NBC "Today" show host Savannah Guthrie said Wednesday that her family is ready to talk to people holding their mother, but they want to see proof that she is alive.

LaMonte McLemore, a founding member of vocal group The 5th Dimension, died Tuesday at his home in Las Vegas surrounded by family, his representative Jeremy Westby said in a statement.

Lewis & Clark College says Newfoundland dog ‘implies the erasure of Indigenous culture‘ Another American history-based mascot has been canceled. Lewis & Clark College recently announced that its new “confident and proud” River Otter mascot will be unveiled Feb. 20, replacing the Pioneer. “Designing Lewis & Clark’s river otter is a daunting task,” the private Oregon college stated… Source

OPINION/ANALYSIS College Fix video journalist Simon Olech took to the streets of Salzburg, Austria to ask European students: What do you think of the USA? Source

Emory University no longer employs the daughter of an Iranian official following demands for her removal over her father’s calls for violence against the U.S. Dr. Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani is no longer listed as an assistant professor in the Department of Hematology and Medical Oncology on Emory School of Medicine’s website, according to The Jerusalem Post. The former professor’s father… Source

Turning Point USA represents a threat to campus and must not be approved, according to student government leaders at Elmhurst University in suburban Chicago. However, university officials say they are monitoring the situation. Campus club founder Tim Dudasik recently spoke to The College Fix via a phone interview about his fight to start a chapter of the free-market student club at the… Source

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Politics Some Crying Kids Are Way Cooler Than Others  This week’s illegal immigrant poster boy is 5-year-old Liam Ramos. According to ICE, when agents approached the boy’s father outside his home, he fled, abandoning his son. The boy’s mother refused to take him, so the agents had to assume custody. The father was soon arrested, but insisted that his son come with him to the Dilley Detention Center in Texas (built under Obama for illegals with children to “send a message that our border is not open to illegal migration”). The two were soon sprung by the Clinton judge Fred Biery, for incomprehensible reasons, and sent back to Minnesota, escorted by approximately half the Democrats in congress. The media are bombarding us with pictures of Liam in a bunny-ear hat, providing minute-by-minute updates on his glorious return to Minneapolis, and holding nonstop interviews with the principal and teachers at Liam’s school and, for extra cuteness, his fellow 5-year-old classmates. That got me thinking. Remember the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo by Alan Diaz for the AP, showing an INS agent (the precursor to ICE) pointing a 9mm MP-5 submachine gun directly at a terrified little boy, Elian Gonzalez, who was hiding in a closet at the home of his Miami relatives? (Incidentally, to this day, the agent’s name remains unknown.) Media: THIS 5-year-old child is totally adorable! THIS 5-year-old child is real *sshole. Unlike Liam, Elian was in our country legally—as that rarest of things, a legitimate asylum seeker. His mother, along with 11 others, had fled Cuba on a boat to the U.S., the boat sank and all aboard drowned, except 5-year-old Elian who, days later, was found clinging to an inner tube by Miami fishermen. Under immigration law at the time, Elian was completely legal because he was a Cuban who had reached dry land before being intercepted by law enforcement. According to the law, not fairytale dreams of the Cato Institute, that made him eligible to remain in the U.S. and apply for residency. (As a sidenote, in deference to the left’s invented legal requirement for deportation—which is found nowhere in our actual written laws—Elian, so far as we know, hadn’t committed any crimes.) But the Clinton administration really wanted to send him back to Cuba, which, if you’re a leftist, is, a super cool place! The fall of the Soviet Union had been heartbreaking for Democrats. The least they could do was hastily return a 5-year-old boy to this socialist paradise, where he could frolic on the beach with Bill de Blasio. Elian’s Miami relatives went to court to ask for custody. After six weeks of the administration swearing up and down that they would abide by the Florida courts’ decision, the moment the courts ruled for the relatives, the Clintonistas changed their minds, defied the courts, and said they were deporting Elian anyway. The sacred supremacy clause! I know what you’re thinking. The New York Times must have been outraged by the photo of a federal immigration agent pointing a submachine gun at an utterly petrified little boy, his finger on the trigger. I couldn’t remember, so I checked. Weirdly, they had exactly the opposite reaction. The Times’ Thomas Friedman: Yup, I gotta confess, that now-famous picture of a U.S. marshal in Miami pointing an automatic weapon toward Donato Dalrymple and ordering him in the name of the U.S. government to turn over Elian Gonzalez warmed my heart. They should put that picture up in every visa line in every U.S. consulate around the world, with a caption that reads: “America is a country where the rule of law rules. This picture illustrates what happens to those who defy the rule of law and how far our government and people will go to preserve it.” In another column, Friedman expressed disgust at the Democratic mayor of Miami for refusing to allow local law enforcement to assist federal agents in seizing Elian. This, he said, proved that the mayor’s “allegiance” was “not to the laws of this land.” (I hope that Tom never hears how Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey hasn’t allowed local law enforcement to help immigration agents in Minneapolis. He will be so mad.) For his part, the Times’ Frank Rich sneered that Elian was “the latest pawn in our culture’s increasingly pornographic exploitation of children … the new JonBenet Ramsey, a child the camera loves who can be bought, sold, dramatized and ogled for ghoulish fun and profit.” We’re just going to have to trust the Times that it isn’t “pornographic exploitation of children” for the media—led by the Times—to promote a video of little kids at Liam’s preschool reading their letters to ICE (not at all encouraged by their teachers, you hear me!?!) while holding up adorably childish drawings, mentioning the bunny-ear hat, and telling federal law enforcement, “this kind of makes me sad.” No, no, no. That’s not “pornographic exploitation.” Pornographic exploitation is Cuban exiles trying to keep their 5-year-old relative out of Fidel Castro’s clutches. Regarding the legal dimensions of the case, the late Anthony Lewis, Times opinion columnist and president of the Ho Chi Min Admiration Society, laid down the law in no uncertain terms: “Longstanding statutes give the Immigration and Naturalization Service custody of any alien who, like Elian, arrives at this country’s borders without entry documents.” The law’s the law! No ticket, no entry. As to that disturbing photo, Lewis forcefully defended the immigration agents’ wearing tactical gear to retrieve a crying child, explaining that “police going into a hostile situation where there may be danger say they must be prepared for the worst.” (Okay, guys—I think you’ve done enough self-incrimination.) Meanwhile, a Times editorial praised the federal government’s pre-dawn, armed raid to nab Elian, noting with approval that “there was no deadly violence.” I guess the bar for a tiptop immigration arrest has risen a bit. Deporting Elian, the editorial continued, was the “proper legal conclusion,” and his American relatives had “no business blocking” immigration agents. (Can I quote you on that, New York Times?) The fault, according to the Times, lay with the relatives’ “belligerence” and the local authorities’ “posturing.” Miami’s elected leaders’ refusal “to aid federal authorities,” the paper pronounced, “was insupportable.” One refusal to comply: heroic. The other: unsupportable. COPYRIGHT 2026 ANN COULTERDISTRIBUTED BY IMPOLITE DEBATES The post Some Crying Kids Are Way Cooler Than Others  appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs What If Iran Already Has a Nuke? The U.S. must act with caution to restore anti-proliferation safeguards. Credit: Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images As Washington weighs its military and diplomatic options in Iran, there is one fundamental question that has seemingly been overlooked: What if Iran is already an undeclared nuclear state?  In addition to Iran’s formidable conventional capabilities, we know that in 2023 the IAEA detected uranium particles enriched at 83.7 percent, dangerously close to the optimal 90 percent weapons-grade threshold. We know that Iran has accumulated more than 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium that appears to have largely survived American and Israeli strikes and may have even been moved in part or in whole to undisclosed locations. Contrary to statements that the 12-Day War “obliterated Iran’s ability to create nuclear weapons,” the current American build-up in the region suggests the opposite. According to a recent analysis in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Iran’s declared 60 percent enriched uranium stockpile would be sufficient to produce at least one, if not several, crude nuclear weapons. Importantly, no further enrichment would be required. Such weapons would not depend on sophisticated missile delivery systems; a truck, helicopter, ship, or other improvised platform would suffice. Detonation could occur on top of a mountain, near American bases—even in the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas flows.  Or, the Iranians could simply dust off the Anglo-American “denial plan” formulated during the Cold War, which contemplated taking Middle East oil fields offline via a conventional or nuclear strike, an act that would almost certainly vaporize trillions of dollars in global market value. Whether Iran has already assembled a nuclear bomb or not remains an open question, but there is good reason to err on the side of caution. Even if it has not yet assembled a bomb, Iran, with a territory almost seven times as large as the UK and a population of 93 million, likely possesses the capability to do so rapidly, secretly, and under conditions of a perceived existential threat. If Iran’s leaders fear that they could end up, in the best of circumstances, like Bashar al-Assad or Hosni Mubarak, or in the worst of circumstances, like Saddam Hussein or Muamar Gaddafi, then it seems reasonable to assume that they would do anything and everything to save themselves.    During the Cold War, Americans were taught that global peace rested on the threat of “mutually assured destruction.” There was truth in that doctrine; nuclear weapons did deter deliberate all-out world war to a certain extent. But the historical evidence reveals a less reassuring picture. The world came perilously close to global nuclear war not once, but repeatedly: during the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the Six-Day War of 1967, and the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Nuclear war was averted not because deterrence worked exactly as theorized, but because of individual restraint and sheer luck.  Luck is now in shorter supply, and so is restraint. The guardrails that once inhibited reckless nuclear behavior are weakening. The logic of mutually assured destruction has been quietly eroded as nuclear-armed rivals test the idea that limited war can be fought safely below the nuclear threshold. The recent conflicts between India and Pakistan did not escalate to nuclear war, ironically teaching precisely the wrong lesson. The nuclearization of the Middle East has magnified these dangers further. In addition to Israel’s undeclared but formidable nuclear arsenal and Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile, Saudi Arabia, the financier of Pakistan’s nuclear program, has signed a mutual defense pact with Islamabad and, effectively, has access to a bomb “on the shelf.” Turkey may soon join this pact, forming a “Sunni NATO” to balance against Shiite Iran and Israel.  Conceivably, Washington could now be considering several options: 1) do nothing and allow Iran to retain and expand its nuclear capability; 2) launch a choreographed strike that permits Iran to respond with a limited counterstrike; 3) attempt all-out regime change or targeted assassination; 4) impose a naval blockade; 5) issue a nuclear ultimatum. For different reasons, any of these options could escalate into a serious global crisis, making Iran more likely to act in desperation and for its partners to double down on their support.    There is a far superior sixth option. The United States must create a grand strategy to revive diplomacy and arms control aimed at halting proliferation and restoring meaningful international safeguards on Iran’s nuclear program. Washington and its Western allies are not alone. The incipient Sunni NATO, China, Russia, and India—four major nuclear powers—do not want nuclear proliferation in their backyard.  Crucially, they too have reasons to mistrust Iran.  We must remember that Pakistan and Iran attacked one another in 2024; Riyadh has a historic rivalry with Tehran; and the Russians, despite their current strategic partnership, were not so long ago viewed by the ayatollahs as the “lesser Satan.” Threatened with sanctions, India now appears to be forsaking Iranian oil in favor of American energy. And China, which buys 80 to 90 percent of Iran’s oil, recently sided with the UAE in its dispute with Iran over strategically located islands. The collective opposition of these powers to an Iranian bomb could be the United States’ greatest diplomatic leverage. It should be used before luck runs out. The post What If Iran Already Has a Nuke? appeared first on The American Conservative.