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New York Post
7 hours ago
- Politics
- New York Post
The left is a cult — and parents can fight it, with Supreme Court's blessing
Photo by John McDonnell/For The Washington Post via Getty Images In a landmark ruling last month, the Supreme Court slapped down a public-school district's mandatory lessons on sexual topics for young children — and gave parents the power to push back against leftist indoctrination in school. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, parents in Montgomery County, Md., argued that mandatory teaching of LGBT-themed books violated their families' religious beliefs. They didn't seek to remove the books — only the right to opt their children out of lessons that used them. The court backed them. Advertisement The district's instruction promoted the idea that gender is fluid and interchangeable, a notion that runs against the teachings of every major monotheistic religion: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Its LGBT teachings are part of a secular belief system that deliberately aims to supplant those traditional faiths with a new one. Leftism today increasingly functions not merely as a political ideology but as a full-fledged secular religion, complete with its own moral code, dogmas, rituals and rules of excommunication. Advertisement Like traditional religion, it offers a comprehensive worldview, one centered not on God or transcendent truth but on the sacredness of personal autonomy, identity and self-expression. Its doctrines — absolute tolerance, sexual liberation and equity over equality — are treated as unquestionable axioms, enforced with the fervor of religious orthodoxy. Public rituals like pronoun declarations, land acknowledgments and DEI trainings serve as liturgical acts of belonging and penance. Advertisement Sacred symbols like the pride flag or protest slogans function as talismans of moral clarity, and dissent from the liberal consensus results in a kind of modern heresy trial: cancellation, professional ruin or public shaming. The leftist 'priesthood' comprises media elites, academics and HR professionals, who act as interpreters and enforcers of the faith. Even its eschatology is religious in tone, offering visions of a utopian future once all bigotry is eradicated. By giving its adherents meaning, identity and moral purpose, leftism fulfills the role organized religion once did. Advertisement And the progressive religion isn't just a belief system — it's a doomsday cult. Consider any discussion of climate change. Suddenly, leftists become apocalyptic preachers warning of imminent destruction: rising seas, burning forests, uninhabitable cities — all brought on by sinful human consumption. The rhetoric is absolutist: Salvation can only be achieved through strict adherence to new commandments — no meat, no plastic, no air travel and total obedience to technocratic elites. Like all cults, dissent is forbidden and skepticism is blasphemy. Climate anxiety drives the young to speak about the future with a mix of fatalism and fanaticism. It's not science but a deeply moral narrative of sin and penance driving this hysteria, dressed in the language of reason but pulsing with religious fervor. Advertisement The Montgomery County parents fought for the freedom to protect their children from the gender-ideology components of this progressive belief system, but that's just one facet of this new secular faith. They were right: The public-school system has become a vehicle for all kinds of indoctrination, preaching a broad secular orthodoxy that runs counter to the beliefs of families of faith. The LGBT content at issue in Mahmoud is just one chapter in that gospel. In his majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that Montgomery County school board 'requires teachers to instruct young children using storybooks that explicitly contradict their parents' religious views, and it encourages the teachers to correct the children . . . when they express a degree of religious confusion.' Advertisement That same dynamic is at play across the curriculum, as public schools push all forms of progressivism on impressionable kids. It's time to fight back against the whole of the leftist religion, not just its more outrageous tenets — by confronting the cult's fire-and-brimstone, end-of-days theology too. That means demanding that science education in our schools must be grounded in reason, not fear. Public schools have no business sermonizing to children about the apocalypse. Leave that to the actual religions. Advertisement Armed with the Mahmoud ruling, public-school parents now have a legal foundation to resist when schools impose teachings that violate their most deeply held beliefs. They don't have to accept every lesson as mandatory — they can demand opt-outs, request transparency and challenge curriculum choices that cross the line from education into ideology. Parents can start by asserting their right to review lesson plans, attending school-board meetings and organizing locally to resist a broader secular agenda dressed up as neutral instruction. Advertisement The Supreme Court made it clear: The state can't force kids to absorb beliefs that conflict with their family's faith. Now it's up to parents to make their schools abide by that principle. Bethany Mandel writes and podcasts at The Mom Wars.
NZ Herald
7 hours ago
- Politics
- NZ Herald
Sectarian clashes between Druze and Bedouin militias have killed at least 30 people
Israel has threatened to intervene in Syria in defence of the Druze and has said it will not allow the Syrian military to deploy south of the capital, Damascus. The strikes were launched after the Syrian Government sent troops to Sweida today NZT to restore order as sectarian clashes entered a second day. The Israeli military said it struck the Syrian tanks because their presence in southern Syria 'may pose a threat to the State of Israel'. The tanks were advancing towards Sweida, the statement said and were targeted to stop their arrival in the area. Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said in a statement that the strikes were a 'message and a clear warning to the Syrian regime - we will not allow harm to be done to the Druze community in Syria'. The clashes in the Druze-majority city of Sweida initially broke out yesterday in the Maqous neighbourhood of the city, Syria's Interior Ministry said. It marked the first time that months of simmering tensions in the wider province had reached the city itself. More than 30 people were killed and nearly 100 were injured, according to a preliminary count from the ministry. The clashes expanded as local armed groups began fighting the government forces. Khalid Nemer, a Druze activist in Sweida, said at least 150 Druze have been killed in the clashes. The Washington Post could not independently verify the toll. 'The situation is very bad. Since the morning, there have been attempts to storm several axes by government forces as well as shelling operations and armed clashes,' said Rayan Maarouf, a researcher from Sweida who runs the local news site Sweida 24. Some Druze have described the government intervention as an attack on the Druze people, rather than an effort to restore order. 'They entered the administrative borders last night under the pretext of protection, but they proceeded to bombard our people in the border villages and supported the takfiri gangs with their heavy weapons and drones,' influential Druze spiritual leader Hikmat Hijiri said in a statement, using a term for radical Islamist groups. While Hijiri has vehemently opposed the new Islamist authorities, Druze spiritual leaders in Syria called for calm today and urged Damascus to intervene. 'Blood is everywhere from both sides,' said a 34-year-old Druze resident of Sweida, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for safety reasons. People were sequestered in their homes 'in a state of panic' because of the fighting, she said, adding that she fled the city and headed to Iraq today. The violence began when a Druze businessman was ambushed, robbed and humiliated with sectarian slurs by an armed group, according to Malik Abu al-Khair, the leader of the Druze al-Liwa party in Syria. Local reports said the incident at the weekend sparked a series of tit-for-tat kidnappings between the Druze and members of a Bedouin tribe before the clashes broke out. Syrian Government troops went to Sweida to 'begin a direct intervention,' the Interior Ministry said. Efforts to integrate the armed factions of Syrian minorities - including the Druze and the Kurds - into the new Syrian military have continually hit stumbling blocks since the overthrow of the regime of Bashar al-Assad last year. Anas Khattab, Syria's Interior Minister, said in a statement that the 'absence of state institutions, especially military and security institutions, is a major cause of the ongoing tensions in Sweida and its countryside'. 'The only solution is to reactivate these institutions to ensure civil peace,' he said. The ongoing violence follows deadly incidents in April and May in which dozens were killed on the outskirts of Damascus and Sweida in clashes between Druze gunmen and Islamist militants backing the new Syrian Government. The fighting prompted Israeli intervention with several strikes in support of the Druze, including one near the presidential palace in Damascus. Some Syrian Druze distanced themselves from the Israeli action, while others, such as Hijiri, welcomed it, telling the Washington Post in May that Israel was 'not the enemy'. The violence subsided after a deal was reached to put Druze fighters in charge of security in Sweida.
Straits Times
8 hours ago
- General
- Straits Times
From print to podcasts, The Straits Times has been a 180-year ritual
The newspaper is a city's start to the day, though now, in its digital form, it is an all-day companion, says the writer. It is 1849 and Moby-Dick is yet to be published and construction of the Eiffel Tower is yet to begin. The modern zipper has not been invented and neither has colour photography. The Washington Post does not exist nor does The Wall Street Journal. But The Straits Times is already four years old and in its pages you can find all manner of things. Bayonets for sale. Horsehair petticoats. Punkas. Gunpowder. If you're not interested in such items, you can read dispatches from New York, the long, formal letters written to the editor, or the birth of a child under the quaint subhead of Domestic Occurrence. The first newspapers arrived around the 17th century and in time most lands had their version of a Dispatch, Courier, Inquirer, Examiner, Advertiser, Tribune, Gazette, Herald, Chronicle and Post. We are simply The Straits Times. In 1845, the year Elizabeth Barrett received her first love letter from a fellow poet named Robert Browning – 'I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett', it began – we started our own relationship with this city. The playwright Arthur Miller, author of Death Of A Salesman, said that 'a good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself'. Very quietly, of course. This conversation began at dawn, for the newspaper is a city's start to the day, though now, in its digital form, it is an all-day companion. The newspaper, often trying to be all things to all people, glues us all. As people unwrap – or click on – the pages, they are in fact wrapping themselves in the city. The writer Alain de Botton put it neatly: 'To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.' Families snatch sections and fold themselves into corners of rooms. News is opened, Sports rifled through, Business examined. Bylines become ignored or turn into trusted friends, a case of two strangers intimately connected by words. Once a taxi driver berated me on discovering that I had not read the latest Sumiko Tan column . The Straits Times has been a 180-year ritual and for readers, through time, everything must be in the right place. When the box scores were removed from Sports, letters of protest followed. When a masthead font is changed, a grumble rises. As if one's morning tea has been fiddled with. In the beginning The Straits Times' front page was crammed with wordy advertisements and to surf through the paper's long history is to be met with all manner of curiosities. On Jan 20, 1920, a new stock of Colt automatic pistols was announced. In 1954, a headline shouted 'Podgy stockbroker kept his mistresses on the loot from phantom oil'. On one corner of the front page was a box titled The Law Of Storms which requires explanation. 'The Editor of The Straits Times,' it was written, 'will feel greatly obliged by Captains of Vessels furnishing him with particulars (extracted from the Ship's Log, including observations of Barometer and Thermometer) of occurrences of typhoons or hurricanes in the China Seas; more especially for notices of typhoons from the Bashee Group northwards to Chusan or Shantung.' The Straits Times was read, then perhaps carried on a bus where it was bent and pleated, and then at day's end probably used to swat flies. A newspaper has historically had many uses. It lines drawers but is also cut and framed and put behind glass, as May and Colin Schooling did with the story on Joseph going to train in America. Phil Graham, the great publisher of The Washington Post, once told Newsweek correspondents, 'So let us today drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of history that will never be completed about a world we can never really understand.' The Straits Times did this every day, becoming a city's habit and its reassurance. Now we bookmark pages on our phone, then the page of a particular edition was occasionally kept and forgotten. In the insides of old cupboards we often find these clippings after our parents pass. It tells us what they cared about, these pages their precious written proof of extraordinary days. The Straits Times has been a citizen's inheritance. Parents read it and children in time picked it up or downloaded its app. A bit like trying on your father's shoes. It became a first introduction to Singapore, telling stories of its moods, its grievances, its cosy corners, its grimy nooks. Reporters have wandered the ports of this city, the riot-strewn streets, the circus tents, the sporting fields. Like those the paper has reported on, it is itself fallible. There are more opinions of a paper than there are those within it. Yet everything has been done in the service of the reader. It is why The Straits Times has overseas correspondents in 11 nations. In time the world has become our beat. But primarily Singapore is our world and how far Singapore has come and who Singaporeans are as a people have always been recorded in headlines, photographs, illustrations, videos and graphs. Der Spiegel, the German news magazine, means The Mirror and like it this paper reflects how Singaporeans have lived, stumbled, improved and changed as a society. In October 1972, a front-page headline read: 'It's dearer after two: Govt acts to cut down size of families'. By January 2013 the shift was clear: 'The big push for more babies' insisted the front page. The Straits Times has been this city's voice, its explainer of the world, its guide, its informant and connective tissue. How many things do you have in common with your great-great-great-grandfather? This paper might be one. It has outlasted cinema halls, parks, roads, and is as intrinsically local as a curry puff or an HDB building. It is loved and loathed and people shut doors on reporters even as they recognise them as allies of a sort. After all, as Gay Talese wrote in The Kingdom And The Power, his history of The New York Times: 'News, if unreported, has no impact. It might as well have not happened at all.' This paper has proclaimed war, announced freedom and declared independence. It has also noted that an 'Enraged buffalo falls to six police bullets'. From news on Mahatma Gandhi's assassination trial to the winning goal scored by a school footballer, we have found room for the global saint and the local hero. Inside its pages births have been listed, deaths catalogued, weddings announced and jobs advertised. One might say a nation lives and loves and works in its newspaper pages. In a shaken-up media world, bruised mostly by a digital revolution which ensures news – not necessarily verified or fairly presented – is available 24 hours on the phone, over 2,500 newspapers have closed in the United States since 2005. The Straits Times has endured yet takes nothing for granted. As a city's landscape alters and its citizens' lives change, so have our designs, our ambition, our sections, our ideas. To stay relevant is to adapt. When this paper began, typewriters had not been invented. Now we don't use them any more. Old journalists could adroitly change a ribbon and impale rejected stories on a metal spike (thus the term 'spiking a story'). Their inheritors design magical graphics and can film and edit on their phones in a flash. The paper can be found at your doorway and in neat piles on supermarket shelves but it's also online and in the digital universe of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube and LinkedIn. News no longer rides on a solitary vehicle. Old-timers still like to feel the actual paper. But everything alters, even the sound of newspapers: once it was only a rustle, now the digital 'ting' is an alert to a new story on the phone. And so The Straits Times comes to your home but also to your phone. We're happy to meet you wherever you go and however you find information. If your world is Instagram, The Straits Times will see you there. If you prefer the app, then through myST you can personalise your newsfeed. The written word remains sacred but the newspaper world has expanded that idea. News is expressed digitally through podcasts, videos, graphics or complex, cutting-edge interactives, whether it's a ride through the 100 years of the Johor-Singapore Causeway or how a person on a wheelchair can navigate the MRT . The boundaries of creativity shift every day. 'Live' blogs follow events as they unfold and during the 2025 General Election , The Straits Times often sent three reporters to a rally. One to write for the newspaper, two to make videos. Perhaps one for Instagram and the other for TikTok. No one, the newspaper understands, sees the world the same way, through the same medium and for the same length of time. The traditional and the modern are intertwined. The old-fashioned, door-knocking journalism that defined newspapers remains but it is bolstered by revolutionised newsrooms where entire teams are devoted to breaking news. But nothing works at a single speed. Reports on a disaster may arrive on the website in seconds, but an imaginative construction of Max Maeder's waterworld might require nine months. But irrespective of form and tools, we know what is expected of us. One hundred and eighty years is a privilege and a weight. Tastes alter and so does a nation's pulse. It is our job to have a sensitive, intelligent, reliable finger on it. When we don't meet a high standard, we expect you to tell us. Of course, we cannot guarantee we will always get it right, but there are some things we can say for certain. Like a repeat of the front page of the very first edition of The Straits Times on July 15, 1845, is unlikely. It noted, among other things, that two milch goats were for sale. They were, it was boasted, in excellent condition.
Time of India
15 hours ago
- Health
- Time of India
How kiwi can help with constipation and improve gut health
Many people struggle with constipation and bloating, often triggered by high-fiber foods or supplements. Instead of relying on medications, a natural solution can be found in kiwi. Kiwi is a small, furry fruit that's packed with nutrients and benefits for our digestive system. Eating kiwi can help with common issues like constipation and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). The fiber, antioxidants, and special enzymes in kiwi work together to support healthy digestion and a balanced gut. According to The Washington Post, eating two kiwis a day has been shown to help regulate bowel movements and alleviate constipation symptoms. Kiwi's unique combination of fiber, antioxidants, and enzymes makes it a gentle and effective way to support digestive health. The nutrient profile of kiwi that helps with constipation Kiwi is a nutrient-rich fruit that includes fiber, actinidain, and polyphenols. Fiber: Kiwi contains both soluble and insoluble fiber, which can help regulate bowel movements and support the growth of beneficial gut bacteria. Actinidain: A unique enzyme found in kiwi that helps break down protein and aid digestion. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Đây có thể là thời điểm tốt nhất để giao dịch vàng trong 5 năm qua IC Markets Tìm hiểu thêm Undo Polyphenols: Kiwi contains a range of polyphenols, including flavonoids and phenolic acids, which have anti-inflammatory properties. How kiwi can help with constipation and IBS Research has shown that kiwi can have a positive impact on digestive health, particularly for individuals with IBS and constipation. Here are some ways kiwi can help: Relieve constipation: Kiwis' high fiber content can help promote regular bowel movements and prevent constipation. Reduce IBS symptoms: The actinidain in kiwi may help break down protein and reduce symptoms of IBS, such as bloating and abdominal pain. Support gut health: Kiwis' prebiotic fiber can help support the growth of beneficial gut bacteria, promoting a healthy gut microbiome. Adding kiwi to your diet Eat it raw: Slice up a kiwi and enjoy it as a snack or add it to fruit salads, smoothies, or oatmeal Add it to your recipes: Kiwi pairs well with citrus fruits and as well as leafy greens Kiwi juice: Kiwi juice can be a convenient way to get your daily dose of fiber and actinidain.
South China Morning Post
15 hours ago
- Business
- South China Morning Post
Could Elon Musk really move his tech empire to China?
Donald Trump's recent spats with Elon Musk – which included threats to deport the South African-born billionaire – have prompted speculation that he might move his business empire to China. That prompted Trump to write on social media earlier this month: 'Elon may get more subsidy than any human being in history, by far, and without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa. No more Rocket launches, satellites, or Electric Car Production, and our Country would save a FORTUNE.' Musk's business empire has collected US$38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits, according to The Washington Post. 'If tensions escalate between Musk and Trump – especially over issues such as regulation, subsidies, censorship or taxation – there is a possibility that Musk might move more R&D or manufacturing capabilities abroad,' said Denis Simon, a non-resident fellow at the US think tank the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. 'China, with its advanced supply chains and infrastructure, could become a favoured destination.
