Independent Media

On the night of the raid, heavily armed federal agents zip-tied Jhonny Manuel Caicedo Fereira’s hands behind his back, marched him out of his Chicago apartment building and put him against a wall to question him.

As a Black Hawk helicopter roared overhead, the slender, 28-year-old immigrant from Venezuela answered softly, his eyes darting to a television crew invited to film the raid. Next to Caicedo, masked Border Patrol agents inspected another man’s tattoos and asked him if he belonged to Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang that the Trump administration has designated a terrorist group.

Until that moment, Caicedo’s only interaction with law enforcement in his two-and-a-half years in the United States had been a traffic stop two weeks earlier for driving without a license or insurance, according to the records we reviewed. Chicago police had run a background check on him and found no prior arrests, no warrants and no evidence that he was in a gang. Caicedo said he had a pending asylum application, a steady job at a taco joint and a girlfriend whose daughter attended elementary school across the street.

None of that mattered. The U.S. government paraded him and his neighbors in front of the cameras and called their arrests a spectacular victory against terrorism. But later, after the cameras had gone, prosecutors didn’t charge Caicedo with a crime. They didn’t accuse him of being a terrorist. And after a brief hearing in immigration court, the government sent him back to the country he had fled nine years earlier.

Self-stimulatory behaviors are often associated with autism, but in truth, these behaviors are part of the broader human experience. From infancy onward, we all engage in self-soothing or sensory behaviors that help us navigate our emotions and environment.

Matthew Locke sued Hubbard County Sheriff Cory Aukes, Chief Deputy Scott Parks and Hubbard County after the sheriff and his deputy used pain compliance techniques on Locke in an attempt to remove him from a protest. According to Locke’s suit, the techniques amounted to an excessive use of force.

The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals decided 2-1 to reverse the decision of U.S. District Judge Wilhelmina Wright, who dismissed the case on the grounds that pain compliance techniques are not prohibited by any existing case law.

The appeals court deemed the techniques excessive and reversed the district court’s ruling, returning the case to the district court, where it will now go into discovery.

Newly released Jeffrey Epstein emails have cast further doubt on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s account of when he cut ties with the child sex offender and his denials about meeting his accuser Virginia Giuffre.

In March 2011, four months after he later claimed to have ended his relationship with Epstein, the former prince told him and the convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell: “I can’t take any more of this,” in response to allegations put to him by the Mail on Sunday.

A row over the definition of the term “gender” threatens to bog down pivotal talks at the Cop30 climate summit.

Before the UN talks in Brazil, hardline conservative states have pushed to define gender as “biological sex” over their concerns trans and non-binary people could be included in a major plan to ensure climate action addresses gender inequality and empowers women.

France is committing to help the Palestinian Authority draft a constitution for a future Palestinian state. French President Emmanuel Macron announced a joint constitutional committee after meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Paris yesterday. France also pledged $100 million for humanitarian aid in Gaza this year.

The Department of Justice is appealing a federal judge's order requiring the White House to immediately begin providing American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation at its press briefings when President Trump or press secretary Karoline Leavitt are speaking.

In a court filing on Friday responding to U.S. District Judge Amir Ali's ruling, the Justice Department requested clarification on which types of events should have ASL interpretation available. The DOJ said it believes the services should be limited to regularly scheduled briefings and not other events where the president takes questions from the press.

Veronica and Charity Bowers, a young Christian missionary and her daughter, are killed when the Peruvian Air Force shoots down a small passenger plane in 2001. The plane had been mistaken for a drug smuggling plane and was shot down as part of a joint anti-drug agreement between the CIA and the Colombian and Peruvian governments.

President Donald Trump has made the Bowers’s deaths newly and urgently relevant since he began ordering the U.S. military to strike down alleged drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean in September 2025. By early November, the U.S. had launched a total of 17 strikes, killing at least 70 people, and those figures seem to grow almost by the day. The attacks are illegal under both U.S. and international law. The administration also provided no documentation of the alleged drug trafficking.

In Cuba, the power grid collapsed during Hurricane Oscar in October 2024, leaving 10 million people in darkness. When Melissa arrived, it struck the same fragile infrastructure that Cubans had barely begun to rebuild.

Haiti’s fragile situation before Hurricane Melissa cannot be overstated. The island nation was still reeling from years of cascading disasters – deadly hurricanes, political instability, gang violence, an ongoing cholera crisis and widespread hunger – with over half the population already in need of humanitarian assistance even before this storm hit.

This is the new reality of the climate crisis: Disasters hitting the Caribbean are no longer sequential. They are compounding and can trigger infrastructure collapse, social erosion and economic debt spirals.

In the future, your clothes might come from vats of living microbes. Reporting in the Cell Press journal Trends in Biotechnology on November 12, researchers demonstrate that bacteria can both create fabric and dye it in every color of the rainbow—all in one pot. The approach offers a sustainable alternative to the chemical-heavy practices used in today’s textile industry.

“The industry relies on petroleum-based synthetic fibers and chemicals for dyeing, which include carcinogens, heavy metals, and endocrine disruptors,” says senior author and biochemical engineer San Yup Lee of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. “These processes generate lots of greenhouse gas, degrade water quality, and contaminate the soil, so we want to find a better solution.”

Known as bacterial cellulose, fibrous networks produced by microbes during fermentation have emerged as a potential alternative to petroleum-based fibers such as polyester and nylon.

Anticipation is building among sumo fans in Japan as they wait to discover if the country’s first female prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, will defy centuries of tradition and step into the sumo ring to present a trophy later this month.

With 11 days of the current 15-day tournament in Fukuoka, south-west Japan, remaining, government officials have left the sport’s devotees guessing with vague comments over the likelihood of clash between Takaichi and the Japan sumo association.

Women are banned from entering, or even touching, the “sacred” dohyo, or arena, due to a belief found in Shinto, Japan’s indigenous religion, that they are “impure” because of menstrual blood.

The supreme court on Monday rejected a call to overturn its landmark decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

The justices, without comment, turned away an appeal from Kim Davis, the former Kentucky court clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the high court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v Hodges.

Davis had been trying to get the court to overturn a lower-court order for her to pay $360,000 in damages and attorney’s fees to a couple denied a marriage license.

KYIV and KHARKIV, Ukraine — Maryna Mytsiuk spends her free time at a shooting range outside Kyiv, hyper-focused on hitting her targets. She's got to practice. She's waiting for a call that, any day, will send her to war.

"Of course, I'd like to be in a combat position," said Mytsiuk, a 27-year-old folklore scholar who speaks Japanese and works at a nonprofit. "With my build and height, I'm not a natural fit for that … so I'm training very hard."

Texas Rep. Nate Schatzline’s energy was palpable as he gazed out from the video on the computer screen, grinning ear to ear, the sleeves of his white dress shirt rolled up.

The Republican legislator from Fort Worth had a message to share with people watching the prerecorded video: As a Christian, you have an essential role in politics and local government.

“There is no greater calling than being civically engaged and bringing the values that Scripture teaches us into every realm of the earth,” Schatzline said.

When 17-year-old David was put in isolation for fighting in juvenile detention in Tennessee, it made him want to fight even more. “I couldn’t do anything but do pushups and get mad and think about stuff. It makes you want to come out and put your hands on somebody,” the teen, who was using a pseudonym because he is a minor, told the nonprofit news outlet MLK50.

Over 5000 fossil fuel lobbyists were given access to U.N. climate summits over the past four years, a period marked by a rise in catastrophic extreme weather, adequate climate action and record oil and gas expansion. “This is climate obstruction at work,” says Nina Lakhani, senior climate justice reporter for The Guardian US. She notes that lobbyists attend climate conferences to “promote false solutions like carbon based carbon markets, carbon capture and storage — these market based solutions which are not going to save the planet.”

Washington, D.C., November 7, 2025 | The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) has filed a motion for a preliminary injunction in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose Division, asking the court to halt enforcement of California’s Assembly Bill 715 (AB 715) before it transforms public school classrooms into censored spaces for discussions about Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East. This motion is part of the Prichett et al. v. Newsom et al., Case No. 5:25-cv-9443, the constitutional challenge ADC announced earlier this week.

As the first American pope, Leo XIV has largely avoided speaking out about domestic politics in the United States.

He waded into controversy, however, by commenting on the Archdiocese of Chicago’s plan to honor U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, who has represented Illinois since 1997, with a lifetime achievement award for his work on immigration issues. Some Catholic critics were opposed to Durbin, who has supported the right to a legal abortion, receiving such an award – and he ultimately declined it.

Imagine walking out of a Walmart, Target or Costco. As you push your large shopping cart to your car, you ask yourself: Did I really need all that stuff?

The answer is you probably didn’t.

In a recent study, my co-authors Lina Wang, Sungho Park and I found that the presence of supercenters – large retailers that sell groceries alongside general merchandise – results in a significant uptick in consumer waste due to overpurchasing.

“There have definitely been things that have concerned me in the last little while with the premier’s leadership and it’s stuff that I needed a lot of answers to and each caucus meeting I get a few more answers as we go along,” he told the CBC. “It’s still up in the air for me in terms of what I’m willing to do.”

With the PCs mired in scandals about the premier’s use of government aircraft and excessive travel expenses, and with plans to build a private “Sky Palace” apartment for the premier atop a government building in Edmonton starting to leak, a group of PC MLAs was beavering away at pushing Redford out the exit.

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.

For decades, the United Nations has intervened in Haiti in a bid to address persistent political, economic and security crises. To date, all attempts have failed.

Now, the international body is trying something new. On Sept. 30, 2025, the United Nations Security Council approved an expanded international military force for Haiti in hopes of turning the tide against organized criminal gangs that have taken hold of swaths of the Caribbean nation.

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.

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.