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Congressional Republicans are renewing their demands for answers from former President Joe Biden’s physician and former top White House aides about the concealment of his cognitive decline and frequent use of autopen for crucial decisions. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer sent letters Thursday to Biden physician Kevin O’Connor and four other top aides seeking […]

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Books Teen Horror Time Machine Surviving Senior Year: Christopher Pike’s Final Friends Trilogy You know it’s been a great year when it ends with a double wedding in Vegas. By Alissa Burger | Published on May 22, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share In the world of ‘90s teen horror, Christopher Pike is the master of complex extended narratives, including his Remember Me trilogy (1989-1995) and the Last Vampire series (1994-2013). Each of these stories include ensembles of characters with all kinds of personal motives and secrets; interconnections between the living, dead, and undead; and roller coasters of twists, turns, and unexpected revelations. The Final Friends trilogy is another of Pike’s series, though in some ways it’s more streamlined than the others: all three books (The Party, The Dance, and The Graduation) were published in 1988, it stays clearly focused on one core group of friends throughout the series with no new characters added along the way, and it works within the contained chronology of the main characters’ senior year of high school.  The Final Friends series has a rich cast of characters, whose interconnections, desires, and secrets keep the drama coming. While some of them have known each other for years, they’re also making some new friends, as two high schools—Mesa and Tabb—are consolidated at the start of the characters’ senior year, a dynamic which balances familiarity with the thrill of the new. Former Mesa High students Jessica Hart, Sara Cantell, and Polly and Alice McCoy have known one another their whole lives. Jessica, Sara, and Polly are seniors, while Polly’s sister Alice is a couple of years younger than them. They all come from fairly privileged backgrounds: Jessica is a few days late to the start of the school year because her family’s vacation in Switzerland ran long, while Polly and Alice are actual heiresses to their family’s company and fortune. Jessica is an image-conscious girl whose big dream for the year is to be homecoming queen, Sara goes out of her way to be abrasive and holds people at arm’s length, and Polly quietly hovers around the margins. Part of Polly’s sadness comes from her parents’ deaths when she and Alice were young, which left the sisters under the care of an elderly maiden aunt and Polly in the role of a surrogate mother to Alice. Alice is bright and bubbly, a kind girl and a creative artist, though her work takes a darker turn when she starts dating a mysterious boy named Clark, who encourages her to trade her cute animals and rainbows for scenes of death and horror.  The girls start making new friends—and enemies—when they move to Mesa High and when Alice throws a party to bring kids from both schools together to get to know each other a little better, the Final Friends group coalesces. Like the Mesa crew, there’s a cohort of Tabb High students who have known each other for years, bringing their past relationships and baggage into the mix. Michael Olson is shy, smart, and immediately develops a crush on Jessica when they’re assigned to share a locker. Michael is friends with a guy everyone just calls “Bubba,” a slightly overweight guy who has impressive computer skills, a salacious sexual reputation, and rumored organized crime ties in his extended family. Bill Skater is the bland but handsome high school quarterback and he’s dating Clair Hilrey, the beautiful head cheerleader who immediately becomes Jessica’s main competition for homecoming queen. There’s a beefy, aggressive football player that everyone just calls “The Rock,” who seems to have more muscles than heart (though of course, first impressions can be deceiving). Russ Desmond is a stellar cross country athlete but also an antisocial slacker, constantly drinking beer and with zero interest in what anyone thinks about him. Unlike the former Mesa students, most of the teens from Tabb High don’t come from lives of privilege and prosperity; Michael, for example, lives with his single mother and works a full time job at the local convenience store to help cover the bills, while Russ has a job stocking shelves in a grocery store to help support his family. The group is rounded out by two new students: Nick Gruntler, a tall Black guy who just transferred in from East Los Angeles and Maria Gonzales, a sweet girl who keeps a low profile because she and her family are in the United States without documentation and she doesn’t want any trouble. Finally, there’s Kats, a former Tabb High student who dropped out, works at the local service station, and somehow always seems to be hanging around.  The teens all start getting to know one another, though their preconceived notions and prejudices throw up a few roadblocks along the way, like everyone thinking Nick’s a dangerous gang member because of how he looks and where he comes from. The Rock and Nick get in a fight in the weight room, which leaves Nick constantly watching his back. Kats thinks it would be a laugh to rob the convenience store; he comes in with a loaded gun and gets mad when Nick tackles him, adding one more name to the list of guys who are out to get him. There’s a lot of tension and competition between Jessica and Clair, who both want to be the prettiest and most popular girl in school. Sara is annoyed with Jessica and Polly because they secretly signed her up to run for class president, and following a snarky speech full of eye rolls and insults, she unexpectedly wins. Russ knocks Sara down when she accidentally steps in front of him during a cross country race and he stops to talk to her, which costs him the race and gets him kicked off the team. Sara and Polly both like Russ, who Polly busts trying to chop down the campus’s victory tree one night while he’s drunk; she takes away his ax and gives him a ride home, but he’s convinced it was Sara who stopped him, which leads to all kinds of “where’s my ax?” confusion. Michael likes Jessica, but Jessica’s got her eye on Bill.  Polly and Alice’s party seems like an ideal opportunity to start building some camaraderie and community, but it ends tragically when Alice is discovered dead in one of the upstairs bedrooms, with all signs seeming to point toward a self-inflicted gunshot as the cause of death, though Michael refuses to accept this explanation. There’s a lot of conflicting information, including uncertainty about where people were and discrepancies in exactly where the sound of the gunshot came from, mysteries that lay the foundation for the second and third books in the trilogy: The Dance and The Graduation.  With Pike’s approach of structuring each book around a core event—Polly and Alice’s party, the homecoming dance, and graduation day—the narrative chronology leaves time between these installments for characters to grow and change. Individual characters’ approaches to coping with their grief, the way they drift apart and come back together, and their own internal trajectories remain largely untold. At the start of The Dance and The Graduation, readers come back to these familiar characters, but with the deck reshuffled. Polly distances herself from her friends as she grieves the loss of her sister, Michael avoids Jessica because he knows she likes Bill, Sara embraces the responsibilities of leadership and makes tough choices. The characters and their relationships develop and change, with readers needing to get to know them anew after this time away from the story. Some of these changes are even for the better. For example, Nick becomes a star basketball player, which completely changes things for him as he becomes popular and confident, gains his father’s approval, and earns a college scholarship. Bubba and Clair become a surprising and adorable couple.  While Michael continues to investigate Alice’s death throughout the entirety of the series, the central conflict of The Dance is who will be named homecoming queen. Jessica, Clair, and Maria are three of the four finalists for the crown; the fourth is a peripheral character named Cindy Fosmeyer, whose sole distinguishing characteristics seem to be that “She had huge breasts and a big nose” (51). The interpersonal conflict in The Dance gets increasingly vicious: Jessica really wants to be homecoming queen and when Polly sees Clair looking queasy at the local family planning clinic, Jessica doesn’t hesitate to start a rumor that Clair got an abortion in an attempt to tank the other girl’s popularity and cost her votes. Polly steals thousands of dollars that are earmarked to cover dance expenses from Sara’s purse. Polly knows how much Sara likes Russ, but when he shows up at her house looking for a place to crash after his dad kicks him out, she invites him in and is all too happy to let everyone think they’re having sex. Jessica and Michael finally get a date lined up, but she blows him off at the last minute to go out with Bill instead. On the big night, Maria wins homecoming queen, though this victory ends up costing her, because someone sabotaged the float and she falls, sustaining injuries that might leave her paralyzed for the rest of her life. In The Graduation, all of the secrets finally come out. Jessica makes up her mind to have sex with Bill, only to realize that her seduction attempts have been unsuccessful because Bill’s gay. Michael finally finds Alice’s shifty former boyfriend Clark, just to learn out that he didn’t have anything to do with the murder (though Clark does get understandably on edge when Michael shows up with a gun, and he hits Michael in the head with a canvas, giving him a concussion). Jessica and Michael finally each declare their love for the other and get together. The friends find out that Maria can walk again, though she lets everyone think she’s paralyzed for just a little longer in an attempt to draw the attempted murderer into a confession. Most importantly, they find out the truth about what happened to Alice. As the tagline on the cover of The Graduation says, “The truth was neither black nor white … but a horrible shade of gray.” Alice’s death was a tragic accident, the result of a fall from a ladder while she was getting some cups from the closet and arguing with Polly. Polly was devastated by her sister’s death but set it up to look like suicide to deflect any suspicion from herself. And then there’s Clark … or rather, the two Clarks. There’s the actual, real life Clark that Alice dated and Michael tracked down, and then there’s Polly’s imaginary version of Clark, who killed Alice, is constantly threatening her, and pushes her to do violent and destructive things, like blow up the boat where the senior class party is being held. Polly has deep-seated trauma and guilt, blaming herself not just for Alice’s death but for their parents’ deaths as well, because she was annoying her father when they had their car accident and because she lived while her parents died. This guilt seems to have been exacerbated by electroshock treatments she received while she was institutionalized after the accident, and which, it is suggested, may play some nebulous role in her belief in imaginary Clark. Polly’s imaginary version of Clark allows her to displace the “badness” she believes resides within her, relieving some of the pressure of her guilt and self-loathing. Things are touch-and-go for a while as Polly makes her confession—the boat sinks, Jessica’s arm gets broken, and Polly threatens to blow them all up with explosives she has strapped to her chest—but Jessica’s steadfast friendship and repeated reassurances that Polly is a good person help dodge disaster. Jessica makes it to the hospital to get her arm set, Polly gets the psychiatric help she needs to begin healing, and the entire senior class survives the graduation party.  As these Final Friends come to terms with these new revelations and romances, they look toward adulthood with cautious optimism. A new chapter is beginning, one that looks to kick off with a double wedding in Las Vegas later that night: Bubba and Clair publicly profess their undying love for one another, and with Maria’s parents deported while she was hospitalized for her injuries, Nick and Maria plan to get married to keep her from getting deported, too—though they also do seem to really care for each other. Michael and Jessica briefly flirt with the idea of making it a triple wedding, though this does seem a bit premature given that they haven’t even gone on an actual date yet. However it all shakes out, life after graduation looks like it’s going to be just as exciting—though hopefully less tragic—than their wild senior year.  Overall, Pike’s inclusion of topics like racial prejudice, xenophobia, and queerness was progressive for the time in which the series was published and in the larger context of the 1990s teen horror trend. Some of the specific representations may be a bit cringey to a contemporary audience—like The Rock’s initial friction with Nick stemming from him confusing Nick with another tall Black guy who is a drug dealer, and Bill’s distress the night of the party being traced back to his realization that he doesn’t like girls—but these definitely mirror biases and prejudices of the 1980s and ‘90s (and some of which persist today). As far as the characters of the Final Friends trilogy are concerned, however, their friends are who they are, and they love, accept, and support them. They come from a range of backgrounds, see the world from their own personal perspectives, and are sometimes treated differently because of who they are or how they look, but for this central group of characters, their shared trauma and fight for survival transcend all of these differences, drawing them together even when the biases of the wider world want to pull them apart.[end-mark] The post Surviving Senior Year: Christopher Pike’s Final Friends Trilogy appeared first on Reactor.

The House Oversight Committee is seeking answers from top Biden administration officials—including the 46th president’s doctor—about Joe Biden’s apparent mental decline while in office and his staff’s use of an “autopen” to put his signature on official documents.  The investigation on Capitol Hill deepens days after leaked audio of the then-president’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur and Biden’s announcement of an advanced prostate cancer diagnosis.  House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., sent a letter Wednesday to five former Biden administration officials, calling them to appear before the committee for transcribed interviews.  “The cover-up of President Biden’s obvious mental decline is a historic scandal,” Comer said in a statement.  Biden’s own Cabinet said he was “on top of his game.” Now Jake Tapper cashes in and says they privately admitted he was “disoriented,” “out of it,” and kept away from them. Watch what they told you—and what they really knew. ?? pic.twitter.com/bvSJdHrZI8— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) May 15, 2025 Comer sent letters to Dr. Kevin O’Connor, Biden’s White House physician; Neera Tanden, Biden’s former director of the White House Domestic Policy Council; Anthony Bernal, former assistant to the president and senior advisor to first lady Jill Biden; Annie Tomasini, former assistant to the president and deputy chief of staff; Ashley Williams, former special assistant to the president and deputy director of Oval Office operations.  The letters also come on the heels of Tuesday’s release of a damning book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. Comer said Americans “deserve to know when this decline began, how far it progressed, and who was making critical decisions on his [Biden’s] behalf.”  “Key executive actions signed by autopen, such as sweeping pardons for the Biden crime family, must be examined considering President Biden’s diminished capacity,” Comer said.  The former president and first lady and several Biden aides have continuously insisted that the 46th president was entirely alert during his four-year term. Biden has noted in interviews that his administration achieved historic change. The Oversight Project, a now-independent watchdog group originally created by The Heritage Foundation and not affiliated with the House Oversight Committee, first analyzed the autopen signatures. There's one way to find out who was really operating Biden's autopen, @MHowellTweets @ItsYourGov https://t.co/nSXoukYVPk pic.twitter.com/qS4rbLsiEB— The Daily Signal (@DailySignal) May 20, 2025 “Today, we are calling on President Biden’s physician and former White House advisors to participate in transcribed interviews so we can begin to uncover the truth,” Comer said.  Comer noted that in 2024, his committee sought transcribed interviews from three of the White House aides, but the Biden White House obstructed the probe. “In the last Congress, the Biden White House blocked these individuals from providing testimony to the Oversight Committee as part of the effort to cover up Biden’s declining health,” Comer said. “Any continued obstruction will be met with swift and decisive action. The American people demand transparency and accountability now.”  O’Connor-05-22-2025 Letter to Dr. O’ConnorDownload The post Biden Mental Decline Probe: House Oversight Demands 5 Former White House Staffers Reveal What They Knew appeared first on The Daily Signal.

House Republicans delivered on their promise to defund Big Abortion on Thursday by passing the budget reconciliation bill that has consumed Washington’s attention for the past three months. In the bill, the House GOP removed Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood, the largest provider of abortions in the country. The effort had been supported by dozens of pro-life legislators from around the country. The move is a monumental win for pro-lifers because Planned Parenthood receives more than one-third of its overall funding from the U.S. government through grants, contracts, and Medicaid reimbursements. That translates to about $2 million per day, which taxpayers are on the hook for. Furthermore, taxpayer funding for the organization has been on an upward trajectory for about the past dozen years, having increased by 50% since 2013.  But the House reconciliation bill halts that trend by ending the flow of Medicaid dollars to Planned Parenthood, except in abortion cases for rape or incest. Planned Parenthood is also a major provider of hormones for so-called transgender transitions in the country, which means defunding it is also combating the organization’s efforts in that regard as well.  “One of the largest providers of hormones for gender-transition procedures can no longer receive federal funding [from Medicaid],” Connor Semelsberger, a government relations director at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal.   That gets Planned Parenthood “out of our pockets, not just, you know, for the sliver of money that would be spent on abortions, but for everything they’re doing, because they’re not a ‘good government’ partner,” Katie Glenn Daniel, director of legal affairs and policy counsel at Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told The Daily Signal. “Planned Parenthood alone performs 400,000 abortions every year, and if you look at their own press releases, they talk about how reliant they are on our taxpayer dollars, so it’s more than time for them to get off the government dole,” Daniel said. Semelsberger emphasized that the language defunding Planned Parenthood was for the maximum time that the House could do so under reconciliation, which is 10 years.  Planned Parenthood for its part has publicly opposed the bill, with its president, Alexis McGill Johnson, saying in part that the bill was “about punishing Planned Parenthood health centers for providing abortion care.” A recent study found that Planned Parenthood facilities are outnumbered by community health centers at a 15-to-1 ratio across the country, meaning that many Americans can choose many other options for their health care.  “There is no excuse for forcing taxpayers to prop up a scandal-ridden industry that prioritizes abortions, gender transitions, and partisan political activism, instead of prenatal care, cancer screening, and other legitimate health services that are in continual decline,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said on Thursday.  The action in the House shows the persistence and effectiveness of pro-life advocates even after the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022.  Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, a pro-family organization, praised the Republicans in a statement.  “This morning, President Trump and [House Speaker Mike] Johnson delivered for the American family! The One Big, Beautiful Bill that passed the House will end taxpayer funding for gender-transition surgeries, defund Planned Parenthood, and increase the Child Tax Credit—all are monumental wins for our great nation,” Schilling said, adding: “Now it is time for the Senate to get this bill across the finish line, so we can Make Families Great Again.”  The post House Republicans’ Bill Delivers ‘Big, Beautiful’ Win for Pro-Life appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. A new report by Ofcom and anti-discrimination group Kick It Out has thrown its weight behind a growing campaign to restrict online speech in the UK, even when that speech breaks no laws. Backed by the government and tied to powers granted under the Online Safety Act, the document marks a significant moment in the institutional push to transform what is currently legal expression into material subject to moderation, suppression, and even criminal investigation. It’s a move that would have been politically unthinkable a decade ago. Today, it’s being packaged as harm reduction. The most striking aspect of the report is how explicitly it acknowledges the legality of much of the content it targets. It doesn’t claim that current laws are inadequate in tackling actual hate speech or criminal abuse. Instead, it argues that lawful content, opinions, statements, or commentary that some users might find offensive, ought to be suppressed anyway. The authors present this as a moral imperative. Content that might “normalize” harmful behavior or “offend” certain communities, even when fully within legal bounds, is framed as dangerous. The report calls for stronger moderation tools, more aggressive enforcement, and deeper intervention from tech platforms. The implication is that legality is no longer the standard, perceived harm is. This shift is more than semantic. It reflects an ideological transformation in how speech is treated online: less as a right, and more as a privilege to be conditioned on social acceptability. Throughout the report, there’s a persistent conflation between criminal activity and mere controversy. The distinction between unlawful hate speech and legally protected, albeit unpleasant, commentary is muddied. The end result is a framework that sees all negative speech, particularly speech involving race, religion, or sexuality, as inherently harmful and in need of control. “Some participants hoped that if the police started taking action against hate and abuse online, this would send a message,” the report states, in what reads more like a policy recommendation than a casual observation. That this so-called “hate and abuse” is often legal does not appear to be a problem for the authors. Instead, it’s a justification for expanding law enforcement’s role in the digital realm. What the report ultimately calls for is a system in which speech that is legally protected is nevertheless treated as if it were criminal, not by the courts, but by private companies under regulatory pressure. Among the recommendations are platform-level interventions: turning off comment sections, using third-party moderation services, and automating the identification and removal of “harmful” content. These interventions are framed not as options, but as obligations for companies that wish to comply with emerging standards under the Online Safety Act. Crucially, Ofcom, now the lead regulator under that Act, signals its willingness to develop codes of practice that would pressure platforms into enforcing rules beyond what the law requires. In effect, this turns Ofcom from a regulatory body into a speech governance authority, with no clear limits. The broader implications of this report cannot be ignored. What began as an effort to address clear-cut online harms, harassment, abuse, and criminal threats, is now morphing into a campaign to govern tone, attitude, and political expression. Kick It Out, an organization once focused on combating racial abuse in football, has become a key advocate for expanding these new powers. It has lobbied for censorship mechanisms to be enshrined in law, and this report forms part of that larger campaign. Far from being a neutral study of online behavior, it reads as a policy document meant to entrench a new norm: one in which platforms are expected to police public discourse according to criteria that go far beyond the law. This is not a slippery slope argument. It’s already happening. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post UK Regulator and “Kick It Out” Report Calls for Policing and Censorship of Legal Online Speech Under Censorship Law appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Bondi: You Better Believe We'll Prosecute Pro-Hamas Assassin 'To The Fullest Extent of the Law'