Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said five teenagers from the Washington, D.C., area and their basketball coach will go home with “commemorative mug shots” after the teens stole from a Davenport 7 Eleven and the coach lied to deputies to protect two of them. “If you don’t take care of your children and keep them under control, then not only are we gonna hold them accountable, but we’re gonna hold you accountable, too,” Judd said. “Well, here’s your sign.” The teens are members of Run it Up, a travel basketball program affiliated with the Amateur Athletic Union. Their team was in the area for the Puma NXTPro tournament. According to Judd, the coach arranged for them to take an Uber to an Airbnb late at night. No adult was there yet because their flight out of D.C. had run late. At about 4 a.m. on July 23, the five teens walked to the 7 Eleven at 3141 Ronald Reagan Parkway in Davenport and stole Doritos, gummies, Starburst Minis, a Big Mama sausage, lemonade, and grape and orange Slurpees totaling $37.60. After a store clerk confronted them, they fled. Deputies located three of the suspects near the entrance to Solterra after the group put the stolen items in a backpack and hid it in the bushes. When deputies showed Coach Malik Abdul Harvey photos of all five teens from the security video, he denied knowing the remaining two. He resisted and misled investigators. He later admitted he had lied to protect them. Harvey was arrested and charged with child neglect, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, accessory after the fact, and resisting without violence. Judd noted that Harvey works for the Department of Juvenile Services at the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center in Maryland. Another coach, the mother of one of the teens, identified the remaining suspects and fully cooperated. The five teens were each charged with conspiracy to commit retail theft, tampering with evidence, petit theft, and violation of the county curfew ordinance for juveniles. They are identified as 17-year-old Tavion Rashaud Hale of Washington, D.C.; 16-year-old Taureon Darnell Ferrell of Washington, D.C.; 16-year-old Obai Sankoh Sheriff of Lanham, Maryland; 16-year-old James Thomas Hall of Washington, D.C.; and 17-year-old Tyjuan Grover of Washington, D.C. Judd made his position clear: “I don’t know what y’all do in Washington, D.C. But it must be crazy. But you’re not gonna come from all around the country and steal in this county without going to jail. That’s a promise from the sheriff.”

Despite its many groundbreaking victories for originalism and textualism, the Supreme Court’s term closed with a barrage of vitriol from some conservatives aimed at Justice Amy Coney Barrett. The biggest trigger was the Court’s birthright citizenship decision, Trump v. Barbara, which came on the Court’s last day. Social media lit up with barbs declaring that Barrett had veered Left. The College Republicans from her alma mater and former employer, Notre Dame, called her an “absolute disgrace” and Rep. Nancy Mace declared that she “should be removed from the Bench.” Missing from the pile-on was any contextual analysis of Barrett’s full track record on the Court. Frustration over Barbara is understandable. Conservatives (including me) care about immigration enforcement and hoped for a different outcome. But the justices do not cast votes on outcomes, and it’s a mistake to judge them solely by the question, “Did my side win or lose?” Fidelity to the Constitution is what matters. We should credit the originalist majority for its good-faith effort to apply originalism and textualism in difficult cases. No approach does better at reading the law as it is rather than as judges wish it to be. The Court regularly wrestles with hard methodological questions, and even principled originalists sometimes err. Take Justice Antonin Scalia, who more than anyone else steered the Court — and legal scholarship generally — toward originalism. He wrote the Court’s decision in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), gutting free-exercise protections so badly that Congress had to pass the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to fix it. He spent years championing Chevron deference to agency interpretations of ambiguous laws. And in Gonzales v. Raich (2005), he provided a concurring vote for a sweeping reading of the Commerce Clause that let the federal government prohibit local cultivation of marijuana — an affront to federalism. Justice Clarence Thomas, a favorite of mine and of many other originalists, dissented in Raich. But weeks later, he wrote the Court’s opinion in National Cable & Telecommunications Assn. v. Brand X Internet Services, which expanded Chevron deference over Scalia’s dissent. (In 2020, Thomas changed his position.) Justice Samuel Alito, another towering originalist, balked at perhaps the best opportunity over the past decade to revive the nondelegation doctrine, the separation-of-powers principle under which Congress is prevented from transferring its legislative power to another branch. Those are long-serving judicial superstars. Of course, many Republican appointees drifted leftward over time, embracing the bald judicial activism of “living Constitution” liberals: Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter. Justice Barrett is not one of them. In fact, she helped clean up the jurisprudential mess those justices had made — most notably voting to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and to overturn racial preferences in education in SFFA v. Harvard. She also voted to end Chevron deference in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo.  Apart from those jurisprudential earthquakes, she has been a reliable originalist vote in hard-fought First Amendment cases, on both speech and free exercise — supporting a web designer’s ability to refuse websites that violate her religious beliefs, protecting parents’ right to opt out of sexual material in public schools, upholding states’ ability to require age verification for pornography, safeguarding political speech, and striking down Colorado’s “conversion therapy” ban. The same holds for Second Amendment protections of the individual right to bear arms in cases from New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. v. Bruen in 2022 to Wolford v. Lopez this term. Barrett helped the Court reject activist contortions of the Equal Protection Clause — efforts to stop states from prohibiting transitioning procedures for minors and limiting women’s sports to biological females. She supported extending the colorblind principle to racial gerrymandering cases. A strong protector of the separation of powers, Barrett defended the president’s ability to fire heads of “independent” commissions — overturning a 91-year-old precedent that had fueled the modern unaccountable administrative state — and dissented with other conservatives when the majority declined to apply the same principle to the Federal Reserve. She has also invoked the major questions doctrine to check executive overreach involving draconian carbon mandates and student loan forgiveness. Yet all these strong rulings risk being overshadowed by the online fury over Barbara, a challenging case in which originalists differed over the text and history of the Citizenship Clause. Barrett’s critics selectively ignore this term’s other textualist victories, several of which she joined on the side of immigration enforcement, including the president’s termination of Temporary Protected Status. The major originalist and textualist victories in the six years since Barrett joined the Court seemed completely out of reach a generation ago. That is not a record of a justice, let alone a majority of the Court, slouching leftward. This is one of the greatest Courts in American history, and Justice Barrett is an instrumental part of it. *** Carrie Severino is the President of the Judicial Crisis Network.

New York City democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled perhaps one of his loftiest promises yet on Monday, vowing that his grocery stores will be 30% cheaper than competitors and will sell apple slices that stop toddler tantrums.  “The savings will last for the entire month. That means no weekly fluctuations or sticker shock at the checkout line — not for our seniors living on fixed incomes, nor for the parents who rely on a regular supply of apple slices to keep toddler tantrums at bay,” he said.  Mamdani said the stores will have a “core set of goods which will include all fresh produce, meat, and seafood, along with 20 other essential items like cheese, milk, and bread.” The stores will set prices at the beginning of each month and will not change until the next month. The markets will not sell hot food to avoid competing with local bodegas.  “Mamdani’s policies — from state run groceries to government-provided babysitting for parents’ night out — perfectly demonstrate how much Leftists want the government to co-parent your kids. Ironically, Mamdani’s obsession with the City parenting your children stems from his own childlessness — and we parents will stick to our own apple slices, thanks,” Daily Wire host Isabel Brown said. The first of the five grocery stores, one in each borough of New York City, will open by the end of 2027 in Hunts Point in the Bronx at the former Spofford Juvenile Detention Facility. Mamdani has committed that the other four will be open by the end of his term as mayor. Mamdani predicts that New Yorkers will save $90 a month, which could translate to $1,000 per year. Another store will open in 2029 at La Marqueta in East Harlem, where former New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia placed a public retail market 90 years ago.  The city will own or lease the land at each of the grocery stores and will pay for needed construction or renovations, but a third-party operator will be in charge of running the store. Mamdani’s administration is requesting proposals from third-party operations to run the grocery stores that the mayor says have “no plans to turn a profit.”  Mamdani has argued that the city-owned grocery stores are meant to serve as a proof of concept for a larger government role in providing essential services. While announcing the second location, he pushed back on President Ronald Reagan’s famous line that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Instead, Mamdani said the more frightening words are: “I worked all day and can’t feed my family.” Critics cite failures of government-run grocery stores in places like Venezuela, where stores suffered chronic shortages, empty shelves, spoiled food, and logistical breakdowns. 

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former chief medical advisor to the president, appears to have misled Congress about the coronavirus fatality rate in the early days of the pandemic, making statements in private that contradicted his public testimony. Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul (R-KY) released a trove of previously private Fauci diaries ahead of his expected testimony this Wednesday before a key oversight committee.  A February 8, 2020, journal entry shows Fauci recounting a phone call with former CDC Director Tom Frieden in which he compared the novel coronavirus to a “bad influenza” and predicted a lower-than-expected fatality rate. The Daily Wire is publishing excerpts from Fauci’s journal without any edits or spelling corrections. “Tom Frieden called me this AM and we discussed various aspects of the outbreak. He and I are on the same page in thinking tht this is acting like a bad influenza in its transmissibility and that the denominator is much greater than 34,867 (above) making the case fatality rate (CFR) more like 0.2-0.3 % rather than 2.0%,” he wrote.  At that moment, Fauci estimated more than 34,000 infections and 724 deaths.   About a month later, however, the physician — who privately blushed about his rising public profile — presented Congress with a markedly different assessment of the disease. Testifying under oath at a March 11 hearing, Fauci responded to a question from Rep. Michael Cloud (R-TX) about the similarities between COVID-19 and influenza. “The seasonal flu that we deal with every year has a mortality of 0.1 percent. The stated mortality overall of this when you look at all the data including China is about three percent. It first started off as two and now three,” Fauci told the panel. “I think if you count all the cases of minimally symptomatic or asymptomatic infection, that probably brings the mortality rate down to somewhere around one percent, which means it is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu. I think that is something that people can get their arms around and understand.” During the hearing, Cloud questioned Fauci about whether COVID-19 was more lethal than previous diseases, including H1N1, commonly known as swine flu. “No, absolutely not,” Fauci said. “The 2009 pandemic of H1N1 was even less lethal than the regular seasonal flu.”  “I’m trying to help the American people know where to appropriately set their gauge,” Cloud fired back.  Fauci doubled down on the alarm bells, despite privately downplaying the virus’s lethality. “I think to set the gauge is that this is a really serious problem that we have to take seriously. I mean, people always say, ‘Well, the flu, you know, the flu does this, the flu does that.’ The flu has a mortality of 0.1 percent,” Fauci said. “This has a mortality of 10 times that, and that’s the reason why I want to emphasize we have to stay ahead of the game in preventing this.”  The newly revealed contradictions come after The Daily Wire reported Fauci’s obsession with media attention as the coronavirus pandemic claimed lives and overwhelmed hospitals around the globe. “Press still hot and heavy about me,” Fauci wrote on April 7, 2020. “Multiple stories per day directly or indirectly involving me.” Weeks later, hundreds of thousands of infections spread worldwide, and nearly 10,000 had died from the virus when Fauci penned the following journal entry on May 21, 2020.  “Big front page article abut me appeared in the Washington Post. Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyoperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable peson in the world,” Fauci wrote.

Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Monday said he is still recovering at a rehabilitation facility from a June medical episode, according to another health update from his office.  In the statement, the Republican said he’s still undergoing treatment and won’t be attending local events this weekend.  “I’m still working hard to get back to my full schedule of work in the Senate and in Kentucky, keeping up with intense physical therapy per my doctors’ orders. Unfortunately, that means I won’t be able to make it to Fancy Farm, Kentucky this Saturday,” he said, according to local outlet WLKY. “As always, I appreciate all of your continued well wishes, and I’m looking forward to getting back to the Senate and to Kentucky soon.” The health update included a fresh photo with his wife, Elaine Chao, and also provided a statement from McConnell’s physician.  McConnell’s office releases a new photo plus a statement saying he is undergoing “intense physical therapy” and not ready to get back to work in person. No timeline for his return to the Senate. He has not been seen in the Capitol since his June 14 hospitalization. pic.twitter.com/G9h99SboZA — Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) July 27, 2026 “Senator McConnell continues his recovery from a fall at home in June. OAP physicians visit with the Senator every day, discussing all aspects of his rehabilitation care,” the Office of the Attending Physician said. “Since his discharge from hospital care, he has maintained a strenuous course of physical therapy and rehabilitation, including multiple sessions a day designed to rebuild strength and reduce the risk of future falls.” “His bout with childhood polio continues to be a significant factor in his mobility. He is not yet medically cleared to leave the rehab facility and return to the office,” the OAP added.  The 84-year-old’s extended hospitalization has fueled mounting questions about both his health and what would happen if Kentucky’s longest-serving senator were unable to complete his final term. He has remained hospitalized since June 14, when emergency responders were dispatched to his Washington residence following what was widely reported as an emergency radio traffic describing a cardiac arrest requiring CPR.  The lack of information sparked widespread speculation online. Still, it has also drawn renewed attention to an unusual wrinkle in Kentucky election law that could become significant if McConnell were to resign or otherwise vacate his seat before his term expires in January 2027. With a Democrat occupying the governor’s office, Republican lawmakers recently moved to eliminate the governor’s appointment authority in favor of a special election process. McConnell, who is not running for another term, has missed 38 Senate votes since the medical incident.