Eight of the nine backcountry skiers who were hit Tuesday by a sudden avalanche near Castle Peak in California’s Sierra Nevada range were found dead by responders on Wednesday and the ninth remains missing, Reuters reports, citing an update from the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office.

Six survivors were rescued on Tuesday. The search for the final skier is still ongoing. Either way, it’s already the third-deadliest single avalanche in US history after the 1910 Wellington, Washington disaster when two trains were hit, killing 96, and the 1980 Mount Rainier avalanche that took the lives of 11 climbers. Which, when you think of it, for a country with a shit ton of mountains that get a shit ton of snow every year, the US’s avalanche safety record is pretty damn good.

“I have been telling Prime Minister Keir Starmer, of the United Kingdom, that Leases are no good when it comes to Countries, and that he is making a big mistake by entering a 100 Year Lease with whoever it is that is ‘claiming’ Right, Title, and Interest to Diego Garcia, strategically located in the Indian Ocean. Our relationship with the United Kingdom is a strong and powerful one, and it has been for many years, but Prime Minister Starmer is losing control of this important Island by claims of entities never known of before. In our opinion, they are fictitious in nature. Should Iran decide not to make a Deal, it may be necessary for the United States to use Diego Garcia, and the Airfield located in Fairford, in order to eradicate a potential attack by a highly unstable and dangerous Regime – An attack that would potentially be made on the UK, as well as other friendly Countries.”

“Prime Minister Starmer should not lose control, for any reason, of Diego Garcia, by entering a tenuous, at best, 100 Year Lease. This land should not be taken away from the UK and, if it is allowed to be, it will be a blight on our Great Ally. We will always be ready, willing, and able to fight for the UK, but they have to remain strong in the face of Wokeism, and other problems put before them. DO NOT GIVE AWAY DIEGO GARCIA!” posted the President of the United States on Wednesday, plainly unable to recall how to spell Mauritius, the Indian Ocean archipelago nation set to gain sovereignty over Diego Garcia but obviously not full control given the 100-year base lease.

It’s not clear why, if Diego Garcia – uninhabited by any civilian population since the British forcibly removed about 280 locals in the early 1970s – is so important, that Trump won’t just step in and ask Mauritius to name a price for the territory since that worked out so well with Greenland.

Not even sure how to start here. If you haven’t read the Saturday National Zero story “Schools cancel photo day over vendor’s Epstein ‘connection’” and/or the Associated Press story it was sourced from the you may not fully appreciate the Tuesday story from WDKY in Lexington, Kentucky headlined “Laurel County parents speak out over Lifetouch concerns, spring photos canceled.”

Or maybe this is enough to get the gist: Lifetouch has been in the school portrait business since the 1930s, it was bought up by online photo hub Shutterfly in 2017, in turn Shutterfly was bought up by hedge fund Apollo Capital Management in 2019. Apollo’s co-founder Leon Black, who quit under pressure in 2021, was REAL tight with Jeffrey Epstein and that’s enough for some parents to act on vague fears that a sex trafficking cabal will have unfettered access to their kids’ names and photos by demanding that principals and administrators cancel photo day despite Lifetouch’s protestations.

Indeed the AP’s story itself was not particularly credulous toward the parents’ um, concerns which makes the lede to WDKY’s story that much friggin funnier: “Parents in Laurel County are speaking out after new concerns surfaced about Lifetouch, a company that photographs millions of students across the country. The concerns stem from a recent Associated Press report that said some school districts nationwide are cutting ties with Lifetouch after social media posts linked the company to Leon Black, the former CEO of Apollo Global Management, which purchased Lifetouch’s parent company,” emphasis added on the part where the local station acts like the AP exposed some direct Lifetouch-to-Ghislaine Maxwell pipeline rather than simply reporting the perception was causing serious problems for the company and quoting from their statements denying any malfeasance.

Alberta MP Matt Jeneroux, who had previously said he was considering quitting his seat and Canada’s Parliament altogether after his name leaked as a potential defector a few months ago, became an actual defector on Wednesday and announced he’s joining Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal Party, the CBC reports on the premier inching closer to a majority in the chamber.

Jeneroux is the third Conservative the Libes have picked up in the current Parliament, following Nova Scotia MP Chris d’Entremont in November and Toronto-area MP Michael Ma in December.

Hint-fucking-hint, Republicans. There are some of you who could credibly do the same.

If you REALLY want to watch ex-coworkers Dan and K$H fellate each other here’s the whole thing:

FCC incel Brendan Carr on Wednesday confirmed his agency is investigating ABC’s The View for “bias,” the Guardian’s Jeremy Barr reports on more impotent rage from the fascist weenie.

Carr said the woman-hosted talk show is potentially in violation of the “equal time” regulation that hasn’t been enforced in decades. The bald worm also cried about the Stephen Colbert-James Talarico mess, bitching that the show could’ve just cut the interview on Texas airings and decrying the coverage from outlets not in the FCC’s actual jurisdiction. “Too many in the mainstream media fell for it… it’s why people don’t trust the mainstream media anymore,” whined Carr, adding “I think you guys should feel a bit ashamed for having been lied to and then run with those lies.”

Douchey sex pest Mark Halperin reports that convicted felon President Trump’s top minions including Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Treasury Suckretary Scott Bessent, Epstein pal Howard Nutlick, Bobby Brainworms, former MTV Real World cast member Sean Duffy, pollster Tony Fabrizio, and cueball-headed political apparatchik James Blair held a midterms strategy session in front of an audience of about 175 to 200 other, lower-ranking comrades at the Capitol Hill Club on Tuesday night, a meeting at which Halperin writes “was a veteran group, not panicked or shaken.”

“Just focused on the work and the task at hand,” he continued. Okay, Mark. Got it.

“The group was served a chicken and steak buffet,” Halperin also wrote in the lnegthy tweet. That was actually before he described their state of mind and the non-state of panic. It’s not clear if he was actually in the room or if he was allowed to eat from the buffet if he was indeed there for the powow. Anyway, Fabrizio had a lengthy presentation on the economy being the main issue for November (no shit) and hammering the need be focus on the Big Beautiful Billionaire giveaway, pushing housing affordability that the GOP has no plans to address and blah blah blah.

“His message was not pessimistic,” Halperin then adds gratuitously to his account.

Convicted felon President Trump’s regime on Wednesday appealed a district court judge’s order to restore the exhibit on the nine people enslaved by George Washington at his former home on Independence Mall in Philadelphia, a site managed by the US National Park service, the AP reports.

“Bold talk for a one-eyed fat man.”

See you at the movies.

Oh I forgot, you don’t have movies. https://t.co/meVcucZf8K

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) February 18, 2026

“A former Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent pleaded guilty today to receiving child pornography, United States Attorney Jerome F Gorgon, Jr announced. Gorgon was joined in the announcement by Jennifer Runyan, Special Agent in Charge of the Detroit Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The superseding information charges Harry Marvelle Peless, III, 51, of Newport, Michigan, with one count of receipt of child pornography. A violation of this offense carries a sentence of no less than 5 years’ and up to 20 years’ imprisonment, and a fine of up to $250,000. Sentencing has been set for June 1 at 9 am,” said a Tuesday Justice Department press release.

“According to court records, law enforcement began investigating Peless after Peless sent sexual messages to an undercover officer posing as a minor. Peless began communicating with the undercover in September 2024, and his contacts with the undercover became a near daily occurrence. At the time of the offense, Peless was employed as a Marine Border Protection Agent at the Gibraltar, Michigan, CBP station. Following the filing of charges in this matter, CPB placed Peless on unpaid administrative leave. Evidence recovered during the investigation showed that Peless had reveived child pornography over the internet, and that he was logged into the chat account he used to communicate with the undercover officer while he was at the Gibraltar CBP station.”

With still 13 days to go until primary day in Texas, Punchbowl News has tallied it up and found that the GOP establishment spent fucking $60 million to defend Senator John Cornhole Cornyn from corrupt Picasso-face Attorney General Ken Paxton’s primary challenge and has had zero polling improvement whatsoever to show for it, dooming him to an extremely likely late May runoff loss.

Flagged by Popular Info’s Judd Legum this week, Kentucky MAGA Congressman Andy Barr, running to replace a rapidly decaying Mitch McConnell, tells the state’s GOP primary voters that it’s “not a sin to be white,” a variation of the classic white nationalist troll “It’s okay to be white,” defined by the ADL as “a slogan popularized in late 2017 as a trolling campaign by members of the controversial discussion forum 4chan. The original idea behind the campaign was to choose an ostensibly innocuous and inoffensive slogan, put that slogan on fliers bereft of any other words or imagery, then place the fliers in public locations. Originators assumed that ‘liberals’ would react negatively to such fliers and condemn them or take them down, thus ‘proving’ that liberals did not even think it was ‘okay’ to be white.” Legum rightly points out there’s been zero MSM coverage of this ad.

For the third time since the current five-year presidential term began in July 2021, Peru’s congress on Tuesday impeached and removed the mountainous South American nation’s head of state from office, this time canning President Jose Jeri on corruption charges stemming from a series of undisclosed meetings with two Chinese businessmen with government contracts, the AP reports.

Jeri was pretty much just getting settled in as he was tapped to take over for now-former-President Dina Boluarte in October, herself having been elevated to the presidency after the last guy who was actually elected, Pedro Castillo, was impeached and removed in 2022. The 2021 to 2026 term needs just one more removal to beat the record of four presidents hit during the 2016 to 2021 term.

In a landmark decision in favor of Buffalo Wild Wings and other major brands in the chain restaurant and/or frozen food space, a Chicago federal judge on Tuesday tossed local man Aimen Halim’s 2023 lawsuit accusing the wing-themed chain of “false and deceptive advertising” because “boneless wings” are not de-boned chicken wings but more or less chicken nuggets, Reuters reports.

“Halim sued BWW over his confusion, but ⁠his complaint has no meat on its bones,” Judge John Tharp Jr wrote in the ruling and there’s a lot of lame puns. “If ​Halim is right, reasonable consumers ​should think that cauliflower ​wings are made (at least in part) from ‌wing meat. They don’t, though.”

Republicans in Congress need to wake up and get Trump’s agenda codified before it’s too late — Especially the SAVE America Act.

If these projections are right, we won’t have another chance… https://t.co/G7fQW3ANPk

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 17, 2026

Kind of hard, even for a guy who still has yet to make good on his threat to “immediately” sue Milo Yiannopoulos for accusing him of numerous homosexual encounters at multiple conservative events, to call it “fake news” now after spending the home stretch of the 2024 election celebrating every single time convicted felon President Trump’s odds inched up on the scam betting site.

The Nevada County, California sheriff’s office late Tuesday announced that they had rescued six out of 15 backcountry skiers believed to have been struck by an avalanche at around 11:30 AM local time in the area of Castle Peak, northwest of Lake Tahoe, the Los Angeles Times reports.

“The six initially reported skiers who survived the avalanche have been successfully rescued this evening by search and rescue teams with varying injuries. Due to extreme weather conditions, it took several hours for rescue personnel to safely reach the skiers and transport them to safety where they were medically evaluated by Truckee Fire. Two of the six skiers have been transported to a hospital for treatment. The search is ongoing, pending weather conditions. It should be noted it was initially believed there were 16 total persons, but that number has been updated to reflect 15 people who actually went on the trip,” posted the sheriff’s office at 10:46 PM PST on Tuesday.

Upfront it must be noted that it seems very unlikely that dog-murdering Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s interference with a Coast Guard search and rescue attempt to find a guardsman who went overboard in the Pacific on last year and NBC says as much in their reporting.

Sadly Seaman Bryan K Lee, the man who fell from the Waesche on February 4, 2025 was never found but personnel were still holding out hope when Noem a USCG C-130 actively deployed to the search to return to San Diego to pick up deportees to fly them to Texas. Coast Guard leadership worked for about an hour to scrounge up two C-27s in Colorado that they instead used for the deportation flight, allowing the C-130 to resume looking for Lee, just hours after his overboarding.

“It’s not clear that Noem’s directive to pull the C-130 had any impact on the search, particularly given the Coast Guard found alternative aircraft that allowed it to return to the effort,” NBC writes.

Still, obviously this was twisted enough for two sources to speak to reporters about and for some DHS spokesperson to acknowledge it while claiming “the C-130 never left the search” and there’s no documentation proving it did. That last part in the non-direct quote sounds like “You can’t prove that the search for a lost Coast Guardsman was interrupted,” while acknowledging Noem sure tried.