Florida & Beyond, and All Opinions

Accusing the media of liberal bias has been a consistent conservative complaint since the civil rights era, when white Southerners insisted news outlets were slanting their stories against segregation. But those charges of bias rarely survive empirical scrutiny. That independence in the United States – enshrined in the press freedom clause of the First Amendment – gives journalists the ability to hold government accountable, expose abuses of power and thereby support democracy. That’s what GOP lawmakers call a liberal bias.

In some parts of Russia, schoolgirls who become pregnant are being paid nearly $1,200 for giving birth and raising their babies. This new measure, introduced in the past few months across ten regions, is part of Russia’s new demographic strategy, widening the policy adopted in March 2025 which only applied to adult women. It is designed to address the dramatic decline in the country’s birthrate.

U.S. charitable giving increased 3.3% to US$593 billion in 2024, lifted by the strength of the economy. The annual report from the Giving USA Foundation, produced in partnership with the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, found that this was the second-highest level on record after adjusting for inflation.

The appeal of carbon capture and storage, in theory, was that it could be bolted on to an existing factory with minimal changes to the core process and the carbon pollution would go away. Without the expectation that carbon capture will help them meet regulations, this may create space to focus on materials breakthroughs that could revolutionize manufacturing while solving industries’ emissions problems.

It’s not certain what the ABC and CBS settlements portend, but many are predicting they will produce a “chilling effect” within the network news divisions. Such an outcome would arise from fear of new litigation, and it would install a form of internal self-censorship that would influence network journalists when deciding whether the pursuit of investigative stories involving the Trump administration would be worth the risk.

As he has done since the 1980s, Grover Norquist continues to exert outsized influence over the GOP. For more than four decades, Norquist has been a relentless advocate for fiscal conservatism. He is the living embodiment of an ideological thread that stretches from Goldwater to Reagan to Gingrich to current GOP leadership.

If you were to ask most people what causes cancer, the answer would probably be smoking, alcohol, the sun, hair dye or some other avoidable element. But the most important risk factor for cancer is something else: aging. That’s right, the factor most associated with cancer is unavoidable — and a condition that we will all experience.

The nearly 900-page bill that the president signed slashes incentives for wind and solar energy, batteries, electric cars and home efficiency while expanding subsidies for fossil fuels and biofuels. That will leave Americans burning more fossil fuels despite strong public and scientific support for shifting to renewable energy.

Iran is weakened and vulnerable after a 12-day war with Israel. Hezbollah, Tehran’s main ally in Lebanon, had already lost a lot of its fighters, arsenal and popular support during its own war with Israel in October 2024. Changing regional dynamics give the Lebanese state an opening to chart a more neutral orientation and extricate itself from neighboring conflicts that have long exacerbated the divided and fragile country’s chronic problems.

Research shows little connection between a shortfall of housing and rental affordability problems. Even a massive infusion of new housing would not shrink housing costs enough to solve the crisis, as rents would likely remain out of reach for many households. However, there are already subsidies in place that ensure that some renters in the U.S. pay no more than 30% of their income on housing costs. The most effective solution is to make these subsidies much more widely available.

Texas Hill Country is known for its landscapes, where shallow rivers wind among hills and through rugged valleys. That geography also makes it one of the deadliest places in the U.S. for flash flooding.

Sea turtles ingest plastic debris of a variety of shapes and sizes, which can include pre-production pellets, foam, plastic bags, sheets, fishing gear and food wrappers. Their ingestion of plastic can come with a slew of negative impacts, some of which include starvation, emaciation and damage to the gut lining. Sea turtles can also become entangled in plastic nets and rope.

Many people who explicitly endorse egalitarian ideals, such as the notion that all Americans are deserving of the rights of citizenship regardless of race, still implicitly harbor prejudices over who’s “really” American. White and Asian participants in a study responded most quickly in matching the white faces with “American,” even when they initially expressed egalitarian values. Black Americans implicitly saw Black and white faces as equally American – though they too implicitly viewed Asian faces as being less American.