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Top 5 US news stories

November 20 2025

Greg Loving

20 Nov 2025 • 9 min read

Chinese President Xi Jinping has made bringing Taiwan under Beijing’s control a key tenet of his ‘China Dream’ of national revival. FLORENCE LO/REUTERS

China Primes Population For War, Flooding Airwaves With Unification Propaganda And Combat Dramas

Nvidia Earnings Crush Expectations, Easing Wall Street Fears Over AI Spending Durability

How ADHD Prescriptions Can Trigger A Cycle Of Psychiatric Medication For Children

CDC Revises Webpage To Claim Vaccine-Autism Link Is Not Ruled Out

California Loophole Overrides Local Zoning, Offering Blueprint To Break Housing Gridlock

China Primes Population For War, Flooding Airwaves With Unification Propaganda And Combat Dramas

Mao Zedong once said that China must wield both the pen and the gun against its adversaries. It is a strategy China is now intensifying for Taiwan. With its so-called pen, China’s state television is preparing the domestic Chinese population for a new phase of pressure against Taiwan. Its prime-time slot is filled with a new historical drama, “The Silent Honor,” which lionizes Communist Party agents operating in Taiwan after the Nationalists fled to the island in 1949 following their loss of the civil war to Mao’s forces. The series frames the agents’ espionage—and eventual execution—as martyrdom for the cause of “unification.” In a parallel move suggesting a top-down mandate to reorient cultural output toward national struggle, state-owned drama troupes are receiving approval only for war-themed plays, said people briefed on the matter, while other genres are being rejected. This domestic messaging is an intensification of an already amped-up atmosphere of Taiwan reunification rhetoric in China. And it is being matched by the gun. Chinese leadership is focusing on neutralizing Taiwan’s supporters, notably Tokyo, following Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s Nov. 7 warning that a Chinese seizure of Taiwan would trigger Japan’s involvement in any conflict. In a response that shocked the world, China’s Consul General in Osaka, Xue Jian, posted a threat on X to “cut off” Takaichi’s “dirty neck.” The post was later deleted, but people close to Beijing’s decision-making said it was a deliberate, state-sanctioned action designed to test Japan’s resolve. Simultaneously, China’s military signaled its readiness to escalate last weekend, sending four armed China Coast Guard vessels close to an island chain that both Beijing and Tokyo claim as their own. Japanese fighters rushed to intercept a Chinese military drone hovering near Yonaguni, Japan’s westernmost island and the closest point to Taiwan.

WSJ

Nvidia Earnings Crush Expectations, Easing Wall Street Fears Over AI Spending Durability

Just three weeks ago, Nvidia became the first publicly traded company to be worth more than $5 trillion thanks to the cutting-edge computer chips it makes for artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, Nvidia provided a reminder of just how much the world craves those chips. The company said that in its most recent quarter, its profit was $31.9 billion, up 65 percent from a year earlier and 245 percent from the year before that. Among the tech industry’s giants, only Google’s parent company, Alphabet, made more money in the same quarter. Nvidia controls about 90 percent of the market for the chips used in A.I. projects, and its financial performance has become a bellwether for the tech industry, which is investing trillions of dollars in big data centers all over the world. Nvidia’s eye-popping profit could be enough to calm nerves on Wall Street, where there are increasing concerns that lavish spending is getting way ahead of demand for the products and services that Silicon Valley’s engineers are building.

NYT

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says the company sees something that is ‘very different’ from an AI bubble. SEONGJOON CHO/BLOOMBERG NEWS

How ADHD Prescriptions Can Trigger A Cycle Of Psychiatric Medication For Children

Danielle Gansky was 7 years old when an administrator at her upscale private girls’ school in suburban Philadelphia flagged problems with her academic performance. She was a bubbly and creative kid, but she was easily distracted in class and her schoolwork was sloppy. The school told Gansky’s mother that the girl should see a psychiatrist, who diagnosed her with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, and prescribed a stimulant. Concerned that Danielle might get kicked out if her focus didn’t improve, her mother broke into tears and agreed. But the pills made Gansky agitated, moody and angry. So another doctor put her on Prozac. More pills followed. Over the years, Gansky was always on two and sometimes three or more psychiatric drugs at once. By her late 20s, she had taken 14 different kinds of psychiatric pills. None of it ever felt right. The pills dulled her mind and made her irritable or sleepy. But when Gansky complained about the drugs, her doctors would up her dose or try another medication. “I was living in a body hijacked by the medication,” said Gansky, 29, who is still struggling to wean herself off an antidepressant. “I didn’t have the words or authority to challenge what I was being told.” Tens of thousands of kids who take prescription ADHD medication also wind up on other powerful psychotropic drugs—including antipsychotics and antidepressants, studies show. For some of them, the ADHD drugs themselves can be a trigger, according to doctors, patients and psychologists, who say additional medications are often prescribed to manage side effects such as insomnia, despite limited scientific evidence supporting these combinations in young, developing brains. About 7.1 million American children ages 3 to 17 have an ADHD diagnosis, according to an analysis of 2022 federal data. About half took ADHD medication for it that year, and prescriptions are growing. The decision to treat ADHD with medication is often made by desperate parents trying to keep their kids from falling behind or being kicked out of school or daycare, parents and mental health clinicians say. For preschool-age kids, the drugs are often dispensed against pediatric guidelines, which call first for behavioral therapy, a treatment that can be hard to get. And mental health providers say the drugs are frequently prescribed to treat childhood trauma that has been misdiagnosed as ADHD. For one in five kids who take them, ADHD drugs are just the beginning. A Wall Street Journal analysis of Medicaid data from 2019 through 2023 shows that children who were prescribed a medication for ADHD were far more likely to take additional psychiatric drugs over the ensuing four years. The Journal compared about 166,000 children aged 3 to 14 who started on ADHD medications in 2019 to kids who didn’t. The medicated group was more than five times as likely to be on additional psychiatric medications four years later. Factors such as differences in sex, race and foster-care status didn’t explain the gap.

WSJ

CDC Revises Webpage To Claim Vaccine-Autism Link Is Not Ruled Out

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention webpage that previously made the case that vaccines don’t cause autism now says they might. The contents of the webpage came up during Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Senate confirmation process. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R., La.) in February said Kennedy had assured him that, if he was confirmed, the CDC would “not remove statements on their website pointing out that vaccines do not cause autism.” The revised webpage says: “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism. Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.” The new text posted Wednesday also notes that the Department of Health and Human Services has launched “a comprehensive assessment” to probe the causes of autism. The webpage had been a focal point for both vaccine skeptics, who criticized its earlier language, and public health advocates, who wondered how far Kennedy would go to change federal agencies’ language around vaccines. The page previously said: “Studies have shown that there is no link between receiving vaccines and developing autism,” citing a 2012 National Academy of Medicine review of scientific papers and a 2013 CDC study.

WSJ

California Loophole Overrides Local Zoning, Offering Blueprint To Break Housing Gridlock

A little-known California law is emerging as a potential blueprint for breaking America's housing gridlock, as developers use the "builder's remedy" to force high-density construction into wealthy enclaves that have long resisted new development. The 1990 state law, dormant for decades until recently, allows developers to bypass local zoning rules entirely when cities fail to plan for adequate housing—and developers like Leo Pustilnikov are wielding it like a weapon, proposing 19-story apartment towers in Beverly Hills neighborhoods where five stories is normally the maximum. The mere threat of the remedy has proven so powerful that cities across California are now accepting more housing than they have in decades, prompting housing advocates to dub it "the NIMBY sword of Damocles."

While California's housing crisis is severe, the shortage afflicting Americans from New York to Los Angeles has created rare bipartisan consensus that something must be done—making the builder's remedy a compelling model for other states struggling to close the gap between abstract agreement on housing needs and actual construction. The law's effectiveness at nullifying the local political barriers that have made it nearly impossible to build—from environmental regulations that delay small projects for years to neighborhood opposition over traffic, parking, and design—suggests a formula that could work nationwide. As Pustilnikov demonstrated with his Beverly Hills application, which he pursued despite unanimous City Council opposition and neighbors calling it a "monstrosity," the remedy shifts power from local NIMBYism to state housing mandates, offering a potential template for states seeking to force reluctant municipalities to accommodate growth.

citizen journal based on NYT

November 20 1983: With Cold War tensions peaking, more than 100 million people watch "The Day After" on ABC, a controversial made-for-TV film about a nuclear bomb being dropped on Kansas. President Reagan wrote that it left him "greatly depressed."

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