'We're gonna lose Hispanic males'

'Journalism is not a crime'

FBI officials alleged Underwood wanted to marry and run away with the girl

A viral post shared on X claims the White House recently posted a photo on its verified Instagram account showing covert U.S. Delta Force teams and then deleted it. The White House deleted this photo of covert Delta Force teams operating inside Israel ONE hour after posting it The US is at “WAR” in Palestine […]

Books Teen Horror Time Machine Welcome to Camp Nightwing: R.L. Stine’s Lights Out and Fear Street: 1978 Not even Susan Sontag could salvage this camp. By Alissa Burger | Published on June 13, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share R.L. Stine’s Fear Street book Lights Out (1991) and the 2021 Netflix film Fear Street Part Two: 1978 are less a case of adaptation and more like two stories that briefly glance off of one another, with the Fear Street film drawing inspiration from Stine’s book and its Camp Nightwing setting, while taking its individual story in a totally new direction, both in the narrative of 1978 and in that film’s interconnections with and contributions to the larger three-film series. Pride Month is always a great time to rewatch the Fear Street film series and celebrate the way it tackles the original book series’ erasure of queer people and people of color, developing these previously excluded characters and giving them horrifying and heroic stories of their own.  In Stine’s Lights Out, protagonist Holly Flynn is talked into working for the summer at Camp Nightwing, despite the fact that she has no camp experience and actually hates the outdoors. Her Uncle Bill owns the camps and is getting ready to launch his fourth summer there, but the past three haven’t exactly been great. As Holly recalls, “Things had begun to go wrong the first year. A fire started by lightning had burned down the rec hall. The second year there was a flood, and right after that an outbreak of measles had closed the camp for three weeks … Last year, sadly, a camper had been killed in a boating accident” (4-5). Uncle Bill is (understandably) having a difficult time finding people willing to work at Camp Nightwing and if he doesn’t turn things around this summer, he’s going to lose the camp, so when he asks Holly to take a job there as an assistant counselor, she has a hard time saying no.  The teenage counselors are largely left to their own devices and their young campers remain fairly peripheral to the action, as the teens are more invested in their own social complications and the growing mystery of Camp Nightwing. Holly’s best friend, Thea Mack, is a fellow counselor, but Thea seems to be the only person on Holly’s side (and even that support is tenuous when Thea thinks they might be in competition for the same guy). Other counselors include Geri Marcus, who Holly used to be friends with in Waynesbridge before her family moved to Shadyside and who now hates Holly, and Debra Wallach, the senior counselor in Holly’s cabin, who is constantly criticizing and berating her. Mick is a mysterious and standoffish guy, while Kit is constantly playing practical jokes, which charmingly include waving a hatchet and throwing fake snakes at people. Geri, Mick, and Kit attack Holly in the woods one afternoon, dragging her to a creek and dumping a bucket full of water and leeches over her head. Mick and Kit seem to think this is just another prank, with Kit telling Holly to “lighten up … All the new counselors have to be initiated. It’s a great camp tradition” (89), but Geri is committed to making Holly suffer as much as she can and when Holly looks to her former friend, she is horrified to see that “Geri’s face was cold, cold as the muddy water that was beginning to make Holly shiver” (89). Mick keeps Geri’s violence from escalating further and once they’ve left Holly alone in the woods, “she got to her feet and began to walk back to her cabin. She was cold and wet and miserable … They didn’t really hurt me, she thought. They only wanted to scare me … I’ll never let them know how scared I was” (91). Any promise of fun or safety at Camp Nightwing to which Holly might have been desperately clinging is gone after this encounter, however, and Holly shifts her focus to just trying to survive the summer.  In addition to the other counselors terrorizing Holly, there are a handful of potentially dangerous “accidents”: a loosened cabinet falls over on Uncle Bill, a bunk bed collapses, and canoes turn up sunk in the lake with holes punched in their sides. Bill and the others shrug these off, but when Debra turns up dead in the Arts and Crafts cabin, with her face mostly worn off by the pottery wheel, it gets harder for people to look the other way (though they do try—Bill and the cops argue that Debra’s necklace could have gotten caught in the pottery wheel, making her death just another “accident”).  Holly is assigned to go on an overnight canoeing trip with a group of campers and fellow counselors, which includes Geri, Mick, and Kit. The other two counselors assigned to the overnight trip are Sandy, a relatively quiet boy who keeps to himself and writes a lot of letters, and John, who acts pretty mysterious and has repeatedly told Holly to stay out of his business. Being stuck in the wilderness with her tormentors and a couple of guys she doesn’t know that well is pretty much Holly’s worst nightmare, which of course ends up being justified. Things are tense but mostly fine until Sandy wakes Holly up the morning after they’ve camped in the wilderness and asks her to come along with him to scout out the next section of river before they start the day’s canoeing. Once the two of them are alone together and Holly is trapped in a canoe with Sandy, the story takes a decidedly Friday the 13th turn, as Sandy confesses that he’s the one behind all of the “accidents,” telling Holly that last year his younger brother Seth died in a boating accident “because Debra was careless” (142) and now everyone has to pay. It’s unclear why he has singled Holly out as his next victim—she wasn’t even at Camp Nightwing the summer Seth died, and she’s the only one who has been taking the “accidents” seriously—but that could be an indicator of the blindness of his vengeance or a lesson for girls who ask too many questions. Holly is able to get to shore and when Sandy follows her, she climbs a cliff face, finds a bunch of snakes in a cave, and (in a real Kit-inspired move) throws one at Sandy, who loses his footing and falls, getting injured but not killed. The police and paramedics come to take him away, while the rest of the counselors and campers are taken back to Camp Nightwing where (shockingly) everything continues on as if nothing had happened, with Holly even reflecting that “I think from now on I’m going to like it here” (163).  Lights Out and Fear Street Part Two: 1978 share the common setting of Camp Nightwing and while the stories they tell there are very different, the interpersonal conflicts between the counselors is a resonant, unifying theme. Ziggy Berman (Sadie Sink) is the odd girl out in this case, with several of the Sunnyvale counselors abusing her and claiming she is possessed by Sarah Fier (though this is just a handy justification for their cruelty and violence against her). There are clear demarcations between Shadyside and Sunnyvale, with the Shadysiders occupying a lower social class, beset by bad luck, and considered “cursed,” while the Sunnyvalers live shiny, preppy lives of privilege. The tension between these two groups is played out on multiple levels: the campers internalize this unbalanced dynamic in their Color War game of Capture the Flag, where the next generation of Sunnyvalers considers it their right to degrade their Shadyside peers. When Tommy Slater (McCabe Slye) is possessed and begins mindlessly ax-murdering campers and counselors, his targets are Shadysiders. Ziggy’s sister Cindy (Emily Rudd) is struggling to get out of Shadyside, doing her best to “pass” as a Sunnyvaler through her preppy clothing, good girl behavior, and college aspirations, which creates conflict with Ziggy and with Cindy’s former friend Alice (Ryan Simpkins). The Sunnyvalers attack Ziggy and in retaliation, Ziggy attacks their ringleader, Sheila (Chiara Aurelia), locking her in the outhouse and pouring bugs from the Science and Nature cabin all over her. While some of the Shadysiders believe in the curse more than others, when Tommy gets possessed and the murderers of the past come back as well, they have no choice but to fight, flee, or die.  In Fear Street Part Two: 1978, Camp Nightwing becomes just another legend, another chapter in Shadyside’s dark and violent history that gets repeated and passed down from one generation to the next, with the camp becoming a haunted place and Tommy transformed into a depersonalized boogeyman, which is underscored by the bag Ziggy pulls over his face when he tries to kill her and which he continues to wear when he returns in 1994, as a dehumanized monster. Like Lights Out and the larger Fear Street trilogy of films, in 1978, the connection between the past and the present remains powerful and potentially destructive. In Shadyside—as in the larger Gothic tradition—the past can never be effectively laid to rest, whether it expresses itself through a witch’s curse, undead killers who return again and again, or the grief of a boy who lost his brother. The trauma of the past becomes the violence of the present.  In addition to creating space for queer characters and people of color in the Fear Street mythos, the Fear Street film trilogy also highlights an aspect of the Shadyside horrors that Stine’s novels fail to address: the aftermath. Surviving is one thing, but living with that trauma is another thing completely; the adult Ziggy, who calls herself C. Berman (Gillian Jacobs), offers a glimpse of what this life might look like. She has a series of clocks and programmed alarms that remind her when to eat dinner (microwaved macaroni and cheese, a stiff drink), feed her dog, and check the doors. She adheres strictly to a routine, with obsessive-compulsive patterns as she repeatedly turns the multiple locks on her front door, and she keeps count of how many days it has been since the massacre at Camp Nightwing on her wall calendar. She is alive, but in many ways, remains defined by that night, trapped in that moment by the violence she witnessed and her complicated emotions of grief, anger, and resignation. When Deena (Kiana Madeira) and her brother Josh (Benjamin Flores Jr.) come to her for help when Deena’s girlfriend Sam (Olivia Scott Welch) is possessed by Sarah Fier, Ziggy’s first instinct is to turn them away and batten the hatches to protect herself and her hard-won quasi-safety, but helping them ends up being the only way she can move forward (though this freedom is not without its own set of further traumas).  Fear Street and Shadyside are terrifying, but so is Camp Nightwing. While it initially seems to offer a break from the day-to-day awfulness of the Shadysiders’ lives, it ends up being the same struggle for survival in microcosm, heightened by the near-total lack of adult supervision. Getting back to nature ends up meaning running through the woods from a killer or trying to escape an out of control canoe to avoid being murdered, and even the Arts and Crafts cabin can be a house of horrors. The obliviousness and negligence of adults is bad enough, but in the world of camp, where the teenagers are more or less left to their own devices, there is no one to protect them from one another or from the horrors of the past that won’t stay buried.[end-mark] The post Welcome to Camp Nightwing: R.L. Stine’s <i>Lights Out</i> and <i>Fear Street: 1978</i> appeared first on Reactor.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that pro-life doctors do not have standing to challenge the Food and Drug Administration’s removal of safety restrictions on abortion drugs. The court issued a unanimous ruling in two combined cases that deal with the FDA’s regulation of abortion drugs, FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and Danco Laboratories LLC v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. Justice Brett Kavanaugh delivered the opinion of the Court, in which he wrote that even though the plaintiffs have “sincere legal, moral, ideological, and policy objections to elective abortion and to the FDA’s relaxed regulation of mifepristone,” because they do not prescribe or use the abortion drug mifepristone, and the FDA is not requiring them to “do or refrain from doing anything,” “the plaintiffs lack standing to challenge FDA’s actions.” “In 2016 and 2021, the Food and Drug Administration relaxed its regulatory requirements for mifepristone, an abortion drug,” the justice said. “Those changes made it easier for doctors to prescribe and pregnant women to obtain mifepristone.” “Several pro-life doctors and associations sued FDA, arguing that FDA’s actions violated the Administrative Procedure Act,” he continued. “But the plaintiffs do not prescribe or use mifepristone. And FDA is not requiring them to do or refrain from doing anything.” “Rather, the plaintiffs want FDA to make mifepristone more difficult for other doctors to prescribe and for pregnant women to obtain,” Kavanaugh wrote. “Under Article III of the Constitution, a plaintiff ’s desire to make a drug less available for others does not establish standing to sue. Nor do the plaintiffs’ other standing theories suffice. Therefore, the plaintiffs lack standing to challenge FDA’s actions.” Justice Clarence Thomas emphasized in his concurring opinion that the ruling is all about standing, noting that the opinion is in line with his dissent in June Medical Services v. Russo. “Just as abortionists lack standing to assert the rights of their clients, doctors who oppose abortion cannot vicariously assert the rights of their patients,” he wrote. The Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine is a group of medical professionals committed to upholding “the fundamental principles of Hippocratic medicine,” including “protecting the vulnerable at the beginning and end of life, seeking the ultimate good for the patient with compassion and moral integrity, and providing health care with the highest standards of excellence based on medical science.” These medical professionals were represented by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). “Women should have the ongoing care of a doctor when taking high-risk drugs,” ADF senior counsel Erin Hawley, who argued the case before the Supreme Court, said in March. “The FDA betrayed women and girls when it removed the necessary in-person doctor visits that protected women’s health and well-being.” “The FDA’s own label for abortion drugs says that roughly one in 25 women who take them will end up in the emergency room,” added Hawley, who is married to Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo. “Yet, the government continues to defend its reckless actions that jeopardize women’s health and safety.” The drug central to the case is the abortion drug mifepristone, first approved by the FDA in 2000 as part of a two-part drug combo with misoprostol to abort babies very early on in pregnancy. The FDA had formerly required a slew of safety restrictions, such as requiring that only a doctor could dispense mifepristone, that the mother would have to get the abortion drugs in person, and that the mother could only abort her baby using abortion drugs up until the seventh week of pregnancy. Moms also would have to make three visits to the doctor to get the drugs: the first to take mifepristone, the second to take misoprostol, and the third to confirm that the baby was dead. In 2016, the FDA eliminated requirements for the doctors who prescribe mifepristone to report “adverse events,” or nonfatal complications that ensued from the abortion drugs—meaning, that unless a mother dies, the abortionists don’t have to report complications from the drugs. ADF has argued that that further obscures “the truth” about abortion drugs. Also in 2016, the FDA also reduced the number of required doctors office visits for women getting abortion drugs from three to one, and it stopped requiring doctors prescribe the abortion drugs. And in 2021, the FDA stopped requiring that abortion drugs be dispensed to mothers in person, which allowed women to receive them through telehealth appointments and by mail—though the agency had explicitly warned that abortion drugs should not be purchased over the internet “because they will bypass important safeguards designed to protect their health.” (That language has since been removed from the FDA’s website.) The ruling comes just short of two years after the Supreme Court ruled, in Dobbs vs. Jackson Health Women’s Organization, the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June 2022. In a statement following the decision, Heritage Foundation legal fellows Thomas Jipping and Melanie Israel emphasized that the decision is “not the final judgement on the safety or effectiveness of mifepristone.” “While legal technicalities might allow Biden’s FDA to continue manipulating its safety rules to push a pro-abortion agenda at the expense of health and common sense, women and girls taking these chemical abortion drugs are still in danger and largely left to fend for themselves,” Jipping and Israel said. They added: “Policymakers should be on the side of women’s safety by, at a minimum, demanding that the FDA follow its own original safety guidelines, not give abortion drugs a pass because of radical abortion ideology.”      This is a breaking news story that will be updated. The post BREAKING: Supreme Court Delivers Procedural Ruling On Abortion Drugs appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Question of the Day: 'Pro-Palestinian Protest' or Terrorist Crime Scene?

Shhhhhh...You Can't Talk About THAT!

Amongst the super-rich, it’s almost a requirement at this point to try some wacky way of halting the irrepressible march of time. Anti-aging strategies range from the positively vanilla – drink lots of water and wear sunscreen – to the still-quite-tame cosmetic surgery options, to the extremely expensive and bizarre (penis rejuvenation, anyone?). But what if all you had to do was take a quick trip into space? A package of new papers is giving us our most detailed look yet at what happens to the human body during short-term spaceflight. Samples collected from the first all-civilian crew of SpaceX’s Inspiration4 mission have been analyzed, as we approach the third anniversary of the mission’s return from a successful few days orbiting the Earth at a height of 575 kilometers (357 miles) – that’s about 160 kilometers (99 miles) further away than the ISS. While the crew was in orbit, they gathered copious scientific data, including blood and skin swab samples from their own bodies, overseen by the mission’s chief medical officer and physician assistant Hayley Arceneaux. The crew spent much of their time in orbit conducting science experiments.Image credit: SpaceX/Inspiration4Scientists at over 100 institutions across more than 25 countries have worked together to coordinate the analysis effort since the mission’s splashdown, culminating in the recent publication of the Space Omics and Medical Atlas (SOMA) package, which also comprises data from a variety of other missions like the NASA Twins Study.“Civilian participants have different educational backgrounds and medical conditions compared to astronauts with career-long exposure to spaceflight. Understanding their physiological and psychological responses to spaceflight and their ability to conduct research is of utmost importance as we continue to send more private astronauts into space,” explained Dr Emmanuel Urquieta, chief medical officer at the Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH), in a statement.Amongst the wealth of interesting results, some of the most striking findings concerned what happened to the astronauts’ DNA.Telomeres, DNA, and cellular agingEvery crewmember experienced lengthening of their telomeres during the flight. Telomeres are the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes, which get shorter during our lives as our bodies’ cells undergo continuous cycles of replication. Eventually, the telomeres become so short that they lose their protective power.Telomere shortening is a signal that a cell is reaching the end of its useful life and a hallmark of cellular senescence – itself intrinsic to the aging process. For a long time, scientists have been experimenting with ways of boosting longevity by slowing telomere shortening.Since the Inspiration4 crew all showed evidence of telomere lengthening during their brief sojourn into the cosmos, it can be said that they got genetically “younger” during the mission. “It's really a remarkable finding in a number of ways and helps us solidify our findings,” commented Susan Bailey, a professor at Colorado State University, in a press briefing discussing the research.In case any multimillionaires out there are already picking up the phone to Elon Musk to secure their spot on the next mission, we should let you know that this telomere lengthening was unfortunately temporary. Not only do they shrink again when you’re back on terra firma, they actually end up shorter than before.“It's one of the things that doesn't quite get back to where you were when you started,” said Bailey. “We think that there is a real opportunity to think about long-term health outcomes for astronauts once they return to Earth and how we can better monitor and improve that outcome.”So, for the full Benjamin Button experience, you’d probably need to be thinking about settling in space for the long haul, rather than just a weekend mini-break. The same telomere lengthening was previously observed in NASA astronaut Scott Kelly after his one-year stint in orbit back in 2015. At the time, this was a huge surprise to scientists, who presumed that the stress of a space mission would have the opposite effect.“We think it's the DNA's equivalent to hormesis,” professor of genomics, physiology, and biophysics Chris Mason told Space.com. “It's the effect that we see when you stress the body, for example in the gym, your muscles get sore, but the body responds by building strength.”The mission's chief medical officer, Hayley Arceneaux, is a trained physician assistant and bone cancer survivor. She became the first human in space with a prosthetic leg when she flew with Inspiration4.Image credit: Inspiration4 crewBut again, any positive effect on telomeres comes with a whole host of tradeoffs in the rest of the body. Inevitable exposure to radiation in space can damage DNA unless countermeasures are imposed, something the SOMA data is helping scientists explore. There are immune system changes to contend with, a small percentage of which appear to persist for at least three months when astronauts return to Earth. Another of the studies in the collection found alarming evidence that lengthy space travel can permanently damage the kidneys, meaning that unless protective treatment is given, any future Mars colonizers will only be making it back home if their ships are equipped with dialysis machines.We also know that time in orbit has some impact on the cardiovascular system, even in the short-term, which seems to be highly variable between people. That’s before you even get to the psychological implications – it’s not for everyone. Space physiology studies like this are always limited by sample size – the Inspiration4 crew numbered only four individuals – which is another reason why the accumulated data in the SOMA package makes it such a valuable resource. “Frequent space travel is on the horizon and more commercial spaceflight participants are eager to venture forward,” said TRISH’s executive director Dr Dorit Donoviel. “We must plan appropriately and ensure scientific research in space is performed as accurately and safely for everyone.”    Time in space does make you – temporarily – genetically younger. The rest of your body, on the other hand, might be aging even faster. And your DNA is just going to immediately age back up again as soon as you return to Earth. All things considered, if Benjamin Button-ing is your thing, and until we have Starfleet levels of medical tech at our disposal, perhaps it’s worth getting back to basics with some good ol’ water and sunscreen. The SOMA package of papers has been compiled into a Nature collection, accessible here.  

In Greek mythology, the island of Crete provides the setting for a legendary battle between the heroic Theseus and the half-human, half-bull monstrosity known as the Minotaur, which is said to have lived inside a maddening labyrinth. And while there’s little truth to this fable, archaeologists have just discovered a monumental labyrinthine structure atop a Cretan hill.According to a statement from the Greek Ministry of Culture, the unusual construction is the first of its kind to be discovered in Crete and was likely built by the Minoans between 2000 and 1700 BCE. Often regarded as the first true civilization in Europe, the Bronze Age Minoan culture is famed for its monumental palaces and innovative writing system.The newly discovered labyrinth is located at an altitude of 494 meters (1,621 feet), at the summit of Papoura Hill, and was found during the installation of a radar system for a new airport servicing the town of Kastelli. Officials have announced that the construction of the airport will still go ahead, but that a new location will be found for the radar equipment so that the ancient site can be excavated and protected.Consisting of eight concentric circular walls – with an average thickness of 1.4 meters (4.6 feet) – the unusual structure measures 48 meters (157 feet) across and covers a total of 1,800 square meters (19,375 square feet), with the maximum height of the surviving walls estimated at 1.7 meters (5.6 feet). The labyrinth is divided into four zones by a series of radial walls that intersect the various rings, while small openings act as passageways between these sections.At the center of the labyrinth is a circular building, which is also divided into four quadrants. According to the Ministry of Culture, the full layout and total height of the confusing structure remain unknown, but will hopefully be revealed as excavation work continues.The labyrinth's monumental size and prominent location hint at its symbolic importance.Image credit: Greek Ministry of CultureIn all likelihood, the site was built around the time that the very first Minoan palaces were erected. Based on the distribution of animal bones within the inner rings of the maze, experts believe it probably served as a ceremonial space where rituals involving offerings and feasts were conducted.Despite the temptation to draw parallels between this stunning discovery and the mythological lair of the Minotaur, it’s highly unlikely that the two are connected. For one thing, the hideous bull-man creature is said to have lived in an underground labyrinth in the ancient town of Knossos, so the locations don’t match.So far, no evidence that the Minotaur or his subterranean hellhole existed has ever been discovered – and it probably never will. Still, the appearance of a labyrinth on the island of Crete is sure to excite mythology lovers.