In 1975 some of the biggest names in prog became the backing band for comedian Charlie Drake to record the Gabriel-penned song You’ll Never Know. It was an utter flop

Massive immigration in a working class neighborhood near Belfast led to riots last week. After two young Irish girls were allegedly raped in separate cases, the citizens protested peacefully. However, the protests were taken over by more radical protesters, leading to riots. Officials are calling the riots racist thuggery. The rioting went on for days. […] The post Northern Ireland Riots Over Unvetted Immigrant Men & An Alleged Child Rape appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

The American Medical Association (AMA), the largest medical association in the United States, is coming out against the Supreme Courts ruling in United States v. Skrmetti, arguing that irreversible and damaging transgender procedures for minors are necessary treatments. “The American Medical Association is disappointed in today’s decision that opens the door to further intrusion into patient care and harmful government interference into the practice of medicine,” AMA President Dr. Bobby Mukkamala said in a statement after the ruling came down. The court ruled on Wednesday that Tennessee’s ban on controversial transgender “care” for minors is constitutional, noting the law doesn’t violate the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Mukkamala became president of the AMA earlier this month, and is continuing the organization’s strong support for transgender drugs and procedures on minors. Credit: The American Medical Association “All patients deserve access to high-quality, evidence-based medical care. Decisions about medical treatment must be made through a shared decision-making process between the patient and their physician, based on individual patient needs and in accordance with medical evidence and the standards of good medical practice,” Mukkamala claimed. “The AMA opposes efforts by the government to insert itself into the patient-physician relationship and interfere in clinical decision-making with no regard for the clinical standards of care,” he added. The AMA — which is the largest medical association in the United States and has significant influence in shaping policy and common medical practices — has been an advocate for transgender procedures on minors for years. For example, the AMA “strongly” supported Dr. Rachel Levine’s nomination as Assistant Secretary for Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services during the Biden era. Notably, Levine is a proponent of all types of so-called gender-affirming care procedures and drugs for minors. “If confirmed, she would be the highest-ranking transgender official in the U.S. government—a strong, inclusive message to America’s LGBTQ community,” the AMA said at the time of Levine, who is male. Additionally, the AMA passed a resolution in 2023 that committed to “opposing any criminal and legal penalties against patients seeking gender-affirming care, family members or guardians who support them in seeking medical care, and health care facilities and clinicians who provide gender-affirming care.” The AMA also vowed to “work at the federal and state level with legislators and regulators to oppose such policies and collaborate with other organizations to educate the Federation of State Medical Boards about the importance of gender-affirming care.” Related: Supreme Court Upholds Tennessee’s Ban On Transgender Drugs For Children

Every year, millions of high school students across the country dream of attending America’s most selective colleges. In California, that goal may be harder to reach as pro-affirmative action lawmakers push for new ways to give certain groups a leg up in admissions. As a high school junior in San Jose, I will be applying to college next year. Students like me are taking AP classes, building their profiles, and doing everything we’ve been told to help us get into the schools of our choice. The system is far from perfect but the basic premise is that colleges will then, in good faith, try to weigh each applicant based on merit and context. No group receives an unearned advantage at the expense of others. California Assembly Bill 7 (AB7) blows a hole in that idea. The bill, which recently passed in the Assembly by a 54–17 vote, would allow California public universities to consider whether an applicant is “a descendant of a chattel enslaved person of American chattel slavery.” It’s part of a broader reparations push and now headed to the state Senate. The bill’s author, Assemblymember Isaac Bryan, says it’s not about race but historic harm. “For decades, universities gave preferential admission treatment to donors, and their family members, while others tied to legacies of harm were ignored and at times outright excluded,” Bryan told the Associated Press.  He’s right about history. The legacy of slavery has shaped socioeconomic outcomes for Black Americans. But that doesn’t mean all descendants of slavery are disadvantaged — or that ancestry should now serve as some kind of admissions shortcut. That distinction seems to be missing from the conversation. What we’re left with is a bill that awards preference based on ancestry. This bill proposes an eligibility line drawn by lineage. To be clear, the text does not use the words “Black” or “African American” but rather delineates a specific historical category, “descendants of U.S. chattel slavery,” without using racial language. It’s designed to sidestep Proposition 209, which banned racial preferences in 1996, and the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions that struck down affirmative action nationwide. Legal scholars describe such policies as “race proxies”: mechanisms that dodge explicit racial language but preserve race as the decisive factor in practice. Courts have repeatedly scrutinized such end-runs: in Parents Involved v. Seattle, the Supreme Court warned against policies that look constructive but act as racial stand-ins. The legal system has long treated ancestral classifications with the same suspicion as racial ones. In Hirabayashi v. United States, the 1943 case on Japanese-American internment, the Court held that “distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.” Moreover, the express text of Proposition 209 includes “ethnicity” in its enumeration of protected categories as well as race. The bill defines a “descendant of slavery” as someone whose ancestors were enslaved specifically in the United States, meaning it would exclude many Black students whose families came from Africa or the Caribbean after abolition. Meanwhile, someone who identifies as white but has traced a distant enslaved ancestry through DNA testing could, in theory, qualify. And we know these terms circle a ridiculously arbitrary line. African American activist Angela Davis went on PBS’s ancestry show Finding Your Roots only to find out she’s a descendent from Mayflower colonists. She was mortified. But even if Bryan turns out to be right on the legal question, does the technical distinction between race and ancestry suddenly make it fair to those it excludes? No. Ancestry-based preferences would still have effectively all the same downsides as other affirmative action policies: lack of individual assessment, blunt group categorization, and fairness concerns for everyone else. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the SFFA majority opinion: “College admissions are zero-sum. A benefit provided to some applicants but not to others necessarily advantages the former group at the expense of the latter.” Even if preference is framed as reparative, someone else is paying the price. There are better options to help marginalized students. California lawmakers could index Cal Grants to local cost of living. They could strengthen the UC/CSU admission guarantees for top students at public high schools. They could improve outreach around community college transfer guarantees or pass bills like the BASIC Act, which would give colleges resources to help students cover food, housing, and health care. This bill, by contrast, like other affirmative action-adjacent legislation before it, assumes inherited identity stands in for “lived struggle.” It doesn’t. We don’t need another lecture on systemic inequality. We see the results of it in classmates of all backgrounds who stop aiming high because they don’t think college is for them, or can’t imagine paying for it. The California Senate should reject this bill and pursue fairer solutions, rather than advancing a measure the Supreme Court is likely to strike down. * * * William Liang is a student journalist living in San Jose, California. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

If one were only to watch Friday’s edition of PBS News Hour, they would come away with the impression that “rotten” political rhetoric is mainly a right-wing phenomenon. Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart went so far as to claim Republicans are afraid “of being human” on the matter. The background for the conversation was President Trump announcing he wasn’t going to call Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz after Democratic State Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband were assassinated. Host Geoff Bennett had pointed out Trump called Walz “whacked out” but didn’t mention other instances of Walz calling Trump a “tyrant,” “cruel,” and urging Democrats to be “meaner.”     It would be one thing to say Trump should rise above it, but Bennett should have at least provided some context. As it was, National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru warned, “There's another element of this. On the one hand, you have got this political rhetoric, which I do think both sides, but disproportionately the president, has gotten rotten. But you have also got a lot of untreated mental illness in this country. And it's that reaction of those two things that is causing this threat level to rise. At least Ponnuru managed to earlier mention assassination attempts against Trump and Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Bennett, however, was more interested in only focusing on Trump and Republicans’ rhetoric, “The criticism, though, that there aren't enough Republicans who speak out forcefully to condemn that hot political rhetoric, what do you say to that?” Now wavering, Ponnuru claimed, “I think that that's absolutely right. But I think Republicans have learned that when they fall out of line with the president, when they criticize the president, whether it's on rhetoric or anything else, that they're going to get punished for it.” Capehart, who earlier in the segment during the Iran part of the discussion made the embarrassing mistake of referring to Top Gun as an Air Force movie, added, “That's actually quite frightening, which I think explains why there's been silence, crickets, because they're afraid of doing the right thing, of being human, will get them on the wrong side of the president of the United States. Folks should be very concerned about that.” If PBS wants to argue they should keep their federal funding because they aren’t biased, a good place to start would be insisting that Democrats tamp down their “Trump is Hitler” or “Army parades are proof Trump is like Kim Jong-un” rhetoric as well. Here is a transcript for the June 20 show: PBS News Hour 6/20/2025 7:46 PM ET RAMESH PONNURU: But there's another element of this. On the one hand, you have got this political rhetoric, which I do think both sides, but disproportionately the president, has gotten rotten. But you have also got a lot of untreated mental illness in this country. And it's that reaction of those two things that is causing this threat level to rise. GEOFF BENNETT: The criticism, though, that there aren't enough Republicans who speak out forcefully to condemn that hot political rhetoric, what do you say to that? PONNURU: I think that that's absolutely right. But I think Republicans have learned that when they fall out of line with the president, when they criticize the president, whether it's on rhetoric or anything else, that they're going to get punished for it. JONATHAN CAPEHART: That's actually quite frightening, which I think explains why there's been silence, crickets, because they're afraid of doing the right thing, of being human, will get them on the wrong side of the president of the United States. Folks should be very concerned about that.