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The Fight Begins Over Student Workers
Topic: Children and Family
Source: Migrant Insider
While ICE raids dominate headlines, the administration is quietly building a case to gut OPT — the visa program powering Silicon Valley's talent pipeline. On July 30, Michelle Hackman of the Wall Street Journal exclusively reported that the Trump Administration was considering a step that could, effectively, terminate merit-based legal immigration. The plan is to charge a $100,000 fee for international students to use the controversial Optional Practical Training (OPT) program to work in the country.

New Study Challenges Common Assumptions About Screen Time For Kids
Topic: Children and Family
Source: Science Daily
A Finnish study has found an unexpected association between screen use and cognitive performance. Children who accumulated more screen time as they grew up tended to show better cognitive processing during adolescence. One of the researchers cautions against viewing screen time as entirely harmful and says the goal should be to balance physical activity with screen use that encourages active thinking. [...] "The findings suggest that screen time can support children's and adolescents' cognitive processing. Presumably, the essential point here is what kind of things they do in their screen time. Teachers and parents should encourage children to use devices and screens in such ways that promote active thinking, problem-solving, creativity and learning," states Doctoral Researcher Petri Jalanko from the University of Jyvaskyla.

Sophie Cunningham: WNBA needs 'bold' commissioner who wants best for players
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: ESPN
Sophie Cunningham said the WNBA needs a "bold" commissioner "who wants the best for the players and not maybe for themselves," indicating Cathy Engelbert's current vision does not align "with where our league is trying to go." Cunningham discussed WNBA leadership and Engelbert's future as the league's commissioner as part of a wide-ranging profile published Wednesday by USA Today. Engelbert's current contract is set to expire after the 2026 season, her seventh as the WNBA's commissioner. Despite the league's exponential growth in recent years, Engelbert's future is uncertain partly because of how she has handled various situations, including a contentious labor negotiation earlier this year. [Ed: and the trans issue.]

BURQA LAW
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Euronews
Portugal Begins To Enforce Ban on Face Coverings in Public Spaces. In Portugal, violators face fines ranging from €150 to €3,000, with exemptions for health, professional, artistic or weather-related reasons, as well as in places of worship, diplomatic missions and on aircraft. Portugal's President António Jose Seguro has enacted a law banning face coverings in public spaces, a measure widely seen as targeting Muslim women who wear full-face veils.

Ceuta migrant girls to transfer to Spain after sexual assaults
Topic: Violence Against Women
Source: Telegraph
Spain is planning to move 500 migrant girls from Ceuta to its mainland after reports of sexual assault in the north African exclave. Between 5,000 and 8,000 people remain in the Spanish territory more than two weeks after about 72,000 migrants swam or burst through the border from Morocco into Ceuta. Authorities have said at least 2,168 minors have been registered, but after 15 reports of alleged sexual assault on females, mostly young girls, social services are struggling to cope.

Art Degrees Take Longest to Pay Off in UK
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Hobbes Independent
...as Performing Arts Graduate Wait 39 Years. Art degrees rank among the worst-paying university qualifications in the UK, with teaching close behind, according to an August 2026 higher education report from Edumentors. The study examined how long graduates take to recoup the cost of university, including tuition fees and earnings they forgo while studying. Performing arts graduates take 39 years to earn back the money they gave up by going to university. Psychology remains one of the UK’s most popular degree subjects, yet graduates still need 16 years of work to cover tuition and other study costs. Education and teaching degrees take nearly 30 years to break even, despite almost all graduates securing jobs within a year of completing their studies.

NYC Mamdani sues City Council to block $10K payments for teacher aides
Topic: Children and Family
Source: Just the News
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Wednesday sued the City Council to block its new bill that will give teacher aides a one-time $10,000 payment that he warns could set a dangerous precedent. The Council passed the bill last month with a veto-proof majority, and it lapsed into law Wednesday without the mayor's veto, which council members would likely have overridden, according to the City Reporter.

Federal Judge Orders Release of Virginia Giuffre’s Case Files at Last
Topic: Violence Against Women
Source: New Republic
Virginia Giuffre’s 2015 civil lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell is going to be unsealed. A federal court in Manhattan last week ordered the public release of the files from Giuffre’s defamation lawsuit against the accomplice and partner of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, following eight years of litigation from the Miami Herald, reported Julie Brown, the investigative journalist for the newspaper best known for uncovering Epstein’s crimes. Maxwell had been fighting to keep the lawsuit details under wraps, but her arguments were not enough to convince U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska, who ruled that the Epstein Files Transparency Act supersedes the grand jury arguments Maxwell cited to keep the records sealed.

Biological Parents of Baby Gabriel File $100,000 Lawsuit
Topic: Children and Family
Source: New York Post
Against Surrogate Who Refused Demand to Abort Their Son. The biological parents of the child birthed by surrogate mother McKenna West are suing her more than $100,000 for keeping the baby rather than abort it at their request, according to a report. Nasheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed filed a countersuit against West, a 28-year-old nurse from Alaska, weeks before she gave birth in Texas to their baby, who was born with a serious and rare heart defect, TMZ reported. They agreed to pay West $60,000 to carry their child — with an abortion clause that allowed them to terminate the pregnancy if there were issues with the fetus, according to the lawsuit.

Congressional probe targets consulting reports that helped make DEI quotas
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Just the News
...a boardroom standard. Four unreplicated consulting reports became the evidentiary basis for hiring quotas — and the data behind them has never been released for scrutiny. House Republicans have accused a major consulting group of making misleading claims about DEI that led to billions of dollars in lost revenue.

“Difference, Power & Oppression”
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Jonathan Turley
OSU Requires Students to Take Courses on How to “Disrupt” the “Systems of Oppression” in the United States” As many criticize higher education for pursuing indoctrination over education, Oregon State University (OSU) appears to be doubling down on a mandatory woke curriculum. The university is under fire for its mandatory undergraduate courses on “Difference, Power & Oppression” (DPO). Much of the rhetoric on the university’s website reads more like the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) than an institution of higher education. OSU requires all undergraduate students who enrolled after the summer of 2025 to complete two “Difference, Power & Oppression” (DPO) courses as part of its Core Education curriculum, including “Difference, Power & Oppression Foundations” and “Difference, Power & Oppression Advanced.”

Planned Parenthood Fraud Appeal Dismissed by Full Fifth Circuit
Topic: Abortion
Source: Bloomberg Law
Planned Parenthood’s appeal of an interim ruling cannot be considered by the Fifth Circuit, the full court held Wednesday, returning the case to a federal district court that previously said the nonprofit’s attorneys aren’t immune from a False Claims Act lawsuit. The case involves Medicaid fraud claims brought by a whistleblower referred to as “Alex Doe,” who conducted an undercover investigation to determine whether Planned Parenthood and its affiliates provided fetal tissue to researchers and tissue procurement companies. Doe claims that Louisiana and Texas terminated the Medicaid eligibility of three Planned Parenthood affiliates in response to his investigation, but the affiliates continued to bill Medicaid in violation of the federal anti-fraud statute.

The Art of the Smear
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Andrew Doyle Substack
How to make a defamatory accusation without ever quite saying it. It’s a form of libel by sleight-of-hand. Perhaps we should call it prestidefamation. Here’s how it works. You take a series of unremarkable facts, out-of-context quotations and tenuous associations, arrange them in a suggestive manner, omit any contrary evidence, invite the reader to draw the worst possible conclusion and then congratulate them for drawing it. Edge has done precisely this. I have a long and well-documented record of opposing fascism and the far right. I’ve written books and articles about it, spoken about it endlessly on television, radio and podcasts. My latest book The End of Woke makes the case against all forms of authoritarianism, and opens with an epigraph explicitly attacking Nazi ideology. Yet Edge has managed to write an article insinuating that I support Nazis. It would be like writing a piece about Oscar Wilde’s robust and unwavering heterosexuality.

Does Using AI to Edit an Op-Ed on Students' Math Skills Undermine the Argument?
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: The Guardian
A math professor at the University of California, Berkeley, criticizing a "severe" math deficiency among students in an op-ed for the San Francisco Standard, admitted to using artificial intelligence to help edit the piece. The Standard published a 2,000-word piece by Zvezdelina Stankova last week, in which the professor said some of her math students were "five to eight years" behind and lacked a "middle school" education on fractions and basic algebra. Stankova said the UC system's test-blind admissions were to blame, suggesting that students who weren't sufficiently prepared for the rigor of Berkeley's mathematics program were admitted because a longstanding benchmark like the SAT had disappeared.

Media’s Obsession With Natalie Harp Shames Us All
Topic: Violence Against Women
Source: Kathy Gannon
Where does the story of Natalie add value to our understanding of the news, of the events that shape our world? No, instead we get an obsession with a young woman who is infatuated with Donald Trump. And shame on the New York Times for your demeaning description of Harp as a “platinum blonde geyser of positivity”. Was that supposed to be clever? It wasn’t. It made you sound like a cheap tabloid stuck in an era where attacks on a woman’s person were fodder for male sleaze- filled jokes that demean and humiliate women __ oh that’s right it appears that era is still with us

Today In Dystopia: Burning Books For Israel, Burning Books For AI
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Caitlin Johnstone
….Today in dystopia they’re really going after books. A library in Sydney has removed the book “How to Sell a Genocide” by Adam Johnson from its shelves after Zionists complained about its criticisms of Israeli mass atrocities in Gaza.
The Guardian reports: “A Sydney library has removed a book critical of Israel called How to Sell a Genocide, following a complaint reportedly from a survivor of the Bondi beach terror attack

The Cruelty Of DEI We should stop these absurd games...
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: The Epoch Times
Author: by Jeff Tucker
This past week ended with shock and sadness at the news that Jason Arday ended his own life in the midst of an investigation over his intellectual credibility. He was the vaunted education sociologist at Cambridge University, media darling and beneficiary of a big book contract, the toast of the town, and the subject of countless hagiographic profiles in media venues.

Psychiatry as Diabolical Pseudoscience
Topic: Violence Against Women
Source: Armageddon Prose
The Sordid Tale of Lindsay Clancy. If you ever had any doubt that the field of psychiatry is populated by degenerate sociopaths who practice alchemical witchcraft with seemingly no remorse for the lives they destroy, I present to you the grilling of Lindsay Clancy’s psychiatric nurse, who prescribed psychotropic drug after drug after drug until she achieved the catastrophic results that, in retrospect, seem inevitable.

Former NBA player Royce White officially declares for WNBA Draft
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: The Post Millennial
...as 'transgender woman,' Matt Gaetz to serve as legal counsel. "As of the signing of the attached declaration, Ms. White identifies as a transgender woman." Former NBA player Royce White has officially declared for the WNBA Draft, with former Congressman Matt Gaetz serving as White’s legal counsel and signing off on the declaration. This comes as the WNBA has been in headlines in recent weeks over the inclusion of trans-identified males in women’s sports, sparked by Indiana Fever player Sophie Cunningham coming out in support of protecting women’s sports.