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David Bowie, born David Robert Jones on January 8, 1947, was a groundbreaking English artist known for his profound influence on 20th-century music. He was celebrated for his constant reinvention and striking visual style, which left a lasting impact on popular culture. Starting his music career in 1963 after studying art and design, Bowie faced early challenges, releasing several unsuccessful singles and a self-titled album. However, he gained recognition in 1969 with “Space Oddity,” his first UK top-five hit. Bowie reached a new level of fame in 1972 during the glam rock era by introducing the flamboyant and androgynous persona The post 10 Best David Bowie Songs appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

For years, California was slated to undertake the world’s largest dam removal project in order to free the Klamath River to flow as it had done for thousands of years. Now, as the project nears completion, imagery is percolating out of Klamath showing the waterway’s dramatic transformation, and they are breathtaking to behold. Incredibly, the […] The post Before and After Photos of World’s Largest Dam Removal in Calif. Will Have You Cheering for Team Earth–(LOOK) appeared first on Good News Network.

News The Running Man The Running Man Chases Down Actors Daniel Ezra and Katy O’Brian No word yet on who the two actors will portray in the new adaptation By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on October 9, 2024 Credit: Katy O’Brian (L) – Lucasfilms; Daniel Ezra (R) – Troy Harvey/The CW Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Katy O’Brian (L) – Lucasfilms; Daniel Ezra (R) – Troy Harvey/The CW Edgar Wright’s feature adaptation of Richard Bachman’s (aka Stephen King’s) novel The Running Man has expanded its cast. We already knew that Glen Powell (Twisters, Top Gun: Maverick) was set to star in the film. And today, we found out via Deadline that Daniel Ezra, whose previous credits include starring in six seasons of The CW sports series All American (pictured above on the right) as well as A Discovery of Witches, has joined the cast. Katy O’Brian, who had roles in The Mandalorian (pictured above on the left) and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, is also on board for the adaptation. We don’t have details on who Ezra or O’Brian will be playing in the feature. Powell is taking on the role of the central character, Ben Richards, a man who—in an attempt to get money for his sick daughter—takes part in a reality show where hunters try to literally kill him. The longer he survives, the more money he makes. This is, of course, not the first time The Running Man has made it to the big screen. In 1987, Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in another adaptation of the same name. For this version, Wright co-wrote the script with Michael Ball and is also producing along with Nira Park and Simon Kinberg. The Running Man is currently set to dash its way into theaters on November 21, 2025. [end-mark] The post <i>The Running Man</i> Chases Down Actors Daniel Ezra and Katy O’Brian appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Epic Fantasy Read an Excerpt From Karin Lowachee’s The Mountain Crown Méka must capture a king dragon, or die trying. By Karin Lowachee | Published on October 9, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Mountain Crown, a brand new epic fantasy novel by Karin Lowachee, available now from Solaris. War between the island states of Kattaka and Mazemoor has left no one unscathed. Méka’s nomadic people, the Ba’Suon, were driven from their homeland by the Kattakans. Those who remained were forced to live under the Kattakan yoke, to serve their greed for gold alongside the dragons with whom the Ba’Suon share an empathic connection.A decade later and under a fragile truce, Méka returns home from her exile for an ancient, necessary rite: gathering a king dragon of the Crown Mountains to maintain balance in the wild country. But Méka’s act of compassion toward an imprisoned dragon and Lilley, a Kattakan veteran of the war, soon draws the ire of the imperialistic authorities. They order the unwelcome addition of an enigmatic Ba’Suon traitor named Raka to accompany Méka and Lilley to the mountains.The journey is filled with dangers both within and without. As conflict threatens to reignite, the survival of the Ba’Suon people, their dragons, and the land itself will depend on the decisions—defiant or compliant—that Méka and her companions choose to make. But not even Méka, kin to the great dragons of the North, can anticipate the depth of the consequences to her world. Even the air around Fortune City tasted dirty. Méka felt it like a mucus of smoke and waste on the flat of her tongue. She spat on the deck of the river barge. The Mountain Guard who’d climbed aboard to check the papers of the passengers watched her do it, his lips curling with a familiar disdain. She’d witnessed the same expression on the crew of the whaling ship that had brought her north to this island that was once her home. As if she no longer belonged in the land of her ancestors. She didn’t look away from the Guard and he approached with the stiff-legged swagger of a typical Kattakan. His energetic presence was a hollow clang to her, an empty bucket struck by the hammer of the cosmos. The infestation of Kattakans to Ba’Suon land created ceaseless echoes of nothingness. Even the wind carried a fervor of life these Kattakans lacked. She had not felt such absence among so much living nature in ten years. Despite her parents’ warning before she embarked on this journey, the absence was nearly impossible to tolerate, as was the condescension and arrogance from people like this Mountain Guard. His sun-lined eyes roved from her shorn hair to the gray dappled suon scales stitched into the wool and fox-fur collar of her coat. His gaze lingered on the rifle slung on her shoulder. “You plan to use that, Bastard?” “No.” Her people were not prone to violence but this was not a language Kattakans understood. He grunted and continued his staring assessment of her attire. She was the only Ba’Suon aboard the barge; all the other passengers were the same ilk of desperate homeless hoping for a better opportunity in the gold fields or in town. The clog of boats along the river, both steam and paddle of every size and craftsmanship, seemed unceasing in its traffic. So many foolish individuals hoping to strike it rich, or exploit one another, or perhaps with little inclination to find another path. She was now a part of the throng, not for the gold but for the suon, though perhaps no less foolish for the journey no matter how necessary the rite. Buy the Book The Mountain Crown Karin Lowachee Buy Book The Mountain Crown Karin Lowachee Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget The Guard waved his hand at the chains crisscrossed over her chest. “What’re those for?” “I could show you but I’d need to call one of those suon closer.” Four of the creatures circled overhead in muted ellipses, dull shadows against the canvas sack color of the sky. Dragons, the Kattakans called them, but they were suon: creatures of fire to the Ba’Suon. Perhaps these suon were wild but their proximity to Fortune City and the subdued waves around them told Méka they were probably enslaved to the gold like the indentured people digging below. They were no threat, they barely disturbed her senses for how tethered they were to the work of these Kattakans, but the Guard glanced upward quickly as though one of them could breathe flames onto his head at any moment. He caught her watching his reaction and flicked a hand at the black twin blades hitched to her belt. “And those?” She stated the obvious. “I’m Ba’Suon. These are Ba’Suon blades. If there is some sort of law against them, you’re welcome to try and take them from me.” He was armed, a pistol in a holster on his belt, his navy woolen jacket a ragged testimony to the weather he endured here during harsher months. He squinted into her eyes as if he expected her to look away. She didn’t. This was not a Kattakan used to taking the initiative. He seemed to come to a temperate conclusion and held out his hand. “Papers.” She delivered them from the pouch at the front of her coat. He read through both sheets, front and back, staring a heartbeat longer at the stamps issued by his Kattakan government and the attached card from the government of the southern isle from which she’d traveled. Both supposedly gave her permission to cross the border, but she had known coming here for the first time since the end of the war that there was no telling what agreements would stand. She had volunteered for the seasonal rite to allow her this access rather than her parents or anyone else in the family Suonkang. It was time she saw their land with her adult eyes, instead of with the emotional vision of the dream that plagued her. A dream like this was a message from the cosmos and she had no choice but to follow its path in order to glean the meaning. “Where’re you coming from?” said the Guard, even as he read her papers. “That is the stamp of Mazemoor.” “And why’re you here?” He held her permit in his hand but she answered anyway. “To gather suon.” “You know you can’t use your Bastard magic in Kattaka around our people.” “I’m aware.” “Where you aim to get ’em?” She looked pointedly toward the Crown Mountains looming in jagged majesty beyond the hills and plateaus around Fortune City. “How you gonna get there?” “The most expedient course would be to hire a horse.” “You ain’t allowed to fly those dragons back.” It was an entire other protocol to register a gathered suon and he must have known that. Just like he knew the answers to everything else he asked her. So she didn’t bother to answer him again. They were paranoid about the wild suon, with reason. On the borders of Fortune City stood wooden tower emplacements for iron cannons aimed to the sky. His gaze flitted toward them then looked all around the deck of the barge, the crates wrapped in rope and oiled canvas and the two dozen other passengers milling about. Another Mountain Guard moved among them asking for identification. He looked back at Méka. “Rifle.” She unslung it from her shoulder and handed it over because pointing out the waste of time would only delay her further. He folded her papers and pocketed them, then seized the rifle in both of his hands at stock and forestock. With perfunctory movements he braced the butt of the weapon to his shoulder and sighted down the barrel. Then he angled it down and slid back the bolt. The rifle was unloaded. He seemed disappointed, as if she should have been breaking the law by carrying it live to the town. He locked it and passed the weapon back to her. She slung it back on her shoulder. He retrieved her papers from his pocket, looked at them and looked at her, then he held them out as if she were somehow forcing him in this dance. With a twist of her lips she accepted them and he moved past her to the next passenger. She hauled up from her feet the lumpen bag of her supplies and draped it over her other shoulder. Another gust of gritty air brushed against her cheek, carrying the scent of mud and unwashed bodies. For Kattakans, gold as both idea and allure alone defined the ambitiously named Fortune City, where nearly ten thousand dream-laden people pitted the wilderness bank like debris left behind by an army long decamped. Méka had come to this river mouth with her family in her childhood, when the terrain had been untouched, but she barely remembered it. She had been perhaps five years old the last time. Soon after, she and many other Ba’Suon families were corralled into camps by the Kattakans who had settled this island by force. It was early summer and steam rose up off the wet land at the mouth of the Derish River. A delicate mist breathed over all of the angled tents and crooked cabins hewn from green lumber. The flat façades of public emporiums were lined up along Shore Street, with their weathered, upswept lettering mimicking the décor of a civilization hundreds of miles away. It was a ghost town, not for a lack of population but for the empty carousing that gripped these souls hanging on to some semblance of a life remembered. Méka couldn’t understand such a life. Her family had quit this land and its overseers after the war ten years ago so they didn’t have to witness it. But the sky and the cosmos bore witness as they had since creation and rang with a stifled fury, the reverberations of which she felt in her Ba’Suon blood. If her dream foretold some sort of reckoning for the imbalance, perhaps this journey would enlighten her to it. Overhead, the shades of low-flying suon still spun, indistinguishable from the sadness of bondage to this town. This far north the summer night sank to twilight blue, when the suon yearned for pitch night and nests. These suon got neither. She wanted to call them to her to soothe, but any outstretch toward them was met with fear and she watched as they darted higher, further away from the river. A faint whistling of air fluted through their hollow scales as they sailed updrafts with the mountains as backdrop. Once these ranges had been free for both suon and the Ba’Suon. Her parents and their parents stretching back as far as families remembered had grown with the mountains and its life. Now only the highest peaks stood liberated from the greed and scrabble below, for no other reason than because the Kattakans’ need for gold could not tame them. Excerpted from The Mountain Crown, copyright © 2024 by Karin Lowachee. The post Read an Excerpt From Karin Lowachee’s <i>The Mountain Crown</i> appeared first on Reactor.

DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—American defense startups are far too reliant on Chinese parts—and that poses a serious risk of exploitation by Beijing, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation. Business is booming as hundreds of defense startups have joined the growing U.S. military-industrial complex since 2021, according to The Wall Street Journal. But defense contractors are heavily dependent on China for parts for weapons systems, including motors, chips, and rare-earth minerals, which poses potential avenues for Beijing to exploit or hamper American technologies, experts said. “This is a serious problem for two reasons,” said John Lee, senior defense expert at the Hudson Institute. “First, as we saw during the pandemic, overreliance on Chinese supply chains for components and inputs leaves countries and economies vulnerable to politically or policy-motivated restrictions being imposed by Beijing.” “Second, components can have elements inserted into them without the knowledge of the end user. This could be spying equipment, channels for China to disable or damage the component from a distance, or even materials that can weaponize the component,” Lee said. New defense contractors particularly rely on these parts because they don’t enjoy the same cash reserve that the industry giants do, and China makes and sells the parts for a cheaper price. But these startups don’t want to be so reliant on China, given that the country is actively trying to undermine the U.S. and would likely be an adversary in a global war scenario, industry executives told The Wall Street Journal. Decoupling from China-based entities proves difficult and expensive, defense startups told The Journal, though it’s the only option in the long term. “There’s a lot of lip-flapping about national security resilience manufacturing. But there’s no money for us to do this,” Scott Colosimo, CEO of defense startup LAND Energy, told the newspaper. LAND has some funding grants from the Pentagon, but needs more support to thrive, Colosimo explained. The rare-earth minerals that China provides U.S. defense contractors—including neodymium, yttrium and samarium—are of particular value, given that they are essential for most high-tech military equipment, including laser and missile systems, jet engines, communications devices, and even nuclear propulsion systems. “Critical minerals are the building blocks for many of the most sensitive products in our defense industry,” said Adam Savit, director of the China Policy Initiative at the America First Policy Initiative. “China can abuse its dominant position in other critical mineral supply chains at any time.” “The only long-term solution to this is to enact comprehensive permitting reform to approve domestic mining projects, and work with allied nations to develop new production when the U.S. lacks the relevant natural resources,” he said. Savit’s warning that China can upset the supply chain of rare-earth minerals also invokes a broader problem: China can cut the supply line for any of the parts needed by U.S. defense contractors, for any time or reason it chooses. “If your supply chain runs dry, you have nothing to sell,” Ryan Beall, founder of drone manufacturer TILT Autonomy, told The Journal. The Hudson Institute’s Lee warned that the problem exposes the U.S.’s and West’s gaps in domestic supply chain capabilities for their respective defense industrial bases, which creates a vacuum that other actors such as China find ways to exploit. China supplies more than 90% of the magnets used in motors for ships, missiles, satellites, and drones, according to The Journal. Republican Reps. Elise Stefanik of New York and Rob Wittman of Virginia sent a letter to an Air Force official Sept. 25 and called the reliance on China “a serious national security threat,” pointing to an example in a report last year that found the Air Force increased its dependence on China for parts by 69%. 20240925_-_wittmanstefanik_-_air_force_supply_chain_concernsDownload The idea to stop relying on China for resources became more popular after the COVID-19 pandemic, which created massive supply chain shortages in various sectors, including health care products. But in the defense capacity, it will take years to produce parts domestically, according to The Journal. “There has been a hollowing out of manufacturing and industrial capabilities in the West, which provides China with an enormous advantage,” Lee told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “In the event of a crisis against a country such as China, this will become very dangerous for the U.S. and its allies.” Unable to wait for domestic capabilities to improve and increasingly wary of buying from China, new defense contractors are turning to other alternatives for parts, according to The Journal. Sourcing components from Mexico and Southeast Asia, utilizing 3D printing, and buying parts in bulk have been some of the creative ways contractors are solving the problem. Industry experts also expect that the U.S. government is likely to restrict some Chinese parts used by contractors in a bid to move toward domestic capabilities, according to the newspaper. Some restrictions on items used to produce cameras and radios already exist. “If the government wants a U.S. supply chain, that’s fine, but they need to be clear about their requirements, and they need to pay for it,” Beall told The Journal. Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation The post America’s Cutting-Edge Weaponry Is Dependent on Chinese Tech, Experts Warn appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Barron Trump, the youngest son of President Donald Trump, recently faced rejection while attempting to open a new bank account, according to claims from his mother, Melania Trump. She attributed the denial to political discrimination, labeling it as part of a larger “cancel culture” that she believes has targeted her family, raising significant concerns about potential civil rights violations. Melania Trump, who shared this account in her newly released memoir titled “Melania,” expressed her deep frustration with the situation, revealing that she herself had been debanked. The former first lady disclosed that shortly after the Trumps departed the White House in early 2021, her son, now 18, was blocked from opening an account at the financial institution she had long preferred. Trump didn’t name the bank. “I was shocked and dismayed to learn that my long-time bank decided to terminate my account and deny my son the opportunity to open a new one,” Melania wrote. She described the incident as an example of politically motivated bias, going so far as to question whether it constituted a breach of civil rights. Despite the gravity of the accusations, she chose not to reveal the name of the financial institution involved. This denial, she argues, is just one example of the broader culture of exclusion and suppression her family has endured, a backlash that intensified in the wake of the January 6th Capitol events. According to Melania, this “venomous” form of cancel culture has extended beyond the political sphere, negatively affecting both her charitable efforts and business opportunities. “The ‘cancel mob’ now includes corporations, traditional media, influential social media figures, and cultural institutions,” she wrote in her memoir, warning of the dangerous precedent this sets in modern society. She goes on to highlight how businesses—both large and small—continue to participate in this “disheartening trend,” one that she finds increasingly pervasive. Debanking, the practice of denying individuals or organizations access to financial services based on their political, ideological, or social positions, has emerged as a controversial trend within the broader phenomenon of cancel culture. It represents a significant escalation in the methods used to isolate or punish those whose views or actions fall outside mainstream acceptability, raising critical concerns about freedom of expression, civil rights, and the role of private corporations in regulating societal behavior. While cancel culture initially took root in social and cultural spaces — through boycotts, public shaming, and social media campaigns — its influence has gradually permeated other sectors, including finance. Debanking is a particularly powerful tool because, in an increasingly digital economy, access to financial services is essential for participation in society. Without access to a bank account, credit, or other financial tools, individuals and organizations can be effectively excluded from basic economic functions, making this tactic materially damaging. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Barron Trump Shut Out by Bank Amid Cancel Culture Accusations appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

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A high school track coach who was fired for defending women’s sports is taking his employer to court to get his job back.  John Parks, who's been a track and field coach in Oregon for 40 years, wrote an open letter proposing a separate division for gender-confused athletes so they wouldn’t have an unfair advantage in girls’ state track and field competitions. But despite his attempt to remain inclusive to “transgender” players, the leftists running Lake Oswego’s School board didn’t like his nuanced idea. Out of retaliation, they fired him in July for “harassing transgender athletes at recent track meets,” an accusation that Parks denies, according to the Daily Wire.  But the coach wasn’t just going to sit down and surrender the sport he loves. Related: Fourth School's Girls' Volleyball Team Forfeits to San Jose State Rather Than Play Against a Boy With the help of the Liberty Justice Center, Parks is now suing the school district for violating his First Amendment rights.  “School employees do not lose their constitutional right to free speech when they step onto school grounds,” Buck Dougherty, Senior Counsel at the Liberty Justice Center, wrote, adding, “Coach Parks faced unjust and unconstitutional retaliation at the hands of the Lake Oswego School District and School Board. We urge the court to grant a preliminary injunction to uphold his First Amendment rights.” The center filed a motion on Monday, demanding the district rehires Parks. They included declarations from multiple parents whose children he coached in 2024, reiterating the motion’s demand.  Follow MRCTV on X! Horrific! Nearly 14,000 minors nationwide have had gender reassignment procedures performed on them in the past four years according to new database.https://t.co/NutkfZ8lg5 — MRCTV (@mrctv) October 9, 202