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100 year old fighter pilot from Escondido receives Medal of Honor
This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here. President Trump honored two storied military veterans during his State of the Union address, including 100-year-old veteran Royce Williams of Escondido, who survived what is believed to be the longest dog fight in military history. The former Navy fighter pilot, who was seated next to First Lady Melania Trump in the Capitol during the president’s address Tuesday night, flew more than 220 missions in World War II as well as the wars in Korea and Vietnam. Trump called Williams “a living legend” before describing his war-time heroics. “In the skies over Korea in 1952, Royce was in the dogfight of a lifetime, a… |
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Renee Nicole Good and her murder
Halenews Editorial The killing has already been diced into bureaucratic fragments: a federal agent, a Minnesota street, a woman dead, a government mumbling about procedure while another city absorbs yet another rupture. That sterile accounting matters, but it is not enough. The public keeps asking a question older than the press and more durable than outrage: who was she? And why must we only learn her name after the state has erased her? Renee Nicole Good did not seek to be a symbol. She did not audition for national relevance. She lived a life that should have remained private—work, children, grief, partnership, rebuilding. And yet here we are, forced to know her only through the instant o… |
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Spielberg and Coppola and Lucas is the toxic friendship that built modern Hollywood
A new book captures how Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg went from allies to rivals, driving a filmmaking revolution in the process. By Patrick Smith Removed from bookmarks I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our Privacy notice George Lucas should have died. It was 1962; the 17-year-old had just crashed his yellow Autobianchi convertible into a walnut tree, in Modesto, California. The car rolled, bounced and came to rest – it was “beyond mangled, flipped upside down and twisted like a crushed Coke can against the tree”, writes Paul Fischer in his new book, The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg and the … |
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Pilot says he woke up in downtown Denver hotel to find bat in his room and bite on his foot
The alleged bat encounter now makes it difficult for the pilot to sleep in hotels, his attorney says Removed from bookmarks A commercial pilot is suing a downtown Denver hotel after a bat allegedly sunk its teeth into his foot, leaving him with a bite he claims cost him more than $100,000 in medical bills. The alleged August 2025 incident happened while the pilot was staying on the 22nd floor of the Sheraton Denver Hotel Downtown. The pilot, who has not been publicly identified because he fears professional repercussions, alleges he was awakened in the middle of the night by bats flying through his room, CBS Colorado reports. “[He] was sleeping and he woke up to a commotion, and he woke up a… |
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Stanford Godmother of AI Launches Spatial Intelligence MasterClass
MasterClass, the personalized learning platform, has announced the launch of Dr. Fei-Fei Li: AI’s Future – and Yours, a class that covers the current state of AI development, its real-world applications and the role individuals can play in influencing how the technology evolves. Known as the “Godmother of AI,” Li is a Stanford professor, cofounder and CEO of World Labs and founding director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute. Her foundational research on ImageNet helped spark the deep learning revolution behind every AI product in use today. The class is available now on MasterClass, where members have unlimited access to 200+ instructors with an annual membership. The class begins wh… |
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Global oil demand to plunge amid disruptions caused by war on Iran
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has sharply cut its forecasts for global oil supply ?and demand growth, saying both are expected to fall from last year’s levels as ?the United States-Israel war on Iran disrupts oil flows and weighs on the global economy. According to its report published on Tuesday, the IEA sees global oil demand falling ?by 80,000 barrels per day (bpd) this year, compared with a projected year-on-year rise of 640,000 bpd in its previous monthly report. The forecast was released after the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and IEA urged countries on Monday to avoid hoarding energy supplies and imposing export controls that could worsen the shock. IEA chief Fatih B… |
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Foreign element caused recall of 90000 bottles of child ibuprofen
Federal regulators have ordered a nationwide recall of nearly 90,000 bottles of children’s ibuprofen after contamination was discovered in two production lots. The medicine, manufactured by Strides Pharma and distributed by Taro Pharmaceuticals, was pulled from circulation following complaints of “gel-like masses and black particles” in the liquid suspension. The Food and Drug Administration confirmed the recall earlier this month, classifying it as a Class II event—meaning the risk of serious harm is considered remote, but temporary or reversible health effects are possible. Parents are being urged to stop using the affected bottles immediately, which carry expiration dates of January 31, 2… |
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The Hidden Secret of AI Intelligence
Feature Editorial We have been sold a ghost in a machine, but what we actually bought was a warehouse full of heaters. When you ask an AI to read an 80,000-word manuscript in two seconds, you aren't witnessing a "mind" at work. You are witnessing a feat of industrial plumbing. There is no quiet contemplation happening in the cloud; there is only a violent, high-voltage surge of electricity through millions of silicon gates. It is a process so hot and so demanding that it requires literal tons of circulating water just to keep the hardware from melting into a puddle of useless metal. To understand why your AI assistant is brilliant one moment and a total idiot the next, you have to stop think… |
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Energy Department Announces two Billion for Projects Strengthening Power Grid
The Department of Energy (DOE) has announced a $1.9 billion funding opportunity for projects aimed at speeding up improvements to the nation’s power grid to meet rising electricity demand while bringing down costs, the department said in a March 12 statement. The money comes from the $10.5 billion authorized for a five-year grid resilience program under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021. The funds were to be disbursed to states and electric utilities over five years. The money will help build more than 600 miles of new transmission lines and upgrade about 400 miles of existing lines so that they can carry more current. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the funding is i… |
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After the Supreme Court ruling on tariffs companies line up for refunds
By The Associated Press Containers are stacked at the Port of Long Beach Friday, Feb. 20, 2026, in Long Beach, Calif. Damian Dovarganes/AP hide caption WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday struck down President Donald Trump's biggest and boldest tariffs. But the justices left a $133 billion question unanswered: What's going to happen to the money the government has already collected in import taxes now declared unlawful? Companies have been lining up for refunds. But the way forward could prove chaotic. When the smoke clears, trade lawyers say, importers are likely to get money back — eventually. "It's going to be a bumpy ride for awhile," said trade lawyer Joyce Adetutu, a partner at th… |
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The Epstein Files and the Machinery of Forgetting
Editorial The first instinct of power, when threatened, is not denial but delay. Delay until outrage exhausts itself, until headlines thin, until the public grows bored or distracted or numb. The newly unsealed Jeffrey Epstein-related documents land in public view with the weight of something both familiar and unfinished, a reminder not merely of a disgraced financier and the crimes that orbited him, but of how expertly the machinery of forgetting has been engineered. These files do not arrive as a revelation in the cinematic sense. There is no single smoking gun, no neat moral closure. Instead, they arrive like sediment, layer upon layer of testimony, allegation, recollection, and evasion. … |
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Daughter and son-in-law charged with killing four family members in 2015
Shocking new charges have been brought in the case of a family that was brutally murdered in their homes on Halloween night in 2015. Cathy Scott, her husband Michael Scott, Mr Scott's mother, Barbara, and Ms Scott's mother, Violet Taylor, were murdered on Halloween night in 2015. Now, the couple’s daughter, Amy Vilardi, and her husband, Rosmore "Ross" Vilardi, have been arrested and charged in their deaths. Ms Vilardi and her husband were featured in tearful television interviews following the murders, but are now considered the prime suspects in the slayings, according to The Daily Beast. The four adults were found shot and killed in their homes in Pendleton, South Carolina, on 2 November 2… |
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Humanity Has Gone Over the Edge
Halenews Editorial Humanity has just gone over the edge of a cliff, and there may be no way back. Picture eight billion people in free fall and you begin to grasp the scale of what is now in motion. The only reason this does not feel urgent is because the catastrophe has not yet interrupted daily life. Nuclear war is no longer a distant Cold War nightmare. Reckless politics, fragile alliances, and leaders who talk about force the way bored men talk about dares have made it real again. If this goes wrong—and it can—the lights do not flicker. They go out. Satellites die. GPS disappears. Phones become paperweights. Banks freeze. Hospitals improvise. The internet, games, streaming, and social li… |
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How Google Is Attempting to Silence Independent News Sites
Part I: The Silent Wall The internet was supposed to be the great equalizer. It promised that anyone with conviction and a keyboard could publish, and the world could read. For a time, that promise felt real. Independent voices flourished, blogs became movements, and small publishers carved out spaces where truth could breathe. But today, that promise is collapsing. Small publishers are running headlong into a wall they cannot see. This wall is not built of stone or law. It is built of code. Invisible filters decide what is “safe,” what is “indexable,” what is “fetchable.” And when those filters misfire—or when they are designed to favor the giants—small publishers vanish. Consider the lived… |
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The Assassination of Malcolm X
On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X woke up alone in a suite at the Hilton Hotel in New York City.He was, in the most literal sense, a guy without a home. The week before, someone had set fire to his house in the East Elmhurst neighborhood of Queens in the middle of the night. His wife, Betty Shabazz, and his four small children were all well, but for their own protection, they were currently residing with friends in a secret location.Malcolm was sure that his old coworkers from the Nation of Islam (NOI), led by Elijah Muhammad, were responsible for the firebombing. He used to be the second most influential person in the religious and political movement, but now he had to watch out for the milit… |
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Lucy is the Woman Who Rewired America
Biography Feature Lucille Desiree Ball was born in 1911 in Jamestown, New York, into circumstances that offered little illusion of permanence, and when her father died of typhoid fever before she was four, the loss did not simply register as grief but as an early lesson in instability, a condition that would follow her for decades and quietly harden her instincts. The Ball household fractured into temporary arrangements, relatives stepped in, finances tightened, emotional certainty thinned, and Lucy learned—long before she had words for it—that security was conditional and visibility could not be assumed. Her mother remarried, the family moved, and the young Lucy developed a temperament that… |
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The Climate Emergency Governments Still Pretend Is Optional
GENEVA — A coalition of scientists and public health experts this week urged the World Health Organization to formally declare climate change a global public health emergency, escalating pressure on governments as new projections warn 2026 could become one of the hottest and most destructive climate years ever recorded. The demand arrives at a moment of extraordinary contradiction. Governments across Europe, North America, and Asia now openly acknowledge the dangers of climate change while simultaneously approving new fossil fuel projects, subsidizing oil and gas production, and delaying emissions targets that scientists say are already dangerously inadequate. The WHO panel’s argument was bl… |
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Attack on Downtown Lviv Ukraine by Russian Drones in Broad Daylight
During the middle of the day on Tuesday, Russian soldiers attacked the center of Lviv, a historic city in western Ukraine that had been mostly untouched by the devastating conflict in other regions of the nation, using drones. Authorities issued a warning that the number of casualties from the unexpected attack, which left more than a dozen people injured, may increase. "Lviv hospitals are already treating thirteen injured people," Mayor Andriy Sadovyi said in an online post. More and more people are falling prey to this epidemic.The regional governor issued a shelter-in-place alert to the people. How did Ukraine defeat Iran's Shahed drones? What can the United States take out from this? The… |
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Two more people die while skiing in the Lake Tahoe region
There have been two additional fatalities in the Sierra Nevada, adding to the total number of fatalities that have occurred throughout the winter season. The avalanche that occurred on Castle Peak last week killed nine lives. According to the Douglas County Sheriff's Office, which arrived just before noon, the most recent deaths occurred on Friday in two "fatal ski incidents" that were unrelated to each other at the Boulder Lodge of Heavenly resort. In a press statement, the Sheriff's Office stated that paramedics from the Ski Patrol and the Tahoe Douglas Fire Protection District attempted to save the life of the subject. On the other hand, both persons were pronounced dead at the site of th… |
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How to Write and Publish Science Fiction
Science fiction has always been a genre of defiance. From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, the best sci?fi stories refuse to accept the world as it is. They imagine what could be, what should be, and sometimes what must never be. Yet for the modern writer, the act of creating and publishing science fiction is itself a rebellion—against shrinking attention spans, against publishing monopolies, against the quiet pressure to write something “safe.” This is not a neutral craft. To write and publish science fiction today is to step into a contested space where art, commerce, and politics collide. 1. The Spark: Writing Against Gravity Every sci?fi story begins … |