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Even as the final scimitar-horned oryx was felled for meat and leather on the Saharan dunes, a network of zoos, hunting reserves, and even a royal menagerie, guaranteed they would live on in captivity. Now, 9 years after these graceful antelope were first introduced back into the lands they once roamed, they have become one […] The post ‘Extinct’ Graceful Oryx Thriving in the Saharan Wilds Thanks to Decades of Captive Breeding appeared first on Good News Network.

Books Reading the Weird Look, Up in the Sky: Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster (Part 8) Sometimes people under stress see strange things — but if you insist it was *real*, just know that you’ve gone mad. By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on December 10, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Chapters 20-22 of Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster. The book was first published in 2023. Spoilers ahead! CW for cancer and extremely weird tumors. Mareva Buduci meets Erin Holdaway a few months before the PVG pandemic: She’s working in UCC network operations, Erin in tech support. Mar has called about a malfunctioning terminal, and she’s gobsmacked when Erin looks so much like her estranged sister Leila. The resemblance largely lies in Erin’s “gorgeous cornflower blue eyes.” Mar was a “surprise baby,” born within a year of Leila. The sisters were inseparable through early childhood. At two, Mar was diagnosed with a rare genetic disease that caused her to grow benign tumors called teratomas. The first removed was interpreted by the doctors as fetus in fetu, a twin Mar had absorbed in the womb. Eight-year-old Mar’s curiosity about her surgical scars made her father point her to an article about the condition. Big mistake: She understood just enough to “get completely freaked out.” She began having nightmares about her ghost twin emerging at night to enviously attack Leila. Mar distanced herself—hurting Leila’s feelings seemed better than letting the ghost hurt her. The night before surgery to remove a second growth, Mar overheard her mother regretting having Mar so soon after Leila. If that hadn’t happened, their second child would’ve been normal! She returned to bed and wept, while Leila tried to comfort her, perhaps for the last time. Later, Mar blamed the oncologist who misdiagnosed her first teratoma; actually, cell malfunction caused the tumors. She’d pushed Leila away unnecessarily, and once they were teenagers, Leila withdrew from Mar. At seventeen, Leila married a decade-older, toxically-controlling medical resident. By twenty-four, Leila had six children and had given up any plans for her own career. Mar suspected that her emotional withdrawal pushed Leila toward her husband. Now Mar wonders if befriending Erin could replace her long-lost connection with Leila. She doesn’t want to come off as an “office stalker,” so she decides to “let things evolve naturally.” * * * The UCC Christmas party, two months pre-PVG: Mar meets Erin again. The two bond over a recently discovered “megacephalopod” that no one else is interested in. They have similar educational backgrounds in evolution, ecology, and environmental science and are total “bio-nerds.” Mar confides that she left grad school to have surgery, after which she had to get a “jobby-job” at UCC. Erin barely got her B.S. after her mother died. With grades too low to garner grad school funding, she also landed with UCC. She changes the subject to Mar’s surgery. Mar explains her condition and adds that she had a hysterectomy at twenty-one, when her uterus filled up with “hollow, bleeding orbs that the oncologist thought might be primitive eyeballs.” Her parents were disappointed at the loss of potential grandkids, despite Leila’s “bountiful brood.” Conversation shifts to pets they’d like to have (cats), Erin’s boyfriend Gregory, and Mar’s possible asexuality. When they part, Mar hopes she’s found a geeky work friend among the UCC careerists and offspring-obsessers. The pandemic quickly takes out three of Mar’s coworkers. She’s excited that Erin will be joining her department but, sadly, Erin returns from PVG sick leave much changed. She works well enough, but grows increasingly jumpy and paranoid. Mar hears her mutter about a “Betty” and feels a little jealous. Physically, Erin becomes emaciated, her eyes mottled with microhemorrhages. Worse, she’s sprouted a huge growth on her back. * * * The shift before “the incident,” Erin seems extremely anxious. Mar considers informing their supervisor but doesn’t want to get Erin in trouble. A new employee named Devin passes through en route to a training class. Erin stares at him  strangely, then trails Devin from the room. Uneasy, Mar follows, but loses sight of them. She approaches a security station. The guard on duty suddenly sets off an emergency alarm. Mar and the other employees are hustled out to the parking lot. Hazmat-suited SWAT officers and paramedics swarm the building. A woman near Mar stares into the sky. Mar follows her gaze to a large, dark shape flying unsteadily. Eagle? Vulture? No, it has long thin arms, and instinct tells Mar it’s “an actual monstrosity and did not belong in the world.” She looks away from it, as do others. After paramedics wheel out a filled body bag, the police herd Erin’s coworkers back inside. They won’t answer any questions, only saying a “trauma counselor” will be talking to everyone individually. Mar wonders if Erin was in the bag, or Devin. She’s thought she’d given up on Erin as a maybe-BFF, but evidently not. Mar’s turn with the “trauma counselor” comes an hour later. Candy Kleypas is dressed in Homeland Security black. Her formal diction slips into country dialect as she skirts Mar’s questions and grills her about Erin’s recent behavior. When Mar suggests she talk to Erin’s doctor, Candy says Dr. Shapiro has gone missing. Does Mar know anything about her whereabouts? Mar knows Homeland Security must be desperate and overwhelmed to ask her about Erin’s doctor. Candy switches to a spiel about how stress can make people see strange things. Mistake, say, large birds for something “unreal.” Candy follows up with barely veiled threats: someone seeing unreal things could land in quarantine or even lose their job. Mar despises such tactics, but mutters that she understands. Nevertheless, Mar knows that she saw something non-avian and dangerous. Something Homeland Security must hide, lest the public panic. But she doesn’t know what she’s seen. Weirdbuilding: Candy, trying to balance convincing Mar that she didn’t see anything with convincing Mar not to talk about what she didn’t see, compares Mar’s glimpse of Erin to Mothman or the Jersey Devil. So we can guess what part of the country she’s from. Madness Takes Its Toll:  Sometimes people under stress see strange things. They interpret some ordinary thing as looking wrong, just so their brains can pin the stress’s wrongness to something concrete. And if you insist that the wrong thing was real, well, we’ll just know that you’ve gone mad. Ruthanna’s Commentary We had a little blip in the space-time continuum two weeks ago, as a result of which I included some thoughts on Chapter 20 in a post that Anne only took through Chapter 19. So I’ve already shared my initial thoughts on meeting Her, realizing that Savannah killed Her estranged sister to get Her address, and suspecting that the elder gods have some nasty plans for Her tendency to grow weird cancerous masses. Wilbur Whately isn’t the half of it. No one wants masses of bloody eyeballs growing in their uterus. Speaking as someone whose uterus was at one point very excited about fibroids, we’re talking about an organ that has enough trouble handling the production of small humans, and often comes up with ideas that we would rather it didn’t. Wombs do not need additional outside advice from apocalyptic deities. Mar’s problem at the moment, though, is that her work-crush has gone from delightful geekfest conversations to PVG-strained depression to an Incident. DHS doesn’t want to answer questions about the Incident, and wants to heavily discourage witnesses from talking about it; they’re trying to discourage witnesses from believing what they’ve seen, but people tend to believe things that they’ve been intimidated into not talking about. Because it’s not that dangerous to talk about hallucinations, is it? The hallucination thinks so. Pay it too much attention, and you might attract attention right back. Avert your gaze, feeble monkey. Is that what DHS thinks, too? That talking about what’s happening, acknowledging it aloud, will make it stronger? Because it seems to me that it’s getting plenty strong on its own, and that people are more effective at fighting enemies they can talk about. Maybe it’s just me. Mar’s therefore stuck processing her own solo half-glimpse of Erin’s full Archivist form, and her own solo half-guesses about who has died, who has killed, and who might be in deep trouble. Her larger problem, I think—everyone’s larger problem—is that humans are full of coping strategies for the weird and terrifying. It comes up in her conversation with Erin about the megacephalopod: making stupid jokes about scary things is a coping strategy. Trying to fit the scary thing into familiar scripts, that’s a coping strategy too. DHS’s messy response represents yet another coping strategy or three: denial, authoritarian control, violence. Humans are all-too-often short on coping strategies that actually improve catastrophic problems. And then there’s that megacephalopod. There are a lot of things in the deep ocean, but still: twelve arms and four eyes? Cephalopod limbs get pretty wild, but that’s not a normal number. Are we sure that’s a cephalopod? Are we sure that’s from around here at all? I might be tempted to a few Santa jokes myself, under the circumstances. Better watch out, indeed. Anne’s Commentary I found myself identifying strongly with Mareva in reference to the paucity of geeks at her work place. I was lucky in my first full-time job as a data entry operator for (of all things) the Department of State of Florida. During my earlier positions there, I was surrounded not by geeks, per se, but by characters of varying degrees of craziness and wisdom, frequently combined. In my last position, I worked in a data center largely populated by college-age or just graduated guys who could geek out with the best of them. Question: Are simulated space battles executed from rolling office chairs not an absolutely foundational geek activity? Because there were a lot of those. Rubber bands were the weapons of choice. Also strategic collisions that sent the enemy caroming into stacks of corporate annual reports. Believe me: The corporate annual reports deserved it. Good times. My subsequent job was less geek-rich, especially after the interns underwent some sinister assimilation into careerist conformity, my older peers into parenthood and related adult stuff. Not that there’s anything wrong with parenthood and adult stuff. I guess you could consider the discovery of a new cephalopod to be “adult stuff.” It’s just, as Erin and Mar demonstrate at the office Xmas party, most of their coworkers aren’t interested in cephalopods, even ones with twelve arms and four eyes and crimson hides, weighing in at nine hundred pounds. Google tells me there are no twelve-armed cephalopods, but this novel’s time-setting is a little ahead of ours, and amazing if monstrous metamorphoses are happening in Mareva and Erin’s world. In fact, they’re happening in Mareva and Erin. Mareva has “a rare, previously undocumented genetic illness” that causes “chronic benign teratomas.” I was confused to read that one of Mareva’s teratomas occurred in her upper abdomen, another on the back of her upper arm; since teratomas are defined as germ cell tumors, wouldn’t these tumors be confined to the reproductive organs? A dive into the internet (which Snyder has frequently prompted), and once again, weird fiction has taught me something cool. Teratomas are often sited in the ovaries or testes, but during development, germ cells can wander off to other parts of the body and later give rise to extragonadal teratomas. Normal germ cells will only develop into eggs or sperm. However, the germ cells that cause teratomas are pluripotent, meaning they can produce tissue from all the embryonic germ layers (ectoderm, mesoderm, endoderm). Hence the bones, teeth and hair discovered in Mareva’s first removed tumor. The rarest type of teratoma (fetiform) contains living tissue that can resemble a malformed fetus. That sounds like the one on Mareva’s arm that on MRI was “curled up like a strange embryo.” It’s possible that a surgeon could misdiagnose a fetiform tumor (or any tumor full of bones, teeth and hair) as a true parasitic twin, as Mareva’s surgeon apparently did. Not that this excuses his mistake in Mareva’s eyes. If her parents had known the truth of her condition, her father wouldn’t have sent her to an article about the fetus in fetu phenomenon—and why the hell he’d do that to an eight-year-old instead of explaining it face to face, after digesting the facts himself, then encouraging her to express her sense of the matter so he could steer her away from twinicidal guilt! Mareva should want to punch out Dad as well as the misdiagnosing doc. Left to her own devices, Mareva devises a system for protecting her sister that can’t but remind me of Elsa isolating herself from Anna in Frozen. Anna even gets involved with a predatory male out of her loneliness, as Leila does with the “love-bombing” David. So far, Mareva hasn’t gotten a killer anthem to sing into the teeth of a mountain blizzard, but there are some chapters yet to go. I can hope she’ll develop her inborn condition into some kind of super power for birthing monsters, hence becoming a true Mother of Calamities. Maybe she’s one of those who has contracted PVG without showing any symptoms or testable immune reactions. Add proneness to teratoma formation to the drastic mutations and metamorphoses the PVG virus can inspire, well. It hardly bears thinking about, but I am anyway, and this line from the epigraph to Part Three becomes more ominous: “All nature, all formations, all creatures exist in and with one another, and they will be resolved again into their own roots.” Next week, we celebrate our 550th post with one of our traditional Weird Watches! Join us for “Aura” from Season 2 of American Horror Stories.[end-mark] The post Look, Up in the Sky: Lucy Snyder’s <i>Sister, Maiden, Monster</i> (Part 8) appeared first on Reactor.

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL — Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio, has announced a grassroots effort to blanket the Buckeye state ahead of next year’s special election. On Wednesday, Husted released a list of 112 grassroots campaign chairs to encompass all 88 counties across the state. An effective grassroots operation for Husted and other Republican candidates in Ohio will be critical for Republicans to continue their momentum in the Buckeye state because shifting voter demographics in the Republican party makes turn out increasingly difficult. The list, first shared with The Daily Signal, includes 23 county commissioners, 20 GOP county chairs, nine mayors, eight State Central Committee members, seven sheriffs, five state legislators, four business leaders, four activists, and three township trustees. You win with people!Today we rolled out 112 @JonHusted Campaign Chairs representing all 88 Ohio counties. This team is ready to take Senator Husted’s message to every community in the state. #OHsen pic.twitter.com/FU4GHi3NsZ— Team Husted (@TeamHusted) December 10, 2025 According to an announcement from the campaign, these campaign chairs ” will continue to serve as the campaign’s first point of contact for community leaders, faith groups, law enforcement, veterans, and grassroots activists.” Such chairs will also “recruit, organize, and lead volunteers at the county level while coordinating local events, earned media, and surrogate activity to strengthen the campaign’s presence inevery corner of Ohio.” Husted will likely go up against former Democrat Sen. Sherrod Brown, who is seeking a comeback after losing to Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno last year. The list of grassroots organizers includes Tony J. Schroeder, a GOP Chairman for Putnam County who has spoken previously with The Daily Signal on numerous occasions about redistricting. Delighted to support the re-election campaign of my friend @SenJonHusted! A son of Williams County and a strong supporter of @potus and America First, Jon understands the values of Northwest Ohio. He's doing a great job for us in DC! pic.twitter.com/NyrDTFkf3T— Tony Schroeder (@schroedertony) December 10, 2025 Another name on the list is Ohio state Rep. Gary Click. Click recently made headlines because his bill honoring Charlie Kirk’s legacy passed the state House last month. “From the football field to the Statehouse to the Senate, I’ve always believed that strong teamsdeliver the best results,” Husted said about the list. “These County Campaign Chairs are trusted local voices who know their communities and share my mission to lower costs, grow jobs, and protect ourvalues. I’m proud to stand with them as we work to move Ohio forward.” On Monday, Team Husted released a video over X regarding his campaign launch. .@JonHusted is launching his Senate campaign! Our country needs trusted leadership grounded in Ohio values. He’ll continue the proven solutions that strengthened Ohio’s families, created jobs, and made our communities safer.#OHSen pic.twitter.com/3fFdRbaFrr— Team Husted (@TeamHusted) December 8, 2025 The video message from Husted shows the senator sharing his life story, including how he was adopted out of a foster home. Husted’s father worked at a local machine tool factory, but was laid off after working there for 25 years, with the factory closing. “It closed because Ohio and America were losing their competitive edge. America’s leaders have let China and other countries steal our technology and our jobs,” Husted warns. “It didn’t have to be that way. That’s what drives me to fight for Ohio’s future every single day.” The advertisement shows that Husted is leaning into the MAGA agenda, touting policies such as border security, tax cuts, no tax on tips or overtime, protecting children online, and protecting women’s sports for women. The post EXCLUSIVE: Husted Campaign Grassroots Effort appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Trump administration is conducting a profound revolution in civil rights law. On Tuesday, the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division announced that it is ending the use of disparate impact in enforcement of Title VI under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This is a huge deal. Back to equality under the law https://t.co/4zj2ejgXKp— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 9, 2025 “The prior ‘disparate impact’ regulations encouraged people to file lawsuits challenging racially neutral policies, without evidence of intentional discrimination,” said Harmeet Dhillon, U.S. assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division. “Our rejection of this theory will restore true equality under the law by requiring proof of actual discrimination, rather than enforcing race- or sex-based quotas or assumptions.” Department of Justice Rule Restores Equal Protection for All in Civil Rights Enforcement“The prior ‘disparate impact’ regulations encouraged people to file lawsuits challenging racially neutral policies, without evidence of intentional discrimination,” said @AAGDhillon. “Our… pic.twitter.com/EjhLR6WhWe— DOJ Civil Rights Division (@CivilRights) December 9, 2025 Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin by any group or organization receiving federal money. On its own, this is a worthy goal to ensure equality before the law and treatment by any organization financially connected to the federal government. But the Department of Justice has been using disparate impact in its enforcement of Title VI since the 1970s and this has twisted the meaning of the law so that instead of working to stop direct cases of discrimination, the DOJ completely racialized the legal system. To a certain extent, the standard of “antiracism” proposed by academic Ibram X. Kendi—whose star has faded considerably in the last few years—was already partially codified into law. Any racial disparity in outcomes could be interpreted by DOJ as de facto racism. This interpretation of civil rights law has been used to essentially bludgeon institutions into dropping reasonable standards. Disparate impact analysis has led to schools dropping standardized testing and programs for gifted students. It’s led to police departments dropping colorblind merit-based exams. It’s prompted fire departments to drop physical fitness standards to ensure that more women could be hired. In many cases the use of disparate impact analysis has meant dropping basic, common-sense standards and putting Americans in harm’s way. For instance, in 2014 the Obama administration’s DOJ issued a “dear colleague” letter on school discipline. The policy essentially threatened K-12 schools with a civil rights lawsuit if their school discipline policies affected some racial groups more than others even if the policies themselves were entirely neutral. The result was that schools adopted lowered disciple standards and therefore created a chaotic environment in many schools that didn’t allow teachers to control their classrooms. Somewhat ironically, schools with the highest minority student populations were most dramatically affected. Most dramatically, the discipline standard was modeled after the school system in Broward County, Florida. Because of a reliance on avoiding disparate impact, school disciple standards were dropped. This was not just a problem in aggregate but allowed the troubled Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooter to slip through the cracks and kill his fellow students. The first Trump administration dropped the Obama disciple standard, but the Biden administration brought it back in 2023. Then Trump ended it again in 2025. That’s some serious whiplash and suggests that a bigger change was necessary for a longer-term shift in policy. While the first Trump administration dropped some Obama policies on a case-by-case basis, there was no general upending of the disparate impact standard. It remained a part of civil rights law. In fact, disparate impact was still used in lawsuits under the first Trump administration despite the general shift in philosophy. Disparate impact policies were outright supercharged during President Joe Biden’s time in office. One could say that it was the policy at the heart of the Great Awokening following the death of George Floyd. What followed was four years of highly racialized policies fueled by the federal government. To avoid being labeled “racist,” organizations around the country engaged in outright and often open discrimination to effectively hit racial quotas. Thanks to President Donald Trump, DOJ will focus on ensuring equality before the law as it should have been from the beginning. The post DOJ Drops ‘Disparate Impact’ Standard in Civil Rights Law. It’s a Huge Win for Equality Under the Law. appeared first on The Daily Signal.

A federal judge in California on Wednesday ordered an end to Donald Trump‘s deployment of National Guard troops to Los Angeles and directed that they be returned to the control of the state’s Democratic governor, finding that the Republican president had exceeded his authority. “Today’s ruling is unmistakably clear: the federalization of the California National Guard must end,” wrote Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, on X. Donald Trump diverted these brave men and women from their vital public safety operations and deployed them against the very communities they took an oath to serve.Today’s ruling is unmistakably clear: the federalization of the California National Guard must end. https://t.co/3vT9BhDDin— Governor Gavin Newsom (@CAgovernor) December 10, 2025 The ruling by San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer represented the latest legal setback for Trump and his efforts to deploy National Guard troops to Democratic-controlled cities, an extraordinary use of the military for domestic purposes. The White House appears poised to appeal the decision. “President Trump exercised his lawful authority to deploy National Guard troops to support federal officers and assets following violent riots that local leaders like Newscum refused to stop,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement to The Hill. “We look forward to ultimate victory on the issue.”   The judge found Trump overstepped his authority by taking control of California National Guard units and sending them to Los Angeles and elsewhere in response to protests against federal immigration authorities. Breyer, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, said there was no evidence to support the administration’s claim that the protests were a rebellion against the government that legally justified sending in troops. Breyer also rejected the administration’s claim that courts have no power to review a president’s decision to take control of state National Guard units during an emergency, saying this was an overly expansive view of presidential authority. “The founders designed our government to be a system of checks and balances. Defendants, however, make clear that the only check they want is a blank one,” Breyer said, referring to the Trump administration. The judge’s ruling came in a lawsuit filed by Newsom, a prominent critic of Trump, that asked the court to block an August order by Trump’s administration taking federal control of 300 California National Guard troops through Feb. 2, 2026. National Guard units are controlled by states but can be called into federal service under certain circumstances. Trump has said his troop deployments in Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Memphis and Portland, Oregon are necessary to fight crime and protect federal property and personnel from protesters. Local leaders in those cities have said the deployments are unnecessary. They have accused Trump of exaggerating isolated episodes of violence at mostly peaceful protests to justify sending in troops. Reuters contributed to this report. The post Judge Says Trump Must End National Guard Deployment in Los Angeles  appeared first on The Daily Signal.

As Congress debates whether to extend Obamacare premium tax credits, a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reveals the subsidies are prone to fraud and sometimes go to dead people. The office, which is funded by Congress, revealed on Dec. 3 that the Obamacare marketplace “initially approved coverage for 19 of our 20 fictitious applicants” for 2025 premium tax credits in an audit of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). “It is an eye opener,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., told reporters Wednesday of the report. The speaker also said the report backs up his advocacy for reforming the premium tax credits that Democrats have demanded to extend. “It makes clear why it would be a dereliction of duty to just extend subsidies without massive reforms to them,” Johnson said. The government report said coverage continued for months for these phony enrollees. “As of September 2025, coverage for 18 fictitious enrollees remained active,” the report reads. “The results of our covert testing for plan year 2025 are generally consistent with results of similar testing we conducted for plan years 2014 through 2016.” The report additionally found $94 million spent in premium tax credits towards consumers whose social security numbers are associated with a deceased person in 2023. The analysis of 2023 data “identified over 58,000 [social security numbers] that received” a premium tax credit despite belonging to people who were marked as deceased in Social Security Administration death data.  This is approximately .42% of the social security numbers that received a premium tax credit that year. According to Johnson, “the Obamacare exchange and insurers didn’t verify any of the information they were supposed to under the law, and they proceeded to pay tens of thousands of dollars to insurance companies for people who do not exist.” The post Dead People Are Getting Obamacare Subsidies, Bombshell Government Report Says appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Hong Kong commentator Wong Kwok-ngon, known to audiences online as Wong On-yin, was formally charged on Tuesday at the West Kowloon Magistrates’ Courts, becoming the first person prosecuted under a new clause in the national security law. The 71-year-old appeared without a lawyer, telling the court he would represent himself. Authorities allege that Wong disclosed on YouTube details of police activity connected to an ongoing national security investigation. The alleged disclosure took place the previous Wednesday and falls under an offense added to the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance earlier this year through subsidiary legislation. Until this case, the provision had never been invoked. Prosecutors also accused Wong of producing a series of “seditious” videos between January 3 and December 6 that they said aimed to incite “hatred” toward both the Hong Kong and central governments. The videos were part of his ongoing commentary on politics and current affairs, which he had long published through his YouTube channel. The arrest disrupted plans for a civil society press briefing scheduled for December 3 about the deadly Wang Fuk Court fire, which killed 160 people. Wong and several other speakers, including solicitor Bruce Liu of the Association for Democracy and People’s Livelihood, were detained shortly before the event began. The briefing, which was to address alleged corruption and management failures in the aftermath of the blaze, was subsequently cancelled. At Tuesday’s hearing, national security judge Victor So refused Wong’s bail application, stating he was “not satisfied” that the veteran commentator would refrain from conduct deemed a threat to national security. The prosecution, led by assistant director of public prosecutions Andy Lo, requested six additional weeks to examine roughly 2,400 videos, most running more than half an hour each. The next court date was set for January 20. Police have also seized fifteen electronic devices, including laptops and mobile phones, as evidence. Both of the charges, revealing details of a national security investigation and committing acts of sedition, carry a maximum penalty of seven years in prison. The case extends the reach of Hong Kong’s national security framework into the realm of online speech, where critical commentary and journalism increasingly operate under legal uncertainty. With laws written broadly enough to encompass public discussion of government activity, the boundary between transparency and criminal liability has grown less clear, leaving the city’s remaining independent voices at continued risk. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post The First Voice to Fall Under Hong Kong’s New “Security” Law appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Democrat Congressman: Yes, the US Is the 'Great Satan'