Turkish Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was held in ICE detention last year after her visa was revoked over alleged “activities in support of Hamas,” has returned home to Turkey following a legal settlement with the United States. The State Department canceled Ozturk’s student visa in 2024 after she co-authored an op-ed in her college newspaper calling on Tufts to recognize the “Palestinian genocide” and to divest from companies with ties to Israel. In March 2025, ICE agents arrested Ozturk while walking on a street in Somerville, Massachusetts. She spent six weeks in federal custody before a judge ordered her release. WATCH

Rapper d4vd, whose legal name is David Burke, was arrested Thursday on suspicion of murder after a 14-year-old girl whose dismembered body was found in his Tesla last year. The Los Angeles Police Department said Burke, 21, has been booked on suspicion of murdering Celeste Rivas Hernandez and is being held without bail. “Detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department, Robbery-Homicide Division, have arrested David Burke, a 21-year-old resident of Los Angeles, for the murder of Celeste Rivas,” LAPD posted on X, adding that the case will be presented to the L.A. County District Attorney’s office on Monday for possible charges. Burke’s attorneys denied the allegations, saying in a statement that “actual evidence in this case will show that David Burke did not murder Celeste Rivas Hernandez and he was not the cause of her death,” per CBS News. “There has been no indictment returned by any grand jury in this case and no criminal complaint filed,” the statement continued. “David has only been detained under suspicion. We will vigorously defend David’s innocence.” The 21-year-old singer initially continued touring after the remains were discovered in September 2025. He canceled the remainder of his tour after the victim was publicly identified.   Rivas’ dismembered body was found in bags inside the abandoned Tesla that had been taken to the city impound. The car was searched after employees reported a foul stench coming from the vehicle. The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department confirmed that Rivas was reported missing from Lake Elsinore more than a year ago, per CBS News. According to a missing person flyer, the teen was last seen on April 5, 2024, leaving her home. Burke first gained recognition on TikTok before being signed to Darkroom and Interscope Records. The “Romantic Homicide” singer has 2 million followers on Instagram and 5.4 billion streams on Spotify.

An illegal immigrant is accused of killing two boys in South Carolina while driving drunk, as federal authorities move to take custody of him for possible deportation, The Daily Wire has learned. Eri Perez allegedly veered off the road and onto a sidewalk in Spartanburg County on Sunday, striking 12-year-old Dereon James Robinson and 9-year-old Mikhail-Lee Smith as they rode their bikes, according to FOX Carolina. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has since lodged a detainer asking local authorities to hand over Perez, who they said snuck into the country as a “gotaway” at an unknown time, the Department of Homeland Security told The Daily Wire. Sophia Pagliuca, a family friend who lived with Dereon for years, called his death “preventable,” expressing outrage over his alleged killer’s illegal immigration status. “He should be alive right now. And it was a preventable death, and that is what adds a whole other layer to this,” Pagliuca told The Daily Wire. “Something has to change. There has to be a solution here that serves justice while preventing any other children or any person from dying in this way,” she added. Dereon’s mother witnessed the crash while accompaning the two boys on their bike ride, WHNS reported. She said she was almost hit before she ran to their aid and performed CPR. Her son was just three days away from his 13th birthday. Courtesy of DHS Pagliuca described Dereon as a “joyful” child. “And in the way that many boys are so rambunctious and all boy and want to fight and want to get dirty, he just wanted to sit with you, and even as a little child, he didn’t speak for a long time. He was older when he started speaking, probably, like, three years old. And he didn’t even have to say anything to you, for you to feel so joyful,” Pagliuca said. “I work in the childcare industry now, and no other child I’ve met has had the same sense of joy and the same ability to lift spirits that Dereon had. He was so special,” she added. Perez was allegedly so drunk at the time of the crash that police had to hold him up, according to WHNS. He also admitted that he had been drinking all day Saturday and Sunday, authorities said. Another passenger was also in Perez’s vehicle but fled the scene and was never caught. Perez was denied bond on Monday after being deemed a “flight risk” for his illegal immigration status, WHNS reported. He was charged with two counts of felony DUI resulting in death, driving without a license and open container, according to FOX Carolina.

You’ve been lied to. You’ve been hearing for weeks now from all of the doubters, all of the so-called “panicans.” But here is what you are not going to hear anywhere else: not just that President Trump is winning in Iran, but why he is winning. He came in with four goals. He has now achieved three of them, and the fourth is on the way. Iran had three methods of resistance. President Trump has basically eliminated two of them. And the third is about to end. People keep assuming that the goal of the war in Iran was regime change. No. Regime change is a means; it is not the actual end. In a certain sense, if the regime were to change its behavior dramatically, you wouldn’t need to change the regime. Yes, if there were to be a regime change, it would pretty much achieve all the goals all at once.  But you don’t have to achieve all of the goals of the war with regime change. The president and Secretary of State Marco Rubio laid out the goals:  Destroy the vast majority of Iran’s forward military capacity. Done. We have defenestrated their foreign military capacity, their missile base is basically gone. Their air force, gone. Their navy, gone.  Wipe out their defense industrial base. Done. The United States and Israel have wiped out their steel foundries. They have hit all of their missile factories. They have hit their missile launchers. Keep Iran’s economy in a stranglehold, while depriving it of the means to rebuild.  Done. The Iranian economy is defunct. Nothing has been getting in. End the Iranian nuclear threat. Pending.  Three of those four have basically been done. It’s the Iranian nuclear threat that remains on the table. Okay, say the panicans and the liars, but somehow Iran has gotten stronger. This is what we might call the Obi-Wan Kenobi theory of foreign policy: “If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.” It doesn’t work that way in real life. When you strike someone down, they usually stay down. And if they recover, you can strike them down again.  The spirit of Iran is not going to teach Luke Skywalker how to blow up the Death Star. That’s not how this works. It is not clear how you get stronger by being alienated from every single country in the region, from Jews to Muslims, or how, somehow, you’re getting stronger if all your leaders are dead and you’re walking around as a regime pretending that an impotent, comatose dude with no leg is your actual leader: “Weekend at Mullahs.” Or how you get stronger when your missile launch capacity has been so degraded, so radically degraded, that you’re being forced to physically unbury the missile launchers you buried.  They buried a bunch of missile launchers to hide them, and now they’re being forced to unbury them just so they have something to shoot. We can see them doing that; if there’s another round here, we will just blow those up, too. How do you get stronger if your navy is at the bottom of the sea or if your Air Force, which was a bunch of Vietnam-era crap, is now a bunch of shrapnel? How are you stronger when your economy is totally nonexistent, when in a few weeks you’re not going to have money to pay your IRGC thugs? Okay, fine, say the panicans and the liars; The Iranians will still win. They will win by outlasting us. Staying alive isn’t winning unless we’re doing “The Hunger Games,” which we’re not. To take a similar example: Is Cuba winning right now? The Cuban communist regime has survived. Are they winning or are they on their last legs? It’s pretty clear they are losing. And so is the regime in Tehran. The regime in Tehran had three methods of resistance, and they’ve been building all three for years and years. First, the so-called “Axis of Resistance.” This included all the terror proxies they placed throughout the region, from Hamas to Hezbollah to the Houthis to terror groups in Iraq. All of those members of the “Axis of Resistance” were supposed to be Iran’s forward army. That was their forward capacity. But since October 7, 2023, Israel has steadily degraded or destroyed that forward capacity. Hamas is stuck in a small section of Gaza. They may be trying to rebuild, but it won’t matter. Israel will go in and blow them up again. Hezbollah has been greatly reduced as a power in the region, and now it is in danger of complete evisceration. The Houthis could have acted at any time during this war, but they didn’t, and they didn’t for a reason. They knew that if they had, they would have been obliterated. So the terror proxies Iran had been funding for generations were basically defenestrated. That was their first mode of striking back. Second was the nuclear program, which they were attempting to develop. They were racing toward a nuclear bomb to protect their regime. That is what caused all of this to happen. If they had given up their nuclear program years ago, they would have had normalized relations with a lot of different countries. The sanctions would not be on them. But they decided they were going to race forward with their nuclear program, and they got the hell bombed out of them. Third: the Strait of Hormuz. Shutting that down was supposed to be their trump card. That was supposed to stop everything. And this is where all of the panicans and all of the liars and the people who hate Trump and hate Israel and all the rest started saying, “The Iranians really showed you. They shut the Strait of Hormuz!” It’s open now. Remember that time when they said that we would never be able to open the Strait? What did we do? We said if you close it, we are going to stop all ships going in and out of Iranian ports, and then you won’t have an economy, and you’ll be dead in the water. Guess what? Within a week and a half, they opened the strait. They stopped messing around in the strait because they didn’t have the forward operating capacity. Their navy was, in fact, at the bottom of the sea. The Persian Gulf was littered with the hulks of their ships. The reality is that they used their pathetic mine-laying capacities — and I say pathetic because they were actually just putting mines in the water and losing them out there — and we are now de-mining the Strait of Hormuz. Trump wrote, “I received a call from NATO asking if we would need some help. I told them to stay away unless they just want to load up their ships with oil. They were useless when needed. A paper tiger.” Fact. What really happened here is that the Strait of Hormuz closing hurt the Chinese far more than it hurt us. The Chinese presumably brought pressure to bear via Pakistan on the Iranians, and the Iranians decided to open the Strait. Not only that, oil prices have now plunged dramatically. We’ve been told that that was the chief element that was somehow going to undermine the war. Nope. President Trump is winning, big-time. And don’t let the panicans and liars convince you otherwise.

A self-admitted shoplifter in Portland is suing a grocery store after an employee stopped him mid-theft, setting up a case that underscores the growing tension between crime, order, and liability in one of America’s most leftist cities. Joshua Merkel, 45, filed a $10,000 lawsuit against Albertsons and a store employee after attempting to steal a cart full of groceries in March 2024. Merkel openly admitted in court that he had no intention of paying for the items, telling jurors, “I understand I was committing a crime.” Now, he’s arguing the employee who stopped him went too far. The incident unfolded at a Southwest Portland Albertsons, where Merkel loaded up a shopping cart with food and walked out of the store without paying, according to court records. The lone employee working the register, Matthew “Deme” Cooper, chased him into the parking lot and confronted him. What happened next escalated into a physical altercation that left Merkel with a fractured jaw and other injuries. But when prosecutors attempted to charge Cooper with second-degree assault, a charge that carried a potential six-year sentence, a jury took less than two hours to acquit him, rejecting the claim that his actions rose to criminal conduct. Despite that acquittal, Merkel is now pursuing the case in civil court, claiming the employee used excessive force and seeking damages for medical bills and what he describes as “mental anguish.” Merkel’s own testimony undercuts much of his claim. He admitted to planning the theft, loading up items in the cart with his girlfriend, and leaving the store without attempting to pay, despite having money on him at the time. While Merkel said hunger motivated the theft, during the criminal trial, defense attorneys argued he was selecting higher-value items, including T-bone steaks, with the intent to trade them for drugs. Merkel himself acknowledged that he has used methamphetamine on and off for roughly a decade, though he denied that it was his motive in this case. The civil lawsuit lands as Portland continues to grapple with soaring retail theft. Monthly shoplifting reports in the city in 2026 have more than doubled since 2023, according to local police data. Reported Crime Trend Report via Portland Police Bureau Critics say the civil lawsuit reflects a broader trend in liberal jurisdictions, where criminals increasingly attempt to leverage the legal system against those who stop them — turning victims and bystanders into defendants. “Crime should not pay,” said O.H. Skinner, executive director of the Alliance For Consumers (AFC). “This lawsuit in Oregon is exactly the kind of situation we have been warning about. A self-admitted shoplifter should not be allowed to sue the Albertsons security guard who stopped him.” “But this is the exact kind of lawsuit trial lawyers use for a big payday,” Skinner added. “They can then use this payday to enrich Democratic allies through the Shady Trial Lawyer Pipeline and push political agendas outside of the legislative process.” The case also raises practical questions for businesses already struggling with theft. The situation has contributed to a wave of store closures across Portland, including the Albertsons location where the incident occurred, which permanently closed in July 2025. Many retailers instruct employees not to physically intervene in shoplifting incidents to avoid legal risk, even if it means allowing merchandise to be stolen.  Merkel’s lawsuit tests the limits of that approach, raising the question of whether someone caught in the act of committing a crime can successfully claim damages for how they were stopped. The case is currently pending in Multnomah County, with no court date yet set.