A jury of 12 delivered their verdict in the seven-week case

'Rigorously examining and adapting its approach'

'Most extreme major candidate'

Movies & TV Marvel Cinematic Universe Ironheart Lays the Path for a Bright Future We get the reveal of a major villain fans have been pulling for, and a whole lot of magic. By Kathryn Porter | Published on July 2, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Despite having a six episode season, Ironheart has come to an end just a week after its premiere. The final three episodes of the series wrap up this installment of Riri Williams’ story with a bow that looks pretty nice from a distance, but is plainly fraying at the edges when you take a closer look.  After leaving John (Manny Montana) behind to die after the Hood’s attack on Heirlum, Riri (Dominique Thorne) is a nervous wreck, and Parker (Anthony Ramos) is growing more unstable and suspicious of her. Due to Riri leaving Zeke’s (Alden Ehrenreich) technology behind at the crime scene, he is arrested, outed as Obediah Stane’s son, and imprisoned for his illegal possession of unauthorized technology. He no longer trusts Riri, and when Parker offers him a way out of prison in exchange for helping to hunt down and kill Riri, he accepts. Zeke is then enhanced in a process that includes having his skull drilled into, gaining electric abilities while also being subject to Parker’s control.  Meanwhile, Riri and N.A.T.A.L.I.E (Lyric Ross) investigate the piece of Parker’s cloak they managed to swipe. Riri’s mother (Anji White)—who has let her get away with so much—takes her to visit her friend Madeline (Cree Summer) and her daughter Zelma (Regan Aliyah). Riri has spent her whole life thinking that Madeline is just a witchy kind of person, but she and Zelma are both well versed in the very same magic that Doctor Strange and the many sorcerers of the MCU use. They quickly determine that the cloak is from a different dimension and tell Riri to do everything she possibly can to destroy it, which she attempts to no avail. After the sting of her failure begins to mix with her ever present PTSD, Riri finally reaches her limit. She has her worst panic attack yet while  flying her suit, and N.A.T.A.L.I.E is unable to calm her down like she was before. N.A.T.A.L.I.E goes against Riri’s wishes and reveals herself to Xavier (Matthew Elam) after bringing him to help. He, understandably, has a bad reaction to seeing his dead sister in the form of a sentient AI assistant and cuts Riri off. In a world where she wasn’t mid-panic in the middle of a junkyard, she may have been able to effectively explain how N.A.T.A.L.I.E came to exist in the first place, but instead her inability to do so leads to N.A.T.A.L.I.E growing angry with her as well, and she storms off with Riri’s suit.  Left with no other avenues, Riri meets up with Zelma, who believes that the entity behind Parker’s cloak is none other than Dormammu, the final boss of 2016’s Doctor Strange. Unfortunately, Parker has directed the remaining members of his team (plus Zeke) to bring him Riri’s head, and the Blood Siblings (Zoe Terakes and Shakira Barrera) interrupt her meeting with Zelma and attempt to take her out. After the clunkiest fight scene in the entire show, Riri is able to trap the pair inside of a protective shield, but is unable to escape before Clown (Sonia Denis) appears and makes multiple attempts to shrapnel bomb Riri to death. She manages to evade Clown as well, but not before slipping to her that Stuart (Eric Andre) is dead, clearly at the hands of Parker and John.  Where was N.A.T.A.L.I.E this whole time, you may wonder? Inside the suit, trapped by Slug (Shea Couleé) with the help of a giant magnet and a box truck. N.A.T.A.L.I.E escapes just in time to save Riri from being turned into roadkill, but they are still unable to make an easy exit when Zeke shows up and completely destroys the suit. He almost kills her too, but is unable to do so, and instead tells Riri to get out of Chicago before Parker finds out she’s still alive and comes after her himself. She runs home to lick her wounds, and Zeke and the gang head back to Parker, gifting him the head of Riri’s suit and maintaining the lie that she died at Zeke’s hand. In all of this, Riri’s mother is a true saint. She allows for Riri’s antics to flourish under her roof, is almost entirely unphased when N.A.T.A.L.I.E appears to her for the first time, and though she does progressively become more concerned about what’s going on in her daughter’s life, she never attempts to pull rank on her to completely yank her out of the situation, no matter how bad things are. She remains there for Riri whether Riri likes it or not, and when Riri hits rock bottom, she’s the first person there to get her back on track. With the help of basically everyone who didn’t spend the night trying to take Riri out—including Xavier, who has now forgiven her—she takes apart her stepdad’s car and builds it into the final version of her suit. Still in need of a power source and with no ARC reactor in reach, she again turns to Zelma. They figure out how to power the suit with magic, but it isn’t able to hold the energy and N.A.T.A.L.I.E’s programming all at once. N.A.T.A.L.I.E is destroyed before she can be transferred to a different data bank, and Riri is left without her for the remainder of the show. In the midst of this, Parker is abandoned by Clown, Slug, and the Blood Siblings after they dig up Stuart’s autopsy. With no one else to manipulate, he breaks his promise to leave Zeke alone and activates his control mechanism, forcing him to help Parker break into a mansion he failed to rob back when he first started running cons with John. In a reveal that feels very trivial, we learn that the mansion is the home of Parker’s father (Paul Calderón). Not only is he a CEO like all of the other targets, he also abandoned Parker when he was 12-years-old following the death of Parker’s mother, citing the fact that he “didn’t want him.” It’s pretty weaksauce as tragic backstories go, but Parker was hurt enough by it to turn to a life of crime that eventually led him into the hands of the man that fans of Marvel Television have been begging to see for half a decade: Mephisto (Sacha Baron Cohen). Mephisto is the one who gave Parker the cloak the night of his failed break-in, using his powers to manipulate Parker into asking for wealth beyond imagination in exchange for something “he wouldn’t miss.” The cloak’s influence is tied to Mephisto, and by the time Riri shows up to finally take Parker down, he’s a rageful shell of himself who is dead-set on murdering her. In their final conflict, Riri gets him out of the cloak and leaves him on the floor of his lair. She then comes face to face with Mephsito on her way out, and while she does a better job of resisting his will than Parker did, he still manages to make a deal with her before she leaves. We are faced with two things as the season comes to a close. First, Riri is reunited with N.A.T.A.L.I.E, except she seems to be having some memory issues because she isn’t AI at all, she’s the Natalie who died 5 years ago back in the flesh. Second, we see a post credit scene featuring a very alive—and seemingly well—Parker seeking out magic from none other than Zelma. As predicted, Ironheart was not able to break the MCU curse that comes along with a six-episode season, but there is a clear desire for a second season that cannot be ignored. As well as the ensemble cast does with the little that they are given, they get an even shorter end of the stick in the back half of this season, which is unfortunately pretty typical of MCU TV. When Parker’s allies abandon him in episode five, that’s the last time we ever see them. It would have been cool to see everyone come back together with Riri to stand against Parker and take him down, but there clearly wasn’t enough room for that to happen. The small scene we get of the remaining four bonding was really nice as it was one of the few times we saw them interact outside of the main character and their cult-like leader, and I wish that there had been more casual interaction similar to that across the entire cast. With even more characters appearing in the back half of the season, the motivations of characters like Zeke and Parker felt flimsier than I’m sure were intended, but again this all comes down to the fact Ironheart would have been even better with a ten or 12-episode runcount. Zeke’s arc flies by in a blink, and the build-up to Parker’s father is non-existent before it doesn’t even matter anymore. Thankfully, Riri is not sidelined in her own show—something that commonly happens to Black female characters in leading roles—but we don’t get to see her make strong bonds with a lot of the people she interacts with regardless of whether or not she knew them before the starting-point of the series. Zelma was an instant favorite of mine, and while it seems like she’ll get some more screentime in a hypothetical season two, it would have been cool to see a full episode of her and Riri working together instead of the sporadic bits that we get in-between Riri working with half a dozen other people. Luckily, every good thing that came out of the first half of the season is still intact here. The performances are incredible from everyone, and Ironheart has so much potential as a longer series that it’s impossible not to want more. As clunky as things started to get, there is a ton of potential for the show now that the door has (finally) been opened on Mephisto and the realm of magic. The only thing holding it back (aside from the episode count) is the way Disney+ chose to release the series. There was no need to squeeze the season into a two-part release when there are more than two episodes—Ironheart should have been released weekly like every other series (except for Echo, one of the other two series featuring a female lead of color). Riri Williams deserves to be more than a flash in the over-full pan that the MCU occupies. As a final note, I have to bring up how wonderful the title cards were. Starting an episode trying to guess how Ironheart was going to show up on screen was super fun, and my personal favorite remains the broken pavement with Riri in the suit as the “A” from episode one. It’s the little things that count for the most, and in the event that a second season happens, I hope they carry that tradition through.[end-mark] The post <i>Ironheart</i> Lays the Path for a Bright Future appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club Buckaroo Banzai: The Aliens Were in New Jersey All Along We don’t have to be mean, ’cause remember: No matter where you go, there you are. By Kali Wallace | Published on July 2, 2025 Credit: 20th Century Fox Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: 20th Century Fox The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984). Directed by W.D. Richter. Written by Earl Mac Rauch. Starring just about everybody in the world but especially Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin, Clancy Brown, and Jeff Goldblum. If you were to make a wry, tongue-in-cheek, film-within-a-film comedy about the making of some quintessential cult classic American sci fi film from the 1980s, you would end up with a story that looks pretty much exactly like the making of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. It was a passion project that nobody outside of the passionate filmmakers really understood before, during, or after its release. Everybody in the cast is recognizable, and very little about the plot is easily explainable. There are scenes the director put in just to confirm the studio wasn’t paying attention. Nobody knew how to market it. Critics were sharply divided and audiences stayed away—at least at first. But people still love this movie today. People still ask about lost footage and deleted scenes and a possible sequel. Go to any major con and you’re likely to see cosplay of one or more characters. I don’t know quite how big the film’s cult fandom is these days, but I know it’s still out there. That’s impressive for a movie that could just as easily have faded into obscurity upon release. The story of how Buckaroo Banzai came to be begins at Dartmouth College in 1968, when sophomore student Earl Mac Rauch wrote a novel called Dirty Pictures From the Prom. That novel was published by Doubleday the following year. I went looking for a description of the novel, not really sure what to expect, and found a summary in the December ’69 issue of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. The summary does not help me understand the book at all. It involves a child prodigy who dies young and is later elected to be God. But it’s also not important, because what matters is that a few years later, early-career screenwriter (and fellow Dartmouth alum) D.W. Richter read the book on his wife’s recommendation. He reached out to Rauch about potentially adapting the book into a film. That never happened, but the two struck up a friendship. Rauch was also interested in writing for film, so Richter invited him to move out to California to get started. Richter was making a name for himself in Hollywood; among other things, he wrote the screenplay for Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). Rauch also began making some headway writing for films, such as developing the story for and co-writing Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977). (Confession: Until writing this article I had no idea Scorsese had directed a musical rom com. There are shocking gaps in my film knowledge.) But all the while, Rauch had a different story occupying his thoughts and filling dozens of notebooks. A story that was bigger and weirder. A story he tried to write dozens of times, in dozens of different ways, before finally finding an approach that worked. The way Rauch talks about developing the idea that would eventually become Buckaroo Banzai reminds me a lot of the way Luc Besson talks about The Fifth Element (1997), in that the story existed as a messy, sprawling amalgam of characters, worldbuilding, trope-heavy plots, and whiz-bang excitement long before it cohered into anything resembling a filmable screenplay. Rauch had a main character—first called Buckaroo Bandy, later renamed to Banzai—and several hundred pages of ideas involving villains, worldbuilding, sci fi zaniness, humor, and action, including at least one version that featured an enormous mecha, but he struggled to finish a script. In another life, Rauch might have embarked on a career as a comics writer, or some other medium suited to the kind of ideas he was generating. But he wanted to write a movie, so that’s when he did. With a lot of help from Richter, and a lot more writerly trial and error, Rauch finally came up with a finished script that could be pitched to studios. It was first picked up by United Artists, but after a writers’ strike, some shuffling of studio executives, and a couple of years, it ended up going into production at 20th Century Fox. Richter hadn’t directed a film before, and when he set out to woo the primary cast he had to do be pretty persuasive. Both Peter Weller (who plays the hero, Buckaroo Banzai) and John Lithgow (who plays the villain Dr. Lizardo, a.k.a. Lord Whorfin) were extremely skeptical at first. Weller, who was in the very early years of his film career, described it fairly politely, saying he “…wondered what the film’s point-of-view would be. Would it be campy? Would it be a cartoon?” Lithgow was a bit more blunt: “Rick [Richter] and Earl are completely deranged.” But Richter was very persuasive, and both accepted the offered roles, and by extension accepted the task of diving headfirst into making what would become a very wacky movie. To be more specific: a very wacky movie with a lot of serious talent behind it. That’s part of why it remains so beloved decades later, in spite of being about a rock star-neurosurgeon-particle physicist who drives his souped-up Ford F-350 through a mountain and encounters hostile aliens who have been imprisoned in an alternate dimension for decades. I’m not going to get into every detail, but it’s worth touching on just how stacked the production roster was. For all its camp and craziness, Buckaroo Banzai was made by people who knew how to make movies. Production designer J. Michael Riva took some time in between working on award-winning dramatic films like Ordinary People (1980) and The Color Purple (1985) to create the world and the aliens of Buckaroo Banzai; his team included visual effects supervisor Michael Fink, who had previously worked on the effects teams on Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1982). To dress Buckaroo Banzai’s ragtag band of heroes, they brought on costume designer Aggie Guerard Rodgers, the woman responsible for the costuming in Return of the Jedi (1983) and who would later go on the design the absolutely iconic costumes in Beetlejuice (1988). One of the most memorable of the Buckaroo Banzai costumes comes from a fun bit of fashion history. When Dr. Sidney “New Jersey” Zweibel (Jeff Goldblum) shows up to join the Hong Kong Cavaliers, he’s wearing a delightfully outrageous cowboy outfit. That suit came from the shop of legendary western wear designer Nudie Cohn, a Ukrainian-born tailor who made western wear for men. Cohn and his wife, Helen Kruger, got their start in fashion designing custom undergarments for burlesque showgirls in New York. After they moved to California in the ’40s they focused on western suits that would come to define the flashy, flamboyant “rhinestone cowboy” look that was so popular in ’50s and ’60s American pop culture. (Earworm: exactly what you expect. You’re welcome/I’m sorry.) There was a lot of filmmaking skill behind the cameras as well. At first the film’s director of photography was Jordan Cronenweth, the cinematographer of Blade Runner (1982), but partway through producer David Begelman replaced him with Fred J. Koenekamp, the cinematographer of disaster film The Towering Inferno (1974). I’ve done some digging but I can’t find a real explanation for why Begelman made that call. That information may be out there somewhere—there are a lot of interviews and articles about this movie!—but what I did learn is that it didn’t make anybody on the film happy. Richter, Rauch, and Weller all argued against the change, as they preferred Cronenweth’s style to Koenekamp’s. Some of Cronenweth’s work remains in the film, most notably in the nightclub scene where Buckaroo and his band first encounter Penny Priddy (Ellen Barkin). (Aside: Peter Weller is an accomplished musician who plays the trumpet, so the rock star part of his character’s resume is not that far-fetched. He also has a Ph.D. in Italian Renaissance Art History, which has nothing to do with this film but is so cool I wanted to share it anyway. He wrote his dissertation on Leon Battista Alberti’s De pictura, a book about painting that impacted how Renaissance artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli understood perspective.) (Second aside: Yes, of course we are going to watch Weller in Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop at some point in the future. I just need to find the emotional fortitude to dedicate a month to science fictional depictions of law enforcement, a topic that is likely to make everybody living through 2025 feel really super great about the state of the world.) It sounds like Richter and Begelman clashed a lot during the film’s production. In a 2011 interview, Richter put it rather bluntly: “Begelman was crazy. He would sabotage the movie in any way.” They argued about a great many things, and Richter was constantly worried that Begelman was going to pull the plug on the production. It got to the point where the crew began to suspect that Begelman wasn’t even watching the dailies anymore because he had apparently given up on arguing with them. One day the crew decided to test this theory. Production designer J. Michael Riva had picked up a watermelon from a roadside fruit stand on his way to work, and Richter came up with the idea of sticking it in one of the defunct machines in the factory. The dialogue was improvised, the mysterious watermelon was included in the dailies and the final cut, and as Richter suspected, nobody from the studio ever questioned it. The watermelon scene has become something of a legend among Buckaroo Banzai fans, and I think it’s pretty emblematic of the film as a whole. This was a movie made by a very enthusiastic group of people who were cheerfully trying to get away with as much as possible. They tried to stuff as much of Rauch’s story and fictional world into the film as possible, even though most of it wouldn’t fit. They shoved in an enormous cast of characters, which actually works better than it should, in large part because so many of the actors have an easy camaraderie with each other. There’s so much that is in the film simply for the gag: the president’s hospital setup, the duck hunters who find the Lectroid ship, the very silly Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds backstory to the alien presence, the dizzying array of absurdist Lectroid names that all begin with “John.” You don’t call one of your primary villains “John Bigbooté” and cast Christopher Lloyd to play him unless you’re trying to make people snicker. (Lloyd also appear in another sci fi film in the summer of ’84. That was Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, which also makes people snicker, but only because we get to see Spock go through accelerated Vulcan puberty.) All of those things that make the film so fun to watch are, alas, the very same things that made it such a hard sell in 1984. 20th Century Fox had no real idea how to market it. They targeted sci fi audiences but didn’t reach out any farther, so when the film came out most people had no idea what to expect. But it didn’t fade away, because all of those same things are also the exact things that make it cinematic catnip to a certain type of sci fi movie fan. The wacky plot, the deadpan humor, the many nonsensical inclusions, the big cast of unlikely heroes, the hints of complexity and sprawling comics-style structure of the larger world, the anything-goes sensibility, this is all stuff that sci fi nerds absolutely love. (I say that with both affection and self-awareness.) It took some time and a home video release, but Buckaroo Banzai did eventually find its audience. It never did get a filmed sequel, in spite of what is promised at the end of the film. Even after the film’s cult status grew to the point where there was both interest and money enough to make it happen, a legal battle regarding the rights stalled the most promising adaptation before it went anywhere. The rights situation had in fact been complicated for years before that, partly due to the lasting effects of Begelman’s shady business practices, and partly due to ownership disputes between the creators and MGM, which acquired the rights as part of a larger deal. A few years ago Rauch published a novel version of the sequel, Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League (Dark Horse, 2021), but I’m not entirely sure what the film rights situation is right now. I’ve never been among those who have any sort of attachment to Buckaroo Banzai. Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s a fun movie with a great cast. I’ve just never wanted or needed to see the story continued. It’s not just that I don’t think there needs to be more, and it’s not really about a resistance to nostalgia either. It’s more that I think Buckaroo Banzai belongs so completely to a certain time and place that removing it from that context changes the film completely. There was an odd trend during the few years between the earnest and epic mainstream blockbusters like Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and the comedic and family-friendly mainstream hits of the latter half of the ’80s, such as Back to the Future (1985) or Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) or Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989). During those few years American sci fi films had a tendency to be a weird, sharp, and unexpected—a delight for sci fi fans but often a bit of a miss for mainstream movie-going audiences. This includes several other early ’80s American sci fi films that we’ve watched and discussed in this column: Repo Man (1984), Tron (1982), The Brother From Another Planet (1984), even Dune (1984). There are real gems in that period, but they are gems in part because they were playing around with things that didn’t fit either the save-the-galaxy cosmic-importance tone of what came before or the aggressively suburban normalization of what came after. They hit at the right time, in the right place, when American cinema needed a dose of off-beat oddity that wasn’t yet polished up for broader appeal. Buckaroo Banzai fits right in among those films, and that’s why it’s still so much fun forty-some years later. It is such an ’80s movie—but I don’t mean that in a derogatory manner, the way people will sometimes describe media from the ’80s. I mean that it’s campy and weird, it’s shamelessly wacky, it’s politically clumsy but has its heart in the right place, it doesn’t bother to explain itself, and most of all, it was made by people having a grand old time filling the film with everything they loved. What do you think about Buckaroo Banzai? Do you have any memories of watching it with other sci fi fans back in the ’80s or ’90s? Next week: We’re watching India’s beloved superhero film Mr. India. Watch it on Amazon, several unofficial YouTube uploads, or anywhere else you can find it.[end-mark] The post <i>Buckaroo Banzai</i>: The Aliens Were in New Jersey All Along appeared first on Reactor.

Attention, all parents and college students worried about the ever-rising cost of college tuition. The Department of Justice has finally—after three decades—started enforcing the federal law that prohibits states from offering in-state tuition to illegal aliens unless they also offer in-state tuition to everyone else—including all citizen students from out of state.  The law they’re enforcing has existed since 1996, when Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. Buried inside that huge law was Section 505, codified at 8 U.S.C. § 1623, which prohibits state colleges and universities from providing in-state tuition rates to illegal aliens “on the basis of residence within the State” unless the same in-state rates are offered to all citizens of the United States. In English, that means that states that offer in-state tuition to illegal aliens also have to offer in-state tuition to everyone. That means you! Section 505 is still the law of the land—as we wrote back in 2011. But the problem is that the law did not include a private right of action, meaning everyday individuals could not sue and win. Only the U.S. government, through the Department of Justice, could sue states and universities to enforce the plain language of the law.  So, the law sat like a Caryatid for over three decades, staring out into space, standing tall, but supporting nothing except higher tuition costs for American citizens who have been subsidizing the tuition of illegal aliens.    That was true until recently. Earlier this month, we wrote about how under the leadership of Attorney General Pam Bondi, the DOJ successfully sued Texas for offering in-state tuition rates to illegal aliens while charging non-Texan American students higher rates. Texas waved the white flag immediately and settled the case by entering into a consent decree to correct the illegal practice. High off its easy win, the department has embarked on a state-by-state crusade, filing complaints against Kentucky on June 17 and Minnesota on June 25 for the same blatant violation of federal law. Both states offer in-state tuition to illegal aliens while demanding higher out-of-state tuition from American citizens who reside elsewhere. These price differences aren’t trivial. According to one figure, the average cost of in-state tuition and fees at a public four-year college in Kentucky is $11,299. That’s only 3.71 percent higher than the national average for a public college. But the average cost of out-of-state tuition and fees at a public four-year college in Kentucky is $26,640, more than twice as much. Let’s look at Minnesota. According to the same source, Gov. Tim Walz’s favorite constituents—illegal aliens who attend a four-year public college—only pay in-state tuition and fees of $12,873. An out-of-state American citizen dreaming of college in the Gopher State can expect more than double that price: an average of $26,719. Think about it this way: an illegal alien from Mexico or Somalia living in Minnesota gets a better deal at a Minnesota state four-year college than a straight-A student from Michigan or Wisconsin, unless, of course, the out-of-state student gets a scholarship or a tuition discount.  How is that fair? It’s not. Where We Want Bondi to Go Next While the recent lawsuits against Minnesota and Kentucky are a great start, other states are also actively violating federal law by offering in-state tuition rates to illegal aliens while not offering the same to out-of-state students. The scofflaws are Arizona, California, Oregon, Washington, Utah, Nebraska, New Mexico, Kansas, Illinois, Florida, Colorado, Virginia, Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York. All these should be addressed—but here are Heritage’s top three picks for the DOJ to target next. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore’s state makes the short list of states the DOJ should haul into court. Maryland’s universities have favored illegal aliens since 2011, when the state passed a law allowing them to pay in-state tuition for community colleges. The Maryland DREAM Act, enacted in 2012, spells out the requirements for in-state tuition for illegals. Here are just a few of the requirements: Attend a Maryland public or private high school for at least one year; or Graduate from a Maryland high school or receive a Maryland high school diploma or equivalent diploma, like a GED; or File Maryland income tax returns for the last three years. Regardless of these Maryland-specific requirements, the act still violates federal laws because Maryland does not give in-state tuition to residents of other states.    Annual in-state tuition and fees for a public four-year university in Maryland average $10,041. The price for a Virginia citizen resident—who can easily drive across the Potomac River to get to Maryland—is a whopping $26,721.   For many families, the difference between tuition of $10k per year versus $26k per year is the difference between attending college and not attending college.  How many illegal aliens are enrolled in higher education in Maryland? A stunning 11,675. If every illegal alien student enrolled in a public college of higher education in the state of Maryland pays in-state tuition (which they don’t, as many get tuition breaks on top of in-state tuition), then the taxpayers of Maryland and the out-of-state students pick up the slack, which amounts to roughly $194,739,000.  In a state that faces a $3 billion budget gap and spends almost $6 billion on higher education, that’s a significant subsidy.     Colorado This rocky mountain state, as beautiful as it is, has some ugly numbers when it comes to giving tuition benefits to illegal aliens in violation of Section 505.    The Centennial State advertises a somewhat reasonable average in-state tuition of $9,798 for four-year public colleges. Expensive, yes, but justifiable in exchange for the scenic views and the University of Colorado system. The picturesque mountains get a bit harder to justify at $32,476, the average annual price for out-of-state students. Colorado has tweaked their state law with respect to how a resident illegal alien can qualify for in-state tuition. The latest revision to Colorado’s law came in 2022 with the passage of HB22-1155, which “remove[d] several barriers that prevented thousands of undocumented high school students from qualifying for in-state tuition rates and in-state financial aid.” Under the new law, a resident illegal alien qualifies for in-state tuition and in-state financial aid if: He attended a Colorado high school for at least a year, or Graduated from a Colorado high school. The student is not timebound as to when he or she must attend college, but he or she must be physically present in Colorado for one year before attending. How those strictures are verified or enforced is anyone’s guess.  The new law means that a California student whose family moved to Colorado the day after his high school graduation will pay 231 percent more than an illegal alien from El Salvador or Mexico who graduated from a Colorado high school after sneaking into the country.    Illinois Home of the Windy City, deep blue Illinois and its governor JB Pritzker are next on our DOJ lawsuit list.   With annual average tuition and fees at a four-year public college at $14,921, Illinoisans take a bigger hit than in-state applicants in other states looking to stay local. The state has the sixth most expensive public school tuition rate in the country.  But anyone else in the nation wanting to go to the Prairie State for college also better start saving early, as the out-of-state tuition and fees for a four-year public college average $30,027 a year.   Illinois’s higher education system actively educates 27,672 illegal alien students. With a difference of about $15k between in- and out-of-state tuition, this population costs the state a whopping $418,013,232. Let’s put these numbers into perspective.  In 1911, it cost $250,000 to build Wrigley Field. Adjusting for inflation, this would be the equivalent to about $7.85 million in 2024. You could build 53 Wrigley Fields, rent out the stadiums on opening day, buy everyone in the stadiums a hot dog, and still have money left over with the amount the state subsidizes illegal aliens yearly via in-state college tuition.  In 2003, Illinois Public Act 093-0007 gave eligible illegal alien students access to in-state tuition. Signed by Pritzker last August, the newest legislation made some changes to existing law, but for all intents and purposes, it remains just as illegal. Both make it impossible for anyone other than an in-state citizen or an illegal alien to receive discounted tuition. The number of requirements imposed on in-state individuals to qualify for in-state tuition doesn’t matter. The only way a state law that offers in-state tuition for resident illegal aliens can comply with Section 505 is if the law offers in-state tuition rates for all students from any state.    Section 505 is Not Anti-Immigrant Let’s make one thing clear. Section 505 is not anti-immigration—nor is it designed by the alt-right to keep the illegal aliens in our country hopelessly uneducated. The statute does not prohibit universities from offering in-state tuition to illegal aliens. If a state wants to do that at its public colleges and universities, it is free to do so. Section 505 only mandates that when billing for tuition, states treat out-of-state U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents the same as illegal aliens.    States that offer in-state tuition (or make financial aid or scholarships available) to illegal aliens take finite resources away from other students, both in-state and out-of-state. That forces the state’s taxpayers—and the parents of U.S. citizen students from other states—to cover the difference. Every family who has sent a child to college knows what it feels like to pay for tuition. As costs go up and up, seemingly for no reason, families are understandably frustrated. And when the reason is that they’re subsidizing the college education of illegal aliens, this goes from frustrating to infuriating. The DOJ’s lawsuits are a step in the right direction to enforce existing federal law and hopefully bring a touch of sanity to the college tuition racket.  That’s a matter of fundamental fairness to American citizens. It’s about time! The post After Lone Star Success, DOJ Sues Kentucky, Minnesota Over In-State Tuition for Illegal Aliens appeared first on The Daily Signal.

“Taiwan is, of course, a country,” proclaimed the island’s President Lai Ching-te on June 22. In his first of a series of 10 lectures, Lai reaffirmed that Taiwan’s sovereignty derives from its 23 million people, earning him a swift rebuke from Beijing. True to form, Beijing resorted to calling Lai’s speech “a ‘Taiwan independence’ declaration that blatantly incited cross-strait confrontation.” Given the precedent set in recent years, it was no surprise China sent 132 aircraft to operate around Taiwan in the week following Lai’s speech, with 99 of the aircraft crossing Taiwan’s median line. This isn’t an isolated, one-time event. It is one of the many instances in the last few years of China increasing its military activity around Taiwan. This summer is no exception, and Beijing is turning up the heat even more. So far, China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army, has been unwavering in its bullying of Taiwan, despite the commencement of President Donald Trump’s second term. As of April 2025, Chinese activity around Taiwan increased by 30% compared to the previous year. Since 2021 The Heritage Foundation has been analyzing People’s Liberation Army operations near Taiwan. Especially the most provocative act of sending military aircraft across the median line—the de facto midpoint between China and Taiwan in the Taiwan Strait. In the Western Pacific, summertime is peak military exercise and activity season. Historically, there has been a bell curve uptick in China’s military activity in the summer months. Yearly activity has steadily increased since 2021, with 2022 being a big year in cross-strait escalations, following then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. China has since sustained an increased number of aircraft around Taiwan and normalized the previously extremely rare Taiwan Strait median line crossings. In the summer of 2022, the Chinese military flew an average of 11 aircraft near Taiwan per day, with most of the aircraft on average crossing the median line. In the summer of 2023, average aircraft activity increased to 13 aircraft per day, with an average of four crossing the median line. In a considerable jump, the summer of 2024 saw an average of 17 aircraft per day flying near Taiwan and 12 crossing the median line. Given this upward trend of the last several summers, it is likely that People’s Liberation Army activity will be higher this year than it was in past summers. It is already on track to do so. The first month of summer 2025 has already outpaced summer 2024. From May 15-June 15, China had 359 median line crossing incidents, compared to 288 crossings in the same period last year. Earlier in the year, in the first few days of April, China conducted a large-scale joint exercise called Strait Thunder 2025A. The exercise saw the highest number of aircraft (76) and People’s Liberation Army Navy vessels (43) operating around Taiwan this year so far. China’s military activities are, of course, not limited to the air and waters around Taiwan. It has been busy across the Pacific. China deployed two of its aircraft carriers on a joint deployment from June 7-22, breaking past the second island chain with aircraft carriers for the first time. It was during this exercise period, on June 20, that the highest number of Chinese aircraft crossed the median line this year, at 46 aircraft. The current 30-day average is 16.5 aircraft per day, and the 10-day running average medial line crossings is 13 per day.  Another important Chinese Communist Party summer activity is the annual Beidaihe conclave meeting, an exclusive gathering of top party officials in August. This year, as in past, General Secretary Xi Jinping will likely begin to set the contours of the party’s next five-year plan proposal, for 2026-2030—a critical time to resource the next phase of intimidation and military pressure on Taiwan. As China characteristically ramps up military activity this summer, Taiwan’s resolve will be tested. Taipei announced that July will be its “National Unity Month,” coinciding with an annual military exercise, Han Kuang. This whole-of-society defense exercises will run from July 9-18, double the time compared to last year, and the largest mobilization of reservists to date. Despite the violence unfolding in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, it is the machinations of the Chinese Communist Party in the Indo-Pacific that presents the greatest danger to U.S. interests. China’s increased willingness to flex its military muscle has America’s Pacific partners anxious and allies looking to bolster their security cooperation with the U.S. If the U.S. doesn’t signal strength and resolve, China may read that as an opportunity to dangerously escalate tensions. The post Turning Up the Heat: China Continues Its Years Long Military Pressure Campaign Around Taiwan appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Politics—the concept, not the American spectator sport—comes from ancient Greek word politiká, or “affairs of the cities,” and is defined as “a set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups.” One group that will need to work together over the next several months is the Republican ticket for Virginia’s next governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general. Yet just a little over a month ago, many Republicans were unsure that a unified ticket would actually happen. >>> Sign up for our Virginia email newsletter Political insiders expressed concern over the media coverage of scandalous photographs that were allegedly posted on the internet by lieutenant governor nominee John Reid. The allegations, which Reid has repeatedly denied, garnered nationwide coverage, and many thought the incident would create an unhealable rift in the party. But Tuesday night, the Republican ticket came together publicly for its first rally in Northern Virginia along with the backing of Gov. Glenn Youngkin. The team projected a message of unity at a packed venue that drew hundreds of supporters. The Daily Signal had the opportunity to speak to Reid in depth before the rally. One thing is for sure, after rally upon rally of standing room-only crowds, the former Gov. George Allen aide has proved that he learned well from his former boss how to focus on the positives ahead. Listen to our interview: The post John Reid Talks About Uniting the Virginia Republican Ticket for November appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Google has drawn fresh criticism for blocking Windscribe VPN from updating its Chrome extension, a move that undermines tools designed to protect users. Google claims Windscribe’s extension breaches its “Single Purpose” policy by including too many features (in this case privacy-preserving features) in one package. The extension offers users protection through location masking, censorship circumvention, and ad and tracker blocking. All of these capabilities work together to strengthen privacy. Yet Google insists these functions are unrelated and must be separated. According to Google’s policy guidelines, extensions on the Chrome Web Store are supposed to deliver a single, narrowly defined purpose or focus on one limited subject area. While these rules are framed as a way to prevent bloated or misleading extensions, in this case, they seem to work against comprehensive privacy solutions. Google suggests that features like blocking trackers, helping users avoid surveillance, and bypassing censorship are somehow unrelated, even though they serve the common purpose of safeguarding online freedom. Windscribe’s appeal to Google was met with a boilerplate response urging the developer to strip down its tool or break it into multiple extensions, each limited in scope. As outlined in Google’s own documentation, extensions that combine unrelated features or request permissions beyond what is necessary for a single purpose risk rejection. This rigid interpretation leaves little room for privacy tools that, by their nature, need to address multiple threats at once. From a privacy-first perspective, this enforcement of the Single Purpose rule looks less like a protection of user experience and more like an obstacle to privacy innovation. Forcing users to install and manage separate extensions to achieve the same level of protection could make them more vulnerable, not less. Each additional extension introduces another potential point of failure, more permissions to grant, and more opportunities for tracking or abuse by malicious actors. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Google Criticized for Blocking Windscribe VPN Chrome Extension appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

BREAKING: Verdicts Reached on All Counts in Diddy Trial; RICO Acquittal, Guilty on Mann Act Charges