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A family of four has tragically died after their small plane crashed in Lee County in North Carolina. 

The trial is underway for a professor who sued the University of California, Los Angeles, over his suspension after he refused to grade black students more leniently in the wake of George Floyd’s highly publicized death. Gordon Klein, an accounting professor at UCLA, is demanding $22 million in damages in a trial that began last week in Santa Monica. Back in June 2020, just weeks after George Floyd’s death, Klein received an email from a group of his students asking for a “no-harm” final exam that could only help their grades and would involve shorter tests and extended deadlines for final assignments and projects. ??NEW: Will UCLA have to fork over $22 million to Gordon Klein, the business professor it suspended after he refused a request to grade black students leniently? We will soon find out — the trial is scheduled to start July 1 in a Santa Monica courthouse! I just read… pic.twitter.com/cwSdaKtVMT — Jennifer Kabbany (@JenniferKabbany) June 28, 2025 The students asked for special accommodations due to “traumas, we have been placed in a position where we much (sic) choose between actively supporting our black classmates or focusing on finishing up our spring quarter,” as The Daily Wire reported at the time. “We believe that remaining neutral in times of injustice brings power to the oppressor and therefore staying silent is not an option,” the students told Klein. The students claimed their request was not “a joint effort to get finals canceled for non-black students,” but rather to “ask that you exercise compassion and leniency with black students in our major.” Klein responded with several sarcastic emails that got him in trouble with the school. “Thanks for your suggestion in your email below that I give black students special treatment, given the tragedy in Minnesota,” Klein wrote to the students. “Do you know the names of the classmates that are black?” the professor asked. “How can I identify them since we’ve been having online classes only?” Klein also asked about students who “may be of mixed parentage, such as half black-half Asian?” “What do you suggest I do with respect to them? A full concession or just half?” he quipped. Klein also wrote that “a white student from [Minneapolis] might be possibly even more devastated by this, especially because some might think that they’re racist even if they are not.” The professor ended his email response to the complaining students with Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous quote about not judging people based on the color of their skin. Students screenshotted Klein’s email and posted it to social media, where it sparked angry responses. Klein was suspended and criticized by UCLA in June 2020 before being reinstated in September 2020, according to the Daily Bruin. “Conduct that demonstrates a disregard for our core principles, including an abuse of power, is not acceptable,” wrote Anderson School Dean Antonio Bernardo in a message to the campus community. “I deeply regret the increased pain and anger that our community has experienced at this very difficult time. We must and will hold each other to higher standards.” UCLA reinstated Klein after just a few weeks, but his reputation and career had already suffered, according to the professor’s lawsuit. Klein accuses UCLA of harming his expert witness practice, where he previously made about $1 million a year in high-profile cases, including Michael Jackson’s wrongful death suit. “By this moment, as a direct and immediate result of [his] public suspension and excoriation, Professor Klein’s expert witness practice had been permanently destroyed,” the lawsuit states. Meanwhile, UCLA will argue that Klein was suspended for his “tone and manner.” The trial is expected to last through the end of next week.

Gracie Hunt, the daughter of the Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt, mourned the loss of her 9-year-old cousin Janie Hunt, who was one of at least 27 campers and counselors tragically killed in the floods that suddenly engulfed Camp Mystic last weekend.  Hunt posted a message on Monday to her Instagram account, offering a tribute to the deceased and sharing a hopeful message from the Bible to her followers.  “Some days, it’s hard to understand how the world can hold both so much beauty and so much pain,” she wrote. “How can the same God who created the stars and set the planets in motion allow such deep suffering? The truth is, we live in a broken world—one that groans for redemption (Romans 8). But Scripture promises that one day, Christ will make all things new—a new heaven and a new earth (2 Peter 3:13).” “My heart aches for our extended family and friends who lost daughters – for every life lost and every family shattered by the floods in Texas. I don’t have easy answers, but I do know this: following Jesus doesn’t spare us from pain – but it means we never face it alone.”   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Gracie Hunt (@graciehunt) The death toll from the Texas flash floods has risen beyond 100 people in the state. In Kerr County, where Camp Mystic is located, first responders have recovered the bodies of 84 people, 28 of whom were children.  Ten girls from Camp Mystic and a counselor are still missing. The camp’s 74-year-old director, Dick Eastland, was killed in the flooding, along with Chloe Childress, an 18-year-old camp counselor. Hunt ended her message with encouragement, asking her followers to “hold on to hope,” and shared verses from 2 Corinthians and Psalms.  “Even in the darkest valleys, we hold on to the hope that this is not the end of the story,” she posted.  

Speaking to attendees at the Claremont Institute over the weekend, Vice President JD Vance took aim at New York Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, explaining that he embodied all the contradictions within the American Left. Referring to Mamdani as a “33-year-old communist running an insurgent campaign,” Vance posited that Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic mayoral primary revealed “interesting threads” that were “reflective of where the broader American Left is at this moment in time.” Vance spoke of how President Donald Trump’s victory represented a “broad working-and-middle-class coalition,” while Mamdani’s coalition was “almost the inverse of that.” Vance pointed out that Mamdani “won high-income and college-educated New Yorkers, and especially both young, highly educated New Yorkers, but he was weakest among black voters and weakest among those without a college degree.” He added that Mamdani “did particularly well in the Bangladeshi areas of New York, but he did particularly poorly with non-Bangladeshi Asian immigrants, particularly Chinese-Americans.” “His victory was the product of a lot of young people who live reasonably comfortable lives, but see that their elite degrees aren’t really delivering what they expected, and so their own prospects with all the college debt may not in fact be greater than those of their parents,” he said. “We have to be honest about where his coalition is,” Vance opined. “It is not the downtrodden. It is not poor Americans. It is not about dispossession. It’s about elite disaffection and elite anger. The party of highly educated, but downwardly mobile elites … they comprise a highly energetic activist base, but it’s important because it’s not just the elites, the college-educated New Yorkers, that base was supplemented by carefully selected ethnic blocs carved out of the electorate using identity politics as the knife.” Vance noted that Mamdani’s desire to appeal to ethnic blocs was reflected in his “bizarre appeals to foreign politics, intended to signal to one particular group of New Yorkers or another.” “Let us ask ourselves why is a mayoral candidate in our nation’s biggest city whining about banning Bibi Netanyahu, a country whose population is about the same size as that of New York, and threatening to arrest a foreign leader if he tries to come to New York City?” he asked. “Why is a New York mayoral candidate attacking Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, as a war criminal? Why is he talking about ‘globalizing the intifada’?” “But what might seem like a contradiction makes a little bit of sense if you peel back the onion,” he speculated. “Consider a movement that rails against the billionaire class, despite the fact that the billionaire class remains firmly in the corner of the modern Left; a movement that idolizes foreign religions, even as it rejects the teachings of those faiths. It rails, this new modern Left against white people, even as many of its funders and its grassroots activists are privileged whites themselves.” “What unites Islamists, gender-studies majors, socially liberal white urbanites, and Big Pharma lobbyists … isn’t the ideas of Thomas Jefferson or even of Karl Marx; it’s hatred,” he stated. “They hate the people in this room. They hate the President of the United States, and most of all, they hate the people who voted for that President of the United States in the last election in November. This is the animating principle of the American far-Left.” “That’s why Mamdani himself is such an appealing instrument to the Left,” Vance said. “He captures so many of the movement’s apparent contradictions in a single human being; a guy who describes the Palestinian cause as central to his identity yet holds views like abortion on demand or using taxpayer-funded money to fund transgender surgeries for minors. These views, of course, are completely incomprehensible on the streets of Gaza. This guy represents that contradiction.” “He’s trying to tear something down and he’s very effective at articulating all of the things that the far-Left hates in modern America,” he concluded.