Iranian dictator Ayatollah Khamenei’s regime on Tuesday announced that the Strait of Hormuz – a narrow waterway through which 20 percent of the global oil supply moves – will be closed for a few hours as the IRGC conducts live fire drills ahead of the anticipated arrival of the USS Gerald R Ford to the region within the next few days, joining another carrier already in the area, the AP reports.

“It is with profound sadness that we announce the passing of Civil Rights leader and founder of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the Honorable Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson, Sr. He died peacefully on Tuesday morning, surrounded by his family. His unwavering commitment to justice, equality, and human rights helped shape a global movement for freedom and dignity. A tireless change agent, he elevated the voices of the voiceless-from his Presidential campaigns in the 1980s to mobilizing millions to register to vote-leaving an indelible mark on history. Reverend Jackson is survived by his wife, Jacqueline; their children Santita, Jesse Jr, Jonathan, Yusef, Jacqueline; daughter Ashley Jackson, and grandchildren,” says the now-late Reverend’s family in a statement on Tuesday.

“Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced investigations into North East Independent School District (‘NEISD’) in San Antonio, Dallas Independent School District, and Manor Independent School District (‘MISD’) for facilitating and failing to keep students safe and accountable during various student protests against lawful immigration enforcement. The investigations are being announced following concerns that ISD administration and faculty orchestrated the protests. It appears that these ISDs have taken little to no action to ensure the safety of students and to stop large-scale interruptions of classroom instructional time,” says Picasso-face in a campaign fundraising pitch.

“‘I will not allow Texas schools to become breeding grounds for the radical Left’s open borders agenda,’ said Attorney General Ken Paxton. ‘Let this serve as a warning to any public school official or employee who unlawfully facilitates student participation in protests targeting our heroic law enforcement officers: my office will use every legal tool available to hold you accountable.’ Attorney General Paxton has demanded that each of the three ISDs hand over information regarding policies related to allowing students to leave campus, excused absence policies, security protocols of the ISD, and internal communications regarding the protests. The Office of the Attorney General will investigate the use of public funds and whether any laws were violated,” Pax continued.

It’s not clear if he expects school security to simply shoot the lib kids next time.

A very freaking hilariously-written paragraph from a Variety article printed last week: “Industry watchers are mixed on how ‘Melania’ will perform on Prime Video. Some believe that everyone who had interest has already watched Amazon’s glossy look at the first lady in the lead up to the inauguration. Others suggest it could see a surge from morbidly curious liberals who wouldn’t ever pay for a ticket for a film endorsed by the Trumps and directed by director Brett Ratner, who has been exiled from Hollywood since he was accused in 2017 of sexual harassment.”

Emphasis added on the “Well some libs who already subscribe to Amazon Prime will hate-watch it, so that might help boost the widely anticipated-to-be-terrible streaming numbers” part.

Anyway that was last week and the scam documentary suffered another massive drop-off at the box office this past weekend, its third in theaters, per the Daily Beast who report that the $75 million quid pro quo is projected to pull in $15.4 million by the time it’s finally dumped on Prime.

“I am opposed to the future boondoggle known as ‘Gateway,’ in New York/New Jersey, because it will cost many BILLIONS OF DOLLARS more than projected or anticipated, much like Gavin Newscum’s ‘Railroad’ to nowhere, which is many times over budget, with no end in sight, and could financially obliterate what is left, after Newscum, of the California Economy. It is a disaster!” posted convicted felon President Trump on Monday, leaving out that the funds for the job – congressionally appropriated in 2021 and thus were unlawfully halted by him over some “DEI” horseshit – have already been unblocked by a federal court. So now he’s “opposed” in a vague political sense.

“Gateway will likewise be financially catastrophic for the region, unless hard work and proper planning is done, NOW, to avoid insurmountable future cost overruns. Please let this statement represent the fact that, under no circumstances, will the Federal Government be responsible for ANY COST OVERRUNS – NOT ONE DOLLAR! The Federal Government is willing to meet, however, to make sure that this does not happen!” the fat bastard continued salving his wounded ego, likely after somebody told him just now that they lost 11 days ago and the stay expired on Thursday.

“Also, the naming of PENN Station (I LOVE Pennsylvania, but it is a direct competitor to New York, and ‘eating New York’s lunch!’) to TRUMP STATION, was brought up by certain politicians and construction union heads, not me – IT IS JUST MORE FAKE NEWS! NO COST OVERRUNS!!! Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Trump then wrote, directly contradicting Krazy Karoline, who said the renaming idea was “something the President floated in his conversation with Chuck Schumer,” in response to a question from a White House reporter more than a week ago.

“In less than a week after he was expelled from the House for his myriad of scams and general scumbaggery, Republican now-former Long Island Congressman George Santos has earned a shit ton of money cranking out Cameo video greetings at now $200 to $300 each, Semafor reports. The wording of their story is slightly dicey but it appears he’s already just in the last few days earned more than the $174,000 annual salary he would’ve made had he survived a full year in Congress, according to screenshots Santos sent to Semafor that were verified by Cameo’s CEO,” wrote National Zero on December 6, 2023, just five days after Santos’s expulsion from the House.

The explainer of what Cameo is was probably in an earlier article so in brief it’s a service that allows, for example, users to spend $1,500 to buy a circa 1 minute personal video message recorded by that Shark Tank douchebag Kevin O’Leary, or $699 for one by Jean Claude Van Damme, or $450 for one by Chuck Norris, and so on… Oh shit, “🔥 Only 9 videos left at this price,” says Norris’s page.

“The videos take less than a minute to crank out and if Santos did a few thousand that’s a pretty realistic sum. The demand is obviously there too, as Georgie boy definitely seemed a little fatigued when Senator John Fetterman used Santos to troll scumbag colleague ‘Bobby from Jersey,'” the article continued and let’s skip ahead to noting they’re “a novelty that people are into right now because Santos just got expelled that will fade and then probably spike again when he goes on trial in the spring.” Yeah he just pleaded guilty, surrendered in July 2025, and did three months before other felon Trump commuted his seven and a half year sentence because fuck you, America.

For context, this is the leader of one of the key mainstream Muslim groups that supported Mamdani. pic.twitter.com/zcIs4tVyly

— Congressman Randy Fine (@RepFine) February 15, 2026

“Nicole Parker, formerly of the FBI, is doing a great job of explaining, on FoxNews, the Nancy Guthrie investigation. Others also, working so hard, with such expertise and knowledge. Hopefully there will be a positive result!” posted the President of the United States at 9:31 AM on Monday, a statement issued to reassure Americans he’s tirelessly pushing himself to the limits of human capacity around the clock to resolve a crisis that has thus far vexed his government’s greatest minds and…

Well it’s one thing for Donald to be sitting on his fat ass watching Fox News instead of literally anything that might reduce the cost of living for Americans. That’s been priced in with him, as is his praise of one of the self-promoting FBI washouts who quit in 2022 and got right to work as one of Jim Jordan’s fake “whistleblowers” because she didn’t want to arrest the Capitol insurrectionists.

It’s when you put those together with the utter sloth and passivity of “Hopefully there will be a positive result!” on a news cycle that – with all the caveats of being a horrible crime that merits some of the media bandwidth it has received – on balance affects fewer Americans than the stories under headlines like “When does McDonald’s Shamrock Shake come out? See return date,” at USA Today or “Costco May Have Just Quietly Changed Its Returns Policy: Reports” at Newsweek for example.

Like if he’s going to post about it instead of something actually kind of important or relevant why can’t he at the very least post something, anything that carries some imprimatur of initiative and command like “I’m ordering the NSA and CIA to begin examining satellite images from the night of Nancy Guthrie’s abduction to determine if there’s any data on what vehicles might have been in the neighborhood” or whatever. Why not just try to seem decisive and resolute instead of old and lazy?

France’s Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin on Sunday accused far left extremist politicians’ rhetoric of having amped up the Antifa libs who savagely beat a 23 year-old far right extremist in the city of Lyon on Thursday under circumstances the AFP reports that local prosecutors haven’t fully revealed.

What is known is that far left France Unbowed (LFI) Euro Parliament MEP Rima Hassan was making an appearance and the victim, identified only as “Quentin” was there to provide security for right wingers protesting Hassan’s presence at the Sciences Po University in the city. According to an attorney for Quentin’s family, the man was quickly surrounded and thrashed by the “organized and trained individuals, vastly superior in number and armed, some with their faces masked.”

Quentin, an associate of the right wing “Nemesis Collective,” succumbed to his wounds on Saturday, leading Darmanin to decry “speeches, particularly from France Unbowed and the ultra-left, which unfortunately lead to unbridled violence on social networks and then in the physical world.”

“Words can kill,” Darmanin, seen as the among the most conservative members of President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist cabinet continued living Pam Bondi’s wet dream of an actually violent episode of Antifa violence against a right winger instead of having to blame the victims.

As of 8:53 AM EST Monday morning users of Twitter (or “X” if you’re a douchebag) were logging in to find the platform roughly as functional as owner Elon Musk’s orbitofrontal cortex in that the pages loaded as well as the region of the South African-born tech tycoon’s brain that governs social behavior, impulse control, and the ability to anticipate future consequences of actions.

Really the only difference is that one is reparable and the other is most certainly beyond saving.

Autopsy results shared with the Miami Herald show that Nicaraguan anesthesiologist Dr Helen Massiell Garay Sanchez had a blood alcohol level of 0.11 percent as well as an ocular fluid ethanol level of 0.156 percent before she became trapped in the freezer of a Dollar Tree store in the city’s Little Havana neighborhood on December 13, 2025 and was not discovered until the next day, with officials saying her intoxication “might have been a factor” in her succumbing to hypothermia.

Yeah that’s a lede alright. The “might have been a factor” part is the Herald’s wording, not the coroner’s. What also sticks out is a passing mention of the store’s manager Yanelkis Gonzalez being named as a defendant in a $50 million negligence lawsuit alongside the major discount retailer – the complaint alleging specifically that Gozalaez had refused to review security footage when a customer told her Garay Sanchez was missing. Besides that there isn’t any space devoted to how the fuck a woman gets trapped in a freezer with a glass door and isn’t found until a day later long after she had already frozen to death. God knows how many customers and employees walked by, not to mention actually opened the freezer to grab a 1.3 oz cup of Haagen Dazs or whatever.

Ultimately yes it is Garay Sanchez’s fault that she was drunk – though at 0.11 BAC not excessively over the legal limit to drive of 0.08 – and there’s almost certainly a lot more to the story of why a 32 year-old pediatric anesthesiologist with a husband and two kids is that hammered that she would fall into a goddamned Dollar Tree freezer and unable to simply wobble up and extricate herself.

At the same time, what the Florida, man… How do you let this woman suffer such a gruesome, pointless death and not even know she was in the fucking dollar store freezer for an entire day?

“Pioneer Illinois Shipwreck Hunter and Scuba Diver Paul Ehorn is pleased to announce the discovery of one of Lake Michigan’s most sought-after missing ships. The passenger steamer Lac La Belle had been missing in the depths of Lake Michigan since a stormy night in October of 1872. Ehorn located her upright, intact hull almost 150 years to the day after her loss. The Lac La Belle was one of the most popular passenger steamers on Lake Michigan,” says a press release posted to ShipwreckWorld.com on the massive development in the world of long-lost steamship hunting.

The Lac La Belle’s loss itself was not actually deadly. Technically all 53 passengers and crew on board survived its sinking but eight died when one of the lifeboats capsized. That low death toll, amount of time passed, and the not-particularly-dramatic circumstances around the sinking are probably why the Lac La Belle’s obscure even to those familiar with wrecks like the 1975 loss of the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald and the 1902 sinking of the John B Cowle. You know, ship dorks.

The headquarters for the Republican Party of Eau Claire County in Wisconsin was vandalized with red spray paint overnight on Friday, and police are investigating. https://t.co/b8RelWdKlw

— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) February 16, 2026

In what former Daily Beast reporter-turned-independent Substacker Roger Sollenberger writes is a “landmark revelation” that undermines the “White House’s protestations that Trump hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing,” Sollenberger says he’s connected the dots and found that an unidentified victim of now-deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was interviewed by the FBI in 2019, that documents in the Epstein files indicate she was deemed to be credible, and – most damningly – that her biographical details line up with that of the recipient of a 2021 settlement with Epstein’s estate.

“[REDACTED] stated Epstein introduced her to Trump who subsequently forced her head down to his exposed penis which she subsequently bit,” says the document on the encounter. “In response, Trump punched” the victim, who was “approximately 13-15 years old when this occurred” in the early-mid 1980s “in the head and kicked her out” of a room at a home somewhere in New Jersey.

The corroboration comes from public reporting on the 2021 case against the Epstein estate that the accuser, “Jane Doe 4,” as South Carolina native who was living in Vancouver, Washington as an adult when she called the FBI’s Epstein tip line in 2019. “The victimization occurred in the 1980’s when the caller was approximately 13 to 15 years old and resided in the [REDACTED] Island area of South Carolina,” the agents wrote in the July 2019 interview memo following Epstein’s second federal indictment but weeks before he was unalived in his cell before he could be brought to trial.

It gets even more damning: On the same slideshow where Jane Doe 4’s allegation was mentioned in an internal FBI slideshow presentation created last summer and included in the files, there’s mention of another woman who had claimed she was 14 when Epstein brought her to Mar-a-Lago in 1994 and said “This is a good one, right?” while showing her off to Trump – who agreed. This woman was a key prosecution witness in the government’s case against Ghislaine Maxwell, per Sollenberger.

Sayyyyy, Maurene Comey, in the unlikely event you’re reading this do you have any insight on that?

“Next time Puerto Rican leftists call for independence, we should just let them have it. We’d wind up saving money on the deal, too, considering that nearly half of Puerto Rico is on welfare, which is one of two reasons why Puerto Rico votes to retain its status as a territory, the other reason being American citizenship” – Top comment on the Friday New York Post article headlined “Bad Bunny and his Super Bowl halftime show just had a brush with the FCC: sources,” following up on fat fuck MAGA Congressman Randy Fine’s widely-ridiculed demand for the regulator to drop the hammer on the ultra-popular artist and NBC for broadcasting his allegedly profane lyrics to 140 million+ viewers.

The “exclusive” reporting by the Murdoch-owned Manhattan rag is so pained in its burial of what the lede would be from any real news outlet: The FCC immediately determined there’s no case and has “shelved any additional scrutiny barring further evidence,” because the Spanish vulgarities were edited out. End of story, leaving Fine and pals stuck working on their next performative outrage. In retrospect the past tense of “just had a brush” in the headline might’ve been a clue that the MAGA FCC had nothing to go on here but goddamn how hard they state media works to bury their failures.

Worth asking if the Caucasian-American commenter was aware of this disappointment and his demand that Puerto Rico be cut loose was his proposed recourse to the affront that was Bad Bunny’s halftime show. It had a certain escalatory MAGA logic to it: FCC won’t punish Bad Bunny, therefore every US citizen born on the territorial island must be denaturalized. That’s “fair” to them.

Well… That’s, um… Most people tuned in these days already know that Republican Kentucky Congressman Tom Massie and convicted felon President Trump do not get along, at all, and Massie’s gone full FTW. It’s already priced in and yet it’s still jarring to hear the arch-conservative taunt the Orange Tyrant with “This is the Epstein Administration.” That’s definitely an escalation.

The headline was almost “British llama herd takes the law into their own hooves,” but at some point in the production process it occurred that such a title would run into the serious danger of being at best inconsistent with this site’s previous excoriations of UPI reporter Ben Hooper’s soul-crushingly awful puns like the infamous “traffic yam” caused by an overturned truckload of sweet potatoes.

So let’s just play it straight: The Derbyshire Times reported earlier this month that an unnamed suspect fleeing from the scene of a theft of several packets of tobacco – Jesus Christ, lol – choose his route poorly. The man jumped a fence into a farm field and very quickly found himself surrounded by no fewer than eight llamas, ungulates whose territorial nature drives them to behave aggressively toward unexpected intrusions by unfamiliar people or animals, especially at night. The llamas’ loud bleating alerted the owners, Heidi Price and her partner Graham Oliver who, along with their dog, marched the man back to the property line where cops were waiting to arrest him.