Day: April 12, 2026
Rep Anna Paulina Luna, Moving To Expel Eric Swalwell, Says It’s ‘Inappropriate’ Dems Are Not Calling For Him To Resign
‘most people go to jail over this’
Why gas prices won’t be dropping — and how you can minimize the pain
On the latest episode of “The Drive with Lauren and Karl,” Karl Brauer and I talked about something every driver notices before almost anything else: the number on the pump.
And lately, those numbers have been going the wrong direction.
Sitting in a drive-through line for coffee, food, or dry cleaning may not feel like a big deal, but zero miles per gallon is still zero miles per gallon.
I was reminded of that the hard way when I filled my diesel SUV and saw the price climb past $5 a gallon. Karl had it even worse in California, where he paid more than $6 a gallon and described a friend filling a heavy-duty Ram for $167.
That’s not a small nuisance. For many drivers, it’s a direct hit to the household budget.
Fleeting relief
The frustrating part is that gas prices had started to moderate. As domestic production improved, prices eased. Diesel came down. Regular gas came down. Drivers finally got a little breathing room.
Now that relief is fading.
The reason is simple: Fuel prices do not respond only to what is happening at your local gas station. They respond to what is happening around the world. Global instability, supply concerns, and broader energy-market pressure push prices up quickly. And when that happens, drivers feel it immediately.
That is especially true in places like California, where prices are already higher than the rest of the country. When fuel rises nationally, it rises even more there.
For consumers, that means the practical question is no longer why it’s happening. It’s what to do about it.
Shop around
There is no magic fix, and no one is suggesting drivers can “budget” their way out of a price spike. But there are a few ways to reduce the damage.
The first is obvious: Shop around.
Apps like GasBuddy, AAA, and other fuel price trackers can help drivers compare prices before they fill up. The information is not always perfect, but it’s often good enough to spot the worst stations and find better options nearby. Membership clubs like Costco or BJ’s can also make a meaningful difference if you already belong and can tolerate the wait.
And that is the catch. When gas prices spike, everyone has the same idea. Those discount stations get crowded fast.
Fuel for thought
That makes another point more important than people realize: Avoid wasting fuel when you do not need to.
That means thinking harder about the little convenience habits most drivers don’t notice when gas is cheap. Sitting in a drive-through line for coffee, food, or dry cleaning may not feel like a big deal, but zero miles per gallon is still zero miles per gallon. If you can park, go inside, and get out faster, that saves fuel and time.
The same goes for trip planning.
If prices stay high, it makes sense to consolidate errands, reduce unnecessary driving, and stop making multiple short trips when one will do. It sounds simple because it is simple. But simple matters when every fill-up costs more than it should.
RELATED: Start-stop was just hit by the EPA. Now comes the real test.
Heritage Images/Getty Images
No safe haven
Vehicle condition matters too.
Checking tire pressure once a month can make a real difference in fuel economy. Underinflated tires increase rolling resistance and cost you money over time. It’s not glamorous, but it’s one of the easiest ways to improve efficiency without changing vehicles or spending money.
The same logic applies across power trains.
If you drive a hybrid, you still use fuel. If you drive an EV, electricity has gotten more expensive too. There is no completely insulated category of driver anymore. Energy costs hit everyone one way or another.
That reality matters because it resets the conversation. This is not just about gas stations. It is about transportation costs broadly rising again.
Domino effect
And once that happens, everything else gets more expensive too.
Delivery fees go up. Services cost more. Operating a truck or SUV becomes harder to justify for some families, even if they need the capability. People start changing habits not because they want to, but because they have to.
That is why fuel prices always matter politically and economically. They are not just one more cost. They touch almost everything.
For now, the best drivers can do is limit waste, shop smart, and be realistic. Prices may come down again eventually, but they are not likely to stabilize until the broader global picture does.
Until then, drivers are back where they’ve been too many times before: staring at the pump and doing the math.
The case for banning the burqa
Kemi Badenoch — Conservative Party leader, survivor of the 2024 electoral rout, and arguably the sharpest political mind left in British conservatism — is considering a ban on the burqa as part of a broader review of Islamist extremism.
She should stop considering and start legislating.
‘Freedom’ that produces permanent public anonymity for one group, in spaces where no one else enjoys it, is not freedom’s finest hour.
The case does not begin with Badenoch, and it does not end in Westminster. Across six European democracies — Austria, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Switzerland — full or partial bans are already law.
Their constitutions survive. Their Muslim populations remain. The predicted social cataclysm never arrived.
What arrived instead was policy — enforced and producing measurable outcomes.
Facing facts
The deeper question is why the rest of the Western world has been so slow, so squeamish, to reckon with what the burqa actually does in public space.
Full facial concealment — not the hijab, not the headscarf, but the garment that renders a woman’s face entirely invisible — removes her from the basic grammar of human interaction. Faces carry trust, intention, fear, and consent. Humans have read them for a hundred thousand years, and no amount of progressive goodwill has updated the firmware.
When you cannot see someone’s face, you cannot treat the person as a fully present participant in civic life. You can only treat the person as a shape moving through it.
Free societies depend on legibility among their members. Not total transparency — nobody is proposing to ban sunglasses or launch inquiries into wide-brimmed hats — but the basic mutual visibility that public life requires.
Courts require faces. Banks require faces. Polling stations, airports, and schools all require faces. Nobody marches on these institutions screaming tyranny.
Anonymity in shared space has always carried costs, and open societies have never been shy about saying so.
The burqa asks for a permanent exemption from an obligation everyone else accepts without drama.
Enforced invisibility
That exemption makes a certain grim sense in Afghanistan, where the Taliban reinstated the burqa as compulsory law in 2022 — a country where female faces are treated as a political problem requiring a legislative solution. In that context, the garment is a uniform of erasure, imposed top-down by men who find women’s faces inconvenient.
Which makes its romantic defense in the West, as an expression of individual freedom, not just ironic but absurd. The symbol of enforced invisibility does not become an emblem of liberation simply by crossing a border.
The First Amendment crowd — loudest in America, with philosophical cousins across the Atlantic — will say that mandating what a woman removes from her face differs not at all from mandating what she puts on it.
The argument does not survive contact with consistency.
Masks off
Masks at protests are already banned in multiple jurisdictions. Religious exemptions from generally applicable laws have limits even under the most robust free-exercise jurisprudence. The Supreme Court has never held that faith confers a blanket right to opt out of civic norms that apply to everyone else.
Employment Division v. Smith settled that much in 1990, and the decades since have not reversed the principle that neutral, generally applicable laws can coexist with religious freedom without apology.
A ban on full facial concealment in public spaces would likely qualify.
“Freedom” that produces permanent public anonymity for one group, in spaces where no one else enjoys it, is not freedom’s finest hour.
Female agency is the argument’s most seductive register. She chooses this. She owns it. Perhaps. But agency exercised under doctrinal pressure, familial expectation, or community sanction has a habit of resembling choice from a distance.
RELATED: Syria’s Bloody Crescent
Mike Mercury
Feminist exception
Western feminism spent decades insisting that personal preference does not close the conversation when that preference is shaped by systems that constrain what preference can look like. That reasoning dismantled arguments about beauty standards and industries far less coercive than religious orthodoxy.
Applied here — to a garment entire governments have made compulsory — the same movement suddenly finds the question too delicate to pursue.
None of this requires hostility to Islam, to faith, or to religious expression broadly understood.
The headscarf is not the burqa. Private devotion is not public concealment.
People are entitled to their beliefs, entitled to wear almost anything behind their own doors, entitled to worship as conscience directs.
But public space is shared space, and shared space carries shared obligations.
Turning your face away from those obligations — permanently, behind fabric, as a matter of principle — is less religious liberty than a form of civic withdrawal.
There is a meaningful distance between religious expression and civic withdrawal. The burqa travels the full length of it.
Open society? Closed case
British polling puts support for a ban at 56%. For once, democratic instinct and reasoned argument are pulling in the same direction — not always a luxury policymakers enjoy.
In America, a federal ban would face genuine First Amendment scrutiny. The constitutional architecture differs, the judicial culture differs, the politics differ enormously.
But “legally complicated” and “morally unclear” are not synonyms.
Many Americans who correctly distrust government overreach have no difficulty concluding that facial concealment in courtrooms, classrooms, and government offices warrants regulation.
The legal pathway varies by country. The underlying social logic does not.
The burqa is not compatible with open societies. The only remaining question is how long open societies intend to pretend otherwise.
Tyson Fury cruises to decision win over Makhmudov and wants Joshua showdown next
Britain’s former heavyweight world champion Tyson Fury outclassed Russia’s Arslanbek Makhmudov en route to a comprehensive points win on Saturday and then called for a showdown with compatriot Anthony Joshua.
LIVE UPDATES: Conflict in the Middle East (April 12, 2026)
Here are the latest news and updates on the US-Israel war against Iran and related developments.
US-Iran talks pause for now, disagreements remain
Negotiations between the United States and Iran appeared to have concluded for now, Iran’s government said early on Sunday, after a series of talks in Pakistan to end the six-week war between Washington and Tehran.
Pope Leo urges end to ‘madness of war’ as US, Iran start talks
Pope Leo on Saturday urged world leaders to end what he called the “madness of war,” in an impassioned appeal as senior US and Iranian officials met in Pakistan to discuss ending the six-week conflict.
Russia, Ukraine accuse each other of violating Orthodox Easter ceasefire
Russia and Ukraine on Saturday accused each other of violating a brief ceasefire in their four-year-old war hours into the truce put in place to mark Orthodox Easter.
Navotas landfill fire that started April 10 now under control
The fire at the Navotas City Sanitary Landfill, which started on Friday night, April 10, has been placed under control on Sunday, April 12, the Navotas City Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office said.
Malnourished boy found locked in father’s van for more than a year unable to walk, hadn’t showered since 2024
A malnourished 9-year-old boy allegedly locked in his father’s van in eastern France was found in the fetal position surrounded by trash and excrement.
