become a budgetary death spiral. The solution is at once simple to envision and difficult to implement. To cut that annual $1.2 trillion interest payment — about one of every six dollars that the federal government allocates — legislators must not merely spend less but spend less than they receive. To spend less than they receive, legislators must cut all of those programs that did not shut down when the liar class (politicians and journalists) insisted that the federal government had shut down. This includes Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, ObamaCare, and defense. Clearly, Department of Government Efficiency cuts to the Department of Education, and the Trump administration’s subsequent shuttering of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, did not offset outlay increases elsewhere. Filing at the margins, rather than cleaving the meat of the matter, does not cut it. To visualize our debt, imagine dollar bills placed end to end from the Earth to the Sun and back 20 times (and indulge me in imagining the dollar bills not burning when in proximity to the Sun). Even if every American became a slave for the next year to our debtmasters and turned over the entire gross domestic product to them, we would still owe about $8 trillion. Republicans and Democrats argue that debt limits and government shutdowns, i.e., a period in which the feds cannot borrow additional funds, are the problem. Their solution to this problem — the ability to borrow more — is the big problem. Let the real government shutdown begin. READ MORE from Daniel J. Flynn: The Trump Doctrine Is To Have No Doctrine One Nation Under Therapy Trump Wins the Words Battle While Democrats Speak a Foreign Language

Student-Led Free Speech Discussion on Charlie Kirk Leads to Teacher’s Discipline on Constitution Day

Europe reportedly allowed Ukraine to launch these long-range missiles deep into Russia while Moscow was conducting nuclear drills - potentially increasing the risk of nuclear escalation or nuclear accident.

…and another one. $500mm evaporated. This one in the telecom space is accused of – get this – faking invoice collateral. This is starting to appear endemic. At some point the big boys who have been financing all these redistribution finance schemes thinking they were all… pic.twitter.com/wvoZjHRZUF — Jeffrey P. Snider (@JeffSnider_EDU) October 22, 2025

by Cindy Harper, Reclaim The Net: The fight over New Jersey’s newborn blood tests is no longer about medicine; it’s about who owns the code of a human life once the state takes it. A constitutional battle in New Jersey over the state’s newborn screening program has intensified, as parents now cite the government’s own […]