Two United States service members are missing in Morocco after a massive war games exercise involving multiple nations. The United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) released a statement indicating that the two had gone missing somewhere near the Cap Draa Training Area — which lies just under 20 miles from the Atlantic Ocean near the city of Tan Tan. AFRICOM did not reveal which branch of service was involved. “Two U.S. service members participating in African Lion 2026 were reported missing near the Cap Draa Training Area, near the city of Tan Tan, Morocco, May 2, 2026,” the command posted via X. Two U.S. service members participating in African Lion 2026 were reported missing near the Cap Draa Training Area, near the city of Tan Tan, Morocco, May 2, 2026.https://t.co/7zxpKQRHfB — U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) (@USAfricaCommand) May 3, 2026 “U.S., Moroccan and other assets from African Lion immediately initiated coordinated search and rescue operations, including ground, air, and maritime assets,” the linked statement continued. “The incident remains under investigation and the search is on-going. Our focus is on the service members involved and their families.” “Additional information will be provided as it becomes available,” the command promised, but no other details were given as to what may have been then nature of the “incident.” The war games exercise, referred to as African Lion, includes more than 7,000 troops from at least 30 nations, and was set to conclude in early May. The exercise was to play out across the four African nations of Morocco, Ghana, Senegal, and Tunisia. The annual war games exercise — which was first launched in 2004 — includes American service members from the United States Marine Corps, Air Force, Army Reserve, and Army National Guard — and is touted as a chance to bring together senior leadership from several allied nations in cooperation and strategic development.

President Donald Trump tore into comedian and HBO host Bill Maher late on Saturday, delivering a blistering review of Maher’s recent interview featuring Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA). Trump made his thoughts on the matter abundantly clear in a Truth Social post, trashing both Newsom and Maher before concluding that the latter, whom he dubbed a “moron” was still “slightly more talented than Jimmy Kimmel.” “I hate seeing Fox, and other Conservative Outlets, constantly making Low Rated Bill Maher ‘relevant’ as it pertains to the Republican Party, and beyond,” Trump began his pos with a complain about the number of people, even on the conservative side of the aisle, who appeared to take Maher seriously. “Bill Maher is a weak and ineffective person who I got to know very well during my dinner with him at the White House.” “He was nervous, scared, and the first words he uttered as he entered the Oval Office were, ‘Can I have a drink?’ It was very endearing but, at the same time, absolutely pathetic,” Trump added. “He was much different from what people think.” Trump went on to say that he’d taken the time to watch some of Newsom’s interview on Maher’s show — an interview in which Maher had repeatedly pressed Newsom, albeit in a friendly manner, about the California policies that most Americans might see as abject failures. “Last night, I happened to watch Gavin Newscum, an admittedly Low IQ person, who said he can’t read a speech, is dumb, and essentially, incompetent, and he took Bill Maher ‘over the coals,'” Trump said. “Bill Maher was defenseless, and totally deficient. Either he didn’t have the knowledge, or he choked, because Gavin went on and on about how good California is doing, while it’s doing very poorly, having, by far, the worst year it’s ever had where, for the first time in History, more people are leaving than coming. Bill Maher started by saying that California was doing poorly, only to have Newscum speak for an extended period of time, and lie about the facts.” “All you have to do is look at what’s happened to Los Angeles, San Francisco, the horrendous homeless problem all over every street, the Railway catastrophe that is Billions of Dollars over budget, and has never been built, the inability to rebuild the 25,000 homes that were destroyed by the fire because he refused to allow water into the street from the Southwest (If it weren’t for our Superstar EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, and me, they wouldn’t have any homes being built right now!),” Trump continued. The president’s conclusion was simple: “Fox should stop putting this person on. He’s not representing us. You look weak, stupid, and ineffective, and I hate seeing that. DON’T USE BILL MAHER ANY LONGER AS A REPRESENTATIVE OF YOU! I hate hearing that ‘Bill Maher said …’ — Bill Maher is a MORON, though slightly more talented than Jimmy Kimmel.” Trump has also been at war with Kimmel in recent weeks, calling on ABC to fire the late night comedian over a line directed at First Lady Melania Trump stating that she had “the glow of an expectant widow.” The “joke” angered the president and Melania, particularly since it came just 48 hours before yet another assassination attempt against Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner — but Kimmel has insisted that it was only meant to be a jab at the dramatic age difference between the pair.

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. *** Something seems to be changing in American culture. Some have described it as a “vibe shift,” like a tangible sensation of spiritual change in the air, perhaps not all that different from the way a sailor might sense when the winds are about to turn. But last month, new data came out that give a specific shape to one key dimension of this shift. The polls point to an unprecedented spiritual reversal happening with young men in America, and one that has turned very suddenly. Gallup released numbers in April showing that the share of American men ages 18 to 29 who say religion is “very important to them” jumped from 28% to 42% between 2023 and 2025. That’s a 14-point swing in two years — a 50% proportional increase, and the single largest shift in our lifetime on how young men relate to religion. This vibe shift erased a nearly 25-year decline in religious interest in just two years. While the change is statistically unprecedented, if you have been watching the culture rather than the polls, none of this should surprise you. The polls are just catching up. The statistical decline of traditional religious participation and the rise of those who claim to believe in “nothing at all” began in the mid-1990s. The New Atheist decade that followed made a specific wager: Strip away “superstitious” beliefs of our bygone religious past, and civilization will march onward in an unfettered path of progress. But by the 2010s, as we moved into an era of intense cultural tumult dubbed the “Great Awokening,” it was obvious we were not getting that promised utopian outcome from our anti-religious experiment. What we got instead was a “meaning crisis” and a generation of young men who grew up feeling the weight of hopelessness. They watched as deaths of despair skyrocketed, institutional trust declined, and civilization slowly descended into ruin as Marxist and postmodern ideologies rushed to fill the religious vacuum. They were handed a world stripped of the timeless guiding stories upon which everything good in American culture had been built, and they were told that all guiding stories — including the stories of scripture — were just propaganda power plays or backwards superstitions. The colloquial phrase for the result was simply “the young men are not okay.” What the data now suggest is that a critical mass of young men have decided this anti-God experiment has run long enough. Young men are tired of not being okay. The early signals were everywhere. Jordan Peterson sold out theaters lecturing on Bible stories with millions more watching on YouTube, hungry for someone to show them a story that could give their lives meaningful direction. Tom Holland’s “Dominion” became the book that thoughtful young men discussed in dorm rooms, with its thesis that the moral foundations of the modern West — human dignity, universal rights, concern for the downtrodden — is Christianity all the way down, whether we remember it or not. Justin Brierley, who spent 15 years hosting debates between Christians and the New Atheists, began to notice that young men weren’t listening to the New Atheists anymore. He covered the precipitous decline of New Atheism’s influence in “The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.” If anyone has been paying attention to the most popular podcaster on the planet, they’d notice a similar religious arc happening with Joe Rogan. Not that long ago, Rogan sounded like the average red-blooded American male of the old cultural moment: bemused by traditional religion and comfortable with the assumption that faith was something smart people had outgrown. In the last several years, his posture has shifted so visibly it has become a running theme of his show. Guest after guest, from biblical scholars such as Wesley Huff to Christ-curious comedians, get invited to wrestle seriously with the question of God rather than brush it aside. In 2025, Rogan himself started attending church, something I predicted would happen in 2024.  There were other signs in pop culture that, in strange ways, hinted at a coming spiritual turn. In late 2023, young men started playing old Creed songs again without an ounce of cynical irony — songs drenched in a sincere, hungry religiosity the 2000s had trained everyone to mock. In 2024, Creed had its highest-grossing year as a band, propelled primarily by young men who were too young to listen to the band’s religiously tinged albums when they first came out. The popular stories that filled our screens began to reflect the ache men had for a positive vision of male heroism rooted in sacrificial love and the pursuit of something bigger than oneself. They made “Top Gun: Maverick” and “F1″ enormous hits — films that refuse the postmodern move of telling you the male hero is an oppressive force of the patriarchy. More recently, they embraced “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” a story about an earnest young man who wants, with his whole heart, to be genuinely good in a franchise famous for insisting that wanting to be good is how you get killed. They cheered for “Project Hail Mary,” whose “hopecore” message is built on a man named Grace laying down his life for the sake of the world. None of these pop culture signposts are as explicitly “religious” as a Sunday school lesson, but what do they all have in common? They show that young men are hungry for hope, meaning, and purpose in their lives. They reflect a shift from the spiritual “closedness” of the last two decades to a fresh spiritual openness, and a growing appetite for timeless religious themes of virtue, sacrifice, and the quest for a higher purpose. Is this a full-blown religious revival? Revival probably isn’t the best word to describe what’s happened. Young men’s interest in traditional religion has spiked, and some have started to fill the church pews. I suspect more will follow. What it does point to should be encouraging for anyone who cares about the future of America. Young men are increasingly willing, in numbers now measurable, to entertain the possibility that the religious wisdom we had discarded was something we needed, but did not see the need for until we tried to live without it. For 25 years, the trend line pointed in one direction, and even some of the most devoted church-going observers assumed it would keep tailing downward. It did not. It broke. In the span of a few short years, a generation of young men looked around at the trajectory of an anti-God culture and, with something like collective intuition, decided they had had enough. *** Paul Anleitner is a cultural theologian whose work focuses on the role of culture and story in our quest for meaning. He is the author of “Based on a True Story: Vibe Shifts, the End of Deconstruction, and the Reboot of Meaning.”

WASHINGTON, May 2 (Reuters) – Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on Saturday he does not think the government needs to bail out low-cost airlines that have sought $2.5 billion in government relief because of high jet fuel prices, following the collapse of Spirit Airlines. “At this point, I don’t think it’s necessary. They do have access to cash. If they want to come to the U.S. government, we would be a lender of last resort. If they can find dollars in the private markets – I think that’s better for them,” Duffy said at a press conference at Newark airport. He said the prospect of a Spirit bailout was seen by some other airlines as an opportunity to get money “not necessarily based on need, but based on opportunity.” On Monday, a group of U.S. budget airlines, including Frontier and Avelo, said it had proposed exchanging warrants that could be converted into equity ​stakes for $2.5 billion in U.S. government assistance. The Association of Value Airlines confirmed it asked President Donald Trump’s ​administration to create a $2.5 billion liquidity pool, used exclusively to offset incremental fuel ​costs, “as a necessary and targeted measure to stabilize operations and keep airfares ⁠affordable during this period of volatility.” They have also asked Congress to suspend the 7.5% federal excise tax ​on airline tickets and the $5.30 per segment tax. Waiving the fees would ​offset about one-third of the incremental cost of higher jet fuel. JET FUEL SURGE DOUBLES COSTS The pitch highlights one of the unintended consequences of the U.S.-Israeli war ​with Iran: a surge in jet fuel prices that has roughly doubled costs, squeezing margins and pushing ‌weaker airlines ⁠closer to the brink. The chief executives of ‌several low-cost carriers met with Duffy and Federal Aviation Administration chief Bryan Bedford in Washington last week to discuss the proposal. The group arrived at the $2.5 billion figure by estimating how much more it expects to spend on jet fuel this year ​compared with earlier forecasts. Airlines for America, which represents major U.S. passenger airlines, opposed a bailout for budget carriers, saying “government intervention on behalf of those airlines would punish other airlines that have engaged in self-help in order to deal with increased costs and reward airlines who haven’t made those tough decisions. That’s not a level playing field.” The group added that in the long term, sustaining businesses unable to earn their cost of capital harmed competition and consumers by making it more difficult for other airlines to compete and attract private-sector capital. The Association of Value Airlines rejected the criticism from Airlines for America, saying government policy had favored major carriers and “the current surge in jet fuel prices is not the result of poor decision-making or a lack of discipline by value airlines. It is an uncontrollable, extraordinary external shock that disproportionately impacts business models built on offering consistently affordable fares to price-sensitive travelers.” (Reporting by David Shepardson, Editing by William Maclean, Rod Nickel)

Funding for the Department of Homeland Security resumed after a 75-day shutdown — but Democrats are already threatening to cut funding again in September if their demands are not met. Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), a ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said Democrats would “absolutely” shut down DHS again if Republicans do not agree to proposed reforms to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — such as banning law enforcement officers from wearing masks and requiring judicial warrants for immigration-related arrests. “In America, police shouldn’t wear masks while walking the streets,” Thompson said, ignoring the dramatic uptick in threats and violent assaults against immigration enforcement officers and their families. “They need identification, they need cameras, and they need judicial warrants.” NEW: Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) says Democrats “absolutely” may shut down DHS again in September if the ICE/CBP reforms they demanded aren’t included in the next DHS approps bill. Dems failed to get any reforms with this shutdown & GOP plans to go around them to fund ICE/CBP. https://t.co/FOjRZcXOvf — Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) May 2, 2026 The House of Representatives ended the record-setting shutdown on Thursday after passing a bill funding most of the DHS — including the Transportation Security Administration and the Secret Service — through the end of September. ICE and Customs and Border Patrol were left out of the measure. Republicans are relying on a reconciliation bill — which would let the Senate bypass the 60-vote procedural threshold and thus the Democrats’ demands — to move ahead with funding for ICE and CBP. The shutdown began in February after Democrats refused to approve DHS funding unless Republicans agreed to include sweeping federal immigration enforcement reforms. Travelers spent hours in TSA security lines at major airports, and the Coast Guard faced utility shutoffs at military installations. Despite the hardships shouldered by everyday Americans during such shutdowns, Thompson was clear that Democrats are willing to trigger another shutdown if they do not get what they want. CNN’s Victor Blackwell pressed Thompson on his answer, asking whether Democrats were willing to force government employees to go without pay again. “When you say ‘absolutely,’ that suggests that there could be another shutdown, and there could be another lapse in pay for those TSA workers, the Coast Guard, if Democrats withhold those votes at the end of September,” Blackwell said. “Absolutely. Victor, look, we have to stand for democracy. If we have to fight for it, there has to be sacrifice,” Thompson added, apparently unconcerned with the fact that it would be average American families making the “sacrifice” he was so quick to offer.