Please donate to ensure this site continues
Topic: Unspecified
Good day to all. If you value this daily newsfeed, please consider making a donation to sustain it at the Paypal button or Bitcoin links to the side of this post. If you wish to donate in another manner, please write to me at wendy(at)wendymcelroy.com. Your contribution will be well used and greatly appreciated. Thank you!

How free childcare started winning US elections
Topic: Children and Family
Source: The Guardian
‘Overnight, people realized how essential it was’. In a matter of weeks, Francesca Hong, an unlikely candidate for governor in one of the country’s most heated battleground states, will test a message that is at once radical and, to many, incredibly practical: the government should help pay for childcare. “When we talk about free childcare, you can connect to folks whether it’s on an economic argument or just purely that it’s the right thing to do for our kids,” said Hong, a democratic socialist running in Wisconsin’s Democratic primary on 11 August.

Nearly 60,000 children orphaned in Gaza
Topic: Children and Family
Source: New Arab
...as Israel’s genocide destroys families and care systems. Speaking to The New Arab, Director General of Taawon Dr Tareq Emtairah said the number of children orphaned by the war has reached close to 60,000 — around six percent of Gaza's child population — a scale he described as unmatched by anything the Palestinian non-profit development organisation had seen in earlier assaults on the enclave. The estimate is detailed in Taawon's new report, Lighting the Path for Orphaned Children in Gaza – A Call to Action, which warns that the unprecedented number of children who have lost one or both parents will require sustained, long-term support extending far beyond the immediate humanitarian response.

xAI Sues Minnesota Attorney General Over Anti-Deepfake Law
Topic: Porn, Prostitution, and Sexual Freedom
Source: The Epoch Times
Companies that allow users to generate nude images of real people face fines of $500,000 per violation under state law. Musk's company xAI, maker of the popular Grok AI tool, is suing Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison to block the law, which is set to kick in on Aug. 1. Violators can be fined up to $500,000 for each image. According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, approximately 117 million people had used Grok as of March 1 this year. If 100 of those users violated Minnesota's law, it could cost the company $50 million in fines.

Howard Defends Unenrolling 500 Students
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Associated Press
The school 'adhered to its policies,' interim president says [Ed: colleges should be run like businesses] The interim president of Howard University said over 200 of the more than 500 first-year incoming students who were unenrolled for the fall semester have been readmitted to the Washington, DC, school. In an interview with the AP on Wednesday, Wayne AI Frederick defended the way the historically Black university handled the initial unenrollment, saying many students and their families apparently misunderstood the communicated financial obligations they were expected to meet before the start of instruction in August. "There were no issues as far as what we communicated," Frederick said, adding that the school had been clear since March about unpaid balances for tuition that were due by mid-July.

Senate Unanimously Opposes Ghislaine Maxwell Pardon
Topic: Violence Against Women
Source: The Hill
Democratic senator says she wanted to get both parties on the record. The Senate just told the White House, in unison, to keep its hands off Ghislaine Maxwell's sentence. In a unanimous voice vote Wednesday, senators approved a resolution opposing any presidential pardon or clemency for Maxwell, the Jeffrey Epstein associate serving 20 years for sex trafficking-related crimes, the Hill reports. The measure, introduced by Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen of Nevada, is symbolic and not legally binding, but it puts both parties on record against leniency for Maxwell. "It's frankly horrifying that Trump would entertain the idea of clemency for even a second for a convicted sex trafficker," Rosen said on the Senate floor.

FTC Alleges Hims & Hers Violated Users' Privacy
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: CBS News
Regulator says telehealth firm also made it challenging for users to cancel. A fast-growing telehealth brand is in the FTC's crosshairs. Regulators on Wednesday sued Hims & Hers, accusing the online health provider of quietly feeding users' sensitive medical data to advertising platforms including Meta and Snap, despite pledging to keep that information private, reports CBS News. The company's stock dropped nearly 15% after the complaint landed in federal court in Northern California.

Library Dads
Topic: Father's Rights
Source: Good News Network
Once upon a time, in a little town called Atlanta, there was a dad who decided on a lark to take his 4-month-old baby girl to the library. He didn’t know it at the time, but the Georgia native had planted the magic bean that would grow into a giant beanstalk of brotherhood and paternity, known simply as the Library Dads. Khari Arnold founded the group after his weekly outings with his daughter Ariah resulted became a keystone in his relationship with her. Not only did it become their special time together, but Ariah showed signs of developing those early literacy skills so vital to success and satisfaction in all walks of life.

UK rape trial collapses after accuser admits using AI chatbot to prepare testimony
Topic: Men's Movement
Source: Human Events
The case, heard at Lewes Crown Court, was halted after the complainant, identified only as C, admitted using an AI chatbot before testifying. Following the disclosure, counsel for the defendant, identified as R, argued that the court could no longer determine whether the complainant's evidence reflected her own recollection or had been shaped by AI. The Crown Court concluded that a fair trial was no longer possible.

He Tried to Blame His Sex Crimes on Autism, Gets 30 Years
Topic: Violence Against Women
Source: Associated Press
Ex-Citigroup exec Edward Gene Smith sentenced after prosecutors slam his 'inflammatory nonsense'. A Harvard-educated ex-managing director at Citigroup Inc. who blamed autism for his actions was sentenced Tuesday to 30 years in prison for sex crimes that prosecutors say occurred over a decade. Edward Gene Smith, 50, was sentenced in Manhattan federal court by Judge Paul A. Engelmayer after pleading guilty to sex crimes, receiving child pornography, and obstructing justice, per the AP. His lawyers wrote to the judge that autism spectrum disorder was the "primary driver" of his crimes. The lawyers said Smith had been "devastated to learn that his understanding of his relationships with the women he thought of as his girlfriends was wrong and that they experienced their encounters with him as nonconsensual sexual abuse and even rape."

SpaceX's xAI Sues State Over Law Targeting 'Nudify' Apps
Topic: Porn, Prostitution, and Sexual Freedom
Source: CNBC
Company says Minnesota deepfake penalties violate First Amendment protections. Elon Musk's AI outfit is taking Minnesota to court over a law that hasn't even kicked in yet. SpaceX-owned xAI on Monday sued state Attorney General Keith Ellison, arguing that Minnesota's new crackdown on "nudify" apps tramples the First Amendment by imposing an overly broad, content-based restriction on AI image tools, reports CNBC. The law, set to start on Saturday, is directed at apps and sites that let users generate nonconsensual sexual images, with fines of $500,000 per explicit deepfake.

Trump Makes Supreme Court Plea on E. Jean Carroll
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: NBC News
He cites presidential immunity ruling to challenge $83.3 million defamation award. President Trump is asking the Supreme Court to toss out the $83.3 million defamation verdict won by writer E. Jean Carroll, arguing that the justices' own presidential immunity ruling now shields him from liability. In a petition filed Tuesday, Trump's lawyers say his comments denying Carroll's sexual assault allegation were "official presidential statements" made while in office and therefore protected—calling this the first case in which a court has hit a president with damages for on-the-job conduct, reports the New York Times.

Criminal “Villification”
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Jonathan Turley
Australia Court Upholds Conviction, Fine, and Compelled Speech in Transgender Case. We have followed the evisceration of free speech values in the United Kingdom and other Western nations. Australia has been one of the most chilling examples of how a population can be conditioned over time to view free speech as a threat. The country now criminalizes and regulates an ever-expanding range of speech, including political and religious viewpoints. The most recent example is the Supreme Court of New South Wales upholding a conviction for ‘vilification’ after women’s rights campaigner Kirralie Smith and the publication Binary Australia referred to two transgender individuals as men due to their biological sex. That led not only to $95,000 in fines but also to a sentence of compelled speech.

Jack Reacher Star's Latest Movie Flops After Unhinged Anti-Trump Rant
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Zero Hedge
Enter Alan Ritchson, who smartly kept his mouth shut through most of the filming for Jack Reacher. Unfortunately, Hollywood has a way of energizing people's worst impulses and a lot of actors feel compelled to loudly virtue signal in order to stay in the good graces of industry elites. Ritchson has been increasingly unhinged in recent months and his latest rant went off the deep end into violent territory when it comes to Trump and conservatives.

The Amazonian trap
Topic: Children and Family
Source: Desert News
Heteropessimism is tempting young women away from love and marriage. Here are 3 steps to escape that trap. Many young American women are embracing this Amazonian strategy of detachment from men, minus the sword and the horse. They’re doing it by deleting dating apps, posting “boy sober” TikToks, enjoying Sunday brunches spent with just female friends, and hardening their conviction that men are more trouble than they’re worth.

How Jane Austen Understood the Purpose of Marriage
Topic: Children and Family
Source: Free Republic
When Jane Austen wrote her masterpiece “Pride and Prejudice,” marriage was placed at the very heart of the culture. Consider the novel’s famous opening lines, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” We soon discover that it is not only a gentleman with a fortune who thinks about marriage. A woman’s education, her social life, the future care of her children and parents, her father’s connections and fortune, all play into her highest hope that one day she may become married, have children of her own, and cultivate their prospects in kind. Society as a whole turns on married life in Austen’s world. Austen was a keen observer of the social pressures surrounding marriage. One might go as far as to say that the burden on young people in her time was much greater than in our own. But it is neither a social obligation nor the mere fact of its cultural importance that led Austen to defend marriage. Perhaps the greatest novelist of all time, Austen prized marriage because of the prospect of happiness it offers to husband and wife. If a man and woman marry for love, this elevates the chances of social goods that naturally flow from a happy marriage for children and the wider society.

People Have Got To Try Being Normal About Caitlin Clark
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Reason
...Sophie Cunningham, and the WNBA. All publicity is good publicity, right? The WNBA received a lot of publicity last week—but most of it had nothing to do with the league's All-Star Game. The biggest furor was over USA Today columnist Nancy Armour's piece complaining about Caitlin Clark's flopping. This was not a normal "National Sports Star Is Actually a Flopper" contrarian take. Armour claimed Clark's "histrionics…are putting other people in danger" off the court. "It seems there is a white nationalist faction to Clark's fandom that is deeply, deeply problematic," Armour wrote. Then came the inartful paragraph, invoking the lynching of Emmett Till, that you have to read to believe:

DEI By Any Other Name is Still Just as Sinister
Topic: Affirmative Action
Source: Mises Institute
Despite opposition from the Trump administration and the backlash against its implementation, DEI still has not disappeared from our body politic. It takes on other names, but not other forms. In Alabama, one of the states where DEI in public institutions is banned by legislation, it has been reported that the University of Alabama renamed their DEI office “Opportunities, Connections, and Success.” After a few more nomenclatural iterations, it was transformed into the Office of Community Impact (OCI). It is described, as would be expected, in language carefully tailored to avoid mention of any “divisive concepts.” After all, President Trump banned hiring “Chief Diversity Officers” but he said nothing against hiring a “Vice President of Community Impact.”

Berlin shaken by attack on Pride March:
Topic: Gay/Lesbian Issues
Source: Le Monde
'I never thought this could happen in the most queer-friendly city in the world'. On Saturday night, a woman died and 29 people were injured after a man drove a van into a group of participants in the Tiergarten park. After a lengthy manhunt, the suspect, Abdul Ballout, was shot dead by police on Sunday evening in Spandau. Ballout, born in 2005 in Berlin, had long been known to police. This German with Lebanese roots was convicted in 2022 for assault and extortion. He had notably been identified and placed under surveillance from age 16 for his ties to Islamist circles in Berlin. According to the city's public prosecutor's office, he had attempted several times during 2025 to join the Islamic State group (IS) in Syria.

JK Rowling has forced Amnesty into retreat
Topic: Unspecified
Source: Unherd
It is hard to persuade the reluctant masses that women can have penises, and so fear has become a substitute for reason. Just as parents invoke the bogeyman to control unruly children, politicians and NGOs now warn of Donald Trump and the ever-looming spectre of the far-Right. That is precisely the tactic adopted by Amnesty UK in its reports “Like A Snowball” and “A Growing Threat”. Rather than treating sex-realist organisations as groups with whom it simply disagreed, both reports placed them within the same supposedly sinister ecosystem as ultra-hardline Christian groups and far-Right movements. The strategy ultimately backfired: the second report was quietly withdrawn after many of those named challenged its allegations and instructed lawyers.