French President Emmanuel Macron has announced new legislation to legalize “aid in dying” that will allow adults facing end-of-life illness to take lethal medication, a first in the country.

The move follows last year’s report indicating that most French citizens support legalizing end-of-life options.

In an interview published Monday by French newspapers La Croix and Liberation, Macron said the new bill will be restricted to adults suffering from an incurable illness who are expected to die in the “short or middle-term” and who are suffering “intractable” physical or psychological pain.

Macron said the law will offer “a possible path, in a determined situation, with precise criteria, where the medical decision is playing its role.”

He gave the example of of people with terminal cancer, some of whom until now have gone abroad to end their lives.

Only people aged 18 or above who are capable of forming their own views will be allowed to get in the process, meaning those with severe psychiatric conditions and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease won’t be eligible, Macron specified.

Patients who seek to enter the process will need to reconfirm their choice after 48 hours and they should then receive an answer from a medical team within two weeks maximum, Macron said. A doctor will then deliver a prescription, valid for three months, for the lethal medication.

People will be able to take the medication at home, at a nursing home or at a health care facility, Macron said.

If their physical condition doesn’t allow them to do it alone, they will be allowed to get help from someone of their choice or by a doctor or a nurse.

Macron said the new bill will refer to “aid in dying … because it’s simple and humane,” rather than terms like euthanasia or medically assisted suicide.

Medically assisted suicide involves patients taking, of their own free will, a lethal drink or medication that has been prescribed by a doctor to those who meet certain criteria. Euthanasia involves doctors or other health practitioners giving patients who meet certain criteria a lethal injection at their own request.

Read more at: breitbart.com

In March 2024, controversy surrounded a proposed wind-energy development in Germany’s Reinhardswald forest. The project involved clearing land and creating access routes for turbines, prompting objections from people concerned about the forest’s ecological and cultural importance. Supporters regarded wind power as part of Germany’s energy transition, while critics questioned the environmental trade-offs of building infrastructure in a wooded landscape. The original article cited a figure of up to 120,000 trees; that figure and the precise extent of clearing require confirmation from project documents.

Read more at dailysceptic.org

The app will help in cases where ‘a person’s voice does not match their gender identity’

The National Institute of Health (NIH) has awarded over $200,000 to researchers to create a “transgender voice training” app that aims, in part, to help trans women sound more feminine.

A transgender professor and two speech therapy experts have teamed up to create the software at the cost of $213,878 in taxpayer funds from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, an agency of the National Institutes of Health, according to documentation. The research will be conducted by the University of Cincinnati, led by Associate Professor Vesna Novak, as well as speech scientist Victoria McKenna of UC and speech-language pathologist Tara McAllister of New York University.

“Transgender and gender diverse people exhibit a significantly lower quality of life than the general public,” according to an abstract of the study first reported by The College Fix. “One reason for this is voice dysphoria: distress because a person’s voice does not match their gender identity (e.g., trans women with deep voices).”

The project, titled “Improving the Accessibility of Transgender Voice Training with Visual-acoustic Biofeedback,” aims to improve “gender-affirming voice and communication training (GAVT)” with software to coach trans women on their “pitch and resonance” through voice exercises, which are the two main indicators of voice femininity and masculinity the abstract states.

In an announcement of the NIH grant, McAllister discussed the goals of the study.

“Some trans people can be negatively impacted if their voice is perceived as incongruous with their gender identity, and they may choose to work with a speech pathologist to achieve a vocal presentation that is comfortable for them,” McAllister said.

“In addition to the pitch of the voice, male and female vocal tracts also differ in their resonating characteristics, but resonance is harder to understand than pitch, and harder to target in therapy.” McAllister added. “The staRt software allows learners to visualize the resonant frequencies of the vocal tract, which could make it easier to adjust them to match a target that is appropriate for their personal speech goals.”

Forty trans women will be randomly assigned to either an experimental group that will use the researchers’ software or a control group that will use a generic voice analysis app. They will meet once a week with a speech-language pathologist for remotely administered GAVT, who will assign homework, while participants will self-report their amount of daily practice, self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation scores that will be compared between groups.

Read more at: foxnews.com

The Rising Tide of Shoplifting

In a significant effort to address the increasing problem of shoplifting, major retailers Walmart and Target have taken an unprecedented step by placing essential items such as underwear and socks under lock and key.

This move highlights the severity of theft issues affecting retailers across the country, with losses amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars.

From the academic who warns of a robot uprising to the workers worried for their future – is it time we started paying attention to the tech sceptics?

Eliezer Yudkowsky, a 44-year-old academic wearing a grey polo shirt, rocks slowly on his office chair and explains with real patience – taking things slowly for a novice like me – that every single person we know and love will soon be dead. They will be murdered by rebellious self-aware machines. “The difficulty is, people do not realise,” Yudkowsky says mildly, maybe sounding just a bit frustrated, as if irritated by a neighbour’s leaf blower or let down by the last pages of a novel. “We have a shred of a chance that humanity survives.”

It’s January. I have set out to meet and talk to a small but growing band of luddites, doomsayers, disruptors and other AI-era sceptics who see only the bad in the way our spyware-steeped, infinitely doomscrolling world is tending. I want to find out why these techno-pessimists think the way they do. I want to know how they would render change. Out of all of those I speak to, Yudkowsky is the most pessimistic, the least convinced that civilisation has a hope. He is the lead researcher at a nonprofit called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California, and you could boil down the results of years of Yudkowsky’s theorising there to a couple of vowel sounds: “Oh fuuuuu–!”

“If you put me to a wall,” he continues, “and forced me to put probabilities on things, I have a sense that our current remaining timeline looks more like five years than 50 years. Could be two years, could be 10.” By “remaining timeline”, Yudkowsky means: until we face the machine-wrought end of all things. Think Terminator-like apocalypse. Think Matrix hellscape. Yudkowsky was once a founding figure in the development of human-made artificial intelligences – AIs. He has come to believe that these same AIs will soon evolve from their current state of “Ooh, look at that!” smartness, assuming an advanced, God-level super-intelligence, too fast and too ambitious for humans to contain or curtail. Don’t imagine a human-made brain in one box, Yudkowsky advises. To grasp where things are heading, he says, try to picture “an alien civilisation that thinks a thousand times faster than us”, in lots and lots of boxes, almost too many for us to feasibly dismantle, should we even decide to.

Trying to shake humanity from its complacency about this, Yudkowsky published an op-ed in Time last spring that advised shutting down the computer farms where AIs are grown and trained. In clear, crisp prose, he speculated about the possible need for airstrikes targeted own datacentres; perhaps even nuclear exchange. Was he on to something?

Read more at: theguardian.com

On February 1, a Dutch law allowing the euthanasia of terminally ill children went into effect. The law legalizes the killing of children ages one through 12 who are deemed to be “suffering hopelessly and unbearably.”

Previously, the country allowed euthanasia of children older than 12, along with infants under age one who could be killed if their parents and doctors agreed and they faced an illness labeled as terminal or faced serious suffering. In 2023, lawmakers passed a controversial expansion of the eligibility guidelines to include children of all ages.

According to reports, the new guidelines state that “the child’s opinion should be sought as far as possible in a way appropriate to the child’s understanding and age,” though parents can decide to have their child euthanized in conjunction with a doctor even if the child is unwilling or unable to consent.

Though the Ministry of Health expects that the new guidelines will affect only a “small group” of cases — about five to ten children a year — opponents are warning that there is nothing to keep this broadened rule from spiraling out of control.

In an op-ed, Elise van Hoek-Burgerhart and Yvonne Gueze-van Horssen, both from the group NPV-Care for Life, warn that the “distressing” regulation has many flaws, including the fact that children are unable to consent to their own deaths. “While the ‘voluntary and well-considered request’ is an important building block of Dutch euthanasia policy, this request is absent for children. Children are impressionable and are (often) not mentally competent,” they wrote.

Physician-assisted death in the Netherlands has continued to climb since it was first legalized. The period from 2021 to 2022 saw a 14% increase in euthanasia deaths, with a record number of 8,720 people dying via assisted death. Of those, 115 people were killed simply due to psychiatric illness — not because of any terminal diagnosis. In July 2023, it was revealed that numerous autistic people and people with intellectual disabilities had been euthanized solely because they felt they couldn’t lead “normal” lives.

Read more at: liveaction.org

A 2024 investigation reported allegations that a smuggling network helped migrants cross from Canada into Vermont and that people associated with the operation faced federal charges. The report described court filings and questioned how suspects continued operating after earlier encounters with immigration authorities. It also discussed an increase in unlawful crossings along parts of the northern U.S. border. The allegations should be distinguished from facts established in court, and readers should consult the original reporting for the case details.

Read more at www.dailymail.co.uk

A February 2024 report described a dispute between Montana parents and state child-protection authorities over the care and custody of their teenage child. The parents alleged that officials disregarded their wishes during treatment and placement decisions involving the child’s gender identity. The original report presented the family’s account and characterized the intervention as an unlawful removal. Those allegations should not be treated as established findings without examining court records and responses from the agencies involved. The case raised questions about parental rights, child welfare and medical decision-making.

Read more at www.thegatewaypundit.com

Prosecutors said that a teenage girl showed no remorse after killing her friend over a dispute about sweet and sour sauce from a McDonald’s fast food restaurant in Washington, D.C.

The 16-year-old was convicted for stabbing Naima Liggon, also 16 years old, in August after a house party they had attended. On Thursday, she was given the maximum sentence allowed and will stay in custody until she turns 21 years old.

Prosecutors said text messages she sent after the stabbing showed she had no remorse for her actions. They also said that surveillance video showed the girl could have simply walked back into the McDonald’s for more sweet and sour sauce.

The defense tried to argue that the girl acted only in self-defense because two people were trying to jump her. They also claimed that was had experienced past trauma and had been triggered in the lethal reaction.

Naima’s mother, Joy Liggon, responded to those claims in an interview with WRC-TV outside the courtroom.

“I don’t know what this young lady went through,” she said. “I don’t know what her life experience was, but I know she committed a crime, and she took someone away from my family.”

“That she called a friend,” added Wallace Liggon, the father of the victim.

The teenager issued a statement to the Liggons in court.

“Sorry to the friends and family. I am sorry to cause you this pain,” she said in part. “I still think about the victim and I want to apologize to Naima’s mother. I am a very genuine person and I’m not a bad person.”

Joy Liggon went on to say that she was relieved the girl got the maximum sentence but added that it wasn’t enough. She had asked for prosecutors to file a first-degree murder charge, but instead, they agreed to a plea deal with the girl for a lower charge.

“You have to realize that your kids have free will and free choice to do what they want, so just keep encouraging them to do the right thing,” she continued. “Walk away from conflict. Some things are just not that serious — definitely sweet and sour sauce.”

Read more at: theblaze.com

An opinion piece circulated by Natural News criticized government and institutional policies relating to gender identity, public facilities, and family terminology in several Western countries. The writer argued that these developments reflected a broader cultural shift away from traditional beliefs. The article contains sweeping claims and judgments that require separate verification; this summary does not endorse those characterizations as fact. Readers can consult the original commentary for the specific examples and arguments.

Read more at naturalnews.com