A man in Ohio competed a triathlon in jean cut offs and came in second. His Bible Study group made him do it because he lost a push up competition. It doesn’t seem very Christian to condemn your friend to that much chafing, now does it?
⚖️ A federal judge rejected the Trump administration’s request to unseal grand jury transcripts in Ghislaine Maxwell’s case, ruling that the materials provide no new insights and that the push for release appeared politically motivated rather than a true bid for transparency.
🚇 London Underground passengers tackled and detained a naked man who exposed himself in front of children, triggering a police investigation into whether their actions constituted assault.
💥 Multiple explosions at U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works near Pittsburgh left two workers dead and at least ten injured, with emergency crews battling fires and searching for those trapped under rubble.
🤝 The U.S. has extended its tariff truce with China for another 90 days, averting a looming escalation in duties as both sides use the pause to recalibrate negotiations ahead of a potential Trump-Xi summit.
🔥 Canada’s 2025 wildfire season is off to an aggressive start with over 7.3 million hectares burned—nearly 78% above the recent five-year average—and more than 470 fires still out of control.
Ukraine will give up the land that has been lost in the war to Russia, willingly or not. That was always how this would end. The Telegraph reports that Ukraine has “softened” and is now willing to give the land up willingly. President Trump said he would try to get back some “oceanfront property.” Key word: Try.
The contested region of Eastern Ukraine has been asking Russia to invade and rescue them from Ukrainian control since at least 2014. They voted overwhelmingly to join Russia in a 2022 referendum vote, largely because the Ukrainian extremist army had been attacking this region for nearly a decade.
When Russia finally did take this land over with a Special Military Operation, Ukraine had no hope of ever winning it back. Its military is decimated and it never had the fortitude to begin with. No amount of American hand-me-downs or European sanctions would ever change that. Ukraine was never going to reclaim the land — or the loyalty — of the people there.
Any serious student of the war understands that the war will only end once Ukraine accepts this. U.S. politicians have signaled that this is acceptable but that means President Zelensky would need to stop the social media grandstanding. According to The Telegraph, he may be willing to — if offered “robust security guarantees in the form of weapons deliveries and a path to NATO membership.”
He probably won’t get that either. More likely, he’ll get a kids’ table version of NATO membership — the political equivalent of the plastic pilot wings they give to “Junior Pilots” on airplanes.
Like Crimea in 2014 or Kosovo in 2008, once the territory is gone in practice, the “dispute” lingers only on paper.
Trump Seizes Control of D.C. Police Amid Dispute Over Crime Numbers
President Trump took federal control of the Washington, D.C. police on Monday using Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, citing “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor” in the capital.
The White House released this Fact Sheet to show that crime is “anything but safe.” Many are saying that these are inflated statistics but it is hard to know for sure because the FBI switched crime reporting methods in 2024.
Under the Biden administration, the FBI began using the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which replaced the old Summary Reporting System. The old system would only record the more serious crime in a given incidence.
For example, if someone was raped and murdered, SRS would log only the murder. NIBRS logs both, which can make totals appear higher.
Similarly, under SRS, a robbery involving several victims counted as a single incident. NIBRS records each victim separately, increasing the number on paper even if the number of events hasn’t changed. In short, year-over-year crime stats are now an apples-to-oranges comparison — easy for both sides to spin.
Still, most people agree D.C. isn’t exactly the postcard image of a “safe and beautiful” city. The question is how to actually rein it in.
There’s precedent for successful aggressive intervention.
In 1919, Governor Calvin Coolidge faced a crisis when Boston police went on strike. He called out the National Guard and took personal control of policing, declaring that “there is no right to strike against the public safety.” His decisive action amid chaos earned him national recognition and helped launch his rise to the vice presidency.
No one’s saying Trump is Coolidge, but the question stands: could federal control actually secure the law-abiding citizens of D.C.? And if this works, could it prompt the Federal Government to do this in other cities like Chicago? And would that spark a constitutional crisis over states’ rights?
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FBI Docs Reveal Schiff Leaked Classified Intel, Hoped to Be Hillary’s CIA Director
Photo credit: Adam Schiff Campaign
The FBI says that California lawmaker Adam Schiff “leaked classified information” in order to get President Trump indicted in 2017. Why would he do this? Because he wanted to be the Director of the CIA if Hillary Clinton won the Presidency and he was “particularly upset” about that, according to recently declassified information.
The FBI released testimony from a Democrat staffer who blew the whistle on Russiagate as far back as 2017. According to FBI summaries, Schiff — then a California Representative — instructed the staffer to leak classified information and assured him he’d be shielded from prosecution under the Constitution’s speech and debate clause.
The staffer said Democrats were feeding the press “impressions” of Russian collusion without evidence, and in some cases, directly leaking classified material. This matches what the Twitter Files showed — Schiff pressuring the platform to “find” Russian bots and threatening them when they couldn’t.
Schiff’s CIA ambition is news. The Clinton campaign never floated his name for an intelligence role, and Schiff has no intelligence background — he’s a career politician.
So the question is: Was he trying to take down Trump out of pure vendetta, or did Hillary Clinton hint at a quid pro quo if they pulled it off?
What’s Trending?
Goosebumps is trending because Disney+ reportedly canceled the show after two seasons. The creators are trying to shop it to another streaming service. Some say it was dropped because it was LGBTQ+-friendly but no one has confirmed that.
Tropical Storm Erin is trending because it could become the first hurricane of the season in the Atlantic Ocean by this weekend.
The Farmers’ Almanac is trending after predicting a “Wild Weather Ride” for the U.S. this winter, with colder-than-normal temperatures, heavy snow in some regions, and big storms in others.
10-20 carats. That is the estimated size of the diamond that Cristiano Ronaldo used to propose to his longtime partner, Georgina Rodriguez, after eight years together. I asked ChatGPT to guess the size and it told me: “That stone looks enormous—judging by proportion alone, it’s likely well over 10 carats, possibly in the 15–20 carat range or higher if it’s a diamond.”
$20. That is how much the new KFC Wings & Wedges Fan Favorite Box costs at KFC. Customers are excited that the restaurant brought back potato wedges and Hot & Spicy Wings.
67,000. That is how many Power Stick deodorants were recalled by the FDA in a Class II recall, one of the more serious categories.
Despite Rumors, SCOTUS Isn’t About to Overturn Gay Marriage
Photo credit: Reuters
Queue the liberal freak out: The Supreme Court is going to overturn gay marriage!
But, no, that’s not the news. The news is that Kim Davis, the former Kentucky clerk that refused to issue marriage certificates to gay couples, has petitioned the Supreme Court to review a lower court decision that found that she had violated the gay couples’ rights.
Her petition argues that government employees shouldn’t be forced to act against their religious beliefs — and, while she’s at it, she’s also asking the justices to overturn gay marriage as a federal right.
It’s very unlikely the Court takes her case. They already denied her 2020 appeal, and nothing about the legal landscape has shifted in her favor since. Support for gay marriage enjoys a 68% approval rating in the U.S., although Republican support for gay marriage has dropped by 14% since 2021.
My read? That drop is because gay rights are increasingly conflated with trans rights — which are not the same thing. The spectacle of naked drag queens in front of kindergartners has hurt the gay rights movement and gay families who want nothing to do with that. Who’d have guessed?
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