Every year on July 4, Americans celebrate their "freedom" on Independence Day—the anniversary of the day the founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence and established the United States as an independent nation in 1776.

As Americans prepare to commemorate Independence Day in 2017—gathering together with friends and family to eat, drink and watch elaborate fireworks displays—they are blindly celebrating a false sense of freedom based on a list of liberties that are far from the current practices of the U.S. government.

Endless Taxes

When schoolchildren in the U.S. learn about the great American Revolution, they are taught about the important role taxes played in the decision to rebel against the British government. American colonists fought back against the unnecessary taxes and tariffs that seemed to increase by the year, and they took a stand against the heinous idea of "taxation without representation."

A 19-year-old has been sentenced to life in prison after previously pleading guilty to plotting terrorist acts in London last year.

Haroon Syed was arrested last year after he tried to purchase weapons online from an undercover agent with an intent to use them in an attack on the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 atrocity. His target list, even though undecided, included a number of potentially busy gatherings in London, such as Oxford Circus, Buckingham Palace or an Elton John concert in Hyde Park.

Syed's defense team claimed the teenager was radicalized by members of the banned terrorist Salafi jihadist group Al-Muhajiroun (ALM).

His brother, Nadir Syed, 24, was handed a life sentence last year after being found guilty of plotting a beheading attack around Remembrance Sunday, in November 2014.

The teenager's lawyers further alleged that Syed had been "entrapped" by undercover MI5 agents, who lured the teenager to reveal his evil plot by posing as potential weapons suppliers.

Sweden is home to some 3,000 violent extremists, the head of the security police has announced. Two-thirds have Islamist motives, while the others belong to far-right and far-left movements.

The numbers were revealed by Säpo chief Anders Thornberg during Almedalen Week, an annual political festival which takes place on the island of Gotland.

Elaborating on the figures, Thornberg stressed that although "few extremists" have the "will and ability" to carry out attacks, they must be found and closely followed.

"It's important that everyone in Sweden takes responsibility to end this trend," he said, as quoted by the Local.

Thornberg's comments come less than three weeks after he announced that the number of militant Islamists in Sweden had grown from "hundreds to thousands."

Best-selling author Robert Kiyosaki, best known for his book "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" recently revealed that he was offered to smuggle drugs for the US government while he was working for the military during the Vietnam war. Kiyosaki mentioned this fact during a recent conference in Bozeman, Montana, and then later clarified his statements in an interview with Millie Weaver.

In the years since the war ended, it has been thoroughly documented that large shipments of heroin were coming from the region in and around Vietnam, and that those shipments were either protected or smuggled directly by individuals working with the US military. During the Vietnam War, the area surrounding Vietnam and Laos was known as "The Golden Triangle," a hotbed for heroin production.

As The Free Thought Project has reported, drugs were transported on military aircraft and brought back to America, where they were eventually sold to the mafia and distributed on the streets. Now the Golden Triangle has taken a back seat to the "Golden Crescent," which refers to the area in and around Afghanistan, a region that the US military is currently occupying.

An FBI vehicle loaded with tactical gear and firearms was stolen at a Chicago gas station after an agent left it "momentarily unattended with the engine running."

At 12:10am Monday, a male suspect purportedly jumped into the 32-year-old FBI agent's 2014 Chevy Equinox and drove away, the Chicago Sun Times reported, according to FBI spokesman John Althen and Chicago Police.

The Chicago Patch reported that a ballistic vest, three firearms - two Glock handguns and one M4 carbine rifle - and SWAT tactical equipment were among the items that were in the stolen car.

Other equipment, including a stun grenade, ammunition and a gas mask, were abandoned in the area and retrieved by police.

The incident was initially reported to the Chicago Police Department who are now working with the FBI on the case, an FBI spokesperson said.

US President Donald Trump has become the latest public figure to pledge his support to the terminally-ill baby Charlie Gard after Pope Francis shared his solidarity with the 10-month-old's parents on Sunday.

Trump waded into the debate after the Pope said the parents should have the right to treat him "until the end."

Charlie's parents lost an appeal in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) last week to bring their child, who has a form of mitochondrial disease, to the US for experimental treatment.

The court upheld an earlier ruling, which said London's Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) should switch off the child's life support machine. Not doing so would only prolong Charlie's suffering, it ruled.

After being "let down" by the ECHR ruling, Charlie's parents Chris Gard and Connie Yates, were dealt another blow when they were told by GOSH they could not bring their son home to die.

On Monday afternoon, the US president tweeted: "If we can help little #CharlieGard, as per our friends in the U.K. and the Pope, we would be delighted to do so."

British jihadist Sally Jones, the world's most wanted female terrorist who traveled to the Middle East to join Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), is now "desperate" to return to the UK, a friend has claimed.

Jones, who was the lead guitarist of an all-girl rock-band in the 1990s, fled her home in Kent to join the terrorist organization in its de facto capital of Raqqa in Syria with her husband Junaid Hussain.

Hussain, 21, was killed in a US drone strike in 2015. He had previously used his youngest son as a human shield. Drone operators seized their opportunity when Hussain appeared to be alone.

The couple reportedly led dozens of IS attacks, and were considered to be the organization's most effective western recruiters and attack planners.

It is understood that Jones, now the most wanted woman in the world after topping the CIA's assassination list, has had trouble finding a new spouse as "she is considered old and ISIS fighters prefer young girls."

She is now pleading to be allowed to return to the UK.

"Revenge and political motives" drove a 54-year-old Tunisian immigrant to plot and execute the murder of an elderly Austrian couple over their alleged sympathy towards a far-right party, local police said.

The chilling double homicide took place in the Austrian town of Linz, and involved a 54-year-old man of Tunisian origin who had lived in the country since 1989, according to police.

In 2011, the man - who has not been named - was falsely sentenced for animal abuse following a complaint by a local activist of Austria's far-right Freedom Party (FPO), an incident which reportedly led to him being stigmatized by the local community.

The murder victims, identified as Hildegard Sch., 85, and her husband Siegfried, 87, lived in the same town and regularly ordered food from a grocery store run by the man's wife.

Fyre Media founder Billy McFarland, who headed the failed Fyre Festival alongside Ja Rule, has been arrested. On Friday, McFarland was charged with one count of wire fraud and potentially faces 20 years in prison.

In a statement, Acting US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Joon H. Kim said:

"McFarland allegedly presented fake documents to induce investors to put over a million dollars into his company and the fiasco called the Fyre Festival.

Writing in one of Mussolini's prisons in the 1930s, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci jotted down the fragments that would become his theory of intellectuals. New classes, like the European bourgeoisie after the Industrial Revolution, he proposed, brought with them their own set of thinkers, which he called "organic intellectuals"—theorists, technicians, and administrators, who became their "functionaries" in a new society. Unlike "traditional intellectuals" who held positions in the old class structure, organic intellectuals helped the bourgeoisie establish its ideas as the invisible, unquestioned conventional wisdom circulating in social institutions.

Today, Gramsci's theory has been largely overlooked in the ongoing debate over the supposed decline of the "public intellectual" in America. Great minds, we are told, no longer captivate the public as they once did, because the university is too insular and academic thinking is too narrow. Such laments frequently cite Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals (1987), which complained about the post-1960s professionalization of academia and waxed nostalgic for the bohemian, "independent" intellectuals of the earlier twentieth century. Writers like the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof attribute this sorry state of affairs to the culture of Ph.D. programs, which, Kristof claims, have glorified "arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience." If academics cannot bring their ideas to a wider readership, these familiar critiques imply, it is because of the academic mindset itself.

In his book The Ideas Industry, the political scientist and foreign policy blogger Daniel W. Drezner broadens the focus to include the conditions in which ideas are formed, funded, and expressed. Describing the public sphere in the language of markets, he argues that three major factors have altered the fortunes of today's intellectuals: the evaporation of public trust in institutions, the polarization of American society, and growing economic inequality. He correctly identifies the last of these as the most important: the extraordinary rise of the American superrich, a class interested in supporting a particular genre of "ideas."