House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) will be at the Manhattan courthouse on Tuesday morning to show his support for former President Donald Trump as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee continues his battle in court. Johnson’s plan to join Trump at the courthouse was reported by MSNBC and CNN, while the Republican speaker’s office confirmed to Fox News that he would be in attendance at the New York hush-money trial. Former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is also expected to appear at the Manhattan courthouse alongside Trump on Tuesday, Fox News reported. The speaker’s show of solidarity with Trump amidst his ongoing legal battles comes after the former president was joined at the Manhattan courthouse last week by Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) and on Monday by Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH). Trump’s Republican allies have shown up to support the former president at the courthouse as Trump is under a gag order, which was placed on him by Judge Juan Merchan. The former president has already been fined 10 times for violating the gag order, and he was threatened with jail time if he violates the judge’s order again. “The thing that the president is prevented from saying, which is a disgrace, is that every single person involved in this prosecution is practically a Democratic political operative,” Vance said outside the courthouse on Monday. Senator J.D. Vance: "Michael Cohen is the prosecution's star witness. This guy is a convicted felon…every single person involved in this prosecution is practically a Democratic political operative…What's going on inside that courtroom is a threat to American democracy…" pic.twitter.com/h3R1xzb5JM — MAGA War Room (@MAGAIncWarRoom) May 13, 2024 Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen testified in the hush-money trial on Monday and said that he secretly recorded Trump before the 2016 election while he was working for him. Cohen said that the recorded conversation with Trump was about a supposed payment to former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker over an alleged affair between Trump and model Karen McDougal. Trump’s ex-lawyer is set to testify again on Tuesday. In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to multiple crimes — including lying to Congress — and spent time in prison. Democratic Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has focused much of his case against Trump on Trump’s alleged relationships with McDougal and porn actress Stormy Daniels. Trump is charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up an alleged affair with Daniels. CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILYWIRE+ APP Trump has denied any wrongdoing and has slammed the Manhattan trial as a political witch hunt. Leif Le Mahieu contributed to this report. 

Australian actor Chris Hemsworth said he’s not happy with the criticism that superhero movies have received, especially from well-respected directors such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. “It felt harsh, and it bothers me, especially from heroes. It was an eye-roll for me, people bashing the superhero space,” the 40-year-old “Thor” actor said during a recently published interview with U.K.-based outlet The Times. Hemsworth went on to point out how even industry greats have failures. “Those guys had films that didn’t work too — we all have. When they talked about what was wrong with superheroes, I thought, cool, tell that to the billions who watch them. Were they all wrong?” he added. “Cinema-going did not change because of superheroes, but because of smartphones and social media. Superhero films actually kept people in the cinemas during that transition, and now people are coming back. So they deserve a little more appreciation,” Hemsworth said. Scorsese authored an op-ed published in the New York Times in 2019 titled “Martin Scorsese: I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain.” “There’s worldwide audiovisual entertainment, and there’s cinema,” the “Goodfellas” director wrote in the piece. “They still overlap from time to time, but that’s becoming increasingly rare. And I fear that the financial dominance of one is being used to marginalize and even belittle the existence of the other.”  He added, “For anyone who dreams of making movies or who is just starting out, the situation at this moment is brutal and inhospitable to art. And the act of simply writing those words fills me with terrible sadness.” Coppola, director of “The Godfather,” agreed with that assessment. He sparked controversy in October 2019 when he said, “When Martin Scorsese says that the Marvel pictures are not cinema, he’s right, because we expect to learn something from cinema, we expect to gain something, some enlightenment, some knowledge, some inspiration. I don’t know that anyone gets anything out of seeing the same movie over and over again. Martin was kind when he said it’s not cinema. He didn’t say it’s despicable, which I just say it is.” Hemsworth also told The Times he’s unhappy with actors who blame the genre for their failures. CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILYWIRE+ APP “It’s, like, ‘They’re films that are successful — put me in one. Oh, mine didn’t work? I’ll bash them,’” he said. “Look, I grew up on a soap opera. And it used to bother me when actors would later talk about the show with guilt or shame. Humility goes a long way. One of the older actors on ‘Home and Away’ said, ‘We don’t get paid to make the good lines sound good, but to make the bad ones work.’ That stuck with me.” He continued, “But hey, it’s all a lesson. And if I ever went back to [‘Thor’] I’d wonder how we could change it again. But there is a superhero curse in the sense you get pigeonholed, and I’ve felt a little hamstrung with what I could do, so [I] desperately wanted something to scare the s*** out of me. And ‘Furiosa’ did.” Hemsworth will appear next in “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” premiering May 24.

The late country singer Toby Keith’s daughter, Krystal Keith, delivered remarks at the University of Oklahoma’s commencement ceremony last week while accepting an honorary degree on his behalf. Keith died in February following a battle with stomach cancer.  “When he learned last fall that he was being inducted to Sooner Nation on this high of a level, he was so excited, and he was so proud,” Krystal said during her speech, per Fox News. Krystal went on to describe how her dad, an Oklahoma native, was devoted to the university, especially its sports teams, and was honored when he found out he’d be receiving the honorary degree. “I actually made a joke about how many hours I spent here getting my bachelor’s degree, and he joked that he didn’t have to work that hard to get his,” she continued. “But we all know he earned it and spent many more hours dedicating his life to earning it this way. He loved his family (he loved all of us), God, our country, and Sooner Nation.” “Throughout his life and career, he made sure to work hard to have the best, to be the best. He often said, ‘They may write better than me, they may sing better than me, and they may look better than me, but they will NEVER outwork me,’” Krystal said during her speech. “And that made all the difference. He was a larger-than-life legend, he was an icon, he did things his own way, his songs inspired nearly everyone in country music and beyond.” The country music legend’s daughter also discussed how proud her father was to be an American, a value he passed to his children. “He always said, ‘Never apologize for being patriotic,’ and practiced what he preached through his work with the USO [United Service Organizations],” Krystal said.  She also described his dedication to performing for the military. “He was going into the most dangerous zones, where guys that never got those entertainers to come to them, were housed and were sitting, and he would go and boost their morale. And that’s who he wanted to go see. We called him Captain America. And that’s something he earned.” CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILYWIRE+ APP “My dad taught me everything: singing, writing songs and … most of what I know about life. And I hope the graduates that are here today can learn from him, too. He fought hard to live his dream,” Krystal said in conclusion. “He had faith and believed in himself. He never gave up the fight, even when the odds were against him. He would want me to tell you to never give up on yourself. As you start your next journey in life, know that you have strong roots here at the University of Oklahoma. Work hard and be the captain of your own ship. Believe in yourself and live your dream.” Keith was also posthumously inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame after being selected for the honor days before his death. 

The homeless man who has been charged with stabbing a 36-year-old mom who was chaperoning a group of schoolgirls on a class trip in Times Square on Saturday has been arrested 14 times in the last 20 years, according to the New York Post. Times Square Tourist mom stabbed by maniac was leading school trip to NYC: ‘Don’t feel safe there’ https://t.co/t0jyOnWOi0 pic.twitter.com/kc4WxnHR3M — New York Post (@nypost) May 14, 2024 Amber Lohr, from western Pennsylvania, had just left a souvenir shop with her daughter and other schoolgirls when Cyril Destin, 61, seated at a deli at Eight Avenue and 43rd Street, jumped to his feet and allegedly stabbed her directly through her sweatshirt and into her chest. Lohr, with blood from her chest seeping through her sweatshirt, still kept her composure and made sure the children were safe before she told anyone she had been stabbed. A bystander then ran for aid; Lohr was treated on the sidewalk before she was taken to Bellevue Hospital. “My wife not only had taken the stabbing but should also be considered a hero by remaining in front of the children, coaching them to go backwards without turning around,” Lohr’s husband John told the New York Post, adding of the bystander, “Whomever she was, thank you.” He also thanked the “strong and fearless” schoolgirls for maintaining their composure and helping even though they were “scared out of their minds.” CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILYWIRE+ APP “We don’t feel safe there,” John Lohr said of Times Square. “A guy with a very lengthy record went out of nowhere and attacked my wife by stabbing her into the chest and within inches of her life being lost. … This man could have murdered my wife or even worse, one of the children she was chaperoning.“To think I could have been planning a funeral rather celebrating my wife on Mother’s Day is sickening to me.” Destin reportedly lives in a homeless shelter across from the deli. He was charged with second-degree assault, along with fourth-degree criminal possession of a weapon. “This man will strike again and maybe the next person may not be as fortunate,” John Lohr stated. “I will not accept anything but the max sentence for him. This man doesn’t only need to be jailed but institutionalized permanently following his well-deserved lengthy sentencing.”

The images were created with artificial intelligence (AI) and Beyoncé did not attend this year's Met Gala. 

One played the prosecutor, the other Cohen

Calling all Patriots!

'Some do, others don’t, I do not'

A university concert pianist has made an unlikely nest for herself while she continues her studies: an old age home. While Beth Christensen studies piano at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory, she doesn’t have a dorm on campus, and instead lodges at Claridge Court, a senior living facility in the nearby town of Prairie […] The post Grad Student Trades Piano Performances for Housing at Senior Facility–Melting the Age Divide and Making Friends appeared first on Good News Network.

Blog short fiction Five SFF Stories Featuring Experiments With Unexpected Outcomes From time travel to arcane research, experimentation can lead to the most surprising results… By Ratika Deshpande | Published on May 14, 2024 Photo by Colin + Meg [via Unsplash] Comment 0 Share New Share Photo by Colin + Meg [via Unsplash] Science is all about trying to understand what we don’t know, often by tinkering with what we do know. As a student of Applied Psychology, I learned to design experiments and create hypotheses—A does (or doesn’t) cause B, X and Y are (or aren’t) correlated. Either way, certain outcomes were expected. But what happens when the outcome is something you never saw coming? Here are some stories that ask (and try to answer) this question… “How To Break Causality and Write the Perfect Time Travel Story” by Stewart C. Baker Writing is not easy, especially when you want to tell a story about time travel, something countless authors have tackled already in various brilliant ways. How do you get around this problem and create the best and most famous time travel story of all time? By time traveling, of course. Everything goes exactly as you wanted it to. Until it doesn’t. What do you do then? “The Truth About Woopy” by Liviu Surugiu Six-year-old Nabi is not afraid of shadows. He has a lot of questions about them, and Tom answers as many as he can, while trying not to wonder if it was a bad decision to encourage his kid’s interest in such things. He thought Nabi was trying to make shadows of animals, just like they saw a man do at the circus. But Nabi isn’t content with simply knowing stuff about light and shadow, so he sculpts them instead. And maybe, if he gets it right, he can make something that can’t exist. What is play for if not to make the things you imagine real? “White Charles” by Sarah Monette Miss Parrington keeps shipping her curious finds to an amateur historian at the museum. She means well, but most of what she sends doesn’t turn out to be useful, so our narrator ignores her latest parcel. Then a junior curator opens the crate, never getting a good glimpse at whatever it was inside before it flies into his face and escapes—recovering from the shock, he says it looked like a giant white spider. Now the question is, how do you recover something so enigmatic and something not quite…right? Monette has created an incredible atmosphere of dread in this story, while also exploring the results of magic gone wrong, and of the power of compassion. A thoroughly enjoyable read. “Dr. Polingyouma’s Machine” by Emily Devenport When Dr. Polingyouma turned on his time machine, both the creator and the creation vanished. It also caused The Effect, “an astonishing intersection of worlds” requiring regular cleaning of the overlap zone. It’s the kind of work on which the fate of the world depends, and requires not a janitor but a dedicated sanitation engineer like Harris, who risks going insane or dying on the job. After all, it is tempting to look at the people—entities—passing through and to poke around, and difficult to grapple with questions that can’t or won’t be answered. “Remaker Remaker” by Lucas J. W. Johnson Martin Fullius, a PhD in Engineering and Thaumaturgy and a freelance Remaker, is visited by a man from Rome who knows about his skills and his secret projects. He offers to provide Martin with everything he requires to work on his projects, in return for completing a job he needs done. It’s a request that goes beyond anything he has made before—hands and legs made from muscles and clockwork are no big deal for Martin. He needs to work hard, research, stretch his understanding of anatomy, and observe its workings. Both his patron and Martin know what he’s capable of. So when he fails, it comes as a surprise. Maybe he needs further research, a change of location. You can make anything if you try hard enough, right? …Right? [end-mark] The post Five SFF Stories Featuring Experiments With Unexpected Outcomes appeared first on Reactor.