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!

Fed judge blocks TX app store age verification law from taking effect in new year
Topic: Children and Family
Source: Kera News
Senate Bill 2420, scheduled to take effect Jan. 1, passed almost unanimously in this year's legislative session. Also known as the App Store Accountability Act, the law would require adults to verify their age before downloading any app, and minors would need parental approval before downloading apps or making in-app purchases. Parents would have to prove their identity and give consent with each download. Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, or SEAT, and two high school students under 18 sued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton — whose office would enforce the law — in October to stop it from taking effect. Plaintiffs argued the law would put content-based restrictions on speech, replacing parents' freedom to moderate their kids' internet access. U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman of Austin sided with the plaintiffs

Defamation Suit Results From Sister's Weinstein Testimony
Topic: Violence Against Women
Source: AP News
Ewa Sokola calls Kaja Sokola's testimony a betrayal. A lawsuit has emerged from Harvey Weinstein's most recent criminal trial, in which two sisters testified. Kaja Sokola accused the disgraced movie mogul of sexual assault. Ewa Sokola was called as a witness to boost her claims, but ultimately ended up helping the defense, the AP reports. Now, Ewa Sokola is suing Kaja for defamation, alleging in a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Manhattan federal court that the psychotherapist and ex-model's public remarks amount to libel and are damaging Ewa's reputation and business as a cardiologist in Poland. [Ed: Winsteain trials are still happening?]

Ashley MacIsaac concert cancelled after AI wrongly says he is a sex offender
Topic: Unspecified
Source: Gizmodo
What he describes is an ugly case of AI-generated mistaken identity. Prominent Canadian fiddler Ashley MacIsaac says he was wrongly branded a convicted sex offender by Google’s AI Overview feature, leading concert organizers to cancel a gig last week. Anyway, according to an article in The Globe and Mail on Tuesday, the guy in that video with the fiddle, Ashley MacIsaac, was preparing to perform at the Sipekne’katik First Nation community in central Nova Scotia when organizers suddenly backed out, apparently having read that MacIsaac had ghastly sounding convictions on his record for sexual assault and “internet luring.” It later emerged, MacIsaac says, that these organizers had seen a Google AI Overview result that had mixed up MacIsaac’s biography with some other, much more horrible, MacIsaac, also from eastern Canada.

Canada creeps ever closer to baby MAiD
Topic: Children and Family
Source: the Catholic Register
In one sentence towards the end of her 11,000-word essay, Plott Calabro accurately pointed out that the Quebec College of Physicians (CMQ) has raised the idea of extending current MAiD practices to cover infants under one year old in cases of “severe deformities.” Legalizing euthanasia for babies, she further noted, would put Canada in the same category as Nazi Germany, which “did so in 1939.” At which point everybody lost their minds – and with good reason.

New charges laid against comedian Russell Brand in UK
Topic: Violence Against Women
Source: 9News
British authorities have brought new counts of rape and sexual assault against comedian Russell Brand, who is already facing similar charges involving four women. The UK's Crown Prosecution Service said the new charges – one count of rape and one of sexual assault – against Brand were in relation to two further women. The alleged offenses took place in 2009, the CPS said. Brand, 50, had already been charged in April with two counts of rape, two counts of sexual assault and one count of indecent assault. The charges were brought following an 18-month investigation sparked when four women alleged they had been assaulted by the controversial comedian.

Manitoba targets 'price discrimination'
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: The Post Millennial
...as grocery stores use 'differential pricing' to charge consumers disparate costs for goods. Premier Wab Kinew said the province is examining practices where consumers are charged different prices for the same grocery items, sometimes based on data collected online. Premier Wab Kinew said the province is examining practices where consumers are charged different prices for the same grocery items, sometimes based on data collected online. "An online grocery seller might charge people different prices based on their demographic information that have been tracked online," Kinew said in a year-end interview with The Canadian Press.

Soon you may be able to type a new Chinese character: the gender-neutral pronoun
Topic: Gender Discrimination
Source: CNN News
Whenever high-profile non-binary activist Siufung Law did media interviews, journalists always asked: what pronoun would they like to use? For a long time, the Hong Kong native, who uses they/them pronouns in English, had no easy answer because Chinese pronouns are largely split into two when referring to people – a male and female form – and neither felt right. Finally, in 2017, Law came across a potential solution: an unofficial pronoun that had been invented by the intersex and non-binary community. The character looked similar to the existing Chinese pronouns but was altered with what looked like an X on the side, which reminded Law of Gender X – the “third pronoun” sometimes used on IDs and passports in other countries.

Human rights experts call on Iran to cancel execution of elderly woman
Topic: Violence Against Women
Source: Just the News
...for pro-woman message. "Criminalising women's activism for gender equality and treating such expression as evidence of armed rebellion constitutes a grave form of gender discrimination," UN special rapporteurs, working group tell regime. Iran is allegedly on the verge of executing a 67-year-old woman for possessing a piece of cloth with the slogan "Woman, Resistance, Freedom" and recording a message she hasn't published, prompting human rights experts affiliated with the United Nations to intervene with Iranian authorities.

Trump Admin Bans Anti-Free Speech EU Globalists From Entering US
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Zero Hedge
Hey Imran, f**k you! "America finally draws a line in the sand against foreign meddlers..." The Trump administration has slapped visa bans on former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton and four other ‘anti-disinformation’ activists, accusing them of coercing American social media companies to censor viewpoints they dislike. The move signals a zero-tolerance policy toward extraterritorial censorship, especially after the EU’s recent assaults on Elon Musk’s X. [Ed: don't know what to think of this. Trump's payoff to Musk?]

10 Times That 2025 Tried To Stop Kids From Growing Up
Topic: Children and Family
Source: Reason
Parents faced arrests, investigations, and fear-driven rules—but there was also meaningful progress toward making independence normal again. Free-range parents may remember 2025 as the year that proved just how hard it still is to give kids any independence. There were arrests, investigations, panics, and new rules that seemed designed to keep childhood on permanent lockdown. But mixed in with the overreactions and worst-case-scenario thinking were a few welcome reminders that common sense can still prevail. Here's the year in review...

The Cost of victimhood Culture
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: The Daily Economy
What a 1980s Facial-Scar Experiment Shows About How We See Discrimination. Kleck and Strenta’s research suggests that what we expect from others often shapes how we think they see us. In 1980, at Dartmouth College, psychologists Richard E. Kleck and Angelo G. Strenta set out to study how people perceive subtle social cues. In their own mischievous words, “Individuals were led to believe that they were perceived as physically deviant in the eyes of an interactant.”

"Stupid In America" Turns 20
Topic: Children and Family
Source: American Greatness
Many American public schools have become perverse, left-wing failure factories, putting the nation at risk... In January 2006, ABC’s John Stossel’s brutally honest documentary, “Stupid in America,” first aired. At the time, he referred to it as “a nasty title for a program about public education, but some nasty things are going on in America’s public schools, and it’s about time we face up to it.” Stossel exposed the ineffectiveness of many government-run schools. But now, 20 years later, things are even worse. Test scores from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), released this year, show that 33% of 8th graders—a higher percentage than ever—are reading at the “below basic” level.

How Postmodernism Killed Great Literature
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: James G. Martin Center
University English departments have made books that don’t matter. In 1908, New Humanist literary scholar Irving Babbitt set out to redefine classic-literature education in a collection of essays called Literature and the American College. An early literary critic, Babbitt believed that the purpose of literature was to cultivate a lasting moral imagination—that is, literature had a duty to craft readers into morally upstanding members of society. Though New Humanism’s reign was short-lived in the academy, its fundamental axiom—that the purpose of literature was to foster moral education—articulated the broader cultural tradition that has sustained the human soul for thousands of years. Literature is supposed to teach us what gives our lives meaning. After all, isn’t that why we gravitate towards literature in the first place?—to learn, by way of the particular, that which is universally true about the human condition?

Are the Epstein Files–including the fake ones–A New Form of McCarthyism?
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Alan Dershowitz
We now know that the alleged suicide letter from Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Nassar is a forgery and a fake. We will soon learn – if all the evidence is released – that some of the accusations and allegations are as phony as the letter. Some of the alleged survivors and victims never even met Epstein or others they have accused. They and their lawyers simply filed demands for money and got it without any proof. Others exaggerated what happened, while still others pimped underage girls to Epstein for $250 a girl.The so called “smoking gun” complaint by Maria Farmer to the FBI back in 1996 proves the opposite of what Farmer and much of the media claim.

“And May All Your Christmases Be [Woke]”
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Jonathan Turley
Liberal Pundits Come for Santa and Other Holiday Traditions. The perpetually outraged have finally come for Christmas. One columnist at Slate called for Santa to be replaced by a penguin due to his race. Aisha Harris admitted that she was being a bit cheeky in pushing the penguin substitute but sought to express “my real concern that America continues to promote the harmful idea of whiteness-as-default.” From the remaking of Nativity scenes to renaming Christmas trees, it seems like every aspect of the holiday must be subject to a political litmus test both in the United States and around the world. Back to Santa.

World War And The Plan To Control Or Kill Young Western Men
Topic: Men's Movement
Source: Alt-Market
When I think of the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk I see the event as symbolic of the death of civil discourse in the west. The timeline split at that moment leaving two distinct groups: The conservatives and centrists who cling to the fantasy that progress through traditional politics is still possible, and the patriots who now realize that a peaceful resolution is unattainable.
I also see it as symbolic of a deeper element of the culture war – Specifically, the war on young white western men. Kirk was 31 at the time of his death. Not “young”, but almost 15 years younger than I am, and it has left me thinking about the future for the next generation of western males at a time when the system is obviously hellbent on destroying them. They have been the subject of economic warfare through DEI: Corporations and colleges give first shot to any identity group other than white males regardless of merit.

The ultraprocessed food makers have an answer for RFK Jr.
Topic: Children and Family
Source: Politico
The companies behind Doritos, Oscar Mayer wieners, and Kraft Mac & Cheese are warning state regulation promoted by the health secretary is driving up your food bill. Makers of ultraprocessed food have struggled all year to find a message to counter Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s, that they are poisoning the American people. They think they’ve hit on one: Kennedy’s plans are going to make already enormous grocery bills even bigger. Food manufacturers are making that case in an attempt to stop a wave of state moves to regulate food ingredients backed by Kennedy and his Make America Healthy Again movement. The companies think it’ll resonate, considering how affordability concerns dogged GOP candidates in this year’s elections and threaten to again in the higher-stakes 2026 midterms.

An elegy to Oxford Street
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Spiked Online
This most storied of thoroughfares will soon be remade and vandalised to align with Sadiq Khan’s soulless vision. Khan’s commitment to a utopian multiculturalism, coupled with his efforts to eradicate pollution with his Ultra Low Emission Zone initiative, will, he believes, shape his legacy. Yet, another issue provided the impetus for his vision of a new Oxford Street: casualties. In 2016, his office justified pedestrianising Oxford Street by referring to a fatal accident involving a person and a bus that occurred the month after Khan was first elected.

Mamdani's $6 Billion Child Care Expansion Would Be a Handout to Wealthy NYers
Topic: Children and Family
Source: Reason
The more the government intervenes in the market, the more New York parents pay for child care. Mamdani ran on the most ambitious universal child care proposal in the country: free day care for all kids ages 6 weeks and above. Apparently, this pitch was compelling to the city's beleaguered parents: The self-styled socialist won by a hefty margin. New York City already has universal child care guaranteed to 3- and 4-year-olds. When Bill de Blasio ran for mayor in 2013, he aimed to distinguish himself from then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who had created 4,000 new free pre-K seats but allocated them only to poor kids. De Blasio universalized the system in 2014. Mamdani wants to expand to an even younger age group, which would cost an extra $6 billion a year.