Lawyers agreed to add the lesser charge of manslaughter to Karmelo Anthony’s charging docs on Tuesday, just before the jury was set to hear closing arguments. “MANSLAUGHTER is now on the table with Karmelo Anthony,” The Daily Mail’s MaryAnn Martinez reported. “The lawyers and judge in this case have agreed to include it in the charging document that jurors will consider today after closing arguments.” Anthony, who fatally stabbed high school athlete Austin Metcalf at a track event in April 2025, was indicted on a first-degree murder charge. The trial has been speedy and closing arguments are set for Tuesday, before the jury begins deliberations. Most legal commentators have speculated that the case presented by the state has been airtight, and a murder conviction was expected later today. Anthony could face a significantly lighter sentence if convicted on the manslaughter charge instead of the murder charge. The manslaughter charge carries two to 20 years in prison, while a murder charge carries up to life in prison. This is a breaking story. Refresh the page for updates. 

Democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was interrupted by far-Left anti-Israel protesters while defending an anti-Israel Senate candidate on Monday. During an event for the National Press Club, a protester shouted about Israel while Sanders was defending Senate hopeful Graham Platner, who has a Nazi-linked tattoo and has been accused of abusing former girlfriends. “Israel doesn’t need defensive systems! They’re a genocidal apartheid state!” a male protester shouted at Sanders. “And let me remind you, 59 years ago, Israel attacked the USS Liberty and killed 34 Americans!” The man was escorted out of the venue.      At another point during the interview, a woman wearing a hijab stood up and shouted, “Israel needs to be stopped!” “How dare you continue to support Israel when they keep killing Palestinians,” she continued. “There’s a genocide! Shame on you, Bernie, for not speaking up!” The woman was also escorted from the room. Platner, who is running for the U.S. Senate in Maine, has previously claimed that he didn’t understand the significance of his tattoo, which was a symbol used by Nazi Germany’s SS. However, recent accounts reported in the New York Times seem to contradict that narrative. “I’m gonna do everything I can to make sure that Graham Platner is the next senator from the state of Maine,” Sanders said at the event before the disruption. After one protester was escorted out, Sanders turned his attention to Republicans to explain his support for Platner. “Republican super PACs have already lined up some $99 million just on TV ads to defeat him. Why is that? Do you think they’re worried about his views or what his relationships to women has been? I don’t think so. What they’re worried about is that he’s going to be a strong voice against oligarchy.” The senator also connected Platner’s past controversies to having PTSD. “He’s [now] gotten his life together,” Sanders said. “I don’t know what is true or not true. … There are people in the United States Senate right now who are not saints.” Sanders similarly dismissed Platner’s troubling background earlier this month, saying, “Is he a saint? I guess not. I don’t know too many saints here.” Platner is expected to cruise to victory in Tuesday’s Democratic primary for Maine’s U.S. Senate seat after Democratic Governor Janet Mills suspended her campaign at the end of April. Mills remains on the ballot, however, having never formally withdrawn, and has reminded voters that her name will still appear in the primary. The winner of the Democratic primary will challenge Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) in the November general election. Related: Ex-Platner Staffer Calls BS On Dem’s Excuse For Nazi Tattoo, Troubling Behavior

A man from Sudan was arrested after being caught on video apparently attempting to behead another man in the streets of Northern Ireland.   Law enforcement identified a Sudanese national as the man shown in an extremely graphic video pinning another man down and repeatedly stabbing the victim in the face and neck in the streets of Belfast. Bystanders stepped in and attempted to wrestle the man off the victim. 

Vice President JD Vance tasked the Justice Department with probing accusations that Minnesota Democratic Governor Tim Walz looked the other way while fraudsters bilked the state’s social services for upwards of $9 billion.  Vance referred the Walz administration to the DOJ on Monday night after the House Oversight Committee released a lengthy report accusing Walz and Minnesota Democratic Attorney General Keith Ellison of allowing their state to be systematically defrauded. The committee also accused Walz of targeting whistleblowers who tried to warn state officials about vulnerabilities in the system.  “I’ve referred these allegations to DOJ’s new Fraud Division for criminal investigation,” Vance announced on X. “Minnesota state officials are not above the law, and if they facilitated fraud, lied under oath about what they knew, or harassed and [intimidated] whistleblowers, they must face justice.” Leading the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on fraud, Vance sent the referral to Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald, the head of the newly established National Fraud Enforcement Division.  The 200-page report from the House Oversight Committee said that the Walz administration’s lax efforts to combat fraud led to $300 million in federal child nutrition aid being lost and put up to $9 billion in Medicaid-related funds in jeopardy.  The committee said that Walz and Ellison were aware of major flaws in Minnesota’s administration of welfare benefits since 2019, but took no corrective action. Instead, Walz’s administration took action to target whistleblowers, the House report said.  “If state officials in Minnesota or anywhere else in the country facilitated fraud or looked the other way while this theft was happening, if they actively prevented state and federal officials from stopping fraud and bringing fraudsters to justice, or if they intimidate and harassed whistleblowers who courageously tried to shine a light on the problem, they must be held accountable,” Vance wrote to McDonald.  The Trump administration has focused on Minnesota in its anti-fraud crackdown. The White House shut down federal assistance payments to the state after independent journalist Nick Shirley published multiple videos showing apparent widespread fraud at so-called daycare centers.  The administration is also taking action in Vance’s home state of Ohio after The Daily Wire reported on Ohio’s administration of funds to questionable businesses that claim to administer home healthcare.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you. *** Today’s college students probably don’t remember, but when the iPhone first rolled out in 2007, some technology analysts thought it would fail. “There is no likelihood that Apple can be successful in a business this competitive,” wrote a MarketWatch columnist. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was even more empathetic: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”  Well, they were wrong, in more ways than one. The iPhone not only became the most popular smartphone in the world, but also helped accelerate the digital transformation of society. The iPhone, and the slew of competitors that followed it, undeniably changed the way we communicate, consume media, and interact with each other. As a new research paper suggests, it also changed the nature and method of how we form relationships and families as well.  Observers and commentators have been speculating that smartphones have been affecting marriage and fertility decisions for over a decade now. The argument goes something like this: How can the phones not have had an impact? Staying at home to binge-watch a show has gotten easier and more enjoyable than when the alternative was reading a novel or schlepping down to the bar. Finding an image or video for sexual gratification has gotten easier than when the nearest X-rated movie was kept behind the counter at the video store. Every airport terminal, cocktail reception, or subway ride — places where we used to mix, mingle, and maybe even meet-cute — is relatively more boring compared to the feeds, podcasts, and videos burning a whole in your pocket.  In other words, it’s less about the devices themselves than the entertainment and communications alternatives they enable. That’s been the supposition, and now those of us who said smartphones and digital media have changed something fundamental about youth and young adulthood in the 21st century have new empirical grounding for this belief.  The strength of the new working paper comes from another oft-forgotten detail about the iPhone’s rollout: For the first few years after Apple introduced the new device, you could only get it on the AT&T network. By comparing counties that had AT&T mobile broadband access in the time the iPhone was being rolled out to those who didn’t, researchers Caitlin Myers and Ezekiel Hooper of Middlebury University were able to estimate what increasing iPhone access did to birth rates.  Taken at face value, their results suggest a meaningful, measurable impact of smartphone access on birth rates. In particular, they find particularly large impacts on young women in their teens and early 20s who lived in areas that were early adopters of AT&T broadband coverage (birth rates among older women were more steady.) If their point estimates are correct, this difference could explain as much as one-third of the decline in fertility over the past two decades. As Myers and Hooper sum up, “the iPhone, and the smartphone era it inaugurated, materially accelerated the post-2007 U.S. fertility decline.”  None of this is to say that this paper can be taken as gospel. The rollout of 3G broadband service, for example, could be correlated in an unseen way with characteristics that were driving down fertility. (Imagine if the urban neighborhoods were more likely to be selected for 3G access were also more likely to have young women who were disproportionately likely to turn against motherhood after the Great Recession.) iPhones in 2007 were far less addictive and immersive than the modern-day versions, with users more likely to be checking e-mail and painstakingly logging into MySpace than getting notifications of new likes and comments. The introduction of the iPhone also coincided with a year of tremendous economic tumult and the near-collapse of the global financial system.  The researchers try to account for these differences as best they can, by re-weighting the data to account for differences in observable characteristics, but differences that can’t be identified by reviewers (such as cultural norms, local attitudes toward marriage, and other intangibles) could still be causing the paper to look stronger than it is. Then again, no one research paper will ever be the definitive last word. And what this new work does is give us more evidence (as if more was needed) that the digital revolution is upending the way we interact as humans, something Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical Magnifica Humanitas explicitly addresses. The specific technology itself is almost immaterial; if Steve Ballmer had been right, and the iPhone had flopped, the introduction of social media, short-form video, and always-on communication, information, pornography, and entertainment on whatever device would have still had an impact on our dating and mating culture.  At this point, anyone who is arguing that phones didn’t change societal scripts in a meaningful way have the burden of proof. We can feel it in small ways, even if we don’t like it — like Ben Lichtenstein, a 24-year-old interviewed by New York Times magazine earlier this year. “I’ve noticed that I can’t so much as wait for the elevator without scrolling through TikTok,” he said. “It’s the best distraction. It makes the time pass. But more and more, I’m like: Why do we want the time to pass?”  We need to try to build tools, habits, and norms that reclaim not just the time in the elevator lobby, but the institutions, rituals, and phone-free meet-ups that used to help couples hit it off. If we don’t address the impact of digital tech on our family formation decisions, the consequences could be dire. *** Patrick T. Brown (@PTBwrites) is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he writes on pro-family policy and publishes the Substack newsletter Family Matters.