Independent Media

More than a dozen NGO rescue vessels operating in the Mediterranean have suspended communication with the Libyan coastguard, citing escalating incidents of asylum seekers being violently intercepted at sea and taken to camps rife with torture, rape and forced labour.

The 13 search-and-rescue organisations described their decision as a rejection of mounting pressure by the EU, and Italy in particular, to share information with the Libyan coastguard, which receives training, equipment and funding from the EU.

ISLAMABAD — This fall saw Pakistan's first-ever campaign to administer the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, which protects girls from cervical cancer. The vaccine is highly effective, according to global health groups, and is routinely administered in some 150 countries.

Environmental activists partied outside the San Francisco Ferry Building on Friday to celebrate the decommission of a Southern California oil rig.

The Center for Biological Diversity called the event a “retirement party” for Platform Esther, a soon-to-be decommissioned oil rig off the coast of Orange County.

Drax power plant has continued to burn 250-year-old trees sourced from some of Canada’s oldest forests despite growing scrutiny of its sustainability claims, forestry experts say.

A new report suggests it is “highly likely” that Britain’s biggest power plant sourced some wood from ecologically valuable forests as recently as this summer. Drax, Britain’s single biggest source of carbon emissions, has received billions of pounds in subsidies from burning biomass derived largely from wood.

In Sudan, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces said Thursday they’ve agreed to a U.S.-backed ceasefire proposal to end more than two years of a devastating war with the Sudanese military. The truce was brokered by a U.S.-led group of mediators known as the Quad, made up of negotiators from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Hundreds of thousands of civilians facing famine remain trapped in the city of El Fasher in Sudan’s North Darfur region after it was seized by the RSF. Sudan’s war has triggered what the U.N. describes as the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, with millions of people displaced.

The province of Manitoba has filed notice that it intends to fight a proposed class action lawsuit against it over birth alerts, arguing that the plaintiff in the case waited too long to sue.

The lawsuit was filed by Carol Harper, a mother from Winnipeg whose baby was taken by Child and Family Services (CFS) in 2019 shortly after birth.

In an amended statement of claim, filed in 2023 by CFM Lawyers of Vancouver, Harper alleges that happened because of a “birth alert” — a message CFS sends to hospitals warning when newborns are at risk.

Scholars have found that the constant, often conflicting and at times false information coming out of the White House and shared via social media posts and the conventional news media causes members of the public to see truth and fact as relative and makes them more likely to dismiss those who disagree with them as untruthful. This leaves doubt about what’s real and what isn’t.

This citizen paralysis creates what philosopher Hannah Arendt described in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” as a general public “for whom the distinction between fact and fiction … no longer exist.” When lies are truth and truth is derided as lies, Arendt wrote, ordinary people lose their bearings and can be manipulated for totalitarian objectives.

Last week and over the weekend, Licensed Practical Nurses (LPN), Health Care Aides and many other health care workers represented by the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE) at public facilities throughout the province voted 98 per cent in favour of striking if a collective agreement can’t be reached in mediation.

The vote result must still be certified by the Alberta Labour Relations Board, AUPE President Sandra Azocar told an Edmonton news conference called to announce the tally Wednesday.

Seven lawsuits filed in California state courts on Thursday allege ChatGPT brought on mental delusions and, in four cases, drove people to suicide.

The lawsuits, filed by the Social Media Victims Law Center and Tech Justice Law Project on behalf of six adults and one teenager, claim that OpenAI released GPT-4o prematurely, despite warnings that it was manipulative and dangerously sycophantic.

How does one monitor a conflict zone on the brink of civil war, especially in a region which is difficult to access, experiences frequent internet shutdowns and where misinformation is common? In this guide, we outline the open source tools and methods we can use to evidence what is really happening in many such conflict settings.

Our focus for this guide is on India, which recorded 84 internet shutdowns in 2024 – the highest number amongst democratic nations. In early June, authorities imposed a curfew and suspended internet access in parts of Manipur after protests erupted over the arrest of ethnic leaders. The state, in the north-east of the country, has been wracked by violence for years.

James Dewey Watson was an American molecular biologist most known for co-winning the 1962 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for discovering the structure of DNA and its significance in transferring information in living systems. The importance of this discovery cannot be overstated. It unlocked how genes work and gave birth to the fields of molecular biology and evolutionary phylogenetics. It has inspired and influenced my career as a scientist and as director of a bioinformatics and functional genomics research center.

This week, President Trump threatened to send the U.S. military into Nigeria for not doing enough to protect Christians. For years, Nigeria has struggled to curtail violence across the country, from international terrorist groups to disputes between farmers and herders. But now, its leadership must face threats from both its internal adversaries and the White House. Nick Schifrin reports.

President Donald Trump and officials in his administration say National Guard troops are needed in “War ravaged” Portland, Oregon, to protect a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement office that he described as being under siege.

But a ProPublica review found a wide gap between the reality on the ground and the characterizations by the president and the Department of Homeland Security, which said ICE facilities like Portland’s were under “coordinated assault by violent groups.”

This week marks a turning point in the UK’s approach to violent porn. The government has announced it will make publishing or possessing pornographic depictions of strangulation or suffocation – often known as “choking” – illegal. This bold move could transform the porn that appears on porn sites and social media platforms.

ROME, Nov 5 2025 (IPS) – Ehmudi Lebsir was 17 when he trudged more than 50 kilometres across the desert to stay alive. Half a century on, the Sahrawi refugee still has not gone home to what was then Spanish province of Western Sahara.

On 6 November 1975, six days after Moroccan troops pushed into the territory, hundreds of thousands of Moroccan civilians streamed south under military escort. Branded the “Green March”, it was, in effect, an invasion and the start of a military occupation of Sahrawi land.

On an unseasonably warm day in June, hundreds of people holding Palestinian and Irish flags spilled over the sidewalks outside Westminster Magistrates Court in central London. The crowd had gathered in support of Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, the 27-year-old member of Irish-language hip-hop group Kneecap charged by the British government with a terror offence for holding up a flag from the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah at a concert last year.

When the Trump administration gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement access to a massive database of information about Medicaid recipients in June 2025, privacy and medical justice advocates sounded the alarm. They warned that the move could trigger all kinds of public health and human rights harms.

But most people likely shrugged and moved on with their day. Why is that? It’s not that people don’t care. According to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, 81% of American adults said they were concerned about how companies use their data, and 71% said they were concerned about how the government uses their data.

Reports of sometimes deadly encounters with brown bears and Asiatic black bears are being reported almost daily ahead of hibernation season as the bears forage for food. They have been seen near schools, train stations, supermarkets and at a hot springs resort.

Since April, more than 100 people have been injured and at least 12 killed in bear attacks across Japan, according to Environment Ministry statistics at the end of October.

Dick Cheney, the former vice president and one of the key architects of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, died Monday at age 84. Cheney served six terms in Congress as Wyoming’s lone representative before serving as defense secretary under President George H.W. Bush, when he oversaw the first Gulf War and the bloody U.S. invasion of Panama that deposed former U.S. ally Manuel Noriega. From 1995 to 2000, Cheney served as chair and CEO of the oil services company Halliburton, before George W. Bush tapped him as his running mate. As vice president, Cheney was a leading proponent of invading and occupying Iraq, which killed hundreds of thousands of people and destabilized the entire region. Dick Cheney also steadfastly defended warantless mass surveillance programs and the use of torture against detainees of the so-called war on terror. We speak with The Nation’s John Nichols, author of multiple books about Cheney, who says the neoconservative leader had a “very destructive” impact on the world.

"Workers across Alberta have begun the process of organizing a general strike after the province legislated an end to the teacher’s strike using the notwithstanding clause, according to the Alberta Federation of Labour.

Teachers across the province were on strike from October 6 until the government passed Bill 2 early Tuesday morning, forcing teachers to be back in classrooms the next day. Teachers were calling for better pay, more per-student funding in public education and smaller class sizes.

“Although this legislation will end the strike and lift the lockout, it does not end the underfunding and deterioration of teaching and learning conditions—our schools will not be better for it,” the union wrote on their website."

People who regularly use ayahuasca, a traditional Amazonian psychedelic drink, may have a fundamentally different way of relating to death. A new study published in the journal Psychopharmacology indicates that long-term ayahuasca users tend to show less fear, anxiety, and avoidance around death—and instead exhibit more acceptance. These effects appear to be driven not by spiritual beliefs or personality traits, but by a psychological attitude known as “impermanence acceptance.”

With turnout breaking recent records, voters flocked to the polls in early voting and on Election Day Tuesday. While some absentee and mail-in votes have yet to be counted and the Board of Elections will certify results later, initial counts by neighborhood show where New Yorkers showed up for Democrat Zohran Mamdani, Republican Curtis Sliwa and independent candidate Andrew Cuomo.

“May Day 2028 will be the defining moment of our generation,” United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain declared in a recent Jacobin essay.

That date — when the UAW’s contracts at the Big Three auto manufacturers are set to expire — has emerged as a target for the activists hoping to orchestrate a massive strike across industries in the United States, more commonly referred to as a general strike.

General strikes involve workers across multiple sectors shutting down production simultaneously. The strategy is simple, but effective: disrupt routine services until workers’ demands are met.