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The Hill
2 hours ago
- Health
- The Hill
Teens with ‘addictive' phone use more likely to be suicidal: Study
(NewsNation) — A new study has found that addiction to social media, video games and mobile devices is linked to a higher risk of suicidal behaviors and thoughts. JAMA Network published the study Wednesday, which looked at data from over 4,000 children starting at 9 or 10 years old. The study followed these children for years and found that, by the age of 14: The study author, Yunyu Xiao, said, 'And these youth are significantly more likely to report suicidal behaviors and thoughts.' According to NPR, Dr. Jason Nagata, a pediatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, said, 'It's an important study and raising awareness about screen addiction. … It shows that elements of addiction related to screen use are more strongly predictive of poorer mental health and even suicide risk compared to just screen time. So, I think that it provides more nuance.' Data was used from an ongoing longitudinal study called the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, which has been following these children for years. During that time, these children were questioned about their average daily screen time, among other things, with a standardized questionnaire. Xiao said that some of the statements in the questionnaire would include, ''I spend a lot of time thinking about social media apps or planning to use social media apps'' and ''I try to use the social media app less, but I can't.'' Then, each child's response would be monitored over the years to see how it changed. Nearly 60% of the participants had low levels of social media addiction, and they stayed stable over the years. However, around a tenth of the children had an increasing social media addiction that peaked around the third and fourth year of the study. When it came to cell phone use, around half showed a high addiction, and a quarter had an increasing addiction. Then, with video games, there were two groups: Around 60% showed low addiction that was stable, and 41% were highly addicted throughout a certain period of time. The study found that those who had high and increasing addiction to mobile phones and social media platforms were at a higher risk of suicidal behaviors and thoughts. At year four, almost 18% of kids reported having suicidal thoughts, and 5% said they had suicidal behaviors. This correlation was also observed in individuals who were highly addicted to video games. However, total screen time had no effect on a lower or higher suicide risk. Nagata said, 'We all get reports from our phones about our weekly screen time. Screen time is an easily understandable metric because it's minutes or hours a day that we're spending on screens.' Psychologist Mitch Prinstein, a professor at the University of North Carolina, also said, 'Some kids might spend their time on screen reading the news, and some might be trolling some pretty dangerous sites. So it's really hard to know what to make of screen time as a risk factor.' Nagata is also someone who has used data from the ABCD study to understand how teenagers are using these social media platforms over time and how that's affecting their risk of mental health symptoms. 'One thing that was really striking to me is that, unfortunately, these symptoms of screen addictions are actually pretty common,' Nagata said.
Sky News AU
8 hours ago
- Politics
- Sky News AU
Hypocrisy of ‘No Kings' protesters exposed
Sky News host James Morrow has exposed the hypocrisy of the 'No Kings' protesters who are 'mad' that the 'so-called king isn't one of their own'. 'When Barack Obama was president, the left wanted to turn him into a wise, benevolent, philosopher king and imbue him with behaviours that had someone suggested them for Donald Trump? Well, they would have screamed that this was all democracy-dodging tyranny,' Mr Morrow said. 'Back in 2014, NPR, recently defunded by the House, enthused about Obama using just two tools to get his way. Not the Constitution and the legislature, but a pen and a phone. 'And then, in 2012, CNN said that liberals – yes, the left, wanted Obama to be a king, not a president.'
The Age
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
The US says this Australian writer was expelled because of a drug lie. He's not the first
A years-long legal battle followed. In 1975, Lennon triumphed. While the government had attributed its attempt to expel Lennon to his cannabis conviction, documents submitted to the court suggested the Nixon administration had been motivated by a fear Lennon could promote opposition to the president. Judge Irving Kaufman would have none of it. 'The courts will not condone selective deportation based upon secret political grounds,' he ruled. Chaplin's exile was on flimsy grounds, too. Scott Eyman, who wrote a book on Chaplin's stoush with the US government, told NPR that authorities had no legal grounds to revoke the actor's entry permit because he had not committed a crime. 'What was not stated and what Chaplin did not know was that if he had turned around and come back and demanded a hearing to get back his re-entry permit, they would have had to give it to him,' Eyman said. 'So they actually had no legal justification for excluding him from coming back to the country.' But times – and visa rules – have changed. ANU international law professor Donald Rothwell told the ABC that US border officials have complete discretion over whether to allow someone into the country, whether or not they hold a valid visa or visa waiver. Loading 'They don't have to give a reason, and there is very little ability for an Australian traveller to challenge that,' Rothwell said. Along the way, they can search phones and luggage and detain people without providing access to a lawyer. The system is not new, or particularly different to Australia's border regime, but the way in which it is being used has shifted. Cases of Australians being denied entry to the US are getting coverage they have never had before. There was the man who told this masthead's Traveller in April he had been sent home from New York for taking a circuitous route to the US (which he said he did because it was cheaper). And a former NSW police officer travelling to Hawaii to visit her American husband was expelled in May for taking three suitcases, which the Daily Mail reported made officers suspicious she would stay longer than allowed in the country. Whether these deportations were caused by the Trump administration's aggressive new approach to screening remains unclear. What is obvious is that its rhetoric has shifted. The US Department of Homeland Security issued a statement on social media questioning the circumstances of the marriage of the former police officer who had travelled to Hawaii, Nikki Saroukos. The department said Saroukos met her husband the same day her former partner left her, and that they had married one month later. 'I never want to return back to the United States,' Saroukos said, even before the statement was issued. Loading It has barely dented other travellers' appetite to go stateside. Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows 56,770 Australians travelled to the US in April 2025, down from 60,520 in April 2024. Kitchen, the writer who was denied entry, says the US government has immense discretion that it uses to keep out people it doesn't like. 'The question [on the visa waiver application] asks if you've consumed illicit drugs in the past,' Kitchen said. 'If every Australian flying into Los Angeles International Airport answered honestly, the lines would get very short, very quickly.' Chaplin's exile deeply hurt the star, who never returned to the heights of success he had enjoyed in America. He would not go back to the country for 20 years, but was greeted as a hero with a 12-minute standing ovation at the 1972 Academy Awards. Loading Lennon stayed in America and was slain five years later. Kitchen is back with his family in Castlemaine, north-west of Melbourne, and has achieved a dream of many young writers: The New Yorker published his account of his deportation.
Sydney Morning Herald
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
The US says this Australian writer was expelled because of a drug lie. He's not the first
A years-long legal battle followed. In 1975, Lennon triumphed. While the government had attributed its attempt to expel Lennon to his cannabis conviction, documents submitted to the court suggested the Nixon administration had been motivated by a fear Lennon could promote opposition to the president. Judge Irving Kaufman would have none of it. 'The courts will not condone selective deportation based upon secret political grounds,' he ruled. Chaplin's exile was on flimsy grounds, too. Scott Eyman, who wrote a book on Chaplin's stoush with the US government, told NPR that authorities had no legal grounds to revoke the actor's entry permit because he had not committed a crime. 'What was not stated and what Chaplin did not know was that if he had turned around and come back and demanded a hearing to get back his re-entry permit, they would have had to give it to him,' Eyman said. 'So they actually had no legal justification for excluding him from coming back to the country.' But times – and visa rules – have changed. ANU international law professor Donald Rothwell told the ABC that US border officials have complete discretion over whether to allow someone into the country, whether or not they hold a valid visa or visa waiver. Loading 'They don't have to give a reason, and there is very little ability for an Australian traveller to challenge that,' Rothwell said. Along the way, they can search phones and luggage and detain people without providing access to a lawyer. The system is not new, or particularly different to Australia's border regime, but the way in which it is being used has shifted. Cases of Australians being denied entry to the US are getting coverage they have never had before. There was the man who told this masthead's Traveller in April he had been sent home from New York for taking a circuitous route to the US (which he said he did because it was cheaper). And a former NSW police officer travelling to Hawaii to visit her American husband was expelled in May for taking three suitcases, which the Daily Mail reported made officers suspicious she would stay longer than allowed in the country. Whether these deportations were caused by the Trump administration's aggressive new approach to screening remains unclear. What is obvious is that its rhetoric has shifted. The US Department of Homeland Security issued a statement on social media questioning the circumstances of the marriage of the former police officer who had travelled to Hawaii, Nikki Saroukos. The department said Saroukos met her husband the same day her former partner left her, and that they had married one month later. 'I never want to return back to the United States,' Saroukos said, even before the statement was issued. Loading It has barely dented other travellers' appetite to go stateside. Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows 56,770 Australians travelled to the US in April 2025, down from 60,520 in April 2024. Kitchen, the writer who was denied entry, says the US government has immense discretion that it uses to keep out people it doesn't like. 'The question [on the visa waiver application] asks if you've consumed illicit drugs in the past,' Kitchen said. 'If every Australian flying into Los Angeles International Airport answered honestly, the lines would get very short, very quickly.' Chaplin's exile deeply hurt the star, who never returned to the heights of success he had enjoyed in America. He would not go back to the country for 20 years, but was greeted as a hero with a 12-minute standing ovation at the 1972 Academy Awards. Loading Lennon stayed in America and was slain five years later. Kitchen is back with his family in Castlemaine, north-west of Melbourne, and has achieved a dream of many young writers: The New Yorker published his account of his deportation.
Scroll.in
11 hours ago
- Politics
- Scroll.in
A new book examines the rise of the ‘alt-right' in the US and its impact on the country's politics
In the weeks after Trump's election, an up-and-comer on the far right named Richard Spencer appeared on NBC, NPR, and CNN. Profiles of him appeared in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. More were in the works. Showtime was putting out feelers for a documentary. Then, just before Thanksgiving, Spencer gave a speech at the annual conference of his think tank, the National Policy Institute. NPI was dedicated to the 'preservation of the heritage, identity, and future of European people in the US and elsewhere.' Spencer might have ended his speech declaring that America belonged to Europeans. But he knew his moment. America belonged to white people. 'America was, until this past generation, a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation; it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.' This was met with a roar of approval from the hundred or so men assembled, culminating in scattered, stiff-armed Nazi salutes, like a mini-Nuremberg rally. He acknowledged these with a sloppy salute, not bothering to put down his drink. A clip of this went viral. I watched it while tracing the arc of Spencer's journey from obscurity to Charlottesville. And when I did, something about the world I had known abruptly shifted. Two 20th-century sources of national pride, providing decades of patriotic uplift, collapsed in a heap. That we had fought a 'Good War' against the horrors of Nazism and fascism. That our country's civil rights leaders had scored a moral triumph over racist Southerners and politics as usual. I knew these were national mythologies that historians did their best to complicate; by pointing out the Red Army's role in breaking the back of the Wehrmacht, for example, or the communist and nationalist forces of China doing the same to Japan. Still, it hadn't occurred to me that the American creed they embodied could be dispensed with altogether, replaced by something called the 'alt-right.' This was a term coined by Spencer in 2008, on the eve of Obama's election and the collapse of the US economy. The alt-right was a reaction to mainstream Republican politics, to the Christian right, libertarianism, paleo-conservatism, and the 'war on terror.' It was the online edge lord's response to what was once called political correctness or multiculturalism and is now called woke. It was old-fashioned white nationalism and white supremacy, with its grab bag of bigotries, wrapped in contrarian, countercultural, and hypermasculine cool. Like the hip alt-weeklies of yore, it had its own outlets where an ironic sense of style and subversive humour had been shaped and fashioned in the company of those with like-minded dispositions. Kicked off traditional social media, the figureheads of this new movement created a replacement 'alt-tech' with their own browsers, plug-ins, payment processors, web hosting, domain registrations, and VPN services. 'They are just building a copycat version of the internet playground,' data scientist Megan Squire has said, describing how the rise of these new platforms allowed men like Spencer to say the formerly unsayable in the name of edginess. In so doing, the 'alt-right' stole the glamour of the rebel, the revolutionary, the outlaw, the punk, and the perennial stance of épater les bourgeois from the boomer left. They used it to skewer the moral pretensions and ideological conformity of progressives, and the square, self-serving Republicans in Name Only, War on Terror–supporting dads. For many, it had a dark, naughty allure. I got it. With a knowing nod to Steve Bannon, with whom he keenly aspired to ally himself, Richard Spencer used the media attention to openly audition for the role of Trump's brain. He offered a political language for the incoming administration. No more foreign wars, a proud embrace of white heritage, the cultivation of white grievance, a flirty fascism, and a renunciation of 'globalism.' The latter was a newish euphemism, replacing cosmopolitan, for Jews. But it was also an abstraction that needed a face. The Jewish financier and funder of democracy initiatives George Soros provided it. Similarly, the woke liberal elite driving the conversation in media, business, and culture, were either Jews or in the pay of Jews, and thus hostile to a political order in which Christian white men claimed ascendancy. In place of the founders' notion of religious freedom, one that, on paper, protected not just Jews and Muslims, but also atheists and infidels, the alt- right proposed a Christian nation, if Christianity is understood to be an aspect of white heritage, stripped of long- standing ethical notions of right and wrong. Some foresaw an indivisible, sea-to-shining-sea, white nation; others, a confederacy of single-race, single-religion 'ethnostates.' Spencer even called himself a Christian Zionist; Israel, which quarantined and policed Christian and Muslim Palestinians in the townships of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, exemplified his idea of an ethnostate. The two movements had a shared history. In 1941, a right-wing Zionist proposed to a German diplomat the solution to the Jewish 'problem' lay in Jewish resettlement in Palestine. By then of course Nazi Germany had other plans. And when, in a debate with Spencer, a rabbi at Texas A&M Hillel insisted that the Torah taught 'radical inclusion and love,' Spencer pointed out that, on the contrary, blood and soil white nationalists shared not only the Zionists' vision of a single-race ethnostate but a virulent hostility to assimilation. The rabbi had no answer to that. Spencer was far happier debating who would or wouldn't be admitted to his Klan than getting to the nitty-gritty of how to make one hundred million Americans disappear. In a bold step beyond Mitt Romney's 'self-deportation,' Spencer called for 'a peaceful ethnic cleansing.' He was joking. There would be nothing peaceful about it. In 2012, Spencer had published a piece on the website titled 'Is Black Genocide Right?' 'Instead of asking how we can make reparations for slavery … we should instead be asking questions like 'Does human civilisation actually need the black race?' [and] 'What would be the best and easiest way to dispose of them?'' This went overboard and was taken down, like a product release before the market was ready. Spencer's cavalier pose over the prospect of genocide was calculated to throw a normal person off, stuck in 'he can't be serious' mode. One journalist wrote that Spencer's ideas didn't arise from deep conviction. It was an intellectual exercise, 'performed for his own amusement.' The ferocity of his vendettas argued otherwise. Spencer isn't amused. That's an affectation. He is enraged. Amid the media furor he'd stoked by summoning Adolf Hitler, Richard Spencer decided just then to appear on the podcast of Andrew Anglin, the balding, squirrelly-eyed editor of the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer. Why, I wondered, with the mainstream media at his feet? Because he was embarked on a vendetta. Spencer divided his time between a loft above a chocolate shop in Alexandria, Virginia, and the picturesque mountain ski resort of Whitefish, Montana (pop. 8000), where his Dallas-based parents had a vacation home. In the latest chapter of a long-running feud, the Whitefish city council had recently declared Spencer persona non grata. This was where Andrew Anglin came in. 'Never back down' was Spencer's personal credo. He had started with the local paper. His wife wrote a letter accusing the city council of orchestrating a Stalinist witch hunt against her husband. A social death sentence, perhaps, but a henchman's bullet at the back of the head? A midnight transport to the gulag? Overstating the harm, then playing the victim, was part of the white nationalist toolbox. Rand and Sherry Spencer, Richard's parents, wrote another letter. A downtown commercial property his mother had developed was being unfairly targeted by protesters. Her Realtor made the mild suggestion: sell it. For Spencer, this amounted to backing down. Time for the big guns. Andrew Anglin and Richard Spencer scarcely knew each other, but they understood each other. Learning of Spencer's feud with the Whitefish city council, Anglin activated his cyber mob. When Sherry Spencer's Jewish Realtor picked up her phone, she heard gunshots. Then slurs: 'You fucking wicked kike whore.' She was doxed. One of Anglin's boys made a meme featuring a photo of her 12- year-old son at the Auschwitz gate. The campaign spread to local rabbis, and then anyone with a vaguely Jewish name. Local businesses that exhibited 'Love Lives Here' window signs had their phone lines tied up. The governor met with the mayor, but there was little anyone could do. Though the practice of choreographed mega harassment has since become ubiquitous, the experience felt unprecedented to Whitefish residents hoping to spend their retirement in vigorous exercise. Two people involved in preparing Charlottesville for the Unite the Right rally told me the saga known as Gamergate was an important inflexion point in the development of the weapon Andrew Anglin unleashed on Whitefish after Richard Spencer's appearance on his podcast. Even gaming journalists struggled to describe what was underway when, between August and October 2014, over two million posts attached to the Gamergate hashtag went out on various social media, but largely on Twitter and Reddit. Excerpted with permission from Charlottesville: A Story of Rage and Resistance, Deborah Baker, Penguin Random House.
