A wild female polar bear was recently filmed with a cub that’s not her own: a notably rare behavior that’s been determined to be an adoption. It was filmed during the annual polar bear migration along Canada’s Western Hudson Bay in Manitoba. There’s a reason why “red in tooth and claw” has been used to […] The post Polar Bear Adopts a Cub That Isn’t her Own–Extraordinary Behavior Caught on Camera appeared first on Good News Network.

Books Teen Horror Time Machine Holiday Spirits, A Killer Christmas, and R.L. Stine’s The New Evil  It just isn’t Christmas until the Evil Entity is released from the ice. By Alissa Burger | Published on December 18, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share The Cheerleaders trilogy (1992) are among the most iconic books in R.L. Stine’s Fear Street series. We’ll check out the trilogy in the new year, but with the holiday season upon us, we’ll turn our attention first to Stine’s follow up Super Chiller to the trilogy, Cheerleaders: The New Evil (1994). Throughout the original trilogy, the Shadyside High School cheerleading squad found themselves up against an amorphous evil power that can take possession of humans and hide itself behind the faces of their closest friends, resulting in all manner of mayhem and murder.  When Stine returns to the cheerleaders in The New Evil, the evil seems to have been safely contained, frozen in ice in the nearby Cononoka River. But when mysterious “accidents” start taking out the cheerleaders one by one, Corky Corcoran begins to have her doubts. First, Hannah is badly injured when she, Kimmy, and Corky are in a car accident. The roads are slippery and Hannah’s not wearing her seatbelt when they crash, so jumping straight to a supernatural explanation might feel like a bit of a leap, though Kimmy is adamant that the evil is back. Corky tries to rationalize with her, telling Kimmy, “You can’t blame the evil spirit every time something bad happens … Sometimes bad things happen. They can’t be helped” (12). But Kimmy has planted a seed of doubt in Corky’s mind and she talks her boyfriend Alex into driving her out to the river to see for herself, where she finds an ice-fishing hole cut in the ice, with vapor rising from the water. This time, it’s Alex who tries to reason with Corky, explaining that the steam is rising from the hole in the ice “because the water below the ice is warmer than the air above the ice” (26), but Corky’s having none of it.  To be fair, accidents seem to plague the cheerleading squad, though there’s some doubt as to whether the evil spirit is to blame or just some cutthroat sabotage of the competition, as new girls vie to take Hannah’s spot on the team. At tryouts for Hannah’s replacement, team captains Corky and Kimmy narrow their choice down to three finalists: Ivy, Lauren, and Rochelle. Just when they’ve made their minds up to give the spot to Rochelle, she is badly injured when a workman loses his grip on a screwdriver, which plummets to the gym floor and lodges in the back of Rochelle’s neck. While this could just be a freak accident, a case of Rochelle being in the wrong place at the wrong time, this is complicated by Ivy’s eavesdropping on Kimmy and Corky’s deliberations and the workman’s anguished confusion, as he tells the cheerleading coach Ms. Closter “It flew out of my hand! … I don’t know what happened. I was holding it tight. But it just flew out!” (51, emphasis original).  Rochelle survives, but she won’t be cheering any time soon and as a result of her injury, Ivy makes the squad. Lauren is furious and lobbies the coach to be part of the team as an alternate, practicing with the cheerleaders and learning the routines, seemingly just biding her time until another unfortunate “accident” will free up a spot for her on the squad. Heather gets powder burns from a malfunctioning confetti cannon and Naomi is badly burned when a fire baton twirling routine goes wrong, and in no time, Lauren has her wish and takes her spot next to the other cheerleaders.  Corky, Kimmy, and Debra have confronted the evil before and they aren’t willing to take any chances, even if that means committing murder, which is where the lines between the influence of the evil and the actions the cheerleaders are willing to take to stop the evil begin to get a bit blurry. Debra has started dabbling in magic spells that can help them detect the evil, deciding it’s best to fight supernatural dangers with supernatural defenses. Corky, Kimmy, and Debra come up with a plan to invite their friends to a pre-Christmas skating party on the frozen river, cast one of these spells to find out who the evil is inhabiting—their top contenders are Ivy and Lauren—and then drown the girl in the icy river. This has worked before and they’re hopeful that once the girl is dead and the evil is forced to vacate her body, they can do some quick CPR to bring her back to life, but the possibility that Ivy or Lauren might actually die doesn’t seem to be a dealbreaker. All is fair in cheerleading and evil banishing, apparently. The spell seems to work and Ivy starts skating toward the three of them (though this could also reasonably be a natural, non-possessed “what the heck is going on over there?” response when she sees three of her fellow cheerleaders gathered around a circle of candles on the ice and chanting). It ultimately turns out that Corky, Kimmy, and Debra have had it wrong all along and when they cast the spell to draw the evil out, they release it from the ice, where it had still been trapped. All of the accidents were really just accidents (or sabotage) and in overzealously being on the lookout for the evil, they’ve brought it back, as it explodes from the frozen river in “A malodorous blanket of black fog … [that] darkened the ice, blackened the sky … The ice blistered and burned. The smoke spewed up thicker, faster, swirling up over the shivering trees, up to the clouds” (100-101).  And now the cheerleaders are in real trouble. The evil is definitely back, just in time for the basketball players and cheerleaders to travel to a pre-holiday tournament, with the evil of course coming along for the fun. One of the basketball players becomes uncharacteristically violent and belligerent with the coach, who is later discovered murdered near the locker rooms. The confetti cannon that the cheerleaders roll out again (despite their first disastrous attempt with it) spews hot black tar all over the fans, the seats, and the court, resulting in several serious injuries and the tournament being temporarily suspended, just when the Shadyside team was really getting into their groove. A cheerleader on the opposing team’s squad starts doing backflips and can’t stop. The Shadyside teens are far from home, unsupervised, and at the mercy of the evil spirit, but despite all of the terrifying things that are happening—including the violent and unsolved murder of one of their two chaperones—the tournament continues, with the Shadyside teens largely left to their own devices.  When Corky, Kimmy, and Debra follow the other cheerleaders and the basketball players to a nearby lake in the middle of the night, it feels like a reprise of their ill-advised skating party, but this time there’s definitely something weird going on, as the gathered teens form a circle, moving and dancing in unison with raised hands and blank eyes, as “Their shadows dipped and turned, dark blue against the gray ice. Slowly, the dancers moved, as silent as shadows” (151). They repel an angry dog with a collective supernatural strength, throwing the poor animal high into the air before he comes crashing back down to the ice, injured, frightened, and driven away. So this time, when the gathered group sets their sights on Corky, Kimmy, and Debra, there’s little doubt about the influence of the evil, which apparently possessed the bodies of ALL of their friends when that dark smoke rolled over them at the skating party. Prior to this, the evil has been content to claim one host at a time, but now the remaining cheerleaders are outnumbered and outmatched: the possessed teens drown Kimmy in the lake and Debra disappears when she and Corky get separated in the dark woods as they try to escape. When the sun comes up, Corky is alone but still alive, watching in horror as the possessed basketball players and cheerleaders climb onto the bus to head back to the tournament.  The evil spirit intends to kill the remaining cheerleaders and Corky decides the only way to stop it is to kill the evil first, which she attempts to do by hijacking the bus when the driver goes into the motel office and driving it off a cliff to plunge into the icy lake below. Corky bails out at the last moment, listening in mingled horror and triumph as all of her friends scream the whole way down to their frigid, watery graves. Like the skating party, she holds onto the naive hope that some of them might be resuscitated once the evil has been expelled from their dead bodies, but she’s fully aware that they could all die, and that’s a price she’s willing to pay. Traumatized and in shock, she walks to the arena to find her coach and tell her what has happened, but as Corky desperately tries to get Ms. Closter to see the truth, the Shadyside basketball players and what’s left of the cheerleading squad take the court, a rampaging horde of the angry and waterlogged undead, “lurching, stumbling after her, reaching for her with their swollen purple hands, coming for her, coming for their revenge” (187).  But not really. The final section of The New Evil is an uneasy combination of reality and Corky’s hallucinations, which are chalked up to a concussion. The basketball team and the other cheerleaders really were possessed by the evil. Kimmy really is dead. Corky really drove the bus off the cliff and walked to the arena in a daze. But the basketball players and cheerleaders never became the vengeful undead because they really were miraculously saved, pulled from the water and resuscitated by a couple of incredibly intrepid ice fishermen who just happened to be in the right place in the right time with the right skill set to make this incredibly difficult and dangerous rescue. The possessed teens have no memory of what happened while they were inhabited by the evil, including no memory of how they killed Kimmy or how Corky killed them, which presumably lets Corky off the hook for a whole slew of crimes.  The teens are themselves once more and grateful to be alive. One of the players heaves a big sigh of relief and exclaims “I still can’t believe everyone survived” (198) and just like that, Kimmy is forgotten, marginalized and nearly erased within the larger context of their shared trauma—or at least their shared trauma as they remember it, with only Corky and Debra aware of the whole dark story. As the teens recuperate in the hospital, they realize that it’s Christmas Eve. It seems like this year, their gift is their lives, though the horrifying reality of what actually happened is sure to be the gift that keeps on giving for the two girls … and if it’s anything like the Cheerleaders trilogy that came before The New Evil, there’s nothing to say the evil won’t come back for a visit in the new year.[end-mark] The post Holiday Spirits, A Killer Christmas, and R.L. Stine’s <em>The New Evil</em>  appeared first on Reactor.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced six moves to crack down on the “malpractice” of “sex-rejecting procedures” Thursday. “This is not medicine; it is malpractice,” Kennedy said of the transgender medical interventions euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming care.” He warned that doctors have engaged in “needless and irreversible sex-rejecting procedures that violate their sacred Hippocratic Oath” to “first, do no harm.” “Sex-rejecting procedures are neither safe nor effective treatment for children with gender dysphoria,” he declared (referring to the painful and persistent condition of identifying with the gender opposite one’s sex). Kennedy announced six actions against these procedures during an event at HHS headquarters in Washington, D.C. HHS has moved to establish two new rules: one preventing hospitals that participate in Medicare and Medicaid from performing these procedures on minors; and a separate one prohibiting Medicaid dollars from funding these procedures on minors. Kennedy also signed a declaration finding that sex-rejecting procedures “do not meet professionally recognized standards of health care,” and warning that practitioners who perform these procedures on minors would be deemed outside of these standards. The FDA will send manufacturers warning letters on breast-binders, which are necessary for some women but are often misused in order to make girls and women appear male. HHS is also reversing the Biden administration’s attempt to include gender dysphoria within the definition of disability. “The Biden era amendments that designated gender dysphoria as a disability serve the financial interests of a billion-dollar industry,” Kennedy said. The National Institutes of Health, meanwhile, has ended grants supporting transgender medicine. Finally, the Office for Civil Rights is sending a letter to recipients of HHS funding, assuring them that health care policies that do not fund sex-rejecting procedures do not violate civil rights law. Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, condemned the “dishonest narrative” of transgender ideology that “treats children like lab mice.” He urged doctors to use “the least invasive possible” methods to address gender dysphoria, such as talk therapy. “American taxpayers should not have to foot the bill for ideological experiments on our nation’s youth,” he added. “Pushing transgender ideology in children is predatory, it’s wrong, and it needs to stop,” FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary declared. Chloe Cole, a detransitioner, spoke about her experience and condemned transgender medicine as “unscientific medical abuse that violates every tenet of medical ethics.” “They messed with the wrong kid,” she declared to applause. To those struggling with gender dysphoria, she said, “I want you to know that there is a better way out.” HHS published a medical review in May finding “extremely weak evidence” for any concrete benefits from “gender-affirming care,” but many harms. This followed an executive order from President Donald Trump urging the health administration to protect kids from the interventions. This is a developing story and may be updated. The post BREAKING: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Announces 6 Moves to Crack Down on ‘Sex-Rejecting Procedures’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—Former Vice President Kamala Harris defended former President Joe Biden’s administration’s decision on Wednesday to not release the files surrounding sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Harris said on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” that former administration officials like herself respected the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) own independent decision to not release the files. The current DOJ is required to release all unclassified files related to Epstein by Friday to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law on Nov. 19. “To give you an answer that will not satisfy your curiosity, I will tell you we, perhaps to our damage, but we strongly and rightly believed that there should be an absolute separation between what we wanted as an administration and what the Department of Justice did,” Harris said. “We absolutely adhered to that and it was right to do that. The Justice Department would make its decisions independent of any political or personal vendetta or concern that we may have and that’s the way it worked.” WATCH: The files garnered national attention in July after the DOJ and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) concluded that Epstein did not possess a client list and that he killed himself in his jail cell. The memo was an abrupt end to the investigation after Attorney General Pam Bondi stated that she had the client list on her desk for review. Trump initially said that the calls to release the files were a Democrat hoax, though he later changed his tune by saying Republicans had nothing to hide. Epstein’s former business partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, told Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche that she never witnessed Trump engage in any inappropriate acts during his friendship with Epstein. Victims of Epstein’s sex trafficking ring told NBC News’ Hallie Jackson in September that they never witnessed or had any knowledge of Trump committing any wrongdoing. Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation The post Kamala Harris Goes to Bat for Biden Administration Over Not Releasing Epstein Files appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. A data breach involving analytics company Mixpanel has left PornHub facing a serious privacy fallout. The stolen data includes email addresses, approximate locations, search terms, and viewing histories linked to PornHub Premium users. PornHub’s internal systems were not breached, but the event exposes a larger problem: once personal data is collected, it can live on indefinitely in third-party systems that may later be compromised. PornHub confirmed that “a recent cybersecurity incident involving Mixpanel, a third-party data analytics provider, has impacted some Pornhub Premium users.” The company stressed that “this was not a breach of Pornhub Premium’s systems” and that “passwords, payment details, and financial information remain secure and were not exposed.” PornHub also said that it stopped working with Mixpanel in 2021, which suggests the stolen records date from that period or earlier. The group known as ShinyHunters has claimed responsibility and is now attempting to extort PornHub. They say they possess about 94GB of data containing more than 200 million analytics records showing what users searched for, watched, and downloaded. Their messages to affected companies begin with “We are ShinyHunters” and threaten to publish the information if no ransom is paid. Samples of the stolen material reportedly include highly specific details such as a user’s email address, what videos they viewed, related search keywords, and timestamps. This data reveals just how much personal insight can be derived from seemingly routine analytics logs. Mixpanel denies that the breach is connected to its November 2025 incident. In a statement, the company said, “Mixpanel is aware of reports that Pornhub has been extorted with data that was allegedly stolen from us. We can find no indication that this data was stolen from Mixpanel during our November 2025 security incident or otherwise.” It added that the data “was last accessed by a legitimate employee account at Pornhub’s parent company in 2023.” This breach highlights a growing privacy concern beyond PornHub itself. Governments in several countries have pushed for mandatory age verification systems for adult websites, often requiring users to provide government-issued identification. More: Tea App Leak Shows Why UK’s Digital ID Age Verification Laws are Dangerous Supporters argue it protects minors, but events like this show the real danger: the more information websites are forced to collect, the greater the harm when that information is exposed. If a site holding only email and activity data can cause this much damage when breached, the outcome would be far worse if those records were tied to verified names or IDs. Centralized identification systems create a permanent risk of exposure. Even data collected years ago can reappear in criminal hands, leaving users with no practical way to erase their digital footprint. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post PornHub Data Leak Shows Danger of Government-Mandated Digital ID Systems for Online Access appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita has filed a lawsuit against Aylo, the company that owns Pornhub and several other adult entertainment platforms, alleging violations of the state’s age verification digital ID law. We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here. The complaint argues that Aylo failed to stop Indiana residents from using VPNs or proxy tools to access adult material, even though the company had already pulled its services from the state. Aylo confirmed to AVN that all Indiana-based IP addresses remain blocked. The company said this was done to comply with the age verification law that took effect earlier this year. Despite that, Rokita’s office insists the move was insufficient and holds Aylo responsible for users who disguise their locations online to bypass the restriction. In his statement announcing the lawsuit, Rokita framed the issue as one of moral and public health concern. “We know for a fact, from years of research, that adolescent exposure to pornography carries severe physical and psychological harms,” he said. “It makes boys more likely to perpetrate sexual violence and girls more likely to be sexually victimized.” He accused Aylo of “peddling their pornographic perversions to Hoosier kids,” even though the company has already blocked access from Indiana. More: From Madison to Moscow: How VPNs Work and Why Governments (Despite Trying) Can’t Stop Them The lawsuit takes a broad interpretation of Indiana’s age verification law. It claims that Aylo’s IP-based blocking method is unreliable and does not qualify as a “reasonable age verification method.” The demand that Aylo or any other online platform somehow prevent the use of VPNs is not only reckless in terms of privacy but technically and legally unworkable. It reflects a misunderstanding of how the internet functions and how deeply privacy tools are embedded in everyday digital life. Virtual private networks are not obscure circumvention gadgets; they are mainstream infrastructure used by millions of people and organizations worldwide. VPNs route a user’s traffic through an encrypted tunnel to a remote server, shielding it from interception by third parties such as hackers, advertisers, or even government agencies. Companies use them to secure remote work connections, journalists rely on them to protect sources, and citizens in authoritarian countries depend on them to access uncensored information. Demanding that a private company identify and block every instance of VPN usage amounts to demanding that it monitor or disrupt encrypted traffic on a massive scale, a task that would erode both privacy rights and network security. Detecting them with precision would require continuous inspection of encrypted packets, an approach that is both invasive and unreliable. The result would be a cat-and-mouse game that punishes ordinary users who depend on secure connections while doing little to prevent determined circumvention. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Indiana Sues Aylo For Not Blocking VPN Users appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The great transatlantic tech romance has hit the skids. What was sold as a landmark agreement binding Silicon Valley brains to British ambition has been shoved into neutral, all because Britain decided it quite fancies telling American machines what they are allowed to say. Washington has now suspended the much-trumpeted US-UK technology agreement, a decision driven by mounting alarm over Britain’s new censorship law, the Online Safety Act. The idea that a British regulator might fine or muzzle American firms has landed in Washington like a dropped wrench. One participant in the talks put it bluntly, telling The Telegraph, “Americans went into this deal thinking Britain were going to back off regulating American tech firms but realized it was going to restrict the speech of American chatbots.” The Online Safety Act gives Britain the power to fine companies it believes are enabling “harmful” or “hateful” speech, concepts elastic enough to stretch around just about anything if you pull hard enough. The communications regulator Ofcom has not been shy about using these powers. Enforcement notices have already landed on the desks of major American firms, even when their servers, staff, and coffee machines are nowhere near Britain. From Washington’s perspective, this looks less like safety and more like Britain peering over the Atlantic with a ruler, ready to rap American knuckles. The White House had been keen on the £31 ($41) billion Tech Prosperity Deal, seeing it as a front door to closer ties on AI research and digital trade. Instead, officials began to see the Online Safety Act as a mechanism for deciding what American platforms, and their algorithms, are allowed to say. Chatbots like ChatGPT or Elon Musk’s Grok suddenly looked like potential defendants in a British courtroom, accused of wrongthink. Matters finally tipped over when UK Technology Secretary Liz Kendall announced in early December that the government would “impose new restrictions on chatbots” to close supposed loopholes. That was the moment Washington’s patience packed its bags. Monitoring the rollout, US officials concluded that the law had wandered far beyond its original promise and straight into the regulation of AI speech itself. As one US source put it, “the perception is that Britain is way out there on attempting to police what is said online,” a phrase that, in diplomatic language, means this is a complete nightmare. If the speech row was not enough, Britain has also managed to irritate Washington with its Digital Services Tax. This 2 percent levy on the revenues of companies like Meta, Google, and Amazon was supposed to be temporary. It has turned out to be more like that houseguest who says they are just staying the weekend. The Labour government has confirmed the tax will remain until some grand global solution appears. President Trump, never one to whisper, has described countries that do this as treating US firms like a “piggy bank,” and he has dangled the threat of retaliatory tariffs with the enthusiasm of a man who enjoys pulling levers. Together, the speech rules and the tax have frozen progress on the wider Economic Prosperity Deal agreed in May 2025. US negotiators now accuse London of failing to reduce trade barriers or update its regulatory mindset for the digital age. In other words, you promised an open road and delivered a maze of speed bumps. Britain is not alone in poking Washington’s free speech nerve. Across the Channel, the European Union has been busy too. X was recently fined €120 million under Brussels’ digital rules, a move that American officials see as part of the same trend. The EU’s Digital Services Act and Britain’s Online Safety Act look, from afar, like siblings who both enjoy telling other people how to behave. To US policymakers, these regimes risk building a global censorship machine under the comforting label of safety. Washington’s view remains rooted in the First Amendment belief that governments should not decide acceptable speech, whether it comes from a human throat or a line of code. If an algorithm says something foolish, the answer is more speech, not a regulator with a clipboard. Downing Street insists all is not lost. A spokesperson says the two countries remain “in active conversations” and that Britain is “confident of securing a deal that will shape the future of millions on both sides of the Atlantic.” Perhaps. But this feels a long way from the optimism of Trump’s September state visit, when both sides cheered more than $40 billion in US investment pledges for British AI and data centers. For now, the tech pact sits in limbo, a casualty of a deeper argument about who gets to decide what can be said online. The United States keeps insisting that open expression is the engine of innovation. Britain has opted for an illiberal approach that places expression under its official supervision. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post US Suspends $41 Billion Tech Deal with UK over Online Censorship Laws appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

By the time the Transportation Security Administration gets through with you, you’ll have paid to walk through their scanners, explain your liquids, and now, if you forget your “acceptable” ID, to exist. The agency’s latest brainstorm is a $45 fee for anyone who dares to show up at an airport without the proper government-issued hall pass. Officially, it’s called the “Confirm.ID program.” Become a Member and Keep Reading… Reclaim your digital freedom. Get the latest on censorship, cancel culture, and surveillance, and learn how to fight back. Join Already a supporter? Sign In. (If you’re already logged in but still seeing this, refresh this page to show the post.) The post Pay to Fly, Pay to Be Watched appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

BREAKING: Trump Admin To Cut All Funding to Hospitals Performing Pediatric Sex Changes

The 'Most Secure Election in History™' Had Some Big 'Oopsies," But Fear Not...