Jen Psaki Suggests That Usha Vance Is a Hostage

Dem Poll: Voters Blame GOP for Schumer Shutdown by, Er ...

I think we can all agree that both are a pain.

Didn't know reptiles peed solids? Urine for a treat.

Although we regret to inform you that you shouldn't get too excited – there's still a long way to go.

Three Culiseta annulata mosquitos were recorded by a local insect enthusiast.

An all-female video game tournament was turned on its head when it allowed a male to compete and win an enormous cash prize.A Fortnite gaming tournament called the Milk Cup says that it was created to provide women with more opportunities to succeed in video game competitions. "It's a space designed for women to compete at the highest level, for serious money," the company says. However, it took just one year since the tournament's inception for it to become dominated by a male.'It felt crazy to lift that trophy.'The 2025 Milk Cup in San Diego, California, boasted a $300,000 prize pool and alleged $78,000 first-place prize. This year's top prize was award to a duo of gamers going by "XSet" Nina Fernandez and allegedly transgender gamer Vader, a male who believes he is female. The pair placed second in 2024.Vader celebrated the win on his X page, exclaiming, "1st ($78,000) at [Milk Cup] LAN WE F**KING DID IT."Nina and the tournament organizers similarly celebrated the victory online.Vader's X profile seemingly lists him as "18" years old, with a transgender flag next to the age. A gamer ranking website also lists him as born in July 2007. His Twitch profile describes him as using "she/her pronouns.""[Our win at Milk Cup] shows you can be your true self and not be apologetic about it," Vader said on a post-match press panel, per ESports Insider. "There are spaces for everybody, so never give up.""It felt crazy to lift that trophy," Vader added, saying he wanted to "prove people wrong." "Anybody can participate in esports. Don't let people stop you. Don’t let comments get to your head. Believe in yourself."While online communities often cater to such delusions, it may come as a surprise that the tournament itself is backed by a nonprofit organization that operates under the United States Department of Agriculture. RELATED: Gen Z gets the freedom to voice chat with strangers — and they can't handle it The website "Gonna Need Milk," representing the organization behind the tournament, claims that "in a world where male athletes take center stage," the organization is "redirecting the spotlight to women."The company further explains it is making an effort to, perhaps ironically, "drive awareness to gender inequality in sport."The bottom of the page denotes that the website is maintained and funded by MilkPEP, the Milk Processor Education Program, which came into existence after the creation of the Fluid Milk Promotion Act of 1990. The USDA's National Fluid Milk Processor Promotion Board sponsors both MilkPEP and Gonna Need Milk. At the same time, MilkPEP boasts that the tournament is run by a collaboration of all-female teams and that its program is "funded by the nation's milk companies."RELATED: CRASH: Amazon Web Services outage cripples apps, megacorps, and doorbells, shocking a fragile America Dan Wheldon celebrates his winning of the 89th Indianapolis 500 by drinking milk. Photo by Donald Miralle/Getty Images Blaze News reached out to MilkPEP and Gonna Need Milk to see if they took issue with a male gamer winning the all-female tournament; neither entity responded. The USDA was also asked if the inclusion of the male violated federal orders. A representative for the USDA said the agency could not provide a response to the question within a reasonable time frame due to "the ongoing government shutdown."Gamers Vader and Nina were also asked to comment on what the determining factors should be regarding allowing a male in the female category and whether they had a response to the backlash; neither responded.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Health officials in California recently confirmed that monkeypox, a virus spread almost entirely in the West by and among homosexual men, has once again reared its ugly head in the United States.The Oversight Project, a government watchdog group, is calling on policymakers poised to tackle the latest outbreaks to drop the political correctness that tripped up previous approaches to the disease.Mike Howell, president of the Oversight Project, told Blaze News, "Public officials should be honest about how and where monkeypox is spreading, should not be worried about offending anyone, and should pull the fire alarm if animals and children start catching it."Monkeypox is a nasty disease caused by a virus in the same genus as the virus that causes smallpox. While endemic in various African regions, monkeypox made a global play in early 2022.Individuals infected with monkeypox may experience a painful rash that can look like pimples or blisters, respiratory problems, exhaustion, fever, swollen lymph nodes, and chills. The disease can be spread via respiratory droplets, through "direct contact with a rash or sores of someone who has the virus," and through "contact with clothing, bedding, and other items used by a person" with the virus.A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine noted that of the 528 infections diagnosed between April 27 and June 24, 2022, 98% of those infected were homosexuals and that "transmission was suspected to have occurred through sexual activity in 95% of the persons with infection."RELATED: 'Trans' fad is dying out among American youth, and straightness is ascendant: Study Photo by Ronaldo Silva/NurPhoto via Getty ImagesMonths after then-President Joe Biden stated in May 2022 that "everybody should be concerned" about the virus, former Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra declared that a "public health emergency exists nationwide." Numerous states including Illinois and New York subsequently rushed to declare statewide disaster emergencies.'They should shut down gay bathhouses.'While the Biden administration and various state health authorities appeared willing to admit that the spread was predominantly among homosexuals, they nevertheless generalized the threat, glossed over the nature and locations of the spread, and refrained from cracking down on super-spreader venues in the same fashion they had when tackling COVID-19 — while in some cases fretting both privately and publicly about feeding into homosexuals' "sexual shame and stigma."Such efforts to gloss over critical facts and to pretend the virus presented a danger to the general population evidently caused consternation behind the scenes.The Oversight Project flagged, for instance, a May 27, 2022, email in which Dr. Stephanie Cohen, then-medical director of the San Francisco City Clinic, noted to other officials at the San Francisco Department of Public of Health that while she supported the "desire to not stigmatize gay men/MSM and agree that other populations can be affected, I worry a bit that we are not being fully transparent about current [epidemic]."The Oversight Project noted that "officials were primarily concerned with not stigmatizing, the exact opposite of the COVID response."The watchdog group further revealed that while health officials around the country were well aware that the disease was being spread at LGBT events and homosexual venues such as bathhouses, they refrained from seeking health crackdowns on such locations.The disease, which the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases under Anthony Fauci was reportedly cleared to conduct gain-of-function experiments on, has apparently made a comeback.Last week, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health and the City of Long Beach's health department both confirmed new cases of monkeypox in their respective jurisdictions.The announcements by both health authorities appear to have once again been worded to avoid stigmatizing homosexuals. The Long Beach health authority noted, for instance, that "Mpox can spread through specific behaviors, regardless of a person’s race, ethnicity, sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation."The Los Angeles County DPH, echoing the state health authority, did, however, note that the disease primarily impacts "communities of gay and bisexual men" and that risk can be mitigated by reducing the number of sexual partners, limiting attendance at "sex or circuit parties," and refraining from sharing "fetish gear" and sex toys."Monkeypox is back. We encourage policymakers to follow the science instead of political correctness this time," stated the Oversight Project.When asked what prioritizing science over political correctness would look like in practice, Howell told Blaze News, "It means they should shut down gay bathhouses if they're again epicenters for monkeypox."Editor's note: Mike Howell is a contributor to Blaze News.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Late Tuesday night, a suspect was arrested after allegedly crashing into a barricade outside a Secret Service facility in Washington, D.C. According to NBC News, the suspect rammed into a Secret Service barricade on 17th and E St, NW, less than a mile away from the White House. 'The vehicle was assessed by Secret Service and the Metropolitan Police Department and deemed safe.'The car reportedly crashed into the facility at 10:37 p.m. ET. "At approximately 10:37 p.m., an individual drove a vehicle into the Secret Service vehicle gate located at 17th & E St, NW, in Washington, DC. The individual was arrested & the vehicle was assessed and deemed safe," the U.S. Secret Service Office of Communications said on X shortly after the incident.The statement continued, "Our investigation into the cause of this collision is ongoing."RELATED: Trump administration mocks outrage of 'unhinged leftists' as construction of ballroom begins at White House Photo by Andrew Leyden/Getty ImagesIn a statement to Blaze News Wednesday morning, the USSS shared similar information: "On Tuesday, October 21, at approximately 10:37 p.m., an individual drove his vehicle into the Secret Service vehicle gate located at 17th and E St, NW, D.C. The individual was immediately arrested by U.S. Secret Service Uniformed Division officers, and the vehicle was assessed by Secret Service and the Metropolitan Police Department and deemed safe. Additional information will be provided upon conclusion of the investigation."The suspect's identity has not been released. Authorities have not publicly shared any cause of the crash or whether it was intentional.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Like you, I take my phone everywhere. I check my email, I scroll X, I call my wife and ask her if there's anything she needs me to pick up on my way home.And I take photos and videos. Of everything. The lake, the gulls, the mountains, the houses, the flowers, the woods, my son, my daughter, my wife, my life. Every video in my phone is less than 30 seconds, and most aren’t more than 10.Who would have thought that the iPhone would essentially eliminate what we used to call 'home movies'?A little clip of a deer behind the house. A shot of a kid cracking a wiffle ball or running the bases. My phone is full of these short little bursts.That’s something different about our era. My parents didn’t take hundreds of five-second clips of my brother, sister, and me. They took long, 10-minute videos with a camcorder. Remember those?Focus on the familyThey’d record these long videos at birthday parties, in the car on family trips, or at my uncle’s cabin. A whole inning of Little League, the soft lull of conversation between Mom and Dad in the background. My mom would ask us questions, interviewing us kids like little adults for what felt like eternity, the zoom moving in and out as we reluctantly answered her questions.Those old family videos feel so much slower and so much less frantic. I don’t know what it is exactly, but in the short ones on our iPhones, it feels like life is happening in a disjointed fashion. Or like people are performing. Or like everything is sped up 20%. I suppose it’s because we don’t get a sense for the scene or the place. We have no context. All we have is an eight-second clip and a question, years later, about where that was.On the old videos, mom and dad would narrate in a kind of family documentarian way, as if curating historical footage for future reference. “So it’s August 17, 1996, and we are visiting Grandma at the cabin. It’s about 85 degrees, and this is the last trip of the summer. How’s everybody doing? What did you think, kids? Are you having fun?” Stuff like that.Mom and dad would walk around the house with the camera, coming upon a kid in the bedroom reading or playing, film the kid from a distance, zooming in on fingers or eyes, the camera shaking.They’d find my grandparents at the table and joke about a few things. My dad would zoom in on my mom getting dinner ready in the kitchen, the soft hum of the tape heard on the mic. My mom would frame a long shot of my dad, outside, smoking his pipe, reading.Video véritéThose long shots on the camcorders were slices of life as it really was. Watching the videos, you feel the time and place and even the real — or more real — behaviors of the people on the screen. Walking slowly with Mom or Dad around the house stirs memories of bedrooms, bathrooms, hallways, and living rooms in ways the short little iPhone clips can’t.Realizing this, I bought an old camcorder. I found a Sony Handycam DCR-SR62 on eBay for 50 bucks and a battery on Amazon for 12.It's old-school but not too old-school. The most annoying thing about the old camcorders was the hassle of bringing analog footage into the digital age. If you want to transfer tape onto computer, it takes a long time. If you have a two-hour video, it takes two hours to get it on the computer.What's nice about the Sony Handycam model I bought is that there are no tapes or disks. All video is stored on an internal hard drive, which can then be transferred to your computer just as easily as you transfer photos from any digital camera. Essentially, you get the best of both worlds: digital transfer speed and long-form family video.RELATED: Forget streaming — I just want my Blockbuster Video back James Laynse/Getty ImagesReal to reelsIn theory, we should be able to record 10-minute slice-of-life videos on our iPhones. But we don’t. The format of the technology pushes us in a different direction. Consuming reels on Instagram nudges our tastes toward short-form portrait and away from long-form landscape.The technology we use shapes the way we live. That’s obvious, of course, but it’s a realization that seems to be continually rediscovered, or revealed, in ways that we never could have anticipated. Who would have thought that the iPhone would essentially eliminate what we used to call "home movies"?I took my Sony Handycam to the beach at the end of the summer. I filmed my kids eating string cheese and sharing a can of sparkling water. I zoomed in on sailboats in the distance, walked up and down the beach recording the kids running in front of me, and interviewed them just like my mom interviewed us.“So it’s September 30, 2025, and we are at beach. How’s the food? Can you believe we are swimming in September? Did you guys jump in the water? What do we think, was it cold? What was your favorite thing we did this summer?”