Day: April 21, 2026
‘Martyrs’: Michigan Dems nominate Hezbollah-praising candidate after ousting Jewish regent
Amir Makled, who reportedly shared posts praising Hezbollah leaders as ‘martyrs,’ won Michigan Democrats’ nomination for University of Michigan regent.
Bear Grylls reveals why A-list stars willingly eat snakes, brave glaciers on ‘Running Wild’
A-list celebrities such as Matthew McConaughey face harsh survival challenges with Bear Grylls on “Running Wild” in Season 9, and the star spoke about the show Tuesday.
Report: DOJ Investigating Southern Poverty Law Center For Spying On The Conservative Groups It Slanders
The SPLC has falsely used its ‘extremist’ tag to place targets on the backs of conservative-leaning organizations that do not share its warped leftist worldview.
7 females, 2 males accused of ganging up on, beating up train passenger in Chicago
Seven females and two males are accused of physically attacking one train passenger in Chicago last week, police said.
Police called the crime an aggravated battery.
‘If confronted by an assailant/offender, remain calm and never pursue. Press the emergency button and alert the transit attendant,’ police said.
The incident took place just after 9:30 p.m. last Tuesday in the 600 block of South State Street aboard a train in the Chicago Loop neighborhood, police said.
Police provided photos of the suspects. (Note: One of the suspects is shown twice — in the bottom far-right photos of the composite image next to the headline.)
Police also provided the following descriptions of each suspect:
- Black male wearing a black T-shirt with white lettering and denim shorts
- Black male wearing a black long-sleeved shirt
- Black female wearing a blue T-shirt and blue shorts
- Black female with red hair wearing a white top
- Black female wearing a purple sweater
- Black female wearing a black flower-print sweater
- Black female wearing a black zip-up sweater and black shorts
- Black female wearing a black hooded sweater and black pants
- Black female wearing a black T-shirt with white lettering and black pants
Police cautioned citizens to “be aware of your surroundings and remember your location, bus/train car number, route or train line, train car number, and direction of travel. If confronted by an assailant/offender, remain calm and never pursue. Press the emergency button and alert the transit attendant. Call 911 immediately, provide detailed description of location and assailant.”
Police added that those with any information about this incident should contact Public Transportation Detectives at 312-745-4447 or submit anonymous tips at CPDTIP.com and use reference RD #JK189284.
Police said another transit-related aggravated battery took place just after 4 p.m. Friday — this time on a CTA Red Line platform in the 1200 block of North Clark Street.
Image source: Chicago Police
Police said the victim — a 23-year-old female — was waiting on the train platform when one of the individuals pictured above pulled her to the ground by her hair, struck her on her face with a closed fist, and kicked her head and body.
Another one of the females pictured above assisted the other female by blocking bystander attempts to help the victim, police said.
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This brave 15-year-old fought cancer with all her heart — what Elon Musk and Jared Isaacman did will leave you in tears
On April 1, when Artemis II launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to embark on its historic 10-day lunar flyby, Glenn Beck was sitting in the audience section designated for people who work in the space program and journalists invited to attend the launch.
As he chatted with various scientists and fellow journalists, he noticed a husband and wife sitting among the group who were clearly not part of either world. He soon struck up a conversation with them and inquired about how they received an invitation.
“They started telling me a story that was as impressive as the rocket going off itself,” he says.
The story was about their 15-year daughter Olivia “Liv” Perrotto, who died of a rare and aggressive childhood cancer in January this year.
A bright, space-obsessed girl who dreamed of becoming an astronaut or fighter pilot, Liv’s illness didn’t quell her courage to pursue her passions.
“That 15-year-old lived more of a life than most of us could ever dream of,” says Glenn.
Elon Musk and NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman are largely to thank for that.
On this heart-wrenching episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” Glenn shares a little-known story he says will “break your heart and then heal it right back up.”
“This is a story that neither [Musk nor Isaacman] … would tell you. They didn’t do it for the credit, and I didn’t ask [them] for permission to tell,” says Glenn, noting that it was Liv’s mother who “wanted the world to know what they did and what it meant.”
When Liv was just 10 years old, she was diagnosed with undifferentiated sarcoma — a rare and malignant cancer. Overnight, her life went from normal childhood circumstances to “chemo, radiation, surgeries, [and] clinical trials.”
“It was a really dark time until she heard about a SpaceX mission … called Inspiration 4. This one was commanded by a guy that most people didn’t know at the time named Jared Isaacman,” says Glenn.
“The crew of Inspiration 4 heard about this little girl with cancer, and Jared Isaacman paid to bring her and her family to the launch.”
“And this was the beginning of just a life-changing relationship,” he recounts.
Isaacman’s involvement with Liv didn’t conclude with her attendance at the Inspiration 4 launch. “He became committed to her care and to her dreams,” says Glenn. “Without anyone knowing, without anyone asking, much to the family’s surprise, this guy just threw himself in.”
A few months after the Inspiration 4 launch, Isaacman asked Liv to design a “zero-gravity indicator” for his next mission. She quickly sent in a sketch of a Shiba Inu dog in an astronaut suit named Asteroid.
The Polaris Dawn team, commanded by Isaacman, took Liv’s hand-drawn sketch and turned it into an actual plush toy that they brought with them on the mission. A video taken by the team captured Asteroid floating in the cabin as the crew reached microgravity.
“Nobody on that mission forgot about this little girl in Pennsylvania. They sent her a birthday cake on her birthday. They sent flowers to the hospital. They all got together on a Zoom call just days before she died,” says Glenn through tears.
“Jared chartered his own plane to fly Liv cross-country so she could get treatments, personally called St. Jude to review her case,” he continues.
But that was just the beginning.
Isaacman also took Liv “up in a fighter jet, which he flew,” and introduced her to Charlie Duke, William Shatner, and many other big names from the broader space community.
“The whole space world opened its arms to this little girl — somebody you’ve never heard of,” says Glenn, “and they didn’t do it for the press; they just did it because her passion was contagious, so full of love.”
Because of the kindness of Isaacman and others, “the space world was [Liv’s] world, not hospitals.”
One of Liv’s other dreams was to speak to Elon Musk. At a town hall event he hosted in October 2024, she briefly got the chance. Liv had just learned earlier that day that her cancer had returned aggressively, but that didn’t deter her from standing in line all night just to ask Musk when he planned to send kids to space.
After learning of her worsening condition, Musk planned a phone call with Liv in January 2026 so that she could ask him all her pressing questions. But the night he arranged to call her, Liv was too exhausted to carry on a conversation, so she requested that the call be moved to the next day. Musk agreed and immediately sent flowers and a kind note to the hospital.
Tragically, Liv passed before the call came.
“Both the notes and the flowers were put in this little girl’s casket,” says Glenn.
Liv’s legacy lives on through the courage she showed in the face of unimaginable pain, the Asteroid plush toy that now flies on SpaceX missions as the company’s official mascot, thanks to Elon Musk honoring her final wish, and the way her story continues to remind the world that acts of kindness and compassion are happening all around us — even when we can’t see them.
Liv’s mother published her own article about the life of her courageous daughter. You can read it on glennbeck.com.
To hear Glenn’s version of Liv’s beautiful story, grab your tissue box and watch the video above.
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Ukraine’s robot operators now kill for ‘e-points.’ Is the future of war a game?
In April 2026, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense announced that ground robots had completed more than 9,000 frontline missions in the previous month. The number was offered without fanfare, embedded in a press release alongside procurement timelines and delivery metrics, as though the figure were perfectly ordinary, which by then it was. Nearly 24,500 missions in the first quarter of the year; 167 units using uncrewed ground vehicles, up from 67 the previous November. The ministry did not dwell on what this meant.
Ukrainian soldiers who complete verified missions using robots earn e-points through a digital platform that tracks, authenticates, and tallies their work. Those points can then be exchanged, through an online marketplace, for additional equipment. Orders reach frontline units in roughly 10 days. The whole apparatus, in its architecture and its assumptions about human motivation, looks less like a combat system and more like a loyalty program.
The state understands its soldiers as participants in a platform, and it is engineering their behavior accordingly.
The UGV itself is not a new idea. The Germans fielded the Goliath tracked mine in World War II, a remotely controlled demolition device that failed, in the end, because its control cable could be cut. The Soviets experimented with teletanks in the 1930s, aiming to spare soldiers from exposure that was otherwise certain to kill them. The problem of controlling a machine at distance through contested terrain, under fire, with limited bandwidth and imperfect video, is not a problem the 21st century invented. What the 21st century has done is make it cheap.
The ultimate cannon fodder
Ukraine’s UGVs are designed, above all, to be expendable. The country operates under mass artillery and persistent drone surveillance, which creates a specific engineering pressure that earlier Western robotics programs never faced. American explosive ordnance disposal robots in Iraq were conserved, repaired, and mourned in a way that revealed something about how their operators understood them. Ukraine’s systems are produced in the thousands, iterated rapidly, accepted as losses, and replaced like ammunition.
The substitution principle drives everything. The state’s explicit purpose, reiterated in every official channel, is to move the most dangerous tasks (ammunition resupply, casualty evacuation, mining and demining, certain forms of direct contact) away from human bodies and onto machines. The missions are logged. The ministry’s argument is that somewhere in those 9,000 March missions is a corresponding number of soldiers who did not die. The robot went; the human did not.
RELATED: The US military needs to adapt to modern warfare
The US military needs to adapt to modern warfareUSAF/Getty Images
What makes Ukraine’s system interesting, and practically consequential, is the way it distributes agency. A UGV mission is not performed by a soldier or a robot, but by a network: the operator watching a video feed, the encoder compressing that feed under bandwidth constraints that determine whether the latency is tolerable or fatal, the repair crew, the procurement pipeline, the verification interface that converts the mission into a data object, the points system that converts the data object into future capability.
The human is present throughout this chain and is, in some sense, responsible for it. However, responsibility, in this architecture, is not the same as when a soldier carries ammunition through a kill zone but is cast as clicking, uploading, or watching a screen.
This practice is not unique to Ukraine. Mediated violence is familiar from drone programs and earlier remote weapons systems. What Ukraine has done is extend the logic farther into the supply chain, the metrics, and the incentive design, making explicit what other militaries have left tacit. The gamification is structural. The state is acknowledging, through the design of the e-points system, that it understands its soldiers as participants in a platform, and it is engineering their behavior accordingly.
Us or them
The Ukrainian government is aware of the genuine tension in this design. Goodhart’s law holds that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. If points are awarded for confirmed hits, soldiers will pursue confirmed hits. Ukraine’s system tries to counteract this by assigning points also for evacuation missions, for the lifesaving work that does not produce the bright flash of verification. Whether this framework works, whether the incentive categories actually reshape behavior or merely sit alongside it, is an empirical question.
By early 2026, seven UGV models from six Ukrainian manufacturers were available for direct order through the DOT-Chain Defence marketplace. Foreign platforms have entered the ecosystem too: Estonian-built THeMIS vehicles, first delivered in 2022, were absorbed into Ukraine’s logistics environment alongside the domestically produced systems. NATO was also watching. Its UNITE initiative, announced in late 2025, proposed to scale prototyped battlefield innovations among alliance members, with unmanned ground systems explicitly named as a future focus.
Ukraine’s particular answer to a particular problem — how to fight at scale under conditions of acute manpower constraint — is becoming a transmissible model. The rapid iteration, the platform-mediated procurement, the tight loop between battlefield data and design revision are not incidental features of Ukraine’s approach. Other militaries, in more comfortable circumstances, studying this from a distance, may conclude that they want something like it.
What they would be acquiring is a way of knowing, a way of governing through metrics and incentives and interfaces, that treats war as a system to be optimized. The appeal is obvious. Systems can be improved. Metrics can be refined. Platforms can be updated. The facts that cannot be put into the system — the exhaustion, the fog — remain outside the data. They do not affect the point calculations. They do not appear in the quarterly mission totals, which continue to rise.
In March 2026, the machines completed 9,000 missions. The ministry reported this statistic as progress. It was surely also something else, something that does not yet have a name.
Connecticut Democrats take photo ID really seriously — just not for voting
Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, like other Democratic officials in the Constitution State, including Sens. Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal, thinks that requiring individuals to provide proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections is intolerable.
Lamont — flanked at a press conference late last month by Connecticut Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas, his Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, and others — stated about the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, “I, for the life of me, can’t figure out why we’re doing this. What’s the rush? Seems to me that the SAVE Act is a solution looking for a problem.”
‘Diminishing faith in the system.’
The governor, speaking just one month after one of the individuals accused in the 2023 Bridgeport absentee ballot fraud case was sentenced to prison, added, “I don’t want to put up all these bureaucratic roadblocks that make it tougher.”
While loath to make it tougher for individuals to vote without valid identification, Lamont certainly does not oppose all “bureaucratic roadblocks” or legislation aimed at requiring photo ID to prevent fraud.
Lamont signed a law last month requiring bottle redemption centers in the state to obtain from any individual hoping to turn in over 1,000 containers the “person’s name, the license plate number of any vehicle used to transport the containers to such redemption center, a copy of such person’s driver’s license, the collection points of the empty containers, and the number of containers tendered.”
“In Connecticut, you have to show ID to recycle more than 1,000 bottles in one day,” Utah Sen. Mike Lee (R) wrote in response to the passage of the legislation, “but not to cast a vote for the next leader of the free world.”
Libs of TikTok said, “Make it make sense.”
RELATED: How Republicans have failed to defund sanctuary cities for a generation
Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP/Getty Images
Republican Connecticut state Rep. Craig Fishbein said in a statement to Blaze News, “The hypocrisy and overt priorities of the Majority Democrats here are staggering.”
“While just last summer, Connecticut saw criminal convictions for voter fraud; they brought us in under the guise of an emergency session to pass this bottle bill, while continuing to ignore, or perhaps support additional voter fraud — thereby disenfranchising those voters who properly vote, and further diminishing faith in the system itself,” Fishbein added.
The editorial board of Connecticut’s Republican-American recently noted that “Connecticut Democrats’ solution to the bottle-deposit debacle reveals they agree that requiring ID is an effective anti-fraud measure. The question is why they pretend elections are the exception.”
The SAVE America Act, which would afford federal elections some semblance of a Connecticut bottle recycling standard of fraud protection, was passed in the House in a 218-213 vote on Feb. 11, then advanced to the U.S. Senate on April 10, but its fate is presently up in the air.
On Sunday, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) alleged that “after two weeks in recess, John Thune is no longer considering the SAVE America Act.”
A congressional insider familiar with the bill’s process subsequently told the Federalist that the proposed legislation is “still the pending business in the Senate.”
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Democrats narrow field in California’s crowded gubernatorial race to avoid primary disaster
California’s crowded gubernatorial race is beginning to narrow, with former State Controller Betty Yee becoming the latest prominent Democrat to drop out, a sign that the party may be coalescing around a leading candidate to avoid disaster in the upcoming primary.
The California gubernatorial primary started with 61 official candidates in March, and approximately 20 have since dropped out.
‘I continue to believe there are too many Democrats in the field.’
While two Republican front-runners have emerged, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and former Fox News host and small-business owner Steve Hilton, Democrats have not yet rallied unified support behind any leading contenders for the upcoming election on June 2.
With Primary Election Day right around the corner, voters in the state will begin receiving mail-in ballots in two weeks.
California’s primary election operates on a nonpartisan basis, meaning all candidates are listed on the same ballot, and the two candidates who receive the most votes advance to the general election, regardless of party affiliation.
The nonpartisan election rules could spell trouble for Democrats if they cannot rally enough support behind a candidate to beat at least one of the top two Republicans competing to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), who has reached his term limit.
Chad Bianco. Kent Nishimura/Getty Images. Steve Hilton. Robin L Marshall/FilmMagic
Democrats began the race with eight high-profile candidates: former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, former U.S. Rep. Katie Porter, climate advocate and businessman Tom Steyer, U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell, California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, former California State Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, and former California State Controller Betty Yee.
The Democratic field narrowed when Swalwell announced last week that he was suspending his campaign for governor and resigning from Congress amid sexual misconduct allegations.
On Monday, Yee became the latest Democrat to drop out of the race, citing low polling results. She told local CBS affiliate KOVR that the Democratic Party had “for whatever reason decided to put money into a poll that would narrow the field” and that the results showed that “experience and competence was not polling as high as we thought when I first started this race.”
“We’re in this new era where it’s kind of almost reality TV show mentality that people want,” Yee told the news outlet. “And, frankly, conflict sells. That’s what gets people’s attention. I’m not a flashy person. I don’t come with gimmicks. I even said and joked with my team one time, ‘Maybe I just need to bring like a folding stool and throw it off the stage just to get some attention.’ I mean, what’s it gonna take, right?”
Yee stated that she plans to endorse one of the remaining candidates soon.
The California Democratic Party’s poll showed voters leaning toward Republican candidates Hilton and Bianco. The highest-polling Democratic candidates were Becerra and Steyer. However, many of those surveyed stated they were still undecided.
RELATED: Republicans shine in first poll since Eric Swalwell stumbled out of California governor’s race
Betty Yee. ETIENNE LAURENT/AFP/Getty Images
Rusty Hicks, the chair of the California Democratic Party, compared the latest polling results to those from an April 7 poll.
Hicks stated that it showed Becerra had moved from 4% to 13%, with him “now tied for third with Tom Steyer.” He also noted that the undecided rate had fallen from 24% to 20%.
“All of these are positive signs for ensuring a strong Democrat moves into the General Election. But it is not enough and our work is not done,” he said.
Hicks addressed Yee’s decision to drop out of the race.
“Earlier today, we saw Betty Yee suspend her campaign. I commend her leadership and commitment to California. And I hope other candidates will consider her example,” Hicks added. “I continue to believe there are too many Democrats in the field.”
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