The FBI announced on Monday that they had arrested 29-year-old Tyler Maxon Avalos, an alleged Minnesota anarchist who went by the nickname "Wacko," on October 16 after he posted a hit on U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi using the social media platform TikTok.
The post featured an image of Bondi with a red sniper dot on her forehead with the caption, "“WANTED: Pam Bondi / REWARD: 45,000 ‘ DEAD OR ALIVE / (PREFERABLY DEAD)."
Avalos added under the photo, "Cough cough. When they don’t serve us, then what?”
His TikTok account had a link to “An Anarchist FAQ book,” according to authorities.
Avalos also has a long rap sheet, including a stalking conviction in 2022 and a domestic battery conviction in Florida in 2016, when Bondi was state attorney general there.
The specific charge Avalos faces from the feds is interstate transmission of a threat to injure another person.
The investigation into Avalos started on October 9 when a user from Detroit "submitted a report to the FBI National Threat Operations Center" about his TikTok profile, including the pic of Bondi with a sniper dot.
The tipster also flagged the suspect's TikTok feed. TikTok, Google and Comcast helped the FBI track Avalos down.
Avalos's profile contained an anarchy symbol.
According to the court affidavit, anarchism "advocates for the replacement of the state with stateless societies and voluntary free associations."
When Avalos appeared in court Wednesday morning, he waived his right to a preliminary hearing.
He was released on his own recognizance but ordered to wear a GPS monitor.
That means a man who said online that he wanted to reward someone if they killed a member of the President of the United States's cabinet is out on the street again.
I will definitely sleep better knowing that, said no one ever. So glad our court system is taking this threat seriously.
President Donald Trump told reporters on Saturday that he won't meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin again until he knows they can make a deal to end the war in Ukraine, according to the New York Post.
“We’re going to have to know that we’re going to make a deal,” Trump said from Air Force One.
“I’m not going to be wasting my time. I’ve always had a great relationship with [Putin], but this has been very disappointing.”
Trump made it clear that he didn't think it would take as long as it has to end the fighting in Ukraine--something he said during the campaign he would do on "day one" of his return to office.
“I thought [the Hamas-Israel cease-fire deal] would have been more difficult than Russia and Ukraine, but it didn’t work out that way,” he said.
The comments followed an announcement last week that after a phone call between Trump and Putin, Secretary of State Marco Rubio will lead the U.S. delegation in talks with counterparts in Russia.
The phone call was supposed to be a precursor to a face-to-face meeting between Putin and Trump, but that plan fell apart because Putin rejected a key part of the plan put forward by Trump: ending the war with the current battle lines in place.
That would mean that Russia keeps control of Crimea, but only holds parts of other areas where fighting has raged, including the Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.
Russia has claimed all of these regions and seeks to annex them all.
Indeed, Putin has spent hundreds of billions of dollars and likely over one million Russian lives to accomplish his goal, and no doubt it would be humiliating for him to end the fighting without accomplishing everything he set out to do.
On the other hand, though, the U.S. and other allies have determined that letting Ukraine fall to Russia is not in the world's best interest.
Putin could realistically say that he has been fighting not just Ukraine, but the entire Western world in the war.
It may yet come to that, since the U.S. is now preparing to give Patriot missiles to Ukraine to stave off the Russian aggression. Trump is also putting new sanctions on Russia's two biggest oil producers, hoping to starve the Russian war machine further.
“There’s a lot of hatred between the two, between [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky and Putin,” Trump told the press corps. “There’s tremendous hatred.”
Virginia Giuffre's posthumous memoir has dropped more bombshell allegations about the late billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein and his child trafficking operation.
Giuffre, who passed away earlier this year, has been leading the charge in exposing Epstein's sordid empire and has been responsible for the outing of Britain's Prince Andrew as a pedophile.
Giuffre made shockwaves when she accused Prince Andrew of raping her when she was only 17. She had been trafficked by Epstein and his associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, to powerful figures, many of whom have remained unnamed.
Her book, titled "Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice," chronicles her meetings with many powerful figures, including former President Bill Clinton and President Donald Trump.
She did not accuse either of wrongdoing, but nonetheless, the meeting reinforces already known connections between Clinton and Epstein, who were close. Epstein and Trump were also connected but became estranged in 2004.
Giuffre's collision course with Epstein began when her father got her a job at Mar-a-Lago, where he worked as a maintenance worker. This brought her into contact with high society, as Trump often used the location as a meeting place for the business world's powerful leaders, which included Epstein.
Trump plays a minimal role in Giuffre's story, but things took a turn when she met Ghislaine Maxwell in 2000, and that began a tragic tale that ultimately culminated in Giuffre's death in April of this year at just 41 years old.
Giuffre wrote, "It couldn’t have been more than a few days before my dad said he wanted to introduce me to Mr. Trump himself. They weren’t friends, exactly. But Dad worked hard, and Trump liked that—I’d seen photos of them posing together, shaking hands. Trump couldn’t have been friendlier, telling me it was fantastic that I was there. 'Do you like kids?' he asked. 'Do you babysit at all?' He explained that he owned several houses next to the resort that he lent to friends, many of whom had children that needed tending."
However, it was Maxwell who recruited Giuffre as a masseuse despite her lack of experience, and that led to her traveling with Giuffre and Epstein around the world.
Of course, this led to Giuffre being asked for sexual favors by Maxwell and Epstein for the wealthy and powerful people that they would meet with. Giuffre was young and taken advantage of but her admiration of Epstein and Maxwell quickly deteriorated.
Giuffre wrote, "This was a man who displayed framed photographs of himself with the Dalai Lama, with the pope, and with members of the British royal family. A photo in his Palm Beach house showed Epstein posing behind the podium of the White House briefing room. This was a man who’d had former president Bill Clinton over for dinner (I was at the table that night) and who’d hosted Al and Tipper Gore as well (again, I was there)."
Later in her book, Giuffre detailed being handed over to an unnamed but supposedly famous Prime Minister by Epstein. She claims she was brutally raped by him on Epstein's private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands in 2002.
When she begged not to be given back to the unnamed Prime Minister, who she says laughed at her and choked her, Epstein told her that it was simply part of the job.
Giuffre is just one of dozens of Epstein's victims, and the fact that Epstein and his associates went unpunished for so long is a crime. Epstein would die by suicide before being convicted in court and Maxwell did eventually get convicted, but all of their associates are still out there free men.
As many states are redistricting, New Hampshire's GOP has declined a plan to redistrict after the state's GOP governor indicated no support for the idea.
There are numerous redistricting battles going on around the nation right now, and the GOP has made serious gains, with states like Texas and North Carolina adding more seats to Congress.
These redistricting campaigns, in combination with an upcoming landmark Supreme Court decision, could easily hand the GOP control of the House of Representatives for decades.
However, those victories won't extend to New Hampshire as State Senator Dan Innis has dropped his plan to push redistricting after Governor Kelly Ayotte (R) refused to endorse the idea.
While this is a setback for the Trump administration, it's less consequential considering the massive gains that the GOP has made.
New redistricting efforts have been extremely successful in Texas and North Carolina, with many Democrat seats eliminated, ensuring that the days of the narrow GOP majority in the House are over.
Furthermore, the Supreme Court is considering a case that could knock down a section of the Voting Rights Act that essentially required racial quotas in creating districts.
If the Supreme Court strikes that requirement down, it will allow GOP states to eliminate dozens of Democrat seats that exist entirely because of the Voting Rights Act's racial district quota rules.
That one provision has allowed Democrats to hold onto seats in otherwise entirely red states like Alabama and Mississippi. Without the Voting Rights Act's current rules, there will no longer be districts drawn on racial lines and that will be devastating for Democrats.
However, in New Hampshire, Governor Ayotte claimed that since New Hampshire is in the middle of a current redistricting cycle, it made no sense to redistrict again.
Ayotte explained, "When I talk to people in New Hampshire … it’s not on the top of their priority list. They want us to continue to work in the legislature on housing issues, child care, keeping the state the safest in the nation, and just making sure that we have the best quality education for our children."
This is a fairly good argument against redistricting, considering the political implications. Should New Hampshire's GOP party choose to push for redistricting, it will be a months-long political battle with Democrats, and nothing else will get done.
In more GOP-dominated states, redistricting battles are less costly. But the Granite State is no GOP stronghold and some level of cooperation with Democrats is needed to get business done.
However, the implications of this decision will be worth keeping an eye on as the GOP tallies up its gains in the House from other states.
The Minnesota Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that the national ban on transgender women competing in female powerlifting is discrimination after a biological male, JayCee Cooper, sued USA Powerlifting in 2021 over being excluded.
“USA Powerlifting’s policy at the time of the decision was to categorically exclude transgender women from competing in the women’s division,” Chief Justice Natalie Hudson wrote for the court.
“Because USA Powerlifting’s facially discriminatory policy provides direct evidence of discriminatory motive, there is no genuine issue of material fact as to whether Cooper’s transgender status actually motivated USA Powerlifting’s decision to prohibit Cooper from competing. We therefore reverse the part of the court of appeals’ decision on this issue,” Hudson continued.
Cooper got a partial win in the suit, but the court also sent the case back to the lower courts to determine whether USA Powerlifting had a “legitimate business purpose” for its policy to exclude biological males from its women's events.
USA Powerlifting President Larry Maile said that the organization “created rules that uphold the principles of fair play” and didn't seek to exclude anyone.
The organization created a division specifically for those claiming to be transgender and nonbinary in 2021.
“Since science shows those who were born biologically male have a profound physical advantage over female-born athletes, our responsibility is to define legitimate categories to fairly place athletes within them,” Maile said.
The organization's attorneys said the decision on Wednesday is a partial win for both sides.
Ansis Viksnins said that USA Powerlifting will get to tell a jury “why excluding a transgender woman from competing in the women’s division was for legitimate reasons, for maintaining fairness in athletics.”
If transgender women, who are biologically male, are allowed to compete against biological females, the males would win every trophy and prize because males have greater muscle mass than females, even males who now identify as females and even those who have taken hormones or had transgender surgeries.
It is only common sense to separate these categories and have a separate division for those who are non-binary or transgender.
Then again, if the "T" part of LGBT had any common sense, they would know you can't just change your gender because you want to.
Transgender women will never have many of the struggles biological women have, including monthly menstruation, pregnancy risks, or anything related to the female reproductive system, which they don't have.
Just because you say you're something, doesn't make it true. And if women's sports is forced to lose all common sense, it will be destroyed beyond any repair. That's the bottom line people don't take into account, and they really should.
Threats by leaders in one major crime-plagued U.S. city to sue President Donald Trump over his plan to deploy the National Guard have not gone as expected for them.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday that President Donald Trump could deploy hundreds of National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon as part of his plan to fight high levels of violent crime there.
The 2-1 ruling lifted a lower court order that blocked Trump from deploying the troops, but other challenges could make that ruling all but moot.
A second emergency order blocking Trump specifically from deploying any federalized troops to Portland remains in place, and the justices on the 9th Circuit said they couldn't evaluate that order.
Trump has asked the judge who issued that order, U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut, to dissolve her order in light of the appeals court ruling, but that has not happened so far.
Lawyers for California and Oregon are resisting that move, and asked for the order to remain in place until the 9th Circuit decides whether to have the full appellate court bench deliberate on it.
"The fight is not over," Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek vowed to reporters on Monday. "Until the district court acts on the second TRO, National Guard members from Oregon, or any other state cannot deploy."
Friday should bring more clarity on two fronts.
Immergut has ordered both parties to appear on Friday for a decision on whether to dissolve the emergency order.
In addition, the appeals court has scheduled a hearing to decide whether the full court will hear the appeal of that order.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court may get its chance to weigh in soon, since Trump has asked for an appeal of an order blocking him from deploying troops to Chicago, another city sorely in need of some law and order.
The deployment to Washington, D.C. has correlated with a drop in criminal activity, especially vehicle thefts, which were down 34% in the first 30 days of the deployment.
Trump would like to keep Guard troops deployed in D.C., but there's a case pending related to whether he will be able to do that as well.
At any rate, he's showing he wants to do something to help these high rates of crime, which is more than we can say for the Democrat mayors of these cities.
President Donald Trump's pick for head of the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), Paul Ingrassia, withdrew his nomination on Tuesday after Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) said he would not support the nominee because of texts he sent to a group chat that became public.
The texts allegedly said that Ingrassia claimed he had a "Nazi streak" and that the holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. "should be ended and tossed into the seventh circle of hell where it belongs.”
"I will be withdrawing myself from Thursday’s [Senate Homeland Security Committee] hearing to lead the Office of Special Counsel because unfortunately I do not have enough Republican votes at this time," he posted on X. "I appreciate the overwhelming support that I have received throughout this process and will continue to serve President Trump and this administration to Make America Great Again!"
Without Scott's support, Ingrassia could not get approved by the committee and get a full confirmation vote by the Senate.
Ingrassia has been the White House liaison to the United States Department of Homeland Security since February 2025, so he's already been inside the administration, influencing policy and working closely with Trump and others at the White House.
The controversy has been known since June, but the way the Senate has been slow-walking Trump's nominees, it hadn't been a well-known issue.
Allegedly, Ingrassia's mother showed up on Capitol Hill in June and tried to defend him to Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Robert Garcia (D-CA), who sent a scathing letter about him to Republicans on the committee.
“Mr. Ingrassia is unfit to serve as special counsel and his nomination is insulting to the American people,” the offensive letter read in part.
Whatever else Ingrassia has said or done, it's just not a good look when your mom shows up to Congress to defend you.
Trump had been making progress in getting his nominees through the confirmation process after Republicans tweaked a few of the rules so that Democrats couldn't continue to slow things down to a snail's pace.
Batches of more than 100 nominees each have been confirmed in one fell swoop over the last few weeks, but any nominees that are controversial or opposed by one or more Republicans, like Ingrassia was, are not included in a batch.
Before Trump took office again in January, most nominees were approved by unanimous consent of the Senate, but that went by the wayside so that Democrats could claim they were trying to preserve Democracy and may never be seen again in Washington.
Eventually, Republicans and Trump got tired of having to spend so much time and effort on each nominee and began demanding the rule changes.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) spearheaded the rule changes in September.
Republicans fought former President Joe Biden tooth and nail when he tried to institute student loan forgiveness plans during his administration, but now President Donald Trump has agreed to remove the pause on established programs that have been in place for years or decades.
Income-driven repayment plans cap the monthly loan amount at a percentage of the borrower's income, and usually forgive the loans after 20 or 25 years of consistent payments.
Trump had paused forgiveness under those plans earlier in the year to review them, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon had argued that the court order blocking Biden's Saving on a Valuable Education plan (SAVE) would allow them to stop offering loan forgiveness under the plans.
Despite this argument, Trump decided to restart them as part of an agreement with the American Federation of Teachers, which celebrated the move.
“This is a tremendous win for borrowers. With today’s filing, borrowers can rest a little easier,” legal counsel Winston Berkman-Breen said.
“The US Department of Education has agreed to follow the law and deliver congressionally mandated affordable payments and debt relief to hard-working public service workers across the country, and will do so under court supervision. We fully intend to hold them to their word.”
Under the agreement, borrowers who receive forgiveness will not owe taxes on the amount forgiven.
“The Biden Administration’s illegal attempts at mass student loan forgiveness impacted all of the Department’s income-driven repayment programs, including Income-Based Repayment. The courts intervened to stop their illegal efforts but that also impacted Department systems and prevented us from processing lawful loan discharges,” a spokesperson for the Department of Education told The Post in a statement.
“Thanks to the Trump Administration’s efforts to separate out the illegal loan cancellation schemes, we are able to process legitimate loan cancellations once again.”
The move is temporary, because Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill will be phasing out the programs by 2028 anyway.
But by agreeing to reverse the pause, Trump will settle the lawsuit by the AFT in March.
It makes sense because the borrowers were told they could access the program when they took the loans, so it doesn't seem fair to change the rules in the middle of the game.
Those paying under income-based repayment plans can end up owing far more than they originally borrowed because of interest over many years, so the forgiveness makes sense at some point.
President Donald Trump said Sunday evening that the ceasefire between Israel and Gaza was still intact after the two sides exchanged fire over the weekend.
Trump seemed to blame civilians in Gaza for opening fire on Israeli soldiers, killing two of them. Israel then launched a series of air strikes on Gaza.
Hamas is being “quite rambunctious,” Trump said from Air Force One, but added he believes its leadership “isn’t involved in that.”
The ceasefire is "still in place," even though both sides accuse the other of violating it, he said.
It's about par for the course in the Middle East, where peace in Israel has never lasted long.
So far, Israel has withdrawn most of its soldiers from Gaza and has allowed food and medical aid to flow in.
Hamas returned all the living hostages it held back to Israel along with remains of 12 of the 28 dead ones. It said before the ceasefire that it would take some time to locate the remains of all the dead hostages.
Israel countered by saying the Rafah border crossing that connects Gaza with Egypt would stay closed until all the remains were returned.
Clearly, there are still tensions between the two sides, and Hamas has not yet disarmed.
Trump threatened last week that if Hamas didn't disarm voluntarily, they would be disarmed by force, though not by American forces.
Part of the peace plan that hasn't yet been implemented calls for Hamas's disarmament, but they haven't agreed to that part yet.
On Saturday, the State Department said it had intel that Hamas is planning an attack on Palestinian civilians in Gaza, which would definitely violate the ceasefire terms.
In that case, the U.S. said it would take action to “protect the people of Gaza and preserve the integrity of the ceasefire.”
“The United States and the other guarantors remain resolute in our commitment to ensuring the safety of civilians, maintaining calm on the ground, and advancing peace and prosperity for the people of Gaza and the region as a whole,” the statement further read.
President Donald Trump has confirmed that two men who survived a military strike on a drug smuggling vessel will be sent to their respective countries.
In an announcement on Saturday, Trump confirmed that the two men on the drug-running vessel will be sent to Ecuador and Colombia to face prosecution for the illegal and nearly fatal drug-running enterprise.
The two men were on board a semi-submersible vessel believed to be transporting fentanyl and other narcotics along a well-known smuggling route toward the United States.
The strike on the vessel marked the sixth strike that the U.S. military has made on suspected drug-running vessels in the Caribbean under the leadership of Trump.
Trump has vowed to crush Central and South American drug cartels both by closing down the southern border, but also by using lethal military force to disrupt the trafficking of deadly drugs that kill countless Americans every year.
For years, drug cartels have had carte blanche to run their deadly cargo through the Caribbean Sea and across the southern border, but those days are over as long as Trump is in the White House.
Trump celebrated the strike in a post on Truth Social saying, "It was my great honor to destroy a very large drug-carrying submarine that was navigating toward the United States on a well-known narcotrafficking transit route. U.S. intelligence confirmed this vessel was loaded up with mostly fentanyl, and other illegal narcotics."
Alongside this post, Trump released the footage of the strike that destroyed the vessel in a similar fashion to the last few strikes on drug smuggling vessels.
For the first time, those participating in smuggling deadly drugs have something to fear. Simply seizing random amounts of smuggled drugs isn't enough to truly deter cartel activity.
Furthermore, Trump has avoided a massive legal headache as he no longer has to worry about detaining prisoners of war who have the legal right to contest their detention in the American court system.
Instead, these smugglers have gone to their respective countries, where their cases will be handled. The cases will likely be open and shut, and those smugglers can expect to spend some time behind bars, which is still better than being dead.
On the home front, Trump is already dealing with growing legal challenges as Democrats have predictably chosen to side with drug-smuggling cartels and launch spurious lawsuits against Trump's use of military force against cartels.
Of course, it's not just Democrats who have an issue with Trump starting a hot war against cartels. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has been a staunch critic of Trump's use of force and claims that the military strikes on drug smuggling vessels are illegal.
It remains to be seen what will happen with these legal challenges, but it's refreshing to see America's trillion-dollar military used to directly defend the homeland instead of waging meaningless wars on the other side of the globe.