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A man who shot and killed four people in a Lancaster home before setting their house on fire and leaving their three dogs to burn to death will face life imprisonment.

Firefighters resumed aerial attacks on the Big Sur fire Friday, as the blaze has burned more than 4,000 acres and continues to impact the local community and economy. The fire, located about four miles south of Nepenthe’s restaurant near Highway 1, has been challenging to contain. Advertisement “So it’s a real wild card. If it gets going back there,” said Kirk Gafill, general manager of Nepenthe. “Fortunately, we haven’t had much in the way of wind events. So, you know, cautiously optimistic. It seems like they’re doing a terrific job advancing the containment and work on this fire and very...

[Catholic/Devotional Caucus] The Forgotten Customs of Assumption Day You have crowned the year with your bounty, and your paths overflow with a rich harvest; The untilled meadows overflow with it, and rejoicing clothes the hills. The fields are garmented with flocks and the valleys blanketed with grain. They shout and sing for joy.-Blessing of Herbs on Assumption DayThe Importance of the Liturgical Year The Church’s Liturgical Year is a harmonious interplay of feasts and fasts interwoven in both the temporal and sanctoral cycles that define the rhythm and rhyme of Catholic life. In days gone by, cycles of feasts punctuated...

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon is speaking out about what he calls “outrageous” misconduct at Minneapolis polling sites after a conservative political commenter tried to impersonate Minnesota voters. In the video, Cam Higby, a member of the “Justice League,” is dressed in a burqa and using an accent to try to vouch for others. Higby says he was highlighting the state’s vouching laws. He alleges poll workers would let him vote under a random name; the video shows Higby leaving a polling place after being told he needed to sign an oath. The video also shows a worker explaining...

No shoes, no shirts, no teens … no problems. A Jersey Shore beach town banned all unaccompanied minors from night activities in a citywide crackdown to stop dangerous gatherings that have led to brawls and underage drinking. The Cape May City Council unanimously voted to implement curfews in the city, which block anyone under 18 without an adult from beach access starting at 8 p.m. and from any other public space in the city after 10:30 p.m., according to the newly passed ordinances. “The Cape May Police Department would like to remind residents, visitors, and families about several new City...

A progressive New York City lawmaker says shoplifters should be left in peace to steal items like toothpaste and soap. Emily Gallagher - a Democrat Socialist member of the New York State assembly - shared a clip on her X account that also villainized drugstores, which have been forced to lock products in plexiglass cases because of rampant theft. Gallagher wrote that 'no one should be arrested - much less jailed' for stealing toothpaste' and said in a speech that such thefts were just 'crimes of poverty.' Speaking at an event, she continued: 'People who were stealing things like toothpaste,...

Simon Baron-Cohen, the distinguished Cambridge autism specialist, has been speaking movingly about his friend, Jason Arday, in a BBC radio interview. Baron-Cohen said the last contact he had with Arday was hours before he was found dead at an address in south London yesterday afternoon: “He really wasn’t coping. He was being subjected to relentless scrutiny…ridicule, discrediting every detail of his life… He wasn’t coping with the loss of his career, the loss of his reputation. He felt he couldn’t go on.” Baron-Cohen went on to talk about him as “an incredibly kind and gentle and caring and generous man”....

TAMPA, Fla. — On Aug. 13, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) announced efforts to establish the first-ever multi-domain, multinational attack drone task force. The unit, called Task Force Falcon Strike, will employ one-way attack drones consisting of unmanned systems from above, on, and below the sea operated by military support staff from the United States and regional partners. Falcon Strike’s launch occurs nine months after CENTCOM established Task Force Scorpion Strike, the U.S. military's first dedicated one-way attack drone squadron in the Middle East. Scorpion Strike rapidly achieved key operational milestones, including the first-ever launch of an aerial attack drone from...

Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick is asking voters to return her to Congress — less than four months after she resigned from the House of Representatives. Cherfilus-McCormick is one of five Democrats seeking her party’s nomination in the reconfigured Broward County 20th Congressional District in the Aug. 18 primary. The district is so overwhelmingly Democratic — President Donald Trump finished 39 points behind Kamala Harris in the 2024 election — that the winner of the congressional primary is all-but-guaranteed to win the November election. In April, Cherfilus-McCormick resigned from the House. A bipartisan adjudicatory subcommittee found she committed 25 ethics violations. And she...

Umberto Longo, appointed to the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences, appears repeatedly in Masonic records. Pope Leo has appointed a historian who appears repeatedly in Masonic records to a Vatican historical committee. On August 13, Pope Leo XIV appointed Umberto Longo, director of the Italian Historical Institute for the Middle Ages and professor of medieval history at Sapienza University of Rome, as a member of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences.The appointment comes despite documentary evidence connecting him to Freemasonry, including records from the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite and later appearances by Longo at events organized within the sphere...

This isn't the video I was planning to upload next, but it was way too cool not to share! Early on August 14th, a meteor entered the atmosphere, lighting up the skies over much of Washington state. Traffic cameras from both Bellevue and Spokane captured footage of the fireball, which was estimated to be beach-ball sized and moving at nearly 33,000 miles per hour! Space invader! Spectacular fireball captured on Bellevue and Spokane cameras! | 3:55 SeattleTraffic Cams | 23K subscribers | 29,148 views | August 15, 2026 YouTube transcript reformatted at textformatter.ai *may* follow.

Much of America is freaking out over the Marxist takeover of the Democratic Party, but for anyone who paid attention, this wasn't hard to foresee. It has been coming for generations. Both Yogi Berra and the great physicist Niels Bohr are credited with saying that "predictions are hard, especially about the future." Currently, much of America is freaking out over the Marxist takeover of the Democratic Party, but for anyone who paid attention, this wasn't hard to foresee. It has been coming for generations. If the party elders had not bent the rules so ruthlessly, Bernie Sanders and his DSA...

A Tennessee teacher who was named Teacher of the Year has quit after accusing the school district of directing her to change a failing student’s grade. Samira Hardcastle, named the 2025-2026 Teacher of the Year at John F. Kennedy Middle School in Antioch, Tenn., submitted her letter of resignation in May after eight years teaching art in Metro Nashville Public Schools. “District leaders asked me to fabricate grades for a parent who sat in the office for hours until her daughter’s failing grades were changed,” Hardcastle said in an impassioned speech at Tuesday’s school board meeting. “It creates false entitlement....

CNN's Fareed Zakaria says this is a problem for democrats: The left has the passion, but the middle still has the votes they need to win in general elections.Also, Fareed explores the concept of gerontocracy: the concentration of wealth & political power among older Americans and how it's creating inequality between them and younger people who are underrepresented. Democrats are solving the wrong problems | Fareed's Take | 10:46 CNN | 19.7M subscribers | 140,463 views | August 12, 20260:00 Democrats are facing a dilemma 5:58 Politicians are much older than the electorate they serve 8:37 Elderly are "lavished with...

A podcast discussing AI in education from Hillsdale leader in K-12 education

A routine summer afternoon took a terrifying turn when a Boston trash collector went to pick up his coworker at a designated pickup spot in Boston — but he didn’t show. Concerned, he called his coworker, Karl Timolus. The voice on the other end, however, wasn’t Timolus.

Inspired by the work of the RNA Therapeutics Institute at UMass Chan Medical School and the development of the COVID vaccine, Marcus Ruscetti, PhD, and Chaitanya Naimesh Parikh, PhD’26, have developed an immunotherapy using a cocktail of messenger RNAs (mRNA) that could potentially be transformative for pancreatic cancer treatment. The study, published in Nature Communications, combines immune cytokine and tumor-associated antigen mRNAs into a single injection to treat pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. Approximately 50 percent of mice with pancreatic cancer treated with the mRNA immunotherapeutic cocktail saw complete tumor responses and more impressively, remained disease free for a year, even after...

What Europe has been suffering for years — parallel neighborhoods, pressure on freedom of speech, tensions over incompatible values, and a slow erosion of social cohesion with extreme violence affecting particularly the working classes — is no longer exclusively a European phenomenon. It is now attacking the heart of the West — the United States — in an increasingly undisguised way. Mass immigration from majority-Muslim countries, combined with low assimilation rates and the ideological defense of “diversity” by the progressive left and the Democrat party, is importing doctrines and loyalties that clash head-on with the principles of American freedom. This...

Her final date will be with the executioner. A serial spouse-slayer nicknamed Iran’s “Black Widow” has been sentenced to death after a lethal marriage spree that left at least 10 husbands in the graveyard over two decades. Kolthoum Akbari, 56, confessed to much of the horrific body count, the Mazandaran Province public relations office told Iranian state media last Sunday. It’s unclear how many of her former spouses perished, but the number is as high as a dozen or more and only one is believed to have lived, authorities said. Most were killed using rubbing alcohol, sedatives and other meds....

I asked Grok how the red states and blue states performed economically between 2000 and 2026. It only gave me up until 2024, but if trends continued, the red states have continued to close the gap and may actually be higher income economies than blue states. Approx. Real GDP CAGR 2000–2024 Yearly Red-leaning group ████████████████ ≈ 2.3–2.6% Blue-leaning group ██████████████ ≈ 1.9–2.2% U.S. overall ███████████████ ≈ 2.1% Approximate cumulative real GDP growth (total multiplicative increase) These are simple compounds of representative average annual rates over 24 years: Red-leaning group (~2.4% average annual): Growth factor ≈ 1.77 → ~77% total cumulative...