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| How a tragic friendly fire incident saved George Washingtons military career |
| Posted on Saturday, July 11 @ 00:00:19 PDT (7 reads) | |
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History research frequently reveals that strange quirks of the past, unplanned events and random coincidences have a much larger effect on world events than people recognize.
for instance: would george washington have gone on to become the legendary american figure of today if he hadn’t accidentally fired on his own men one foggy night in westmoreland county back in 1758?
that is just one of the many questions raised by the archaeological work happening at a small, privately owned field not far from fort ligonier, where historians and archaeologists discovered the site at which washington’s 1st virginia regiment accidentally opened fire on men from gen. Hugh mercer’s 2nd virginia regiment.
for the past five summers, the fort ligonier association has funded a week of archaeological work at the site, led by jonathan burns, director of the cultural resource institute at juniata college.
in his own writing from 30 years after the incident, washington determined that the miscalculated skirmish put him “in as much danger as (i have) been in before or since.”
that’s pretty tough talk from the guy who led the continental army in the american revolution.
“it’s the last place where george washington was under fire before the revolutionary war,” said julie donovan, the fort’s director of marketing and public relations.
a foggy night of chaos
so what happened, and why is it important?
on oct. 12, 1758, a group of french soldiers staged a raid on fort ligonier. While the british soldiers encamped there held the fort, the french took all of the horses tied up outside.
less than a month later, on nov. 11, 1758, with winter rapidly setting in, brig. Gen. John forbes made the decision to hunker down until spring at fort ligonier with his 6,000 men. This temporarily suspended his campaign to head about 50 miles west and take fort duquesne from the french, according to fort ligonier director of education and living history matt gault.
“but they get word that the french are coming back to raid the post again,” gault said. “And so gen. Hugh mercer sets out with a party to intercept the french soldiers.”
on nov. 12, 1758, the sound of distant musket fire could be heard at fort ligonier, and washington set out with his own group of soldiers, following the loyalhanna creek to try and flank the french raiding party and aid mercer.
on a foggy night, gault said, washington’s men followed the sound of gunfire but were unsure what to do when it ceased. Spying movement far off in the trees, the men opened fire on what they thought was the french raiding party.
it turned out to be mercer and his troops, gault said.
“the french were gone and they were skirmishing with their own men,” he said. “Eventually washington realizes this, and charges on his horse across his own battle line, with musket balls flying on both sides, batting down his men’s rifles and trying to order a ceasefire.”
after the firing stopped, 38 privates and two officers were reported dead or missing.
the intelligence that saved a campaign
but why do historians think this was a pivotal moment in american history? As it turns out, mercer’s men had taken two french soldiers captive, and they began to talk.
“forbes was going to keep his men at fort ligonier through the winter,” gault said. “But these french hostages provide information that the french army force at fort duquesne was in a weakened position. It changes forbes’ mind and they decide to march immediately on fort duquesne.”
without a tragic incident of friendly fire, gault said, perhaps forbes never gets this information about the garrison at fort duquesne.
“if not for this moment, we’d probably be looking at a very different story for fort ligonier and the founding of pittsburgh,” gault said.
moreover, gault and other historians can only speculate what the early life of the united states would have been — or if it would have existed at all — had washington taken a fatal bullet during the friendly-fire incident.
david preston, who serves as the gen. Mark clark distinguished chair of history at the citadel, is one such historian. He recently penned a cover story for smithsonian magazine about the discovery of the site and the history surrounding it. He said it emphasizes the importance of the french and indian war, which is sometimes overlooked in american history.
“without the experience washington gains in this war, he likely would not have been named commander-in-chief of the continental army,” preston said. “And honestly, washington’s experience in this war is characterized by a lot of loss, defeats and setbacks. The taking of fort duquesne is also the start of the british entry into the ohio river valley.”
confirming local legends through science
the field where the friendly-fire incident took place is still the final resting place for several of the soldiers who died. Two different cadaver dogs that have worked the site over the years hit in the same location of the field, donovan said. Isotope testing on musket balls and some of the more than 325 artifacts found has helped confirm it is indeed the site where the skirmish took place. Association officials are not disclosing its exact location, partly because it is private property and partly to ensure it is preserved for future study.
weeklong archaeological digs over the past five summers, followed by subsequent lab tests, were able to confirm the legends and stories passed down through generations in this part of westmoreland county.
“we’d heard local stories that survived of this place possibly being a battle site, and families advising not to drink the water from springs in the area because there were bodies buried in the field,” said collections manager meghan budinger. “And we heard of local folks using metal detectors who’d hit caches in and around the area.”
some of those finds are part of the collection on display at the fort’s “friendly fire incident” exhibit in its george washington gallery. Washington’s actual writings mentioning the incident are kept in a sealed environment in the basement, under a special light that will not degrade the paper or writing. However, the upstairs exhibit includes lead musket balls, a piece of an old shoe buckle, 18th-century coins, british colonial uniform buttons identifying specific units involved in the incident, and a small key for winding a french pocket watch.
budinger said burns and his archaeological team don’t believe they’ve found the edges of the battlefield just yet.
“they keep finding musket balls and other items,” she said. “It really shows us that history isn’t static. It’s always changing, and so is our understanding of it.” |
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| Dowry Killings Have Faded From Public Attention In India |
| Posted on Saturday, July 11 @ 00:00:19 PDT (6 reads) | |
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Dowry killings have faded from public attention in india
(analysis) a new academic study argues that india has built an “infrastructure of inattention” around dowry killings, referring to legal and cultural processes that once made such deaths the focus of mass public protest but now allow such murders to pass with little public attention.
dowry deaths surged in india during the 1970s and 1980s, a period marked by the state of emergency imposed from 1975 to 1977, says the study, published in the academic journal public culture/277/409633/infrastructures-of-inattention-and-necropolitical) and written by king’s college london social anthropologist kriti kapila. Women were killed by husbands and in-laws over unmet dowry demands, mostly by burnings disguised as kitchen accidents involving kerosene and loose sari fabric.
dowry is considered by many as “streedhan” — or women’s wealth — and refers to payments made by a bride’s family to the grooms family at marriage, the study says. In 2022, india recorded 6,516 reported dowry deaths, compared with 1,841 registered with the national crime records bureau in 1988, and 60,577 related court cases remained pending, the study notes.
kapila’s study traces why dowry survived and even worsened despite being outlawed under the anti-dowry act of 1961, back to two other laws passed around the same period. Parliament passed the hindu marriage act in 1955, introducing divorce into hindu marriage for the first time, and the hindu succession act in 1956, giving women inheritance and property rights, the study says.
according to the study, marriage between hindu families traditionally carried a lasting imbalance. A family that had a daughter was treated as ritually tainted simply for having her, the study argues, and dowry was the price that family paid to the groom’s side to accept her and lift that stigma. The debt did not run both ways equally, according to the study. It was the bride’s family that owed, and the ritual logic behind it treated daughters as a burden from birth, as kapila describes it.
the hindu marriage act made divorce legal for the first time, the study says. That meant a marriage could now end within a person’s own lifetime, instead of carrying that ritual arrangement forward across generations. B.R. Ambedkar had hoped this kind of change would eventually help dismantle the caste system itself, since caste and marriage were so closely tied together. That did not happen, the study says.
marriage stayed governed by caste rules in practice, and the practice of dowry survived along with it, the study says, but it no longer meant what it once did. It stopped being payment for ritual stigma and started working like a price tag, one families could set on a groom and demand in cash, sometimes for years after his wedding.
the dowry protests of the 1970s and 1980s marked the first time women in india mobilized as women, without needing men to act on their behalf, according to the study. The study contrasts that history with female foeticide, a second and larger form of what kapila calls structural femicide, achieved through prenatal sex-selection. Female foeticide has never produced mass protest or public mourning, despite killing more women than dowry deaths, according to the study.
india’s 1991 census first recorded an adverse sex ratio nationally. The 2001 census recorded 927 girls for every 1,000 boys in the 0-6 age group, down from 945 a decade earlier, and found that some northern states had as few as 884 females for every 1,000 men, the study notes. Parliament made female foeticide a punishable offense under the prenatal diagnostic techniques act of 1994, amended in 2004.
the study says dowry deaths themselves faded from public attention by the late 1990s, driven by two related changes. Suicide rates among young women in india rose through the 1990s, and many of those deaths, though not officially linked to dowry, had the effect of masking dowry-related killings.
brides who might once have been killed by their husbands’ families began instead to take their own lives, the study says, which made it harder to build a case against the relatives responsible for driving them to it.
at the same time, kerosene stoves, once common in indian kitchens and often used to stage a dowry killing as an accident, became rarer in cities, making that particular cover story less believable. As killings increasingly took the form of suicide rather than murder, the public grief and anger that had once followed a bride’s death gave way to private shame, according to the study.
this is what the study calls an “infrastructure of inattention.” Once dowry deaths took the form of suicide rather than murder, protest became difficult in a specific way, according to the study, since it is hard to campaign against a death for which no living person can be clearly blamed.
female feticide presents an even starker version of the same problem, the study argues. Sex-selective abortion is a decision made by a foetus’s own parents and grandparents, so there is no outside party left to hold accountable. The relatives who might otherwise grieve and protest are themselves part of the decision that ended the pregnancy.
rather than simple neglect, the study describes this as a kind of enforced inattention, in which families become unable to acknowledge their own role in a killing, and that inability, multiplied across the country, is what has kept female foeticide from ever becoming a matter of mass protest, unlike the dowry deaths of the 1970s and 1980s.
the study also points to the mass protests that followed the 2013 “nirbhaya” delhi gang rape and murder as the last time women in india mobilised on this scale. But it argues that rape draws public anger for a different reason than dowry deaths or feticide. Rape is understood as a violation of someone’s personal freedom and consent.
this piece has been published in partnership with newsreel asia.
vishal arora is an independent journalist based in new delhi, india, who covers asia and beyond. He serves as editor of @newsreel_asia and is a board member of the media project. He’s written for many outlets including the wall street journal, the diplomat and the caravan. |
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| Op-Ed: The Parents Of Nolan Xavier Wells Need Support, Not Judgment |
| Posted on Saturday, July 11 @ 00:00:19 PDT (6 reads) | |
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Nolan xavier wells deserved to see his 19 th birthday next month. The 18-year-old deserved to continue his studies and athletic career at southwest mississippi community college, where he was a star wide receiver for the school’s football team with a major in general business. He deserved to create more special memories with his siblings: elmore, ethan, jalen, jaden and carli. He deserved more opportunities to make his supportive and loving parents , christine and elmore, proud. Nolan xavier wells was full of promise and his future was bright. It is safe to assume no one thought this more than his own mom and dad.
we can agree to disagree on a lot of things. But one thing most of us do collectively agree on is that parenting is one of the hardest and most important jobs in the world.
no book, podcast, or class will ever prepare you for the curveballs parenting throws. Just when you think you might have it all figured out, you realize that you don’t. You never stop worrying about or wanting the best for your children. And raising a black son in america? The amount of second, third, and fourth-guessing is indescribable. You question their school choices and their friend circles. You straddle the fine line between nurturing and caring without being too overprotective (because what does that even mean as a black parent?) And “helicoptering.” You want them to be confident, critical thinkers who can problem-solve and navigate this crazy world on their own. But you also over stand the realities of existing while black.
when news of wells’ death circulated on the world wide web over the 4th of july weekend, the tragedy immediately led to a spiraling of dark speculation. According to multiple news reports, the teenager, who was apparently an excellent swimmer, went missing during a holiday celebration with some of his high school friends. Said group of “friends,” four in total, traveled by boat to horn island, a popular, undeveloped island just south of his hometown of ocean springs, mississippi. A quick google search reveals that horn island is primarily visited by nature enthusiasts as it does not have amenities and lacks safe drinking water and cell phone service. Visitors can only reach the island by private boat or chartered service from the mainland.
while the young men were supposed to be enjoying a celebratory excursion, only three returned home to their families. On the night of july 4th, nolan’s mother reported him missing, and posted on social media , writing that he was last seen on the northwest tip of the island around 3:00 p.M.
on july 6, a national park service ranger found wells’ body on the northwest tip of horn island. Ashlee cole, mother of one of the other teens who took the boating excursion, claims that wells decided to stay on the island and return to the mainland later with another group of friends. She also asserts that her son and the other two boys (who all happen to be white) left around 4:30 p.M.—Sans wells—when the boat was supposedly taking on water, and there was an issue with the bilge pump (these pumps are used to remove excess water from the bottom of a boat). Oh, and cole is a judge. A judge . Let that sink in.
fast forward to today, at the time of this op-ed publication, text messages and social media posts of wells were suspiciously deleted from his cell phone when it was recovered. “We always told him, if you go with a group, you stay with a group,” wells’ dad publicly explained. The family is now working with prominent civil rights attorney benjamin crump on the active case.
even at my big age, if my friends and i go out we stick by the tried-and-true rule: “we came here together, and we’re leaving here together.” Ain’t no exceptions. We can argue about it later. You might be getting on my nerves, or vice versa. But there’s no way we’re leaving this club/restaurant/bar without you—especially if we’re out of town.
the public wants answers. The family of wells, especially his parents. Need answers. They also need support, love, and a strong community to hold space for them in a genuine way. One thing they definitely do not need is shame or judgment. These parents are grieving the death, possibly murder, of their child in front of the world. In between taping segments for good morning america and meeting with what is no doubt a massive legal team, they are dodging requests from reporters who simply view them and their deceased son as clickbait. People who, unlike them, don’t know what their son’s favorite food was, what his most-watched movie was, the sound of his laugh, or what his last interactions were like with his siblings.
since this case went public and became an international conversation starter, my timelines have been filled with disturbing commentary about nolan xavier wells . Like this:
my kids could never have gone to an island with those boys by himself. Y’all think putting your kids in an all-white environment is helping them. Look at what happens. This is why my children don’t go to all-white schools, and we don’t live in an all-white neighborhood.
huh?
this is not the time. No parent has it all figured out. None. Of. Us. Not me. Not you. Not him, or her. You can think you’ve checked all the right boxes, dotted every “i” and crossed every “t” with your children, and then boom: you get reminded that you’re not in control. For the record, my own young son attends an all-black school, we reside in a predominantly black neighborhood, and i’m quite protective of him and always will be; unapologetically. Our individual parenting choices are just that—individual. There is already more than enough scrutiny of black parents. Having to bury your child is one of the most heartbreaking acts a human can endure. To have to do it under a microscope? My god. Picking apart christine and elmore’s parenting choices just ain’t it.
we know people post social media commentary that they would never say face-to-face. This isn’t new. Criticizing the choices of black parents and especially black mothers is also not new. As my good sis kimberly seals allers has profoundly stated, black women are trusted to raise everyone else’s kids, even forced to be wet nurses at one time in history, yet somehow when it comes to our own children, our maternal instincts are severely questioned. What we’re not about to do is transfer those white supremacist norms to this mourning couple.
hopefully, justice will be served fairly and swiftly. Our greatest asset and source of currency as a people is community. No other form of generational wealth compares. The family of nolan xavier wells needs us to help them now and in the days, weeks, and months ahead. Let’s uplift them with all the compassion, not judgment, we can. |
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| SZA reveals autism diagnosis, shedding light and awareness about how Black healt |
| Posted on Saturday, July 11 @ 00:00:19 PDT (10 reads) | |
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Paris, france – january 20: (editorial use only – for non-editorial use please seek approval from fashion house) sza attends the louis vuitton menswear fall/winter 2026-2027 show as part of paris fashion week on january 20, 2026 in paris, france. (Photo by aurore marechal/getty images) the grammy winner shared a personal moment on instagram. It might also have helped other black men, women, and children find a moment for a proper diagnosis.
grammy award-winner sza made a personal declaration on her private instagram account earlier this week, specifically regarding her health and the science behind how she navigates life.
in a since-deleted post, she informed fans that she has autism spectrum disorder and, in particular, a high-functioning variant of the syndrome where individuals can have challenges at times when it comes to social interactions, non-verbal communication, and select interests and behaviors, according to the cleveland clinic .
“finally took the time (and) got formally diagnosed,” she wrote in the post, which the jasmine brand and other outlets later shared. “Aspergers/high functioning autism/smarter than u n–as so stop playing in my face cause pattern recognition told me and i will get to the bottom of it thanks.”
she added, “pretty sure this is why i’m taking ai so personally, btw. And also why i’m in every comment section, lol.”
the news was met with several black women applauding sza for her revelation, also sharing that they were on the spectrum and her visibility was important for others to become informed about autism and not use it as a catch-all.
“as someone that’s also level 1 autistic, sza publicly talking about her recent diagnosis is so important,” one threads user wrote .
another added , “sza just got diagnosed with high-functioning autism as an adult. I hope her transparency encourages other adults to go get evaluated instead of just wondering their whole life.”
others on social media noticed that sza’s revelation was being dismissed, showing a “lack of grace” to someone who chose to share their story with people they somewhat trusted in a curated online community .
“a late diagnosis often comes after a lifetime of misunderstanding, masking, trauma, and having to unlearn the language everyone has used for decades,” one threads user wrote as part of a lengthy response to the backlash sza faced. “People don’t instantly know the terminology that every online disability space prefers. They learn through community.”
view on threads
for years, black people with autism have found themselves with unique challenges, from receiving a proper diagnosis to having a community that supports being outspoken and not seeing the syndrome as a burden. According to autism speaks , black children are more likely to be diagnosed with autism than their white or hispanic counterparts. And the journey to even get a proper diagnosis is one that plenty of families find themselves struggling with.
the alienation of black people with disabilities has prompted many people to step up and establish organizations, from autism in black , the color of autism foundation and more. Even with those organizations, the biases are heavily prevalent when it comes to black people and autism. In a recent cdc study, black children are typically diagnosed only if they show a form of intellectual disability. According to the cdc , more than 50 percent of black children have an intellectual disability, compared to 31 percent of white children.
“none of those factors seem to explain the discrepancy we’re seeing among black autistic children being more likely to have intellectual disability, so i think there’s some questions to be answered,” dr. Brian boyd, william c. Friday distinguished professor at the university of north carolina at chapel hill, said. “Is the issue timing of identification—that they are being identified later and therefore not getting access to services as soon? Are they not getting the same intensity and amount of services? These issues are something that we still have to understand.”
earlier this year, comedian ron funches revealed he was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder after he was voted off from the nbc reality show “the traitors.” Funches said the diagnosis was a relief due to his treatment on the show, saying he felt “misunderstood” and “isolated.”
“i honestly didn’t know i myself had autism,” he wrote in a post on threads. “I thought i was just an ally and parent of an autistic child but the way i felt i wasn’t being comprehended or understood while i thought i was being direct… made [me] start the process of going to get a diagnosis.”
a similar situation occurred with former “bet college hill” star and comedian willie macc, who has utilized social media to shed light on his late diagnosis with autism, and how being on the spectrum played out in real time on cable tv.
“at 37, i found out officially i was on the spectrum and i told my son we might both be wired different,” he shared in a facebook video in june. “He said ‘yeah old man, i know.’”
several celebrities have been outspoken in acknowledging autism as a disability, including sherri shepherd, tisha campbell, toni braxton, faith evans and holly robinson peete. Sza’s revelation wasn’t one for mockery or derision; it was a moment of reflection and deeper understanding, showing that it is never too late to learn what makes you who you are.
as black women routinely find themselves unheard when it comes to their health, sza took an active stance with hers, something black girls and others can see themselves in. |
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| LinkSwarm For July 10, 2026 |
| Posted on Saturday, July 11 @ 00:00:19 PDT (7 reads) | |
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Chinese commie money is helping fund american commie wins, rapey mcnazi drops out, ukrainian drones feast on russian ships and hit russia’s largest oil refinery (among others), labour wants to install big brother into youtube, and a victory for right to repair. Plus: trebuchet!
it’s the friday linkswarm!
iran war: bombing currently paused, but the ceasefire is over and, oh yeah, supposedly iran is plotting to assassinate
president trump.
funding the rise of socialism.
one of the most consequential groups behind the surge of radical leftist candidates in new york’s and colorado’s congressional primaries was a super pac formed earlier this year, calling itself american priorities. After filing with the federal election commission (fec) in february of this year, the group pledged to spend more than $10 million during the 2026 midterms and declared that its goal, according to founder hannah fertig, was “to make sure that someone’s there to protect candidates who question these [pro-israel] policies,” countering the influence of the american israel public affairs committee (aipac).
the group invested about $2 million in supporting adam hamawy, an egyptian-born physician who has testified on behalf of omar abdel-rahman, the blind sheikh convicted of seditious conspiracy for his part in the 1993 world trade center bombing. Thanks in part to the group’s generous contributions, hamawy handily won the democratic primary in new jersey’s 12th district.
american priorities then spent an additional $2 million across the river in new york, contributing to the successful campaigns of brad lander, who unseated the incumbent, congressman dan goldman, in a campaign focused largely on vilifying israel, and darializa avila chevalier, who unseated adriano espaillat in new york’s 13th district while doubling down on a host of controversial statements, from using the american flag as a napkin to supporting hamas in the immediate aftermath of oct. 7, 2023. The super pac also spent $150,000 on tv ads to help democratic socialist melat kiros win colorado’s 1st district primary.
who, then, is behind american priorities?
public reports reveal that the group’s two largest donors, by far, are omer hasan and mohammad waqas javed, who were described in the press as former silicon valley executives who recently became involved in politics and about whom “little is publicly known.”
but hasan and javed, as a simple web search reveals, are both alums of the same company, the mobile advertising and data company applovin, founded in 2012.
the company’s path to becoming one of the world’s most highly valued ad tech companies is highly unorthodox. According to the economist, for example, the company’s share price has climbed more than 30-fold between 2022 and 2025, an astonishing feat for any company but particularly for one that, for years, wallowed in obscurity in the murky waters of app-monetization solutions.
in 2018, six years after it was launched, the company introduced a mobile-gaming publishing arm. “The result,” explained ad tech analyst rio longacre, “was a self-reinforcing flywheel: more games meant more first-party data, which fueled better optimization, which in turn strengthened both the adtech stack and the company’s foothold in the gaming ecosystem.” Which, naturally, also raised considerable concerns: applovin was now both running the advertising platform and selling inventory, which inspired many critics to strongly doubt the validity of the numbers it was reporting.
but the company’s growth—and the vehemence of its critics—grew far more exponentially in 2022, when it pivoted away from being primarily a gaming company to “an adtech company powered by ai-driven performance optimization,” a giant de facto machine learning operation. The company’s many detractors, longacre noted, now charged it with “money flowing between entities the public can’t fully scrutinize, creating the illusion of third-party demand when some of it may simply be internal recycling. They also highlight the quality of traffic inside the system, pointing to patterns that resemble click-farm-adjacent behavior—bursts of installs from low-value regions, strange retention curves, and activity that seems optimized more for algorithmic signaling than real user engagement.”
to assess the validity of these claims, it helps to know who applovin partners with. In 2016, the company agreed to be bought by orient hontai capital, a state-backed chinese private equity firm. The committee on foreign investment in the united states, an interagency government body dedicated to monitoring the national security implications of large-scale business transactions, objected, and the deal was subsequently amended.
the chinese connection, however, was far from over: one of the company’s largest investors is one hao tang, who, according to regulatory filings in 2025, owned 3.2% of applovin, valued at roughly $4.6 billion. Other reports claim that tang controls, through shell companies, at least 9.8% of class a shares, making him the company’s largest individual shareholder beside applovin’s ceo, adam foroughi, who told fox news in april, when applovin was trying to acquire tiktok’s non-chinese assets, that he remains the largest shareholder.
snip.
at the moment, $2 million of american priorities’ war chest comes from hasan and javed (an additional $500,000 came from another former applovin team member, tariq afaq ahmed, according to fec filings). As attention on both the left and the right continues to focus on aipac and its alleged impact on american politics, it’s worth noticing that the most prominent pac on the scene right now is funded primarily by two veterans of a shady tech colossus with strong links to china and repeated allegations of ties to the communist party in beijing.
formally withdraws from maine senate race following sexual assault allegation.” “Democrats will now have until 5 p.M. July 27 to name their replacement candidate.”
he looked like he was going to lose. (Hat tip:
charlie martin at instapundit.)
rogue’ district attorneys in texas callsfor reforms at state level.”
a new analysis from a texas think tank found a correlation between district attorneys’ non-prosecution policies and increases in crime, but with few state options for addressing so-called “rogue” prosecutors, the group suggests that texas lawmakers should consider reforms next year.
ross jackson, a senior policy analyst for right on crime at the texas public policy foundation, said he has been researching the issue since last fall.
“there are correlations that are particularly evident in austin and minneapolis and some other cities around the country and it’s more evident in cities and counties where there hasn’t historically been a huge crime rate like in austin,” jackson told the texan.
according to jackson’s report, austin experienced one of the most dramatic surges in violent and property crimes in recent years, which saw the city’s homicide rate climb by over 60 percent between 2016 and 2024.
travis county district attorney jose garza, who was first elected in 2020, has been accused of dropping or reducing charges in hundreds of criminal cases, including one in which an appeals court had called for a new trial. Last year, garza’s office reportedly failed to bring timely indictments for crimes that included violent felonies, leading to the dismissals of hundreds of cases.
attempts to remove garza through house bill (hb) 17, a state law enacted in 2023, have failed, and he has ignored calls for his resignation over mishandled cases. Jackson noted that hb 17 is limited to removing district attorneys who officially adopt non-prosecution policies in conflict with state law, and does not apply to those who adopt informal policies or internal guidance.
jackson noted that some proposed legislative remedies face high hurdles.
the policy solutions examined by jackson include mechanisms to discipline or remove district attorneys, as well as avenues for prosecuting serious crimes when the local district attorney or a county prosecuting attorney fails to do so.
one possibility suggested by jackson is creation of a new state commission to provide oversight and administer discipline. The model he suggested is based on the state’s former prosecuting attorneys coordinating council that operated between 1977 and 1983. While state lawmakers could create such a council through statute, jackson noted that an amendment to the texas constitution would be needed to allow the council to remove district attorneys.
constitutional amendments require the support of two thirds of both chambers of the legislature, which usually requires bipartisan support, as well as approval by voters in a statewide election.
jackson also noted that state lawmakers could give authority to the state commission on judicial conduct to discipline rogue prosecutors, but giving it a removal mechanism would also likely require a constitutional amendment.
one possibility for prosecuting cases dropped by prosecutors would be to give that power to the texas office of the attorney general (oag). Under a 2021 texas criminal court of appeals opinion, the oag may only prosecute cases referred by a local district attorney or county attorney.
“unless the court reverses their decision, giving the oag that authority would definitely require a constitutional amendment,” said jackson. “I think that would be the most difficult option legislatively, just given the partisan nature of that position. I don’t see many crossover voters on something like that.”
other options include creating a state prosecutor or creating five new regional district attorneys, each anchored in one of texas’ urban areas.
jackson says that lawmakers appear to have the authority to create a state prosecutor or regional district attorneys through statute, but the regional approach may also require a constitutional amendment and may necessitate the creation of new courts — a more costly option for taxpayers.
earlier this year, gov. Greg abbott cited garza’s history as travis county’s district attorney in his call for new legislation to create a statewide prosecutor and a mechanism for removing rogue prosecutors. Texas sen. Mayes middleton (r-galveston), now the gop nominee for state attorney general, has also voiced support for a statewide prosecutor.
in addition to garza, jackson’s report identified concerns over district attorney policies in both bexar and dallas counties. In bexar county, district attorney joe gonzales gave local law enforcement officers the option to issue tickets for certain “drug, theft, and traffic misdemeanors in lieu of jail time,” and dallas county district attorney john creuzot announced that he would no longer pursue charges against “low-level, first-time drug offenders.” Cruezot rescinded a previous policy in 2022 of declining to prosecute low-level theft.
113 active spies from foreign countries arrested.”
the fbi has arrested 113 active spies from foreign nations, agency director kash patel said on wednesday.
the arrests of foreign spies “means our tech stays home and our defense secrets stay locked down,” a video shared by patel on x said. “But the fbi didn’t stop there. They forced 62 removals of chinese spies in 2026 alone.”
the video added that this has shattered the chinese communist party’s (ccp’s) deep cover operations against the united states.
the house committee on homeland security released a report in february 2025 detailing multiple cases of espionage conducted by the ccp in the united states since 2021.
the cases, spread across 20 u.S. States, involved the transmission of sensitive military information to beijing, stealing trade secrets to benefit the regime, transnational repression schemes targeting chinese dissidents, and obstruction of justice. Every 12 hours, the fbi opened new cases to counter beijing’s intelligence operations, according to the report.
the report noted that the ccp’s theft of u.S. Intellectual property amounts to roughly $4,000 to $6,000 annually per american family of four after paying taxes.
in one prominent case, a senior adviser to the state department was arrested in october 2025, accused of taking thousands of top-secret documents and meeting with chinese officials. The individual allegedly downloaded and saved documents related to u.S. Fighter jets and weapons capabilities.
on jan. 12 this year, the department of justice (doj) announced that a former u.S. Navy sailor was sentenced to 200 months in prison for spying for beijing.
the person had access to sensitive national defense information about the amphibious assault ship u.S.S. Essex, such as its weapons, propulsion, and desalination systems. These ships are a “cornerstone of the u.S. Navy’s amphibious readiness and expeditionary strike capabilities,” according to the doj statement. The sailor sold critical information to a chinese intelligence officer for $12,000.
more recently, on june 4, the doj announced that a u.S. Citizen pleaded guilty to acting as an agent for china. The man, who lived in china, would travel to the united states to meet with individuals who could provide him, and ultimately the chinese ministry of state security, with important information.
finally: “vance announces investigation into alleged h-1b visa fraud.”
vice president jd vance announced wednesday that the trump administration has opened an investigation into allegations of fraud within the h-1b visa program, which allows foreign workers to legally work in the united states on a temporary basis.
the visas allow u.S. Companies to hire high-skilled foreign workers to serve in occupations such as healthcare, technology and education, while critics argued big businesses use the program to import cheap labor to replace americans.
“big corporations and fraudsters overseas are using this program to undercut the wages of american workers,” vance said in a speech in milwaukee. “If you are trying to take advantage of that visa program, you are not allowed into the united states.”
president donald trump tapped vance as his “fraud czar” in early april. Since his appointment, he has overseen major fraud busts across the nation, including against allegedly fraudulent hospices in los angeles and other operations in minneapolis and maine.
labor department inspector general anthony d’esposito said the administration is also investigating alleged fraud in the permanent labor certification visa process, and that investigators have already begun to issue dozens of subpoenas in relation to the probe.
“this is another example where fraud is fueling violent crime,” d’esposito told fox business. “Much of the visa and the human trafficking that we see when it comes to this foreign labor is tied to cartels, is tied to transnational gangs, and this is the work that we should be doing, not only to make america safe again, but to make america more affordable again.”
i hope they take a close look at microsoft. (Hat tip: stephen green at instapundit.)
big drone strike on st. Petersburg oil terminal: multiple impacts.”
hit omsk refinery! Russia’s largest! Su-57’s deployed in defence!” As i’ve said before, if they can hit omsk, they should target the transiberian railway bridge over the irtysh river.
hits two oil refineries: nizhnekamsk oil refinery and saratov oil refinery.”
big himars strike on belgorod: fuel at airport, powerplant and gas pipeline all hit.”
ten power substations in crimea.
and 13 more!“This makes 48 ships hit in four days.” (
more.
still more.)
shoots down su-35with top russian pilot: possibly air-to-air
hit by drone at belbek air base in crimea.”
oil refinery on fire again. Not clear it’s actually a ukrainian attack.
cleared from kharkiv.
heh: “if you have a vpn, you can edit in real time the status of gas stations in russia.”
cuba’s entire power grid collapsesas castro’s grandson seeks talks with trump.”
hours after usa today published an interview between one of its journalists and cuban president castro’s grandson, raúl guillermo rodríguez castro, the communist-run island experienced an island-wide power grid collapse.
the electrical workers’ union said the entire power grid went offline and that officials were investigating the cause. Cuba’s energy ministry confirmed the blackout and said crews were working to restore service.
“a total disconnection of the national electric power system is occurring. The causes are being investigated,” the electrical workers’ union wrote on x.
and that was the first blackout. It just blacked out again today…
how commies erase history and memories.
soros continues to pump money into efforts to turn texas blue. George soros funds the texas majority pac, which is supporting a left-wing slate for the 2026 election cycle.”
according to transparency usa, soros has already funneled over $1 million into the texas majority pac. The federal american bridge pac, long aligned with soros, has contributed $7.57 million to the texas majority pac.
the soros family has poured a staggering $103 million nationwide into the 2026 election cycle so far.
the texas majority pac exists to turn texas into a blue state by electing democrats to statewide offices.
snip.
texas gun rights is warning that texas majority pac-backed candidates, including james talarico, gina hinojosa, vikki goodwin, nathan johnson, sarah eckhardt, jon rosenthal, and clayton tucker, support radical anti-gun policies such as red flag laws, raising the age to purchase guns, gun-registration schemes, and the outright banning and seizure of common semi-automatic firearms.
“soros and his allies are not investing millions in texas because they think this is a lost cause. They are doing it because they believe texas can be flipped,” warned texas gun rights president chris mcnutt.
appoints comptroller candidate don huffinesto fill outgoing hancock’s unexpired term.” Huffines ran against abbott for the 2022 republican gubernatorial nomination.
ban on in-state tuition for illegals upheld by federal court.”
a federal appellate court has upheld an agreement between texas and the trump administration ending in-state tuition for illegal aliens in compliance with federal law.
the texas dream act, enacted in 2001, formerly allowed qualifying illegal alien students to pay in-state tuition rates at public colleges and universities.
in june 2025, the u.S. Department of justice sued the state of texas, arguing that federal law preempted the texas dream act.
according to the suit, federal law preempts any state rules that grant illegal aliens benefits not afforded to all u.S. Citizens. The texas dream act did this because u.S. Citizens from outside the state were forced to pay higher rates than the qualifying aliens.
texas attorney general ken paxton ultimately agreed with the doj, settling the case.
webb county sheriff martin cuellar faces removal bid amid federal fraud case. The lawsuit seeks martin cuellar’s removal following his federal indictment on fraud and money laundering charges tied to an alleged covid-era disinfecting scheme.”
webb county sheriff martin cuellar, the brother of democrat u.S. Rep. Henry cuellar, faces a state court hearing thursday as proceedings move forward in an effort to remove him from office while he awaits trial on federal fraud and money laundering charges.
a docket control conference is set for 9 a.M. In the 49th district court in the case seeking cuellar’s removal under chapter 87 of the texas local government code.
the removal petition was filed in may by former laredo city councilman alfonso “poncho” casso, who alleges cuellar committed official misconduct based on the conduct underlying a federal criminal indictment returned last year.
according to the u.S. Department of justice, cuellar conspired with former webb county sheriff’s office assistant chief ricardo rodriguez and others to operate a private disinfecting business during the covid-19 pandemic using sheriff’s office employees, equipment, and other county resources.
federal prosecutors allege the business, disinfect pro master, secured a $500,000 contract to disinfect schools in the united independent school district while relying almost entirely on sheriff’s office personnel and supplies to perform the work.
coverage of the federal charges here.
support ibogaine research.
texas lawmakers are continuing to push for advancements in state-led ibogaine research, following
[an executive order from president donald trump].Lt. Gov. Dan patrick and texas house speaker dustin burrows sent a letter this week to the university of texas health science center in houston (uthealth houston), university of texas medical branch (utmb), and texas health and human services commission (hhsc).
the letter refers to senate bill (sb) 2308, passed in the 89th legislature, which created a state-sponsored consortium for the purpose of conducting research and clinical trials into ibogaine, a naturally occurring psychoactive compound. The drug is being studied for its potential benefit for those suffering from traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, and other mental health conditions.
however, as the letter affirms, no proposals set forth by pharmaceutical companies met the standards required for the state to move forward with clinical trials.
patrick and burrows commented on the lack of readiness to proceed: “this should not preclude the state of texas from independently proceeding with this vital work through our university research partners as spelled out in the march 31 press release from both the house and senate.”
the press release in reference announced texas’ allocation of $50 million toward research into the drug.
the labour government wants censor creators by algorithm.
american video-sharing platform youtube told users in britain that, under pressure from the left-wing labour party government, independent creators will likely see their content suppressed.
the british government has been accused of attempting to silence political opposition, with youtube telling uk creators that proposed new rules would include a “prominence regime” that would force sites like youtube to give a “privileged position” to the bbc, itv, channel 4, and other legacy media.
the notice said that artificially propping up establishment media would naturally result in independent media being downranked and obscured from view, as “pushing this group forward means pushing everyone else downward. Mandatory prioritisation of broadcasters would affect how your content reaches your audience, regardless of what your audience actually wants to see.”
“mandating prominence for established media networks would push the uk’s diverse mix of independent journalists, educators, and digital-first businesses down the line,” youtube added.
snip.
the government is said to have told the site that legacy broadcasters had the “trust” of the state to provide accurate reporting, which youtube noted implies that “digital-first voices are less credible, damaging the foundational trust that sustains the creator economy.”
translation: labour to suppress coverage of muslim rape gangs and anything else that makes it look bad.
this comes despite the bbc recently facing significant scandals involving the accuracy of its reporting, including last year when it was forced to apologise to u.S. President trump after a documentary produced by the public broadcaster deceptively spliced together different sections of his speech on january 6th 2021, to falsely give the impression that he had encouraged supporters to riot, when he did the exact opposite.
just last month, the bbc was also forced to issue an apology to brexit leader nigel farage after one of its presenters fabricated fictitious quotes from the reform uk leader in the wake of the killing of handcuffed teen henry nowak.
commenting on the notice from youtube, mr farage said: “look at this appalling state censorship. Labour now want to seize control of youtube’s algorithm. They want youtube to artificially boost the bbc and channel 4’s content, and suffocate independent journalists and producers.
“the bbc has been biased to pro-mass migration, open borders, and net zero views these past few decades. It’s part of the reason we’re in a mess. The bbc’s own internal reports admit and document some of this bias.
“people have moved to x and youtube in part as a response to it. And now, labour want to control what they see there? Reform will scrap this heavy handed lunacy.”
insert your own 1984 reference here.
flips on tranny madness.
listen to this extraordinary exchange between [gb news broadcaster] camilla tominey and labour’s health secretary james murray. It is genuinely jaw-dropping.
camilla: “you’re quite pro-trans, aren’t you? Do you think a woman can have a penis? Because you did previously?”
murray: “no, i don’t.”
camilla: “so you’ve changed your mind?”
murray: “yes.”
camilla: “why?”
murray stumbles. He says he’s been thinking about the issue over recent years and would not now say trans women are women.
the labour party is in many ways more loony than the democrats. If tranny madness has broken there, maybe it’s finally receding globally.
he is resigning as the member of parliament for clacton to trigger a by-electionin the essex constituency, which he intends to contest as the party’s candidate.”
murdered in her home. Police have a 26 year old man in custody.
fatally shot man during houston operation in self-defense. Federal officials say a mexican national used his truck as a weapon during a magnolia park enforcement operation before an ice agent shot him.” Magnolia park is an old houston neighborhood southeast of downtown along buffalo bayou.
the man has been identified as lorenzo salgado araujo.
according to the department of homeland security, ice agents attempted to stop salgado araujo’s vehicle around 6:50 a.M. In the 6800 block of canal street. Dhs said salgado araujo rammed an ice vehicle, ignored multiple verbal commands and used his vehicle in an attempt to run over an agent, who then fired his weapon in self-defense. Three other people were detained during the stop.
salgado araujo suffered a gunshot wound to his abdomen, according to the houston fire department, and was taken to ben taub hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
two separate federal investigations are now underway. The fbi’s houston field office is investigating a possible assault on a federal officer, while the department of homeland security’s office of inspector general is reviewing the shooting itself.
houston police said they have no role in the case and referred questions to federal authorities.
officially begun trading. Txse officially opened its doors to begin trading on monday.”
based in dallas, txse began its phased rollout in july. The firm’s launch comes as major financial institutions, including blackrock and citadel securities, have invested over $120 million in the new exchange since 2024. The exchange gained federal approval last year and attracted investment from several other firms, bringing total investment to more than $275 million.
txse opened its doors at 8:30 a.M. On monday morning to approved brokers, banks, and trading firms. For now, brokers are trading only test stocks. Thousands of symbols, such as tsla (tesla), will come online in july, with an announcement to precede it. That rollout will officially allow the public to trade stocks on the exchange.
txse officials also hope to have exchange-traded products, or etps, trading by the end of the third quarter. Etps allow investors to gain exposure to a wide variety of investment products, such as oil or the s&p 500.
while all trading is primarily done through electronic mediums, exchange locations still matter because brokers predominantly invest in local businesses. Txse has the ingredients for success, including a large number of fortune 500 companies that have recently relocated to texas and a rapidly growing financial district in dallas.
stockbrokers tend to make a fair bit of money, and dallas will enjoy some second order economic benefits from having the exchange there.
the enemy within.
at just 16 years old, calla walsh was celebrated by the new york times as part of an “influential new force in democratic politics” for her work on the campaigns of senator ed markey (d., Mass) and senator elizabeth warren (d., Mass.)
but six years on, walsh is making headlines again for a much different reason: she recently appeared in an iranian state-media interview calling the late ayatollah ali khamenei the “greatest anti-imperialist leader” of her lifetime.
walsh, now a 22-year-old full-time resident of lebanon, has descended from a progressive wunderkind to a radical who has been placed on a suspicious persons watch list by the u.S. Government for her “expansive dealings with the governments of cuba and iran … as well as a spiderweb of u.S.-Designated terrorist groups,” according to the free press.
“he was a leader to all people of the world who struggle against imperialism, arrogance, against zionism, against genocide,” walsh said of khamenei while speaking with iran’s presstv about her attendance at his funeral saturday.
snip.
at just 14, she knocked on doors in cambridge to encourage residents to support a bill that would prohibit “gender-identity-based discrimination” in public places. One year later, she helped coordinate thousands of young protesters for an international “climate strike” at boston’s city hall. At 17, she served as one of the youngest delegates at the democratic socialist of america’s national convention. That same year, the boston globe called her a “force in the world of climate activism.”
she volunteered for warren’s 2020 presidential campaign and also helped boston mayor michelle wu’s campaign.
she received significant notoriety for her efforts in the “markeyverse” in 2020, an online gen z–led movement credited with helping the incumbent senator secure a 2020 primary win over then–representative joe kennedy iii. “The markeyverse carried out a devastating political maneuver, firmly fixing the idea of senator markey as a left-wing icon,” the times reported.
she went on to hold several other roles in democratic politics: she served as communications director for massachusetts state house candidate jordan meehan, and she did digital-media work for boston city councilor julia mejia’s reelection campaign in 2021. She also worked as a regional organizer and strategist for act on mass, a progressive nonprofit.
but the candidates she was working to elect were falling short of her increasingly radical politics. Just two months after she helped to secure markey’s reelection, she was already protesting outside his office, according to the free press. She partnered with codepink and the people’s forum to protest the senator’s support for a bill to increase u.S. Defense spending in east asia.
the makings of her radicalization were beginning to fall in place as early as 2021, when she was invited to cuba at just 17 years old. She then visited the country four times between 2022 and 2024.
by the end of 2021, walsh announced her exit from the democratic party and electoral politics. She explained that she’d been disappointed by markey in the aftermath of his reelection win and that she’d learned that no party or candidate could spur the revolutionary change she wanted — it might be achieved only by “direct action, protest, and internationalist solidarity.”
soon after, she posted a me too account of an inappropriate relationship she had with a 27-year-old campaign field director in massachusetts when she was just 16. She and the older man had sexually explicit conversations during a yearlong relationship that included in-person meetings but did not involve sex.
“most of the interactions i have with men and adults i work with in politics are tainted by my trauma and fears of being sexually exploited again,” she wrote.
funny how you meet so many scumbags in democrat politics.
in addition to her trips to cuba, walsh also notably appeared in chinese state-media propaganda videos in 2022 to criticize then–house speaker nancy pelosi for leading a congressional delegation to taiwan. Walsh was involved, at least for a time, with codepink and the people’s forum which are led by neville roy singham and his wife, jodie evans, who are both under investigation for their suspected ties to chinese intelligence services.
her trips to cuba ultimately led to her introduction to fergie chambers, a marxist organizer and millionaire heir to the cox communications empire. Walsh met chambers, who is 20 years her senior, at a 2022 conference in cuba. That meeting seemed to supercharge her extremism.
democrat, liberal, progressive, social justice warrior, radical, extremist, socialist, communist, terrorist. It’s funny how, say, 40 years ago, these were distinct categories, but now it’s an ever tightening venn diagram of extremism. What’s the line between a “progressive” and an “extremist”? The first time they assault a jew?
we previously covered walsh’s pro-ayatollah policies here.
even if you use a vpn.
[a victory for right to repair]: “ftc chairman announces settlement with john deere to let farmers fix their own equipment again.”
the federal trade commission, along with five states, secured an important settlement in an antitrust lawsuit against farm equipment manufacturer deere & company that will ensure farmers can enjoy the right to repair their own john deere tractors and farm equipment.
for the next decade, deere will be required to give farmers and independent repair shops “the same equipment repair resources, including applicable software capabilities” as its stealerships – err, dealerships.
‘today’s settlement enables farmers to do what they’ve done for generations — fix their own tractors and other farm equipment — without having to pay an authorized john deere dealer to do it for them,’ said ftc bureau of competition director daniel guarnera. ‘The settlement with deere will help lower costs for american farmers. The ftc will continue fighting against anticompetitive restrictions on american consumers’ right to repair.’
while he was busy burglarizing a verizon store.”
fire a trebuchet.
some sort of sign that platner was a bad person.”
have you raped anyone?’ To questionnaire for aspiring candidates.”
flees to argentina.”
cutest little run..????????????
[pic.Twitter.Com/ayvglsz2ke]— ????O?G? (@Yoda4ever)
[july 6, 2026]
(hat tip: ace of spades hq.)
i’m still between jobs. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.
tags: 2026 election, adam foroughi, adam hamawy, ai, aipac, american priorities pac, ann widdecombe, anthony desposito, applovin, austin, babylon bee, bexar county, border controls, brad lander, calla walsh, camilla tominey, campaign contributions, china, clayton tucker, communism, crime, crimea, cuba, dallas, dan patrick, dana perino, daniel guarnera, darializa avila chevalier, defensive gun use, democrats, department of labor, dogs, don huffines, drones, dumbass, dustin burrows, elections, federal trade comission, fraud, george soros, gina hinojosa, graham platner, grant hulk, greg abbott, guns, h1b visa, hannah fertig, hao tang, holly hansen, houston, ibogaine, illegal aliens, immigration and customs enforcement, irony, j. D. Vance, james murray, james talarico, jodie evans, john creuzot, john deere, jon rosenthal, jose garza, kash patel, kelly hancock, ken paxton, kharkiv, labour, linkswarm, lorenzo salgado araujo, maine, martin cuellar jr., Maryland, mayes middleton, melat kiros, microsoft, mig-29, mohammad waqas javed, moscow, murder, nathan johnson, neville roy singham, new york, nigel farage, nizhnekamsk, omer hasan, omsk, orient hontai capital, pac, reform party (uk), right to repair, ross jackson, russia, russo-ukrainian war, sarah eckhardt, saratov, spencer pratt, spying, st. Petersburg (russia), su-35, su-57, suchomimus, susan collins, tablet, texas, texas comptroller, texas gun rights, texas majority pac, texas public policy foundation, texas scorecard, texas stock exchange, the texan news, transexual, travis county, trebuchet, uk, united independent school district (webb county), vikki goodwin, vpn, webb county, windows |
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| Crump, Sharpton Demand Answers in Nolan Wells Case |
| Posted on Saturday, July 11 @ 00:00:19 PDT (6 reads) | |
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Overview:
the death of 18-year-old football player nolan xavier wells has become more than a homicide investigation. As conflicting accounts, racial tensions and social media scrutiny intensify, benjamin crump and rev. Al sharpton are pressing mississippi officials to answer growing questions about how wells died — and whether justice will be served.
it’s a deadly mystery that has captivated the nation: a black football player who vanished during an independence day boating trip in mississippi with three white friends was found dead near their destination some 48 hours later.
now, conflicting accounts of nolan xavier wells’ final hours, including an alleged altercation, and growing distrust of law enforcement have drawn two of the nation’s most influential civil rights warriors — attorney benjamin crump, known as “black america’s attorney general,” and rev. Al sharpton — into the case.
related: another mysterious death strikes a nerve
at a press conference in new york yesterday with wells’ parents, sharpton and crump demanded mississippi officials deliver answers about wells’ death. Given the racial dynamics of the case, they warned, investigators must leave no stone unturned.
‘we want justice’
“oftentimes when our [black] children are killed in highly questionable situations, there is this notion that there is nothing wrong, no foul play, let’s just sweep it under the rug,” crump said. “If the roles were reversed and you had three young black men on a boat with a young white man and that young white man ended up dead, what kind of investigation would be being conducted by the mississippi law officials?”
sharpton said the investigation should follow every lead before reaching unjust conclusions — or rushing to exonerate wells’ friends — in a high-profile, highly unusual homicide case.
“this does not smell right,” sharpton said. “We want justice.”
meanwhile, former nfl quarterback colin kaepernick and filmmaker tyler perry both have pledged to help fund the investigation, including an independent autopsy, and have offered financial assistance to help wells’ parents bury their son.
mississippi’s ugly history
wells disappeared six days ago while on a holiday boating trip to horn island, a popular but remote destination off the mississippi coast.
officials have said the 18-year-old, who played for southwest mississippi community college, traveled to the island by boat with his friends from a private dock in ocean springs. While investigators have confirmed wells was photographed aboard the boat, the circumstances surrounding his disappearance remain unclear.
the jackson county sheriff’s office has said they haven’t found evidence to suggest wells’ had been the victim of a crime. But they added that they are awaiting toxicology results from the coroner’s office.
the case exploded into the headlines and rocketed around social media during the last week, with race an inescapable part of the conversation. Some online commentators noted that the white teens who were with wells have given conflicting accounts of the circumstances surrounding his death; others pointed to mississippi’s long, violent, racist history and law enforcement’s strained relationship with the black community.
calls for caution
what’s not in dispute is that wells was on horn island with a group of friends not long before he died.. According to investigators, and a facebook post made by the mother of one of wells’ friends, the group experienced mechanical problems with its boat at some point during the day-long excursion.
wells’ friends said he decided to stay behind on the island with another group of friends while they headed back to the ocean springs marina. But when wells remained unaccounted for several hours later — after the first group of friends made it back to the marina with wells’ cellphone — officials searched the area, looking for him.
a national park service ranger found wells’ body on july 6.
investigators have asked the public to submit photos, videos, and eyewitness accounts from the island. They have specifically requested footage or information related to an alleged altercation wells had on the island before his disappearance. While there has been widespread speculation about wells’ death, investigators have called for caution until the investigation has concluded.
conflicting accounts
during friday’s news conference, crump described wells as a promising football player, college student, and devoted brother. He said the teenager’s family hired crump’s legal team to check local law enforcement and guard against a cover-up.
“the family has distrust of the mississippi law enforcement officials giving them a fair investigation where their black son ended up dead after going out on a boat with three young white men,” crump said.
crump also pointed to conflicting accounts about wells’ final movements, saying investigators must reconcile those differences.
related: why trey reed’s death sparks suspicions and calls for transparency
“a young woman [wells] was talking to says that [wells] was going back to get on the boat” with his friends, crump said. But wells’ friends, crump says, insist that wells “was going to stay and talk to the young woman.”
“one of them is telling the truth,” he said. “One of them is not. We have to get to the bottom of it.” |
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| Yesteryear: July 2026 - Dentons Hoss Mondays, Slinky Whistle Bait and an orphans |
| Posted on Saturday, July 11 @ 00:00:19 PDT (6 reads) | |
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100 years ago
from july 1926
picnic draws big opening attendance: first day speakers fail to show up; rodeo is pleasing to many
airplane stunts, including wing-walking and a parachute leap, were to feature the afternoon program at the picnic. The stunts were to be staged at 5 o’clock friday and saturday; they will be duplicated between 4 and 5 o’clock. L.B. Post of dallas was secured by the picnic committee to do the stunts and make the leap and the airplane from which he drops was to be piloted by joe graves, also of dallas.
persons from krum, sanger, pilot point, ponder, denton and other sections of the county gathered at lipscomb park thursday afternoon and evening to make what is said to be the largest crowd ever to attend the opening day of an american legion picnic here.
july 16, 1926
50 years ago
from july 1976
‘orphan’ meets unknown sister
kate northrup never even knew she had a younger sister.
but an elderly italian woman told the sister, mary, when the girl was 12 years old, that she a brother and sisters somewhere. And when mary’s adoptive parents died, she began a search for her siblings.
that search has been successful. Mary and kate met for the first time recently in an airport lobby in syracuse, n.Y.
when the sisters’ real parents separated during the depression years, there were only three children in the family. The father placed kate and her brother, buddy, in orphans’ homes in 1928. Kate was 3 years old. An older sister, josephine, was raised by an aunt and uncle. After the parents reunited briefly, mary was born. The year was 1931.
the mother did not want kate’s father to know of the fourth child, so she changed the baby’s name from her true name, nocera, to ross, and placed mary in an orphanage. Mary was adopted at the age of 2.
mary had wonderful parents, kate said. Josephine grew up with the uncle and aunt. Kate and buddy were together in new york infant homes until being separated and placed in orphanages. Buddy was adopted also: kate was never adopted.
“i was raised by the outside world, the hard knocks,” kate said, “and i made out all right.” After being placed in the orphanage, she never saw her mother again until the day of her funeral. Her father came to see her in some of the foster homes she lived in, but kate held a great deal of resentment against him.
at age 15, she ran away from a foster home. She married, became mrs. Northrup and had one son, whom she is very proud of and who now lives in california. Then she walked away from her marriage, saying it was not right for her.
kate entered restaurant work, which became her lifelong career. She operated the sirloin stockade in denton and was also with long john silver’s. She is now opening the pasta house in denton. She lives in sanger.
kate “had no desire” to keep up family ties once she was on her own. Most of her relatives, including mary, who is now mrs. Andreozzi, live around syracuse, n.Y. She did make occasional contact with josephine, the oldest sister. Always before, “strangers have had me for christmas,” kate said. “I grew up without love but i didn’t want it. I had the love of the public.”
but she is thrilled with finding a new sister.
— holly mccray, july 13, 1976
25 years ago
from july 2001
wwii slang is perfect name for vintage store: sisters and mom open shop full of nostalgia
the sign above a business west of the denton square reads: “slinky whistle bait.”
the unusual name has attracted attention as passersby wonder just what it means.
“donna and i were dressed up to go to a wedding and our grandfather whistled and called us ‘slinky whistle bait,’” recalled erica barton, who co-owns the vintage clothing store with her sister.
erica, 24, and donna, 29, learned the term was commonly used during world war ii by servicemen like their grandfather.
the sisters, hoping to launch their lifelong interest in collecting vintage clothing into a business, decided the name fit perfectly.
their mother, betty barton, helped the sisters, offering her own retail experience from owning a clothing store in duncanville.
“we couldn’t have done it without her,” donna said.
with clothing for both men and women, the sisters said they were trying to fill a niche in denton by offering unique clothing for the college crowd.
“we expected the college age to be our biggest customers,” donna said. “But other people like to just come in and look for nostalgic reasons.
“what sets us apart — like going to a thrift store — is that we’ve done everything for you,” donna said. They wash and mend all of the clothing and separate them on racks by sizes. They also buy from vintage wholesalers, picking up items like swimsuits, which have never been worn.
donna, who enjoys designing clothing and sewing during her off time, says the older clothing is made much better than what is offered in stores now.
opening the business at 227a w. Oak street in mid-december, erica and donna recently ventured into selling furniture from the 1950s through the 1980s — the same period as much of the clothing.
paper lanterns hang from a grid above racks filled with plaid pants, frilly shirts, checked bib dresses and shelves filled with what is now considered memorabilia. The hawaiian motif has been popular this summer. “People like the whole luau thing. We’re out of grass skirts,” donna said.
crocheted purses hang from hooks beside clutch purses, wigs and wide ties. A heywood-wakefield dresser complete with two nightstands and two twin beds sits in the backroom near vinyl-covered chairs.
“we have things that cost from 25 cents to $2,500. That’s the cheapest and the most expensive,” erica said.
customers are immediately greeted at the door by a big black dog. Beannie, 9, is donna’s “baby” whom she brings to the store almost every day. “He loves it here.”
despite the 5-year difference in their ages, the sisters live together as well as work together. They both attend the university of north texas. Donna enjoys art, especially design, while erica sings and plays the drums in a band she started with kelsey wickliffe. Known as the faceless werewolves, they perform in dallas and denton clubs along with a third band member, baldomero valdez.
this fall, the sisters will juggle their course load with running the store, which is open noon to 7 p.M. Monday through saturday.
but they aren’t too concerned. They expected it to be tough.
whatever happens, they are glad to be in business together.
“the best thing about opening a business is being with my dog, my sister and my mom,” donna said.
— dawn cobb, july 8, 2001 — compiled from the files of the denton record-chronicle by leslie couture for the denton public library
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| Lynxs Cheryl Reeve became a rarity while on path to WNBA coaching history | USA |
| Posted on Saturday, July 11 @ 00:00:19 PDT (7 reads) | |
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Minneapolis — cheryl reeve waited a decade before getting a shot to be a wnba head coach.
she had been a part of wnba franchises that folded or relocated.
those difficult moments tested her conviction as she grinded as an assistant.
her family reminded her she held two degrees.
others suggested she coach college ball.
but reeve is stubborn as hell.
she knew what she wanted.
“i’m a wnba person,” she vividly recalls telling those around her. “If this thing goes down, i’m going down with it. And i’m going to stick it out.”
look how that panned out.
twenty-six years later, and in the wnba’s 30th season, reeve is the all-time winningest head coach at a time when the league has never been more popular.
reeve, 59, captured her 380th regular-season win with the minnesota lynx wednesday to unseat legendary coach mike thibault.
she looks to potentially add to the record saturday when the lynx host the liberty.
reeve’s persistence coupled with her competitive fire and sustained success have made her one of the greatest coaches of this millennium.
reeve is a four-time wnba champion, vying for her fifth this season after many counted the lynx out due to roster turnover and uncertainty heading into this campaign.
fresh off of being inducted into the women’s basketball hall of fame late last month, reeve is a frontrunner for coach of the year, an award she’s won four times already.
in a profession where people are hired to be fired, reeve is a rarity.
she’s a trademark of longevity, having spent the past 16-plus years with the lynx.
the key to her staying power is her success.
making the playoffs is an expectation for the franchise under reeve.
as a result, minnesota has gone to 14 of the past 15 postseasons and appeared in seven wnba finals during that span.
reeve on friday recalled her early career challenges of being overlooked for wnba jobs in favor of nba men thought to be more qualified than her despite never coaching in the wnba.
when she got the chance to coach the lynx ahead of the 2010 season, she said she wasn’t worried about her contract length.
“i wanted the opportunity,” she said. “I didn’t care if it gave me one year. If i was good enough, i was good enough, and i still feel that way today. I’m not worried about my job and that’s a real blessing for me.”
as for the wnba, reeve said she is proud of how far the league has come.
“i was always really hopeful at that time that we could get here,” she said. “We had to push, pull, drag, kick all the things, it doesn’t matter. The fight’s been worth it.
for years, reeve tried to separate her identity from her job.
she loved to coach, and she loved basketball, but it wasn’t who reeve saw herself as.
but who is she kidding now?
“it is my identity, and i can stand in that,” reeve said. “I do care deeply about being a wife, being a mom, but ultimately basketball, it is my identity, it is my life. There’s no way around that, and i stand in that and there’s nothing to be ashamed of in saying that.”
and reeve has no plans to stop any time.
she has the same drive she had when she took the job 17 years ago.
she’s fueled by a desire to win a championship with her current group.
that, “and greed,” she said.
“i’m a pretty passionate person in general,” she said. “When that passion doesn’t hit the same way or it’s not there when i don’t care that we lost a possession, when i don’t care that we didn’t block out, or when i don’t care that we … whatever it is, that’s when you’ll know. But i can tell you, [my players] can tell you today that the passion’s still there.” |
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| Ten Ghosts and Monsters the World Forgot to Make Famous |
| Posted on Saturday, July 11 @ 00:00:19 PDT (6 reads) | |
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Ten ghosts and monsters the world forgot to make famous
everyone knows nessie and the chupacabra, but the whooping ghost of a new brunswick logging camp and a two-hearted polish owl-demon have been frightening people just as long.
along the dungarvon river in central new brunswick, on a cold night when the wind comes down through the miramichi highlands, people still claim to hear a scream in the trees. It comes at dusk. It rises, wails, and fades, and for more than a century the loggers, railwaymen, and townsfolk of the area have called it one thing: the whooper. Some say it is the wind. Some say it is a train that no longer runs. And some say it is a murdered cook named ryan, still crying out over a crime nobody was ever punished for.
that is the trouble with the famous monsters. The loch ness monster gets the documentaries and the chupacabra gets the tabloid covers, while stories every bit as strange sit in the folklore of small towns and old countries, told by the people who live there and almost nobody else. What follows are ten of them, gathered from four continents. A few are backed by real history, by real bridges and real graves; others fall apart the moment you open a census book. Every one of them is still being told, which is its own kind of survival.
the dungarvon whooper of new brunswick
the best-known version of the story goes like this. A young cook named ryan came to a lumber camp on the dungarvon river carrying everything he owned, including a money belt heavy with coins and bills that he made no effort to hide. He was well-liked, good at his job, and known for a powerful set of lungs. He could whoop and holler louder than any man in camp. One morning the camp boss stayed behind while the crew went out to the timber, and when the men came back that afternoon, ryan was dead on the cabin floor and the money belt was gone. The boss said the cook had taken sick and died. Nobody believed him, and nobody said so. A storm rolled in that night, too much snow to travel, so the men buried ryan in a shallow grave in the woods. As they walked back to camp, the screaming started. Whoops and wails that sounded exactly like the dead cook, coming out of the dark behind them, and they came back the next night, and the next, until the crew abandoned the camp for good.
according to the legend, the cries went on for years, until a priest was brought in to bless the grave. Some say it worked. Others say the whooping never stopped.
the details shift depending on who is telling it. In some versions the boss uses a meat cleaver and buries ryan in a pickle barrel. In one older telling recorded on the website my new brunswick, the killer is not the boss at all; a fellow lumberjack lures the cook out on a hunting trip, shoots him for the money belt, and blames a bear. What stays constant across all of them is the whooping and the guilt underneath it.
here is what can actually be pinned down. The legend was set down in a song by michael whelan, a local poet from the renous area, published in a newspaper in 1912 and set to the tune of an existing song called “where the silvery colorado wends its way”. The oldest layers of the tale go back further, to the lumbering era of the 19th century, though the exact origin is unknown. There is a real whooper spring on the dungarvon river said to mark the grave, and a real priest named edward murdoch, a roman catholic clergyman from renous, who performed a blessing or exorcism at the site around the turn of the century. There is also a real dungarvon whooper that has nothing to do with ghosts: a passenger train on the canada eastern railway that ran between newcastle and fredericton along the southwest miramichi. Locals said its whistle, carrying through the hills on a winter night, sounded like the screams from the story, so they gave the train the ghost’s name. The passenger service ended in the early 1960s. Today there is a chainsaw carving of ryan in a municipal park in the miramichi river valley, and the story gets told on stage, in comic books, and around campfires. Whether a cook named ryan was ever really robbed and killed in those woods, no record confirms. People near the dungarvon still report the scream at dusk.
the strzyga of slavic poland
in the villages of old poland, some children were said to be born marked. A midwife might notice it first: a second row of small teeth behind the normal ones, barely visible. Folk belief held that such a child had been born with two hearts and two souls, and that made them a strzyga. These children were often driven out of their communities young, marked as something unnatural. And when a strzyga died, only one of the two souls left the body. The other stayed, and it woke the corpse back up.
at first the risen strzyga might pass for the person it had been, just paler, its skin faintly blue. But it changed. Feathers came in. The ears grew long and pointed, the fingers turned to claws, and the creature took on the look of an owl. It slept in graves by day and hunted by night. Where a western vampire drinks blood, the strzyga tore out and ate the insides of its victims, feeding on the life-force itself, and it especially hunted the people who had wronged it in life. It could disguise itself as a barn owl before it struck, which is one reason owls have long carried an uneasy reputation in polish country belief.
the folklore came with defenses. To keep a suspected strzyga from rising, villagers might burn the body or cut off its head. There were stranger measures too: burying small objects or scattering grain in the grave so the creature would be compelled to count them instead of escaping, slapping the corpse with the left hand, burying it face-down, or cutting the tendons in its legs. And to avoid one at night, you were told to walk in the middle of the road, stay out of heavy brush, and keep away from cemeteries.
the strzyga is one of the oldest entries on this list, and one of the best documented as genuine folk tradition. The word descends from the latin strix, the screech-owl of roman and greek belief that fed on human flesh and blood, and the same root branches out across europe into the italian strega (witch), the romanian strigoi, and the albanian shtriga. Polish and silesian folklore carried the belief well into the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It appears in oskar kolberg’s 19th-century ethnographic collections and in w?Adys?Aw reymont’s nobel prize-winning novel ch?Opi (the peasants), set in the 1880s, where villagers trade strzyga stories. Historians note a grim real-world root under the supernatural one: during epidemics, people were sometimes buried alive, and those who clawed their way out of shallow graves, weak and mutilated, were taken for strzygi by the neighbors who found them. The creature reached a new global audience through andrzej sapkowski’s the witcher, which draws on polish and celtic myth, but sapkowski invented none of it. The two-hearted owl-demon was frightening his ancestors for centuries before a video game ever rendered her.
madam koi koi of the boarding schools
in boarding schools across nigeria, and in ghana and parts of south africa, generations of students have learned to fear a sound. It comes after lights-out, down an empty corridor: koi, koi, koi, the sharp two-note clack of red high heels on a hard floor. That sound is her name and nearly the whole of her. She is madam koi koi, and the students who have actually seen her face, the legend insists, are not around to describe it.
the most common origin has her as a teacher, beautiful and always well-dressed, with a fondness for red and a cruel streak she hid from the adults. Behind her classroom door she beat students for the smallest mistakes. When their complaints to the headmaster went nowhere, and after one beating went too far, the story turns dark and violent, and it ends with the teacher dead and the students who did it beginning to vanish one by one. In some tellings she was fired first, then struck and killed by a car on her way home, swearing revenge as she died. Either way she comes back as the clicking of heels in the dark, and the students who wronged her disappear.
the variations are endless because the story spread the way these stories do, one frightened older student telling a younger one after lights-out. In ghana she is madam moke, the name again tied to her heels. Tanzania has a miss konkoko; south african schools tell of a bathroom-haunting figure called pinky pinky. Some versions soften her into a victim rather than a villain: a mother killed with her child in a road accident, or a woman who returned to punish the men who assaulted her. In one detail, students are warned never to wear red to bed, in case she mistakes them for her own dead daughter.
unlike the strzyga, madam koi koi is not ancient. She is a modern legend, one that began circulating in nigerian boarding schools in the later 20th century, spreading especially through the federal government colleges founded after independence. Researchers who have gone looking find no verified historical teacher behind her. Folklorist alfred burdon ellis, who documented a great deal of yoruba tradition from firsthand conversation, recorded nothing resembling her, which fits, since the boarding schools she haunts did not become common until decades after his work. What she really is, most who study her agree, is a rule with a face. A child lying rigid in the dark, counting the heel-beats as they pass the dormitory door and fade, is being taught one thing: stay in bed after curfew. The legend has outgrown the schools since then. It has been adapted into nollywood films and a 2023 netflix horror series, the origin: madam koi-koi (not found on amazon), the platform’s first nigerian horror series.
the banshee of the tar river
during the revolutionary war, an englishman named dave warner built a flour mill on the tar river in eastern north carolina and used his grain to feed the american militia. That choice made him a marked man to the british, and a hero to his neighbors. One of those neighbors, grateful for his help, warned him about something else along the river: a banshee whose wail carried over the water on full-moon nights, when the current ran black. Dave, a peaceable man, figured his good conscience would keep him safe, and for a while it seemed to. He heard the wails and came to no harm.
then, in august of 1781, the same neighbor brought a different warning. The british were coming, they knew what he was doing, and they meant to stop him. Dave stayed and defended his mill. When the redcoats took him, they dragged him to the river, and by the most-told version they tied him to a stone and threw him in. As his blood spread through the water, he cursed them: the banshee would come for every one of them. Moments after he went under, a scream rose out of the fog. The soldiers barricaded themselves in the mill. By midnight, one account says, they walked one after another into the black water and drowned, drawn by a wailing they could not resist.
the details drift from teller to teller. Sometimes the soldiers scoff at the curse; sometimes they hesitate. Their deaths come by trance, by madness, or are simply discovered the next morning. What holds across versions is the mill, the murdered miller, and the vengeful cry that follows.
researchers have gone looking for dave warner in the records of revolutionary-era north carolina, in merchant and mill-owner lists, in the histories of nearby tarboro in edgecombe county, and found no trace of him, nor any account of british soldiers dying mysteriously near the tar river. British troop movements in the carolinas in 1780 and 1781, under charles cornwallis, are fairly well mapped, and they were operating far to the west of the river. The banshee itself is an import, a figure from irish and scottish tradition carried over by scots-irish settlers who were numerous in the region and who would have reached for the word “banshee” by reflex for any wailing river-spirit. Most likely, imported folklore fused with local memory of the war and hardened into a story pinned to a specific place. It still surfaces in living memory when the river turns dangerous. After hurricane floyd flooded the tar in 1999 and swamped tarboro and princeville, older residents recalled the old tale and wondered aloud whether the banshee was still collecting.
the headless nun of french fort cove
in the wooded cove near miramichi, new brunswick, a figure in a nun’s habit is said to walk the trails at night, and where her head should be there is nothing. Under a full moon, people claim, she comes toward them, and some have heard a voice ask where her head has gone.
the story dates to the mid-18th century, during the expulsion of the acadians, when the british were driving the french population out of the maritimes. As the tale is usually told, a french nun called sister marie came to the area to nurse the sick and wounded among the acadians who remained, and she became beloved, setting up a fund to support struggling families. When word spread that the british had learned of the settlement and were coming, the community gathered its valuables and entrusted them to sister marie, who buried them somewhere only she knew. Not long after, walking home one night, she was ambushed by men who demanded the hiding place. She refused. They beat her, and then one of them cut off her head. Neighbors reached her too late, in time only to see the killers throwing her head into the water before they fled. Her head was never found. Her body was sent back to france for burial, and almost at once people began seeing her on her old path, searching.
who killed her changes with the teller. In some versions she is attacked by a “mad trapper” who runs off into the woods with her head; in others, by sailors or pirates after buried treasure. In a darker telling her ghost has soured over the centuries, and if you refuse to help her look for her head, she follows you home.
french fort cove was a genuine 18th-century french fortification on the miramichi, built during the struggle with the british, and today it is a public park with a former stone quarry whose cut ledges are still visible, stone that went into local buildings and even the langevin block on parliament hill in ottawa. Sister marie is harder to find. The legend’s paper trail is most often traced to doug underhill’s 1999 book miramichi: tales tall & true (not found on amazon), which attributes it to a historian named harold w.J. Adams, said to have published it in the miramichi leader newspaper. But researchers have been unable to find a publication date, locate the newspaper archives in question, or turn up any independent information on harold w.J. Adams at all. The nun herself is usually given the surname “inconnue”, french for “unknown”, because even in the legend no one knew her real name. Underhill, who grew up hearing the story, has said he believes there is enough to it to be true; the documentary record neither confirms nor kills it. The headless nun tours still run at french fort cove. Visitors still report the occasional cold moment on the trails, and no one has ever found the head.
the kludde of flanders
on the country roads of belgium, in the mists of brabant and flanders, travelers after dark listened for one sound above all: the rattle of a chain. That was the only warning that the kludde was near. The creature had no fixed shape. Most often it came as an enormous black dog that walked upright on its hind legs, a chain around its neck, but it could just as easily be a half-starved horse, a cat, a frog, a bat, a raven, or even a small tree that grew to an impossible height as you watched. The one constant was a pair of dancing blue flames that went ahead of it in the dark. Those were its eyes.
in its dog form the kludde would spring onto a traveler’s back and bear them to the ground before vanishing. As a horse it tricked people into climbing on, then galloped headlong and flung them into a river or pond, where it lay on the bank and laughed while they floundered. You could not outrun it; it wound like a snake and matched every turn. Try to grab it and your hands closed on air, or came away burned. And it could make itself visible to one person while a companion two steps away saw nothing but an empty road, which drove more than one traveler half-mad trying to convince a friend that anything was there.
the kludde is genuine flemish folklore, though it belongs to belgium rather than the netherlands proper. One of the first notable records was written down in 1840 near ternat by the baron of saint-genois. The creature haunted specific places, often bridges and hollow trees, and specific local tales survive: one from schelle where a family, having carelessly spoken its name at the dinner table, heard chains in the hallway that night and prayed until the sound stopped; another from moorsel about a fourteen-year-old servant named benoit wouters who could not shake the black dog off his back the whole way to his farm, and whose hair turned grey where it had gripped him. It belongs to a wider european family of chain-dragging shapeshifting road-demons, cousins to the black dogs of britain and the water-horse of celtic myth. Belgians still know it, in part, through the suske en wiske comics, where it appeared as far back as a 1949 volume, familiar enough that generations of belgian children have grown up with its name.
the inupasugjuk of the arctic
across the arctic, from alaska through northern canada to greenland, the elders speak carefully and rarely of the giants. An inupasugjuk is enormous, and it is not simply a large person. Its inuktitut name means something closer to “one who is in the likeness of a big person”, a deliberately cautious phrasing that marks the giant as an inhuman thing that only resembles a human. Males are almost never seen; they are so seldom encountered, the belief goes, that little can be said about them at all, perhaps because those who meet one do not come back.
the females turn up more often in the stories. They are said to find humans curious, small enough to be interesting, and they have been known to snatch a person up and carry them off to keep as a plaything. The advice the elders give for meeting one is simple and grim: crouch down, hold still, and stay unseen. Being noticed is the danger.
the inupasugjuk are a well-attested part of inuit oral tradition, listed among the recognized supernatural beings of the arctic alongside the shape-shifting ijiraat with their red eyes, the child-snatching qallupilluk of the sea, and the tuniit, the strong and simple ancestors said to have lived in the north before the inuit. Temperament varies by region: in the western arctic the giants tend toward the malicious, while in the east they behave more like ordinary people, capable of kindness and angered mainly when offended. The most famous of them, inukpasugjuk or inukpak, was said to be large enough to wade into the ocean and pluck up whales like a man catching fish, to step over mountains and rivers, and in one widely told tale to adopt a full-grown human man as his own tiny son. Some inuit stories hold that a lone mountain on otherwise flat terrain may be a giant asleep, and that their footprints are still pressed into the land. Scholars have suggested the giants may preserve a folk-memory of some earlier people, older even than the tuniit, though no one can say for certain. The stories live in the spoken word, passed down and retold, and are only recently being carried into books, art, and animation.
the dearg due of waterford
in the part of ireland now called waterford, the legend runs, a young woman of extraordinary beauty fell in love with a farm laborer and meant to marry him. Her father cared nothing for love. He married her off instead to a wealthy chieftain, a cruel man, in exchange for land and money, and the marriage destroyed her. Her husband treated her as a possession, isolated her, tormented her, and in time she died, broken and grieving, mourned truly by no one but her first love. Her burial was mean and quick.
and then she rose. Fury and the thirst for revenge pulled her out of the grave as the dearg due. She went to her father first and killed him in his sleep. Then she went to the chieftain, found him unrepentant among other women, and drained his blood. That first taste left her with a hunger that never eased. She used the beauty she’d had in life to lure young men into the dark, and she fed on them one after another, until at last she simply vanished, her fate unknown, her grave said to lie near a spot called the tree of strongbow.
this is the one on the list that most deserves a hard look, because it is often sold as ancient and is almost certainly not. The details that make it vivid, the loving peasant, the tyrant husband, the vengeance, are largely fixtures of late 20th-century retellings. Folklorists tracing the story find its earliest identifiable version only in 1924, in dudley wright’s book vampires and vampirism (not found on amazon), and that version is bare: a beautiful female vampire lies buried under a ruined church near “strongbow’s tower” in waterford, ready to lure men to their deaths. There is no strongbow’s tower in waterford; the name is likely a garbling of the real reginald’s tower, and over time “tower” drifted into “tree”. Even the name resists translation. As tellers of the story often admit, “dearg” does mean “red” in irish, but “due” corresponds to no irish word for blood, which is fuil. What genuine old irish tradition does contain is the practice of piling stones or a cairn over a suspect grave to keep the dead from rising, a real burial custom that later vampire tellings borrowed. The dearg due is frequently linked to bram stoker, on the theory that irish vampire lore shaped dracula, but no direct evidence connects him to this particular tale. It endures anyway, which says something about how folklore actually works: a thin, late story can put down roots and pass for ancient inside a few generations, especially when it gives shape to older fears about power, marriage, and what the abused might do if death didn’t stop them.
the goatman of old alton bridge
cross the old alton bridge outside denton, texas, at the wrong hour, and something is supposed to be waiting on the other side. Locals call it the goatman, a towering figure that is part man and part goat, with heavy horns and eyes that glow red out of the dark under the trees. Say his name while you cross, the legend warns, and you call him. Knock three times on the iron trusses, or cut your headlights and honk, and you invite him. He dwells beneath the bridge by day and hunts at night. Cross at three in the morning and the legend promises something worse than an encounter: a glimpse straight into hell.
the bridge itself is entirely real and genuinely old. It is an iron truss span over hickory creek between denton and copper canyon, built by the king iron bridge manufacturing company in 1884, named for the vanished town of alton that served as denton county’s seat from 1850 to 1856. It carried horse teams and then automobiles, one lane wide, so narrow that drivers honked before crossing to warn anyone coming the other way. In 2001 traffic moved to a new bridge nearby and the old one became a footpath on the county trail system. In july of 1988 it was placed on the national register of historic places and named a texas historic landmark.
the most-told origin centers on oscar washburn, described as a black goat farmer who settled near the bridge in the 1930s and built a respected business selling meat, milk, cheese, and leather goods, well enough known that he hung a sign on the bridge reading “this way to the goatman”. As the story goes, his success as a black entrepreneur enraged local klansmen, who crossed the bridge one night in august of 1938 with their headlights off, dragged oscar from his home, and lynched him from the span, only to look down and find the noose empty and the body gone. In the grimmest tellings they then returned and killed his family. Ever since, the legend says, his vengeful spirit has haunted the bridge, and the old-timers add a chilling qualification: the goatman does not take everyone, mostly only those carrying the blood of klansmen.
historians who have dug into it, including shelly tucker, author of ghosts of denton, and university of north texas historian shaun treat, find no census record of an oscar washburn near the bridge in that era and no documented account of a lynching there in 1938. There is also an older, competing origin involving a lynched goatherder named jack kendall, whose body was said to rise through voodoo and swap its head for a goat’s, and no record confirms him either. But the absence of a paper trail carries its own weight here, because lynchings of black texans during the jim crow era frequently went unrecorded by the very authorities who might have documented them. As one researcher put it, the fact that no record survives does not prove nothing happened. The goatman legend endures partly as a ghost story and partly as something harder, a piece of folklore carrying the memory of real racial violence that the official record left out. The bridge draws paranormal investigators, film crews, and thrill-seekers year-round, and at least one local dresses as the goatman to oblige them.
the stratford knockings
the stratford knockings are one of the best-documented american hauntings of the 19th century, and part of the reason is timing. The disturbances began in march of 1850, two years after the fox sisters of new york had launched the spiritualism craze by claiming to rap out messages with the dead. A whole country was primed to believe a house could talk. When newspapers across the region picked up the story of the phelps mansion, the curious came in numbers, and the case entered the record in a way most folk hauntings never do. The house itself was real and traceable: built in 1826 by matthias nicoll for his daughter and her husband, captain george dowdall, who died before he could retire to it, and bought years later by the reverend eliakim phelps, who used it seasonally.
what happened inside it is where the record turns strange. Phelps came home from church one afternoon to find the place wrecked, clothes thrown about, drawers pulled open, belongings scattered. His first thought was burglars, until he realized nothing had been taken. On another occasion the family returned to find the house draped in black funeral crepe, and one of the beds arranged with mrs. Phelps’s nightgown laid out like a body in a coffin, the sleeves folded across the chest.
the disturbances ran for months and grew stranger. Windows shattered with no cause. Objects flew, appeared in impossible places, or vanished from locked spaces and turned up elsewhere. Some spirits seemed malicious, breaking glass and pricking the family with pins; others communicated in orderly knocks and helped locate lost things, sometimes claiming they’d caused the trouble purely for amusement. At the center of much of it was eleven-year-old harry phelps, the reverend’s stepson, whom many took for a medium, and around whom the activity always seemed to cluster.
skepticism grew alongside the fame. When the family moved to philadelphia that fall the activity dwindled, then resumed with force when they returned in 1851. Some suspected the reverend’s younger wife and stepchildren of staging the whole thing to break the tedium of life in stratford, and suspicion fell hardest on harry, since the events tracked his presence so closely. The phelps family left for good in 1852, selling the mansion to moses beach, publisher of the new york sun, who kept the story working for him. Some later tied the haunting to the 1651 execution of goody bassett, a woman hanged for witchcraft near the property. The mansion was eventually demolished, and the knockings faded into local legend. Whether it was spirits, a gifted child, an unhappy family’s elaborate hoax, or some mix of all three has never been settled.
ten stories, ten corners of the world, and not one of them a household name. Some rest on real graves and real bridges; some collapse the moment a historian opens a census book; most sit somewhere in between, a scrap of documented fact wrapped in generations of telling. Nessie has her sonar sweeps and the chupacabra has its cable specials. Meanwhile, on the right dark night, someone in new brunswick still swears they hear a whoop in the trees, and someone in denton still knocks three times on an iron rail just to see what answers.
references
dungarvon whooper — wikipedialegend of the dungarvon whooper — the haunted walkthe dungarvon whooper — astonishing legendsdungarvon whooper — my new brunswickthe myth of strzyga explained — grungestrzyga — wikipediathe strzyga/striga in polish mythology — brendan noblemadam koi koi — wikipedialady koi koi: the red-heeled ghost of nigeria — facts-chologymadam koi koi — gods and monstersthe banshee of tar river, north carolina — facts-chologya blogiversary banshee — southern spirit guideheadless nun — wikipedialegend or not? How the ghost of a headless nun haunts french fort cove — cbc newsthe headless nun of french fort cove — facts-chologykludde — a book of creatureskludde — monstropediabestiarium: kludde (flemish folklore)inugpasug — mythlokinuit traditional stories — the canadian encyclopedianunani: the likeness of a big person — nunatsiaq newsthe dearg-due: another fake irish vampire — cassidy’s slang scamthe dearg dur — irishcentraldearg due: ireland’s vengeful vampire of blood and stone — moon mausoleumold alton bridge — wikipediathe goatman of old alton bridge — kera newsdenton’s haunted bridge legend grows, but does the story add up? — Nbc 5 dfwalton, texas and the haunted goatman’s bridge — legends of america
note: some of this content may have been created with assistance from ai tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by darren marlar, creator and host of weird darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is not an ai voice.
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| Common Hormonal Contraceptive Linked to Risk of Rare Brain Tumor |
| Posted on Saturday, July 11 @ 00:00:19 PDT (6 reads) | |
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Hormonal birth control has allowed millions worldwide to manage their menstrual cycles and control their reproductive futures.
but as with any drug, there are pros and cons for doctors and patients to carefully consider.
while strong evidence suggests that hormonal birth control provides numerous benefits, some scientists argue that there are potential risks, like depression or stroke, that have been inadequately addressed.
one concerning connection that keeps popping up in observational population studies around the world is the development of a rare yet treatable brain tumor called meningioma.
researchers at the danish medicines agency have now combed through 25 years worth of health data in denmark, covering roughly three million females, to clear up the picture.
their findings are published in jama network open.
the nationwide study is the first of its kind to show that only certain types of contraceptives are indeed linked to this type of tumor.
although the relative risk reported by the study is modest and the absolute risk is probably tiny, it is important to investigate further.
injectable birth control called medroxyprogesterone (brand name depo-provera) showed the strongest association with meningioma tumors, with a relative increase in risk of about 4-fold.
according to the danish study, weaker associations exist for combined oral contraceptives and the mini-pill, with a relative risk increase of 1.5-fold.
importantly, these risks only persisted while participants were actively using contraception. The elevated risk generally seems to disappear within five years of stopping a contraceptive progestogen.
while a 4-fold relative increase in risk seems very high, the absolute risk of meningioma is small, explains cancer epidemiologist paul pharoah from cedars-sinai health sciences university in the us.
he explains that about 5 women per 1,000 will develop a meningioma in their lifetime.
that only increases to 6 women per 1,000 women using medroxyprogesterone from ages 25 to 44.
these very small increases in risk need to be balanced against the benefits of different forms of contraception, says pharoah.
it is important that women do not stop using their birth control pills without consulting their doctor.
not only are meningioma tumors rare, but when they do occur, they are also typically benign in roughly 90 percent of cases.
on occasion, however, these tumors can cause seizures and cognitive issues, so they are taken seriously. Meningiomas are usually removed surgically or treated with radiation therapy.
thousands of women who say they were diagnosed with an intracranial meningioma after receiving depo-provera injections have filed lawsuits against pfizer since 2024.
in december 2025, the us fda approved a new label for the injection that warns customers of a possible connection to meningiomas.
obstetrician and gynecologist gino pecoraro from the university of queensland in australia acknowledges that while those taking certain forms of contraception may be at a very small increased risk for meningioma, there are also risks to not using contraception, too.
pecoraro points out, for instance, that pregnancy in australia carries a maternal mortality rate of 6.6 per hundred thousand, while the australian five-year survival rate following meningioma diagnosis is greater than 90 percent.
while its unknown what causes meningiomas, there is good reason to suspect that hormones like progesterone play a role.
in the united states and denmark, women are more than twice as likely to be diagnosed with meningioma compared to men.
whats more, meningioma tumors also tend to grow more rapidly during pregnancy or when a patient is taking therapies with progesterone-like mimics.
we have known for a few years that high-dose exposure to certain progesterone drugs increases the risk of meningioma, reproductive endocrinologist channa jayasena from imperial college london told the science media center.
meningiomas are tumors of the lining of the brain. Most meningiomas have receptors that can listen to progesterone in the body, so it is plausible that any type of progesterone-like drug could slightly increase the risk.
progestogens are synthetic compounds that mimic the natural hormone progesterone. They are used in some contraceptive injections, iuds, combined birth control pills, and progesterone-only pills – sometimes called mini-pills.
for years now, scientists have suspected that this hormone may be linked to meningiomas; however, previous studies have turned up mixed results.
often, these analyses did not take into account current contraceptive use as opposed to past contraceptive use, and this may have muddied the results.
the risk seems to be erased when contraception is ceased, at least according to this recent danish data crunch.
gynecologist melanie davies, who was not involved in the current study, says that this new research confirms an association between progestogens and some brain tumors.
however, she adds, because meningioma is such a rare condition, these findings should not put women off using progestogens, which are effective hormonal treatments for debilitating conditions and suit many women who require contraception.
jayasena also points out that this study did not look at hormone replacement therapy, which uses much lower doses of progesterone, and so is not expected to increase meningioma risk.
therefore, he stresses, these results do not apply to women taking hrt.
an investigation into the association between progestogens and meningiomas is currently ongoing at the european medicines agency.
related: when you got your period may impact dementia risk, study finds
prescribers should certainly be aware of the association, argues pecoraro.
this is further evidence of the importance of appropriate contraceptive consultations addressing risks and benefits of various means of contraception, taking place between prescribers and women, prior to writing a script or making a recommendation.
women who have suffered brain tumors after taking the injections argue that patients should be warned of the possible risks.
the study is published in jama network open.
this article was fact-checked by rachel garner and edited by rebecca dyer. While we pride ourselves on our process, we are only human. If you spot a mistake, please let us know. |
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