Actress Daveigh Chase, who died in mid-June at the age of 35, died of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and prolonged drug abuse. Chase, best known as the voice of Lilo in Disney’s 2002 smash animated feature “Lilo & Stitch,” died in a Los Angeles hospital, and according to a medical examiner’s report reviewed by E! News, the manner of her death was listed as “natural,” and the cause of death was AIDS. Years of substance abuse, the report also noted, had been a major contributing factor in her death. As The Daily Wire previously reported, Chase had been living on the streets for some time prior to her passing. Initial reporting from entertainment news site TMZ quoted Roy Hernandez, who claimed to be her boyfriend, as saying that she’d died from meningitis and an infection in her blood that led to sepsis. Chase, who also gave a terrifying performance as the ghostly Samara Morgan in “The Ring,” had been struggling with addiction for years and had recently been hospitalized in Los Angeles due to malnutrition. The actress’s longtime manager, John Ryan, told The California Post at the time of her death that Chase likely still had millions in uncollected residuals. He explained that the deal Chase had signed when she got the role of Lilo — at just 8 years old — had included residuals and a cut of any future toys or theme park attractions that featured her voice. That money, which has continued to roll in, was apparently left uncollected as she was “too far gone” to accept her payments. Years earlier, Ryan said that he and Chase’s stepsister Gaia Brown had hired a private investigator in the hopes of tracking Chase down and forcing her to get treatment for what they believed was addiction to heroin and fentanyl. When a 2025 video circulated on social media, showing an emaciated and barely conscious woman who looked a lot like Chase on Skid Row, they went there to search for her. Ryan said at the time that he even spoke to her on the phone, but by the time they got to Skid Row, she had left. “We were so close to finding her. Daveigh was the sweetest and brightest light in Hollywood. I can’t believe this is real. Her legacy and work will live on forever,” Ryan said. Chase’s final role was in 2016’s “American Romance.”

Disclaimer: Mayflower cigars does not sell tobacco products to anyone under the age of 21. If you are not at least 21 years of age, please do not enter our website. No U.S. government official or entity endorses Mayflower Cigars. Michael Knowles, host of “The Michael Knowles Show” and founder of Mayflower — the premium cigar brand known for its industry-disrupting launch, has just announced the launch of Mayflower Dawn of America, a limited special reserve cigar released in commemoration of the United States’ 250th anniversary. The cigar is available now at mayflowercigars.com and through a small number of select retailers. The Dawn of America is a special reserve edition of the Mayflower Dawn, the brand’s bestselling flagship blend. Where the standard Mayflower Dawn is wrapped in an Ecuador Connecticut leaf, the Dawn of America carries a Connecticut shade wrapper grown in American soil and aged seven years — a deliberate departure that Knowles has described as central to the cigar’s identity and its connection to the occasion it marks. “This is the cigar you smoke to celebrate and commemorate the most important occasions,” Knowles said in announcing the release. “The cigars you not only smoke today but also save for the future.” The Blend and the Band Presented in commemorative boxes of ten, each Mayflower Dawn of America cigar arrives sealed in its own tube. Mild to medium in body, it carries notes of cream, almond, toasted bread, and coffee — a profile shaped in large part by the age of its wrapper.  A Connecticut shade leaf that has been given seven years to age is a fundamentally different thing than a younger leaf. The more assertive compounds dissipate over time. The natural sugars develop complexity. What reads as bright and grassy in a young leaf settles, with age, into something smoother, creamier and more measured — a process evident from the first draw. On the secondary band appear five words: “To ourselves and our posterity.” The phrase comes from the preamble to the Constitution, tucked at the end of a statement listing the purposes of the new republic. Knowles has cited it as the animating idea behind the release — the Founders’ acknowledgment that what they were building was intended not only for themselves but for the generations that would follow. To those familiar with history, the choice to mark the nation’s 250th with a cigar is one both fitting and distinctly American. Tobacco and the American colonial project are bound together from the beginning. It was John Rolfe who in 1611 began cultivating a milder strain of tobacco at Jamestown, with export beginning the following year — a crop that within a decade transformed a struggling outpost into an economically viable colony and set the template for American agricultural commerce. George Washington grew tobacco at Mount Vernon. For nearly the first 25 years of Thomas Jefferson’s ownership of Monticello, it was one of the plantation’s primary crops. The leaf financed the infrastructure of colonial life long before the Revolution gave that life a political name. The wrapper’s origin adds another layer. Connecticut shade tobacco has been grown in the Connecticut River Valley for generations, and New England’s place in the founding of the republic runs deeper than geography. It was from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire that militiamen gathered at the opening of the Revolution — men who left farms and families for a cause that had not yet found its words. The soil the Dawn of America’s wrapper grew in is the same soil that produced the armed resistance that made the Declaration possible. The semiquincentennial will be marked in countless ways this year, most of them fireworks and flag pins and gone by morning. The Mayflower Dawn of America was created for a more enduring commemoration — built for the back of the humidor — one a person reaches for years from now on the occasions of a wedding, a birth, or savored on the next milestone the country reaches. Posterity is a practical question about what gets handed down and what gets carried forward, asked by a generation that knew the answer was never guaranteed. Two hundred and fifty years later, the question still stands. The Mayflower Dawn of America simply gives it a place to be asked again. Mayflower Dawn of America is available now at mayflowercigars.com and through a very limited number of select retailers. The batch is extremely limited. Must be 21 or older to purchase. Void where prohibited; conditions & exclusions apply.  

The Supreme Court got this one right. In National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, decided today, the court struck down the federal limits on coordinated expenditures between political parties and their candidates. The vote was 6–3, with Justice Kavanaugh writing for the majority, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett. For decades, these restrictions rested on a bizarre fiction, that a political party could somehow corrupt the very candidate it nominates. Nobody who has ever worked in politics believes that. Parties exist to elect candidates. The court has now said what practitioners have known all along: the government cannot punish them for doing so. The court did not mince words. Justice Kavanaugh wrote that Colorado II’s “reasoning has been rejected by subsequent cases and is no longer good law in light of the court’s more recent precedents. To the extent that Colorado II has retained any vitality, it is now overruled.” That 2001 decision, FEC v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee, had upheld the coordinated-expenditure limits by a 5–4 vote over a powerful dissent by Justice Thomas — the only member of that court still serving. Twenty-five years later, his dissent has been vindicated. As the majority acknowledged, Justice Thomas “explained that ‘the ordinary means for a party to provide support is to make coordinated expenditures’” and that “‘breaking the connection between parties and their candidates inhibits the promotion of the party’s message.’” I have some stake in saying so. As a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, I was at the commission when this litigation began. The Biden administration chose to defend the restrictions. When President Donald Trump returned to office, the solicitor general shifted the government’s position, rightly, in my view, and conceded the limits were unconstitutional. That was not a political stunt. It was an honest acknowledgment of what the First Amendment requires. Because the government declined to defend the law, the court appointed Roman Martinez, a former clerk to both Chief Justice Roberts and then-Judge Kavanaugh, as amicus curiae to argue in defense of the statute. The history matters. When the case went to the en banc Sixth Circuit, a majority of the judges questioned the continued validity of Colorado II, considering later Supreme Court decisions, particularly McCutcheon v. FEC (2014) and FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate (2022), but felt bound by the 2001 precedent. The Supreme Court freed them, and us, from that constraint. Look at what these coordination limits did. They did not reduce the amount of money spent on politics. They just pushed spending away from political parties and toward outside groups. The court recognized this directly: the coordinated-expenditure limits imposed a “stifling effect on the ability of the party to do what it exists to do.” Meanwhile, donors sent their funds to Super PACs and other outside groups with a First Amendment right to spend unlimited money. The numbers are staggering: in the 2024 cycle, PACs raised over $15.7 billion, compared to $2.7 billion by political parties. A Super PAC run by consultants could spend without limit, but the Republican or Democratic party committee could not coordinate a mail piece with its own nominee. The First Amendment does not require that absurdity. The majority applied what it called the “closely drawn” scrutiny from McCutcheon and Cruz, requiring that any restriction on political speech be “necessary,” “narrowly tailored,” and not “disproportionate” to the government’s interest. The only permissible interest in campaign finance restrictions, the court reaffirmed, is “preventing corruption or the appearance of corruption” — and only the narrow, quid pro quo kind. Not “influence.” Not “access.” Not “ingratiation.” The court wrote plainly: “Ingratiation and access … are not corruption,” but instead “embody a central feature of democracy.” As for the government’s circumvention argument, the idea that donors would funnel money through parties to evade contribution limits, the court concluded that three existing tools already address that concern: base contribution limits to candidates, earmarking rules that treat directed contributions as direct donations, and robust disclosure requirements. The coordinated-expenditure limits were a “fourth line of defense” — a “prophylaxis-upon-prophylaxis” that was disproportionate to the interest it served. The majority pointedly observed that a majority of states “largely give parties free rein to make coordinated expenditures on behalf of their state-level nominees,” and yet “no evidence of corruption” via circumvention “has materialized.” It is important to remember: parties disclose their donors. Their leadership is public. They file detailed reports with the FEC. The court itself emphasized that disclosure “offers much more robust protections against corruption” today than ever before, because of advances in technology and the Internet. If you care about transparency in elections, you should want more money flowing through parties, not less. Critics will say this opens the floodgates. It does not. Contribution limits to the political parties still exist. Parties still cannot raise unlimited money the way Super PACs can. What changes is that parties can now spend what they raise in coordination with their candidates instead of pretending they operate independently. As the court stressed, the decision “treats all political parties equally” and will “allow all political parties, including the DNC and RNC and the respective Senate and House campaign committees, to participate more freely and compete more fully in the political process.” Some money will migrate back from Super PACs to party committees. That means more disclosure, more accountability, and more coherent campaigns. Campaign finance reformers have spent decades getting this wrong. Every time Americans find a way to participate in political speech, the reformers’ knee-jerk response is the same: restrict it. They pushed for the coordinated-expenditure limits. They got them. The predictable result was that money flowed to outside groups while parties withered. The court has now corrected part of the problem by eliminating the coordination restriction, but the underlying contribution limits, themselves an unconstitutional restraint on political association, remain in place because the same misguided reform impulse that created them still dominates the conversation in Washington. At bottom, this case asked a simple question: Can the government restrict political speech because regulators think there is too much of it? The answer is no. It has always been no. As the court reminded us, the “Framers were even more famously suspicious of government suppression of political speech” than they were of political parties. And it closed with the most powerful point of all: “For nearly 200 years after the ratification of the First Amendment, parties could spend on campaigns in coordination with candidates,” and no one suggests “that these elections were not functional or that they were marred by corruption.” The First Amendment is not a suggestion, and it does not come with a carve-out for election season. That should not be a controversial statement. But in Washington, apparently it still is. Credit the court for moving the conversation in the right direction — toward freedom, and away from the reflexive assumption that government knows best when Americans speak about politics. *** Trey Trainor is a partner at Dhillon Law Group, Inc., board certified in Legislative and Campaign Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization, and former Commissioner and Chairman of the Federal Election Commission.

A JetBlue plane collided with a drone while landing at John F. Kennedy Airport on Monday morning.  The pilot told air traffic control, “We are cleared to land 13L. Just quickly, I couldn’t talk to approach, but we collided with a drone back there in the turn.”  “You said you collided?” confirmed Air Traffic Control.  “Yep, it hit us right … right above the cockpit,” answered the pilot.  This morning, JetBlue Airbus A321-231 (N979JT) operating flight B6948 from Las Vegas to New York JFK reported a drone strike while on approach to JFK. According to the crew, the drone struck the aircraft just above the cockpit at approximately 3,000 feet around 7:15 a.m. The… pic.twitter.com/VJNVOoBrW5 — Turbine Traveller (@Turbinetraveler) June 29, 2026 A JetBlue spokesperson said that the plane landed “without incident,” and that customers “deplaned normally, and the plane was removed from service for a post-flight inspection.” The inspection revealed no damage to the aircraft, per the New York Post. The FAA said it will launch an investigation. The drone collided with the aircraft at around 3,000 feet. Drones are legally permitted to fly at a maximum of 400 feet. The FAA has rules for drones avoiding airspace next to airports and will punish unauthorized drone operators with criminal charges or potential fines.  FAA Statement The pilot of JetBlue Airlines Flight 948 reported striking a drone at approximately 3,000 feet altitude while on final approach to John F. Kennedy International Airport around 7:15 a.m. local time on Monday, June 29. A post-flight inspection did not reveal any… — The FAA ✈️ (@FAANews) June 29, 2026 The collision occurred just days after a United Airlines aircraft had a near-miss collision with a drone at Newark Liberty International Airport. The pilot told air traffic control, “We almost hit a drone” and that the device was “about 100 feet below us.” 

This piece is part of MI x DW, a collaboration that brings Daily Wire readers exclusive commentary and research from the Manhattan Institute’s world-class team of scholars. *** The Supreme Court today restored an old-fashioned constitutional idea: if a principal federal officer exercises executive power, the president must be able to remove him. The justices’ 6–3 ruling in Trump v. Slaughter, which struck down a law prohibiting the president from firing members of the FTC except for cause, is the logical endpoint of a 15-year series of cases that have steadily chipped away at Humphrey’s Executor, the 1935 decision that blessed for-cause removal protections for the heads of so-called independent agencies. The court didn’t mince words. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “Humphrey’s framework, in short, has not withstood the test of time.” Then came the sentence that will launch a thousand administrative-law articles: “If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, we overrule it.” The New Deal compromise that invented quasi-legislative agencies has finally met Article II of the U.S. Constitution. That’s good, because the Federal Trade Commission isn’t a debating society. It, along with its alphabet-agency brethren, writes rules with the force of law, investigates private parties, adjudicates violations, and sues in federal court on behalf of the United States. Whatever labels Congress attached to that body in the Progressive Era, the FTC — like the FCC, SEC, NLRB, and so on — today exercises executive power. And the Constitution vests “the executive power” in one president, not in commissioners serving staggered terms, answerable to no one whom voters can fire. Click here for more Manhattan Institute content. This ruling isn’t a gift to Donald Trump or his successors. It’s a restoration of constitutional accountability. Congress can create executive-branch agencies and specify what they may do, but it cannot create a fourth branch of government and then pretend its officers are independent of the only person the Constitution makes responsible for executing federal law. Roberts put the point crisply at the end of Slaughter: “Subordinates who exercise the President’s power are subject to removal by him.” That’s a unitary, not an imperial, presidency, and it’s a hallmark of republican government. The president remains constrained by statutes, appropriations, courts, Congress, elections, and the Constitution itself. If the people dislike how the FTC enforces the law, they should be able to blame — and replace — the president, not chase a goulash of insulated mandarins. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurrence adds the important next step. Killing Humphrey’s Executor doesn’t cure every constitutional disease in the administrative state. It simply reallocates the power Congress poured into independent agencies. As Gorsuch warned, “the fourth branch’s powers still exist; they have just been reassigned to the President.” If agencies possess vast legislative and judicial authority, the answer isn’t to hide those powers from presidential control, but to restore legislative powers to Congress. Make Congress great again! Trump v. Cook, decided alongside Slaughter, is the necessary complication. By a 5–4 vote, the court blocked, for now, Trump’s attempt to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. The Fed is different — not because central bankers are philosopher-kings, but because central banking has a historical pedigree unlike that of modern enforcement agencies. The court held that the Fed follows the tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States, whose independence was tied to Founding-era concerns about political manipulation of monetary policy. Monetary policy is not antitrust enforcement or securities regulation. Still, Cook is an unsatisfying resolution. The court denied the government’s stay application and left Cook on the board for now, but it didn’t finally decide whether Trump had cause to remove her. Indeed, the majority emphasized that “the ultimate question of whether the President can remove Cook for cause will depend in part on the underlying facts,” which have not yet been found. Nor did it bless the government’s process. Cook was entitled, the court said, to “some explanation of the evidence at issue, some avenue for a response, and a deadline by which a response would be due.” Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Gorsuch, had the better procedural point. This was a stay application, not a merits case. As Alito wrote, the court should have granted or denied it “in a brief order last fall.” Instead, the justices took full briefing, held argument, deliberated for months, and produced an opinion that still sends the factual dispute back where it belonged all along: the trial court. The emergency docket has become the interim-relief docket, and sometimes interim relief requires interim modesty. Taken together, Slaughter and Cook draw the right constitutional map. The FTC and similar agencies sit within the executive branch and must answer to the president. The Federal Reserve remains a narrow historical exception, and even there President Trump can try again if he supplies process and proves cause. In a republic, the people whom we elect should govern. The buck should stop with the president, not assorted boards of independent bureaucrats. *** This is republished with permission from the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. The original can be found here. Ilya Shapiro is director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor of City Journal, senior counsel at Burke Law Group PLLC, and author, most recently, of Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites. He also writes the Shapiro’s Gavel newsletter.