Dee Snider, the 70-year-old frontman who became the voice and face of Twisted Sister for half a century, has resigned from the band. The remaining dates on Twisted Sister's 50th anniversary concert tour are canceled.
The announcement came via a statement on the band's website this week, and it paints a picture that fans never saw coming — though Snider, apparently, has been fighting through it for years.
Snider's representative laid it out plainly:
"A lifetime of legendarily aggressive performing has taken its toll on Dee Snider's body and soul. Unbeknownst to the public (until now) Snider (70) suffers from degenerative arthritis and has had several surgeries over the years just to keep going, able to only perform a few songs at a time in pain."
Several surgeries. Pain through every set. And nobody knew.
But it's not just the joints. The statement revealed that Snider recently learned his heart has also paid the price for decades of full-throttle performing:
"Adding insult to injury, Dee has recently found out the level of intensity he has dedicated to his life's work has taken its toll on his heart as well. He can no longer push the boundaries of rock 'n' roll fury like he has done for decades."
Degenerative arthritis and a compromised heart — either one alone could end a career. Together, they ended Snider's on his own terms, as Breitbart reports.
What stands out here isn't the diagnosis. It's the decision. Snider didn't fade. He didn't limp through a farewell tour on a stool with an acoustic guitar and a teleprompter. He chose the door.
"I don't know of any other way to rock. The idea of slowing down is unacceptable to me. I'd rather walk away than be a shadow of my former self."
There's something deeply respectable about a man who refuses to dilute what he built. In a culture that rewards the endless grift — the reunion cash grab, the nostalgia circuit, the half-speed legacy act — Snider did the harder thing. He stopped.
His representative closed with a borrowed line that landed perfectly:
"In the immortal words of Dirty Harry, 'A man's got to know his limitations.' Sadly, Dee Snider now knows his."
Not everyone saw this coming. Bandmates Jay Jay French and Eddie Ojeda issued their own statement, calling Snider's exit "sudden and unexpected." They said the fate of Twisted Sister will be determined in the coming weeks.
That's a telling detail. Whatever conversations led to Snider's decision, they apparently didn't include the rest of the band until the end. Whether that reflects the severity of his condition, his personality, or both, the result is the same — Twisted Sister's 50th anniversary celebration is over before it finishes.
There's a cultural thread worth pulling here. Snider performed through degenerative arthritis for years. Multiple surgeries. Pain every night. He told no one. He didn't post about it. He didn't launch a GoFundMe or turn his condition into a brand. He just kept showing up until his body wouldn't let him anymore.
That ethos — quiet endurance, work as identity, refusal to be pitied — is increasingly countercultural. We live in an era that rewards vulnerability as performance, where broadcasting your suffering is a form of social currency. Snider did the opposite. He hid the suffering and delivered the work.
You don't have to be a Twisted Sister fan to recognize what that costs a man, or to respect the kind of stubbornness it requires.
At 70, after five decades of performing at an intensity that wrecked his body and strained his heart, Dee Snider refused to give anyone a lesser version of himself. He gave them nothing instead — and somehow, that's the most rock 'n' roll exit imaginable.
Vice President JD Vance sat down for an exclusive interview in his office at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and shared a detail that most parents will find either deeply relatable or slightly nerve-wracking: he and Second Lady Usha Vance still don't have a name picked out for their baby boy, expected later this year. And they're in no rush.
It's a tradition for the couple, apparently. All three of their children — Ewan, 8; Vivek, 6; and Mirabel, 4 — arrived nameless and left the hospital with one.
"We've talked about a few names. We're working on it, but, you know, with all three of our kids, we actually didn't settle on their names until after they were born, which is, I think, pretty unusual."
Unusual is one word for it. In an era of gender-reveal pyrotechnics and nursery themes announced before the second trimester, the Vances are doing something almost countercultural: waiting to meet their child before deciding what to call him.
The couple announced in January that they were expecting a boy, their fourth child. Usha Vance, 40, carries a quiet distinction with the pregnancy: she is the first vice president's wife to be expecting since Ellen Colfax gave birth in April 1870, during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant. That's over 150 years between pregnancies in the Naval Observatory household — a gap that says something about the age at which most vice presidents serve, as Daily Mail reports.
The Vances married in 2014 after meeting at Yale Law School, where they attended the same classes. Friends and even a former law school professor reportedly noted that Vance was visibly "lovesick" around Usha. He has described his feelings during their dating phase as "overwhelming." Their eldest son arrived in 2017, and the family has grown steadily since.
"Most people choose a name. Well, before the kid is born. I think Usha and I have never just found a name where it's like, 'Alright, this is what we want to name our kid.' And so we always wait to meet them and settle on the names from there."
Something is appealing about that. A willingness to let the child be a person before becoming a label.
This isn't a policy article. There's no bill to dissect, no agency to scrutinize. But it's worth pausing on what it means to have a young, growing family in the vice president's residence — something that hasn't happened in modern memory.
Vance grew up in working-class Ohio. Usha's parents are Indian immigrants. They built a life together that now includes three kids, a fourth on the way, and the second-highest office in the country. Before his time as vice president, Vance previously split his time between Washington and the family's home in Cincinnati during his tenure as a Republican senator. The family knows what it means to balance public life with raising children.
In a political culture that treats family values as a slogan, the Vances are living them — visibly, without performance. No elaborate announcement campaign for the baby name. No focus-grouped reveal. Just two parents who want to look at their son before they decide what to call him.
Baby number four arrives later this year. The name arrives when it's ready.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard torched Sen. Mark Warner on Saturday, posting a detailed rebuttal on X after the Virginia Democrat accused her of burying a classified whistleblower complaint filed against her last May. Gabbard didn't mince words—she called Warner a liar and laid out a timeline she says exonerates her office entirely.
The complaint, filed by an unnamed U.S. intelligence official eight months ago, alleges wrongdoing on the part of Gabbard. Neither the contents nor the specific allegations have been revealed. What has been revealed is a political fight over process—specifically, how long the complaint sat before reaching Congress and who bears responsibility for the delay.
Warner says the law required Congress to receive the complaint within 21 days. Gabbard says that the requirement doesn't apply here. One of them is banking on the public not reading the fine print.
Gabbard's Saturday post was lengthy, specific, and combative. She went after Warner by name and accused him of coordinating with the media to mislead the public.
"Senator Mark Warner and his friends in the Propaganda Media have repeatedly lied to the American people that I or the ODNI 'hid' a whistleblower complaint in a safe for eight months. This is a blatant lie."
She then zeroed in on the custody chain—a detail Warner's framing conveniently omits. The complaint wasn't sitting in Gabbard's desk drawer. According to Gabbard, it was secured by Biden-era IC Inspector General Tamara Johnson, who held possession of it for months before her successor, Inspector General Chris Fox, continued the same protocols, as Fox News reports.
"I am not now, nor have I ever been, in possession or control of the Whistleblower's complaint, so I obviously could not have 'hidden' it in a safe. Biden-era IC Inspector General Tamara Johnson was in possession of and responsible for securing the complaint for months."
That's a significant point. If the complaint spent the bulk of its life in the hands of a Biden-appointed inspector general, the "Gabbard buried it" narrative requires some creative rewriting of the calendar.
Warner's accusation rests on a specific legal claim: that the statute required the complaint to reach Congress within 21 days of filing. Gabbard's rebuttal rests on an equally specific legal distinction—one that matters far more than Warner seems to want anyone to notice.
"The '21 day' requirement that Senator Warner alleges I did not comply with, only applies when a complaint is determined by the Inspector General to be both urgent AND apparently credible. That was NOT the case here."
An inspector general representative told the Wall Street Journal that it had determined some of the allegations in the complaint weren't credible, while it hasn't decided on others. If the complaint failed the credibility threshold, the 21-day clock never started. Warner's entire legal argument collapses into a talking point.
Gabbard said she was first notified by Chris Fox on December 4 that she needed to provide security guidance on how to share the complaint with Congress. She wrote that she took immediate action and that the IC Inspector General shared the complaint and referenced intelligence with relevant members of Congress last week. Fox hand-delivered it to the Gang of 8.
Gabbard offered Warner a choice:
Either he knows these facts and is intentionally lying to the American people, or he doesn't have a clue how these things work and is therefore not qualified to be in the U.S. Senate.
Both options are unflattering. Neither is implausible.
Warner, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told NPR on Thursday that the situation was straightforward:
"The law is clear."
He added that the complaint was required to be sent to Congress within 21 days of its filing and said he believed it was an effort to bury the whistleblower complaint. His office told Fox News Digital that Gabbard's post was an "inaccurate attack that's entirely on brand for someone who has already and repeatedly proven she's unqualified to serve as DNI."
Notice what's missing from Warner's response: any engagement with Gabbard's actual legal argument. She cited the credibility threshold. He repeated, "The law is clear." She named the Biden-era inspector general who held the complaint for months. He said she buried it. The accusation doesn't change no matter how many times the defense is stated—which tells you everything about whether this is a legal dispute or a political operation.
Sen. Tom Cotton reviewed the complaint and the inspector general's handling of it, then posted his assessment on X Thursday:
"I agree with both inspectors general who have evaluated the matter: the complaint is not credible and the inspectors general and the DNI took the necessary steps to ensure the material has handled and transmitted appropriately in accordance with law."
Cotton didn't stop there. He framed the entire episode as part of a broader pattern—one that should sound familiar to anyone who watched the last decade of Washington politics.
"To be frank, it seems like just another effort by the president's critics in and out of government to undermine policies that they don't like; it's definitely not credible allegations of waste, fraud, or abuse."
Cotton's characterization carries weight here. He's a Republican on the intelligence committee who has actually read the classified material. Warner has read it too—but Warner's public statements focus on process timelines, not the substance of what's in the complaint. That asymmetry is telling.
One U.S. official told the Wall Street Journal that disclosing the complaint's contents could cause "grave damage to national security." That's a detail worth sitting with. The same complaint Democrats are using to attack Gabbard is apparently so sensitive that its mere disclosure would be dangerous—and yet the political pressure campaign to publicize the dispute around it rolls forward without hesitation.
This is the contradiction at the heart of Warner's gambit. He wants maximum political damage from a complaint whose contents he can't discuss, filed by a person he can't name, about allegations an inspector general has partly deemed not credible. The weapon isn't the complaint itself. It's the accusation that it was hidden.
The whistleblower's lawyer accused Gabbard's office of slow-walking the complaint. Gabbard's office called the accusation "baseless and politically motivated."
Washington has a well-worn formula for this kind of fight. A classified complaint surfaces through media leaks. The substance remains hidden—conveniently immune to public scrutiny—while the process debate dominates headlines. The accused can't fully defend herself without compromising classified material. The accuser gets to imply the worst while risking nothing.
Gabbard, to her credit, engaged on the specifics. She named the Biden-era inspector general who held the complaint. She cited the legal standard Warner ignored. She provided a timeline with dates. Warner responded with a sentence fragment and a character attack.
The question isn't whether the complaint was in a safe for eight months. Everyone agrees it was. The question is whether Gabbard put it there—or whether a Biden appointee did, following standard protocol for classified material that didn't meet the credibility bar for expedited congressional review.
Warner knows the answer. He's counting on everyone else not to ask the question.
President Trump proclaimed on Friday, opening the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument to commercial fishing, revoking prohibitions that had locked American fishermen out of nearly 5,000 square miles of Atlantic waters off the New England coast.
The White House branded the move part of Trump's "America First Fishing Policy" — a direct reversal of restrictions first imposed by Barack Obama in 2016 and reinstated by Joe Biden after Trump lifted them during his first term.
Three presidential terms. Three reversals. The 4,913-square-mile monument has become a regulatory ping-pong ball, and the people who actually make their living on the water have paid the price every time the pendulum swings toward Washington's environmental bureaucracy.
The White House made a straightforward argument: the fishing ban was never necessary in the first place.
"Prohibiting commercial fishing is not necessary for the proper care and management of the Monument, as many fish species are highly migratory, not unique to the area, and are already protected through existing laws, such as the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act."
That last point matters more than environmentalists want to admit. The Magnuson-Stevens Act is one of the most successful fishery management laws in the world. It already governs catch limits, habitat protections, and sustainability standards across U.S. waters. Layering a blanket commercial fishing ban on top of it wasn't science — it was symbolism, as Breitbart reports.
Obama established the monument in 2016, describing it as a way to protect vulnerable undersea corals and ecosystems. The timing — the final year of his presidency — was characteristic of an administration that loved using executive authority to lock up natural resources on its way out the door. Biden's restoration of the ban followed the same instinct: regulate first, ask fishermen later.
The White House statement framed the proclamation in broader economic terms:
"President Trump is committed to removing unnecessary restrictions on American fishermen in order to strengthen the U.S. economy, support coastal communities, and restore fairness to an industry disadvantaged by overregulation and unfair foreign competition."
John Williams, president and owner of the Atlantic Red Crab Company in New Bedford, Massachusetts, put it plainly to the Associated Press:
"We deserve to be rewarded, not penalized. We're demonstrating that we can fish sustainably and continue to harvest on a sustainable level in perpetuity."
Williams represents the kind of working Americans who rarely get a seat at the table when Washington decides how to manage the ocean. New England's fishing communities are not abstract stakeholders in a policy debate. They are families, businesses, and towns whose economic survival depends on access to the waters their industry has worked for generations.
The conservation establishment treats commercial fishermen as the problem. The fishermen themselves — the ones who depend on healthy fish stocks for their livelihoods — understand sustainability better than most of the advocates who lobby against them from offices hundreds of miles inland.
Gib Brogan, fisheries campaign director at the environmental group Oceana, offered the predictable counter to the Associated Press:
"The Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument was created to provide strong protections for the wide range of marine life that live in these unique habitats."
Note what's missing from that statement: any specific claim that commercial fishing in the monument area has caused measurable ecological harm. Brogan describes why the monument was created. He doesn't demonstrate that the fishing ban achieved anything that the Magnuson-Stevens Act couldn't.
This is the pattern with environmental opposition to resource access. The argument is always about intention — what the policy was "created to" do — never about whether the restriction actually accomplished more than existing law. It's preservation by declaration, where drawing a line on a map substitutes for evidence-based management.
When the federal government closes off nearly 5,000 square miles of ocean to commercial fishing without demonstrating that existing regulations are inadequate, it isn't protecting the environment. It's choosing environmentalist aesthetics over the livelihoods of coastal Americans. The fish in that monument are highly migratory — they don't respect the boundaries Obama drew. But the fishermen who lost access to those waters felt every mile of them.
Trump announced the move on Truth Social, calling it:
"another BIG WIN for Maine, and all of New England."
He also aimed at the whiplash the industry has endured:
"In my first term, I reversed the prohibitions placed on commercial fishing, but Joe Biden, or whoever was using the AUTOPEN, foolishly reinstated them. Since Day One, I have taken historic action to end these disastrous policies."
The broader story here extends well beyond one marine monument. For decades, the progressive approach to conservation has followed a simple formula: restrict access, claim moral authority, and force the people who actually work the land and sea to prove they deserve permission to keep doing what they've always done.
It's a framework that treats American industry as guilty until proven innocent — and even then, the restrictions rarely come off. Obama imposed the ban. Trump lifted it. Biden reimposed it. The only constant was uncertainty for the fishermen caught in the middle.
The White House statement connected the proclamation to broader economic goals:
"By revoking the Obama-Biden restrictions, President Trump's proclamation supports New England's fishing communities, in turn fostering economic growth and job creation in coastal regions."
Coastal New England doesn't need another layer of federal protection from an industry that already operates under one of the world's most stringent fishery management frameworks. It needs Washington to stop treating working Americans as collateral damage in a conservation branding exercise.
The monument is open. The fishermen can fish. And the waters will be just fine — managed, as they already were, by the law.
One week after 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie vanished from her home in the Catalina Foothills outside Tucson, Arizona, the Pima County Sheriff's Office has not identified a single suspect, a single person of interest, or a single credible lead — at least none it's willing to share. What it has produced is a cascading series of investigative missteps that have left the Guthrie family desperate and the public questioning whether the department tasked with finding her is up to the job.
FBI agents returned to Nancy's home on Friday for what Fox News infrared footage confirmed was the third time agents combed the residence. It was the fourth time crime scene tape had been put up and torn down from the property. During this latest search, investigators seized a vehicle from the garage and recovered a camera from the roof — a camera that had seemingly been missed in every previous sweep.
Three searches of a house before you find the camera on the roof. Let that sit for a moment.
Sheriff Chris Nanos, who has led Pima County's law enforcement since 2020, has spent the week oscillating between overstatement and retreat. On Monday, he told NBC News that Nancy had been "abducted" and "taken from her bed." By Tuesday, he was walking it back, clarifying he'd been speaking figuratively and that no evidence supported the claim she was literally taken from her bed. His explanation landed somewhere between confession and complaint:
"Sometimes I'm speaking in generalities and ... and ... I'm not used to everybody hanging on to my words and then trying to hold me accountable for what I say. But I understand."
A county sheriff — the top law enforcement official in a jurisdiction investigating the disappearance of an elderly woman — is not used to people holding him accountable for what he says. During an active missing persons case. On national television, as Daily Mail reports.
By Thursday's press conference, Nanos had abandoned even the pretense of projecting competence. Asked about potential suspects and motives, he offered this:
"My guesswork is as good as yours."
The Tucson Sentinel published an op-ed on Wednesday that captured the local mood, describing Nanos's Tuesday press appearance as a performance whose answers could be summed up with:
"For the most part his answers were exasperated statements that could be summed up with a Scooby Doo 'Ruh ROH...'"
Nancy was reported missing shortly after noon on Sunday, February 1. Police arrived at her home by 12:15 PM. The department's fixed-wing Cessna aircraft — a basic tool for a search operation in a rural area — did not get airborne until around 5:00 PM. That's roughly five hours sitting on the tarmac while the trail went cold.
Matt Heinz, a member of the Pima County Board of Supervisors, told the Daily Mail what anyone with common sense already understood:
"The initial few hours of any kind of search like this are absolutely crucial."
The failure to deploy the aircraft wasn't just a scheduling hiccup. Sergeant Aaron Cross, president of the Pima County Sheriff's Deputies Association, said trained aviators who could have crewed the Cessna had been transferred out of the Air Operations Unit in recent weeks. Kathleen Winn, the Pima County Republican Party Chairwoman, echoed that claim. Sources close to the department blamed Nanos directly for the staffing shortage that left no qualified pilots available when it mattered most.
So the plane existed. The need was obvious. The personnel had been moved. And an 84-year-old woman's best chance at a rapid aerial search evaporated on the tarmac.
The crime scene tape going up and down four times at the same residence in less than a week isn't just embarrassing optics — it raises real questions about the chain of custody and evidentiary integrity. When reporters pressed Nanos on whether the repeated sealing and unsealing could create problems in a future prosecution, his response was dismissive:
"I'll let the court worry about it. We follow the rules of law."
That's a remarkable posture for the lead agency on the case. Any competent defense attorney watching this investigation unfold is already taking notes. If a suspect is ever identified — a significant "if" at this point — the prosecution will have to explain why the primary crime scene was treated like a revolving door. Nanos is letting the court worry about it. The court may have plenty to worry about.
The Guthrie family has released multiple videos pleading for Nancy's safe return. Whoever is responsible for her disappearance has made no contact with the family — no ransom demand, no communication of any kind. Nancy's daughter, Savannah Guthrie, has been identified among the family members grappling with an investigation that produces more questions than answers with each passing day.
The circumstances of Nancy's disappearance remain stubbornly unclear. She vanished during the early morning hours of February 1 from her home in the Catalina Foothills, a rural stretch of Tucson. Who reported her missing has not been disclosed. How she was taken — or whether she left under other circumstances — is unknown. Nanos himself admitted his earlier characterization of an abduction from her bed was figurative, not factual.
Nanos acknowledged Thursday that he should have called in the FBI and regional teams sooner. That admission, while welcome, doesn't explain why basic investigative instincts failed in real time. Deploying aerial search assets in a rural area isn't an advanced technique — it's standard procedure. Securing a crime scene once and keeping it secured isn't a luxury — it's the baseline. Finding a camera mounted on the roof of the subject's home shouldn't require three separate searches.
Sources within Nanos's own department told the Daily Mail he made critical mistakes in the first hours of the investigation. That's not political opposition talking. That's his own people.
This case has drawn overwhelming national media attention, and Nanos conceded that the scrutiny is entirely new to him. That much is obvious. The question isn't whether the sheriff is uncomfortable with cameras. The question is whether his department can find an 84-year-old woman who vanished from her home a week ago.
As of Saturday afternoon, the answer remained no.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem spent the past week doing something her critics apparently find intolerable: her job. While Congress fumbled through a partial government shutdown largely over how to fund her department, while Minneapolis smoldered from anti-ICE unrest, and while House Democrats staged "shadow hearings" to build an impeachment case against her, Noem was on a four-day swing through Mississippi, Texas, Arizona, and North Dakota — inspecting storm damage, meeting with Border Patrol agents, and standing along the border wall in Nogales to deliver a message that has clearly rattled the establishment.
The message: the border is more secure than it has been in decades, deportations are running at historic levels, and she isn't going anywhere.
In an interview with Fox News Digital conducted along the border wall in Nogales, Arizona, Noem laid out the deportation figures that define her tenure so far. The topline: over 3 million people removed from the country since the current administration took office. That breaks down into roughly 700,000 detained and physically removed, with over 2.3 million self-deporting — many of them incentivized by a program offering a $2,600 payment and a flight home.
"You know, you send the message around the world that America is now going to be enforcing its laws and making sure that if you're in this country illegally, that you should go home, and we've been incentivizing that through a $2,600 payment and a flight."
The self-deportation wave is the part of this story that rarely gets covered. Enforcement isn't just about agents and handcuffs — it's about credibility. When people around the world believe the United States will actually enforce its immigration laws, millions make the rational decision to leave voluntarily. That is deterrence working exactly as intended, as Fox News reports.
For context, DHS says more illegal immigrants crossed the southern border in a single average month under former President Biden than have crossed during Noem's entire tenure. That comparison alone should end most of the arguments against the current enforcement policy. It won't, of course, but it should.
The most politically charged element surrounding Noem right now isn't the border — it's Minneapolis. Operation Metro Surge, launched primarily in response to a fraud scheme involving members of the Somali community in Minnesota, has resulted in an estimated 4,000 criminal illegal immigrant apprehensions since the beginning of the year. Minneapolis, a self-declared sanctuary city where local authorities offer only minimal cooperation to federal immigration officers, became the epicenter of violent clashes between agitators and federal agents.
Two U.S. citizens — Renee Good and Alex Pretti — were killed by federal immigration agents during the unrest. Noem labeled both "domestic terrorists," saying their deaths resulted from impeding law enforcement operations. The details of the specific incidents remain scarce, but the political fallout has been immediate. A Quinnipiac University survey taken January 29 through February 2 found that 58% of respondents believe Noem shouldn't have her job.
The poll number is real. The political calculation behind it is also real — and worth examining. Democrats and media outlets have spent weeks framing the Minneapolis operations as federal overreach. They have held shadow impeachment hearings. They have demanded Noem's resignation. What they have not done is grapple with the underlying question: what is a government supposed to do when a sanctuary city shelters thousands of criminal illegal immigrants and local leaders refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement?
The answer, apparently, is nothing. Enforce the law, and you're an authoritarian. Don't enforce the law and — well, Democrats never seem to face that second scenario, because they've built a political framework where non-enforcement is the default and any deviation from it is a scandal.
President Trump has repeatedly backed Noem in public — in January and again at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, where he addressed calls for her removal directly. A reporter asked whether he intended to relieve her of her position.
"Why would I do that? We have the strongest border in the history of our country."
He followed that with a claim about crime statistics:
"We have the best crime numbers we've ever had going back to the year 1900. That's 125 years. We have the lowest crime numbers."
Trump also placed border czar Tom Homan — a man who served as ICE director during Trump's first term and ran Enforcement and Removal Operations under Obama — in command of the Minneapolis situation. Noem credited Homan with bringing local Minneapolis leaders to the negotiating table.
Some unnamed reports have tried to manufacture a rivalry narrative between Homan and Noem. Nothing in the public record supports it. Both are executing a shared mandate, and the president has shown no hesitation in deploying them in complementary roles.
The partial government shutdown consumed Washington's attention during Noem's trip. Congress reached a House agreement to fund DHS through February 13 — a temporary patch, not a solution. Noem used the moment to remind Americans that ICE is only one piece of a sprawling department.
"Only 11% of the DHS budget is ICE. The rest of it is FEMA, TSA, that runs our security checkpoints at our airports."
"It is also the Coast Guard, which is absolutely critical to our maritime protection and also partnering with the Department of War."
She ticked through the rest — weapons of mass destruction programs, science and technology, national labs, cybersecurity — making the point that holding DHS funding hostage over disagreements about immigration enforcement puts far more at risk than ICE operations. ICE is one of 23 agencies under her authority. Shutting down the department to protest deportations means grounding Coast Guard operations, degrading airport security, and delaying disaster relief.
"We have a lot of responsibilities that we absolutely need to fund in order to do them properly. So, I'm hopeful that Congress will recognize that and pass this bill quickly."
It's a revealing dynamic. Democrats who claim to care about government services are willing to defund all of them to stop the one they don't like.
Between the policy fights and the political firestorms, one detail from Noem's trip stands out: she hosted and personally served a barbecue dinner for Border Patrol agents in Arizona, and a separate dinner inside a Tucson hotel for CBP officers. These aren't photo ops that generate viral clips. They're the kind of unglamorous leadership gestures that matter to the people doing dangerous, thankless work along the border — work made harder by a political class that alternately ignores them and vilifies them.
An unnamed GOP insider told Fox News Digital that Noem's time as governor of South Dakota didn't prepare her for one of the most challenging roles in the presidential cabinet. Maybe. Or maybe the critics are measuring preparation by Washington standards, which tend to reward people who manage crises with press releases rather than plane tickets.
Noem's approach this week was simple: show up where the problems are, meet the people doing the work, and make your case to the camera with a border wall behind you instead of a podium. It's not subtle. It doesn't need to be.
Noem is scheduled to testify before a House committee next month. House Democrats will treat it as a prosecution. The impeachment shadow hearings signal where they intend to take this. The 58% disapproval number from Quinnipiac will be cited endlessly.
But here is what the disapproval crowd has to answer for: the border under Biden was an open wound. Thousands of people died in the crossing. Cartels ran human trafficking operations with near impunity. Communities across America absorbed the consequences of a federal government that refused to enforce its own laws. Noem and Homan inherited that wreckage and have overseen the removal of over 3 million people from the country in a matter of months.
As Noem put it, standing along the wall:
"What people need to remember is that Democrat policies were destroying our country. And President Trump came in and said, 'I'm going to protect the American people. It's not going to happen anymore.'"
"Since [the Biden administration], thousands of people's lives have been saved just here, just right here on the border, because those migrants are not victimized anymore."
That's the argument the left cannot afford to engage honestly. So they poll-test disapproval numbers and hold shadow hearings instead.
The border wall behind Noem in Nogales isn't just a physical barrier. It's the line between a country that enforces its laws and one that pretends they don't exist. For now, the woman standing in front of it shows no interest in stepping aside.
An NYPD narcotics sergeant has been convicted of second-degree manslaughter after he hurled a cooler filled with drinks at a fleeing drug suspect, killing the man when he crashed his motorized scooter and slammed into a tree. Sgt. Erik Duran, 38, now faces up to 15 years in prison.
Judge Guy Mitchell delivered the verdict on Friday in Bronx criminal court following a bench trial — no jury, just a judge weighing the facts alone. The conviction makes Duran the first NYPD officer in years to be tried for killing someone while on duty. He has already been dismissed from the department.
Sentencing is scheduled for March 19.
On August 23, 2023, authorities say 30-year-old Eric Duprey sold drugs to an undercover officer in the Bronx and then fled the scene on a motorized scooter. Duran, part of the narcotics unit conducting the operation, grabbed a nearby red cooler packed with ice, water, and sodas, and threw it at Duprey as he rode away.
Duprey — who was not wearing a helmet — lost control of the scooter, crashed into a tree, landed on the pavement, and slid beneath a parked car. Prosecutors said he sustained fatal head injuries and died almost instantaneously.
Security footage captured Duran grabbing and hurling the cooler.
Duran testified in his own defense this week, telling the court he acted in a split-second to protect himself and fellow officers from the oncoming scooter:
"He was gonna crash into us. I didn't have time. All I had time for was to try again to stop or to try to get him to change directions. That's all I had the time to think of."
He also said he immediately tried to render aid after seeing the extent of Duprey's injuries. The judge wasn't persuaded. Mitchell convicted Duran of second-degree manslaughter while dismissing the assault charge, finding that prosecutors had failed to show Duran intended to hurt Duprey. He did not deliver a verdict on the lesser criminally negligent homicide charge, having already found Duran guilty on the more serious count, as NY 1 reports.
Mitchell's statement from the bench was pointed:
"The fact that the defendant is a police officer has no bearing. He's a person and will be treated as any other defendant."
On its face, this sounds like equal justice. In practice, it strips away the entire context of why Duran was on that street in the first place — executing a narcotics operation against a man who had just sold drugs to an undercover officer and was actively fleeing. Duran didn't wander into a confrontation. He was doing the job the city asked him to do.
That doesn't automatically excuse the cooler throw. But to say the badge "has no bearing" is to pretend that policing doesn't involve split-second decisions in chaotic, dangerous environments that civilians never face. A construction worker who throws a cooler in a parking lot dispute and a narcotics officer trying to stop a fleeing suspect are not in the same situation, no matter how badly the court wants to flatten the distinction.
The Sergeants Benevolent Association called the conviction a "miscarriage of justice" and said it still believes Duran was innocent. In a statement, the union laid out what many officers across the city are likely thinking:
"The verdict rendered by Judge Mitchell is clearly against the weight of the credible evidence. Verdicts such as this send a terrible message to hard-working cops: should you use force to defend yourself, your fellow police officers or the citizens of the City, no matter how justified your actions, you risk criminal charges and conviction."
That message will land whether city leaders want it to or not. Officers already working in a department demoralized by years of anti-police rhetoric, progressive prosecution, and revolving-door criminal justice now watch a colleague face 15 years for a decision made in seconds during an active narcotics bust. The calculus for every cop in New York just shifted — not toward better policing, but toward less policing. Toward hesitation. Toward doing nothing and letting the suspect ride away.
That's the incentive structure this conviction creates, regardless of whether it was legally sound.
The case was prosecuted by the office of State Attorney General Letitia James, who stated after the verdict:
"Though it cannot return Eric to his loved ones, today's decision gives justice to his memory."
James has built her career on high-profile prosecutions with political resonance. Her office taking the lead here — rather than the local district attorney — is itself a statement about the kind of cases Albany wants to pursue. Prosecuting an NYPD officer for a death that occurred during a drug bust against a suspect who was actively fleeing fits neatly into a progressive framework where police force is treated as inherently suspect and criminal suspects are treated as inherently sympathetic.
Eric Duprey's death is a tragedy. A 30-year-old man is dead. His wife, Orlyanis Velez, spoke outside the courthouse:
"I was waiting for justice just like everybody, but when the moment happens, you can't believe it's happening. It's been a lot of time. These people been killing citizens, been killing everybody. They don't give no reason."
Her grief is real. But the broader narrative her words were woven into — that police officers are systematically "killing citizens" without reason — is the same narrative that has driven anti-police policy in New York for years. Duprey was not stopped at random. He was not an innocent bystander. He had, according to authorities, just completed a drug sale to an undercover officer and was fleeing a narcotics operation.
None of that means he deserved to die. But the refusal to acknowledge even the basic circumstances of the encounter — a drug deal, a flight from law enforcement, a split-second response — tells you everything about how this case will be used politically.
The NYPD confirmed Duran's dismissal in a statement citing New York State Public Officers Law:
"Pursuant to New York State Public Officers Law, a public officer who is convicted of a felony automatically ceases to hold that position."
Automatic. No review, no appeal within the department. A felony conviction and the career is over by operation of law. Duran's attorney and police union representatives had not responded to requests for comment on potential appeals at the time of reporting.
Duran faces sentencing on March 19, where a judge will decide how many of those 15 possible years he'll serve. The decision will be watched closely — not just by Duran's family, but by every officer in the NYPD, weighing whether the risks of proactive policing are still worth taking.
New York asked its officers to get drugs off the street. One of them did, and now he's a felon. The next officer won't throw a cooler. He also won't chase the suspect. He'll stand there, watch the scooter disappear, and file a report that nobody reads.
That's the city Letitia James is building.
Nancy Pelosi is throwing her weight behind Jack Schlossberg, the 32-year-old grandson of President John F. Kennedy, in the Democratic primary for New York's 12th Congressional District. The 85-year-old former House Speaker's endorsement lands in a crowded field vying for the Manhattan seat vacated by Rep. Jerold Nadler, who announced his retirement after more than three decades in Congress.
The district stretches from Union Square to the Upper West Side and Upper East Side — some of the most expensive real estate in America, populated by some of the most reliably Democratic voters in the country. And yet the primary way to represent them has turned into something genuinely entertaining.
Pelosi's statement, obtained by The Post, was prepared by Schlossberg's own campaign — a detail worth pausing on. The statement highlights Schlossberg's:
The language reads less like an independent endorsement and more like a press release the candidate wrote about himself and handed to a famous person to sign. That's not unusual in politics, but it tells you something about how much of this race runs on brand rather than substance, as New York Post reports.
Pelosi served in Congress alongside several members of the Kennedy family — the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, former Rep. Patrick Kennedy, former Rep. Joe Kennedy, and former Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III. The dynasty connection runs deep, and Pelosi is betting it still means something to Manhattan Democrats.
Schlossberg has been branded a "nepo baby" since launching his run, and it's not hard to see why. His mother is Caroline Kennedy, former U.S. ambassador to Japan and Australia. His political résumé consists largely of being a political commentator and delivering a speech at the Democratic National Convention. He is 32 years old, running for a seat held for decades by a 78-year-old career legislator, in a district where name recognition is currency.
The Kennedy name is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Strip it away, and you have a young commentator with no legislative record, backed by an octogenarian former Speaker, competing in a primary against candidates who have actually held office or built careers outside their family trees.
Among the other contenders: state Assemblyman Micah Lasher, former journalist Jami Floyd, and — in one of the more surreal entries — George Conway, described as a former Republican and the ex-husband of former Trump White House counselor Kellyanne Conway. Manhattan Democrats now get to choose between a Kennedy scion, a man whose chief public identity for years was opposing his own wife's boss, and an assemblyman who probably wonders how he ended up as the boring option.
The most interesting subplot isn't the primary itself — it's the family fracture the campaign spotlights. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Schlossberg's cousin, serves as Health and Human Services Secretary. Schlossberg called him:
"A rabid dog."
The White House pushed back on the remark. So here is the Kennedy family in 2026: one member running for Congress as a Democrat with Pelosi's blessing, another serving in a Republican administration, and the candidate publicly savaging his own relative to prove his partisan bona fides.
This is what happens when a political dynasty outlives its unifying figure. The Kennedys no longer represent a coherent political vision. They represent a last name that different family members cash in from opposite sides of the aisle. Schlossberg needs Democratic voters to see him as the "real" Kennedy — the one who stayed loyal to the party — while RFK Jr. charts his own course entirely. The family Christmas must be something.
Schlossberg's family also suffered a genuine tragedy in late December when his sister, Tatiana Schlossberg, died at age 35 from leukemia. That loss is real and deserves recognition regardless of political disagreement.
The NY-12 primary is a miniature portrait of the modern Democratic Party. The establishment — embodied by Pelosi — rallies behind legacy and celebrity. The progressive base hasn't coalesced around an alternative. And the field is cluttered with candidates whose qualifications range from "state legislator" to "famous last name" to "divorced a Republican."
For conservatives watching from the outside, the race offers a useful reminder: Democrats don't run on policy in districts where policy differences between candidates are negligible. They run on pedigree, endorsements, and who can most convincingly perform outrage at the other side. Schlossberg's signature policy contribution so far is calling his own cousin a rabid dog.
Pelosi's endorsement won't decide this race, but it reveals who the Democratic establishment wants carrying the torch — someone young, photogenic, and named Kennedy. Whether Manhattan voters want the same thing, or whether they've finally grown tired of dynasties, is the only interesting question left.
The Kennedys once inspired a generation. Now they're splitting Thanksgiving over cabinet appointments.
A wind turbine at the University of Minnesota's Eolos Wind Energy Research Field Station in Dakota County struck and killed a bald eagle, dismembering the bird into three pieces. The lower torso and tail were discovered first. The head and wings weren't found until over a month later.
Fox News reported that the U.S. Department of the Interior issued a violation notice in January, citing the university for breaking the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act by killing the eagle without an incidental take permit. The proposed civil penalty: $14,536. The turbine's construction was funded by a $7.9 million grant from the Obama Department of Energy, awarded in 2010.
The grant traces back to one of Barack Obama's first major legislative achievements — the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which appropriated roughly $90 billion to, as a Center for Climate and Energy Solutions report put it, "lay the foundation for a clean energy economy of the future." The Department of Energy received $35.2 billion of that pot.
Some foundation.
DOI spokesperson Matthew Middleton made the administration's position clear in comments to Fox News Digital. Under President Trump and Secretary Burgum, he said, the department:
"is enforcing the law to protect these iconic birds and demand accountability from an industry that has jeopardized these protected species."
Middleton didn't mince words about what that eagle represented — or what the wind industry has treated it as:
"America's bald eagles are a national treasure, not collateral damage for costly wind experiments. Wind companies will no longer get a free pass as this administration safeguards bald eagles and advances energy policies that prioritize affordability and strengthen America's economy."
The University of Minnesota, for its part, offered all the urgency of a faculty senate subcommittee. A university spokesperson confirmed the school had received the DOI's notice and said it is "currently under review." No substantive response. No explanation. No accountability. Just bureaucratic stalling dressed up as process.
The DOI's violation notice also revealed that the university was in the process of testing its collision detection sensors when the incident occurred. The sensors were supposed to prevent exactly this. The eagle died anyway — torn apart by the very machine that was allegedly being calibrated to protect it.
The University of Minnesota isn't alone. In January, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finalized fines totaling $32,340 against Ørsted Onshore North America for two bald eagles killed by Ørsted turbines — one in Nebraska, one in Illinois.
Fox News Digital had reported on those proposed fines months earlier. The January notice of violation against the university does not indicate it has since obtained an incidental take permit, and the Fish and Wildlife Service sent a letter urging the school to reassess the turbine's danger to eagles and consider applying for a long-term permit.
That the federal government has to write a university suggesting it may think about whether its giant spinning blades pose a threat to birds tells you everything about how seriously the green energy sector has taken wildlife protections.
For years, the wind industry operated under a kind of moral immunity. If your energy source carried the "clean" label, regulators looked the other way. Eagles died. Enforcement languished.
The tradeoff was always implicit: the climate mission mattered more than the birds. Nobody in Washington wanted to be the person who slowed down a wind farm to save a raptor — not when there were press conferences to hold and subsidies to distribute.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has been one of the most direct voices on the broader dysfunction behind projects like the Eolos facility. Appearing on Jesse Watters Primetime in June, Burgum called out the entire ideological apparatus propping up these ventures:
"When you think about the green new scam, it was pro-China, and it's anti-American, and it's also unaffordable and unreliable."
Burgum has also characterized solar and wind projects as "destabilizing our grid and driving up prices." That's not rhetoric — it's a description of what ratepayers across the country experience every time an unreliable energy source demands backup from the natural gas plants that were supposed to be retired.
The Eolos facility is a case study in how this works. Billions in taxpayer dollars flow through federal legislation into grants. Those grants fund research stations and experimental turbines. The turbines kill protected wildlife. The operators shrug. And the taxpayer foots the bill twice — once for the construction, and again when the fines come due at a public university funded by state dollars.
Nobody in the Obama administration's Department of Energy asked whether a $7.9 million wind turbine in Dakota County might pose a risk to bald eagles. Or if they did, the answer didn't matter enough to change the plan. The ARRA's $90 billion clean energy push was about speed and symbolism, not stewardship. Move fast. Build turbines. Claim credit. Let someone else deal with the carcasses.
What's changed is that the current administration treats the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act as something more than a suggestion. The combined enforcement actions against both the University of Minnesota and Ørsted signal a shift that the wind industry should study carefully. The days of treating eagle kills as an acceptable externality — a quiet cost of doing green business — are over.
A $14,536 fine won't bankrupt the University of Minnesota. But the principle it establishes carries real weight. If a research university running an experimental turbine funded by a federal grant can be held accountable, so can every commercial wind operation spinning blades across the Great Plains.
The wind industry spent years wrapping itself in moral authority. Clean energy. Carbon reduction. Saving the planet. But moral authority has a way of evaporating when your product shreds the national bird into three pieces and your best response is that the matter is "currently under review."
The Fish and Wildlife Service has urged the University of Minnesota to reassess and to pursue a long-term incidental take permit. Whether the university complies — or continues to stall behind vague statements about internal review — will test whether institutions that benefited from Obama-era green energy largesse are willing to meet even the most basic standards of environmental accountability.
The bald eagle that died at Eolos didn't have a lobby. It didn't have a press team or a federal grant. It had a law — one that existed long before the clean energy gold rush, and one that this administration has decided to enforce.
That eagle was torn apart by a machine the taxpayers built. The least anyone can do is hold someone responsible.
Zubayr Al-Bakoush — described as one of the architects of the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya — touched down at Andrews Air Force Base at 3 a.m. Friday in American custody. He will face prosecution on charges of arson, murder, attempted murder, and terrorism in a DC federal court.
The New York Post reported that an eight-count indictment, filed in November 2025 and unsealed Friday afternoon, charges him with conspiring to provide and actually providing material support to terrorists, including himself, and using those resources to kill U.S. officials, injure others, and set fire to buildings.
He is the third Islamic extremist arrested in connection with the Benghazi assault. Fourteen years after four Americans were killed on sovereign U.S. soil in Libya, one of the men who allegedly led the attack now sits in a federal holding facility.
Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the arrest at DOJ headquarters Friday alongside FBI Director Kash Patel and DC U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro — both of whom had been on the tarmac at Andrews in the early morning hours to receive the prisoner personally.
"Zubayr Al-Bakoush landed at Andrews Air Force Base at 3 a.m. this morning. He is in our custody. He was greeted by Director Patel and US Attorney Jeanine Pirro."
Bondi vowed prosecution "to the fullest extent of the law." She did not mince words about why it mattered.
Bondi drove straight at one of the most infamous moments in the Benghazi saga — former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's dismissive response during a 2013 congressional hearing, when Sen. Ron Johnson pressed her on the failures that led to the attack.
"Hillary Clinton famously once said about Benghazi, 'What difference, at this point, does it make?' Well, it makes a difference to Donald Trump. It makes a difference to those families."
"And 14 years later, it makes a difference to law enforcement."
That line landed in a room that understood its weight. Clinton's remark became shorthand for an entire governing philosophy — one that treated accountability as an inconvenience and the deaths of Americans abroad as a political problem to be managed rather than a crime to be avenged. For more than a decade, it served as a kind of permission structure: if the people at the top didn't care, why should the bureaucracy beneath them?
Bondi's message on Friday was the opposite.
"Let this case serve as a reminder. If you commit a crime against the American people anywhere in this world, President Trump's Justice Department will find you. It might not happen overnight, but it will happen. You can run, but you cannot hide."
The 13-page indictment lays out the timeline of an attack that unfolded over hours, hours during which help never arrived.
According to the indictment, Al-Bakoush and others violently breached the Mission's gate around 9:45 p.m. on September 11, 2012, and set fire to its buildings, including a villa housing Ambassador Chris Stevens, State Department information management officer Sean Smith, and diplomatic security agent Scott Wickland. Stevens and Smith died trapped inside the compound. Wickland survived.
Roughly half an hour after the initial breach, the attackers retreated and began firing on the complex with handguns, AK-47 assault rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades. They re-entered the Mission around 11:45 p.m. In the early morning hours of September 12, they turned mortars on the nearby CIA annex, killing CIA contractors Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods and seriously injuring State Department Assistant Regional Officer David Ubben and CIA facility security officer Mark Geist.
The indictment identifies Al-Bakoush and 19 co-conspirators who also allegedly intended to plunder property from the Mission, including documents, maps, and computers containing sensitive information. A confidential federal informant described Al-Bakoush in January 2020 court filings as one of "two key leaders of the Mission attack."
Four Americans are dead. A diplomatic compound in ashes. Classified materials looted. And for 13 hours, the people inside waited for a rescue that never came.
DC U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro framed the arrest against the original failure — not just of security, but of will.
"An American ambassador, elite military personnel and a State Department employee were all violently murdered. The American cavalry never came. For 13 hours, they waited for help that never came."
A select House committee investigation found that Obama administration officials failed to deploy military assets to Libya despite intelligence warnings of growing danger to American interests. Instead of confronting that failure, the administration constructed a cover story. Five days after the attack, then-UN Ambassador Susan Rice went on national television and attributed the violence to a spontaneous reaction to an internet video.
"What sparked the recent violence was the airing on the Internet of a very hateful, very offensive video that has offended many people around the world."
No diplomatic security agents in Benghazi attributed the attack to a video or a protest. It was a coordinated assault carried out by members of the Al Qaeda-linked group Ansar Al Sharia, armed with rifles, RPGs, and mortars. The video narrative was a fabrication — not a misunderstanding, not a premature assessment, but a deliberate choice to mislead the American public weeks before a presidential election.
That context matters now because it explains why accountability took 14 years. When the priority is political survival rather than justice, investigations stall, leads go cold, and terrorists walk free.
Al-Bakoush is the third suspect brought to account. Ahmed Abu Khatallah, described as the attack's leader, was arrested in Libya in June 2014 and initially sentenced in June 2018 to 22 years in prison — a sentence a federal appeals panel called "unreasonably low." He was resentenced in September 2024 to 28 years during the Biden administration. Mustafa al-Imam was captured by U.S. special forces in October 2017 and sentenced in January 2020 to 19 years and eight months.
Two convictions in over a decade. Twenty co-conspirators were named in the indictment. Pirro made clear the work isn't finished.
"The Benghazi saga was a painful one for Americans. It has stayed with all of us. And let me be very clear, there are more of them out there."
"Time will not stop us from going after these predators, no matter how long it takes, in order to fulfill our obligation to those families who suffered horrific pain at the hands of these violent terrorists."
Pirro said her team "will not stop" hunting down other attackers who remain at large, and that she and Patel had kept in touch with family members of the four Americans killed.
FBI Director Kash Patel, who noted he worked on the Benghazi case as a young prosecutor, was on the airfield for the formal foreign transfer of custody.
"When an act of terrorism of this magnitude strikes at the heart of our nation, we go to work."
"I was at the airfield with US Attorney Pirro earlier this morning when we did the formal, foreign transfer of custody of Bakoush into US custody to face prosecution. And her office and the Department of Justice are going to execute justice for the fallen."
Patel declined to disclose where Al-Bakoush was apprehended, citing the need to protect the integrity of the investigation. The operation involved the FBI's New York Field Office, the DOJ's National Security Division Counterterrorism Section, the Department of War, the State Department, and the CIA.
A CIA spokesperson said Director Ratcliffe was "deeply grateful" for the efforts of the DOJ and the FBI:
"CIA and the Nation will never forget the extraordinary sacrifices of Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, who gave their lives in defense of others and exemplified the very best of our Agency."
There is a reason Benghazi never faded from public memory the way the political class wanted it to. It wasn't partisanship. It wasn't a talking point. It was the image of Americans abandoned by their own government — fighting through the night on a rooftop in a hostile country while Washington deliberated and then lied about what happened.
Chris Stevens. Sean Smith. Glen Doherty. Tyrone Woods. They deserved better from the people who sent them there, and they deserved better from the people who spent years deflecting blame rather than hunting down the men who killed them.
Pirro put it plainly:
"President Trump will make sure that the cavalry comes for Americans, no matter where they are in this world."
Fourteen years late, the cavalry arrived at Andrews Air Force Base at 3 a.m. with a prisoner in tow. That's what difference it makes.