If you’ve ever reached those last few weeks of pregnancy, you know that everything hurts. Your baby could come at any minute. As much as you want to look cute with your bump, you don’t always feel that way. Sometimes people around you notice and try to help. Other times, those people are savage toddlers who make you feel 100 times worse. Just ask Amy von Gillern. She didn’t understand why her toddler, Brock, was walking around the house with his belly protruding, and then she realized he was walking just like her. She captured a hilarious video of his imitation and shared it on TikTok, where it went viral. @itsamyvon The snack in hand really drives it home. #thirdtrimesterbelike #pregnantwithatoddler #expectingmom ♬ Heartwarming, everyday, funny BGM(1194980) – K’s note The Toddler’s Tiny Belly Looks So Darn Cute Amy told People it took her a second to realize why her toddler insisted on walking with his belly sticking out. “I started noticing it about two weeks ago. At first, I didn’t think much of it until he started saying, ‘No I’M pregnant!’ whenever he overheard me tell somebody I was,” she said. “He walks around like that with his stomach pushed out and says there is a baby in his tummy too, which is adorable.” Amy thought everything was going fine, but Brock humbled her really fast. “Here I was thinking I was handling my pregnancy so well, just to be humbled so dramatically by my 2-year-old! I am so much more conscious of my posture and deep sighs around him now!” she joked. Followers loved seeing the sweet toddler push out his belly and let Amy know she’s not alone with her copycat son. “Wait a minute! I’m 38.5 weeks pregnant and my son is suddenly walking very strange… do you mean to tell me he’s mocking me?” a mom said. “Mine says everything makes him “naush” (nauseous). I may have been down bad for a while,” another person shared. But this person put it all into perspective. “Imitation is the highest form of flattery…or maybe humility,” they wrote. This story’s featured image can be found here.

Will the real Meghan Markle please report to the unemployment line

'Really fallacious'

'I know you guys are lying'

'You can either continue to lie or you can correct the record'

Williams was initially charged with 13 counts involving child pornography

Column Science Fiction Film Club First Men in the Moon: Old-Fashioned Victoriana for the Space Age Ray Harryhausen and Nigel Kneale adapt H.G. Wells’ novel for the big screen. By Kali Wallace | Published on March 18, 2026 Credit: Columbia Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Columbia Pictures First Men in the Moon (1964) Directed by Nathan Juran. Written by Nigel Kneale and Jan Read, based on the novel of the same name by H.G. Wells. Starring Edward Judd, Martha Hyer, and Lionel Jeffries. The year is 1964, and humanity is on the verge of a tremendous accomplishment. A multinational effort has brought the spaceship United Nations 1 to the Moon. The lunar lander touches down, and the first astronaut heads outside. It’s not quite as impressive as it could be, because he’s lowered to the surface dangling from a trapeze sort of thing, but the film characters don’t know how silly that looks. Everybody rejoices. People celebrate all around the world. Humanity has made it to the Moon! The astronauts of UN 1 are very excited to be the first humans to explore the Moon—right up until they find a tattered Union Jack and a handwritten note claiming the Moon in the name of Queen Victoria in the year 1899. The note is scribbled on a court summons, which gives the folks back on Earth a place to start looking for answers to the mystery of who littered on the Moon sixty-five years earlier. The 1964 scenes serve as a framing device in First Men in the Moon, the majority of which takes place during that first Moon adventure in 1899. But there’s an interesting bit of Space Race history in that narrative frame. On September 20, 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy gave a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in which he said that the United States and the Soviet Union should pursue cooperative space programs and a joint Moon mission, rather than working separately toward the same goal: “Why, therefore, should man’s first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition?” he asked. “Why should the United States and the Soviet Union, in preparing for such expeditions, become involved in immense duplications of research, construction, and expenditure?” Of course, just two years earlier, Kennedy had clearly framed human space travel as a national competition in his speech to Congress on May 25, 1961. But what gets people fired up to build rockets is different from what happens when people set to work, and there was always some degree of back-and-forth between the competing space programs. The UN address in 1963 wasn’t the first time Kennedy had publicly suggested joint space missions, and it wasn’t the first time the Soviet Union, under Premier Nikita Khrushchev, would decline. The two leaders had discussed the possibility in letters, and various officials in the two space programs had been talking as well. Cooperation wasn’t an outlandish or unpopular idea, but nobody had yet figured out how to made it work. Decades later, Khrushchev’s son, Sergei, would say that his father had privately considered accepting Kennedy’s proposal for a joint Moon mission, even though it would mean removing some of the secrecy around the Soviet space program. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, Khrushchev was removed from power in October 1964, and it took another few years and another few changes of leadership before any official cooperation happened. In 1972, President Richard Nixon and Premier Aleksei N. Kosygin signed the “Agreement Concerning Cooperation in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space for Peaceful Purposes,” and the first joint mission launched in 1975. That was the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, during which a crew of three American astronauts piloted an Apollo spacecraft to dock with a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft piloted by two cosmonauts. These days, it’s commonplace for space missions to have multinational crew. But in 1964 there was something bravely optimistic about the notion. When First Men in the Moon opens with an American astronaut and Soviet cosmonaut aboard the same lunar lander, discussing the mission as equals, it was a brief look toward a more cooperative future, a side note in a movie that otherwise has nothing to do with ’60s space programs at all. Because this isn’t a Space Age story, for all that it is a movie of the Space Age. H.G. Wells began writing The First Men in the Moon in 1900, and it was serialized in both The Strand Magazine and Cosmopolitan in 1900 and 1901. Artist Claude Shepperson provided the illustrations, in which we can see the familiar designs of both the off-spherical spacecraft and the insectoid Moon people. The serial was also compiled and published as a book in 1901. Wells was an extremely popular writer at the time, having already published several future classics, including The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and The War of the Worlds, so naturally his story about a mad scientist and his neighbor using a gravity-canceling material to visit the Moon was also pretty popular. The first cinematic adaptation of The First Men in the Moon was made in 1919 in the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, almost nothing survives of the film. According to the British Film Institute’s BFI Most Wanted project, which identifies lost films to encourage people and institutions to search for them, there is only a single known still image from the movie, as well as a brief synopsis and a small number of contemporary reviews from when it played in theaters throughout the UK. That one surviving still photo is delightful. The Selenites look so charmingly bug-eyed. Skip ahead forty-five years and that’s when we get the second film adaptation. I haven’t been able to find contemporary accounts of the film’s production—they made be out there, but for obvious reasons a lot of stuff from the 1960s is not readily available online—so most of the information comes from retrospective looks at the film. And some of those, such as an article from Fantastic Films in 1979, contain some obvious factual errors, which make me unsure how much of the information can be trusted. It seems like the idea for the film first came from a meeting of the minds between stop-motion animation artist Ray Harryhausen and screenwriter Nigel Kneale. We’ve talked about Harryhausen before when we watched The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms(1953), which was his first film as lead animator. We haven’t talked about Nigel Kneale before, even though I sometimes receive polite and wholly justified comments asking when we’re going to get to his work, which I promise I am not ignoring. In sci fi circles, Kneale is best known as the creator of the character Professor Bernard Quatermass. The professor first appeared in the BBC serial The Quatermass Experiment (1953) and came back in three more series; three of the series were adapted into movies produced by Hammer Films, while the fourth (released in 1979) was abridged into a film. Kneale and Harryhausen convinced producer Charles Schneer and director Nathan Juran to make First Men in the Moon, even though Schneer had doubts. Schneer and Harryhausen worked together on all but one of the films Harryhausen animated, and they also worked with Juran on the sci fi monster movie 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957) and the very successful fantasy adventure film The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958). So this was a group of men who all knew each other and had worked together successfully before. Schneer just wasn’t sure audiences would be interested in H.G. Wells’ version of a trip to the Moon, and he also didn’t know if the rather solemn way Kneale and Harryhausen wanted to approach the movie would work. (Aside: Juran’s long career also included such extremes as working in the art department on John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley [1941]—where space artist Chesley Bonestell was creating matte paintings and Irving Pichel was providing the narrated voiceover—and directing the cult classic B-movie Attack of the 50-Foot Woman [1958].) On the other hand, just a few years earlier, George Pal’s The Time Machine (1960) had adapted another Wells novel while maintaining the Victorian context, and that movie had done well at the box office. So they decided to go forward with First Men in the Moon, while adding the Space Age framing to the Victorian bulk of the story. We meet the charming cad Arnold Bedford (Edward Judd), who is living in a cottage in the English countryside writing a play, which is the Victorian equivalent of living in a Los Angeles pool house and writing a screenplay, as he doesn’t actually do any writing, lies to his girlfriend about his income and prospects, and is behind on his rent. When the girlfriend, Kate (Martha Hyer), comes to visit, they meet Arnold’s eccentric neighbor, an inventor called Cavor (Lionel Jeffries). Cavor has invented a material called Cavorite, which can cancel out the force of gravity. Arnold sees a potential fortune in this discovery, and Cavor wants to test it by going to the Moon. Naturally. Why not? Through a series of shenanigans that involve a court summons, several geese, and many large explosions, all three of them end up in Cavor’s spherical spacecraft, headed toward the Moon. They only bring two spacesuits—actually diving suits—so the men leave Kate in the spacecraft when they head out to explore the lunar surface. They discover a huge window in ground, fall through it, and that’s when they meet the subterranean, insectoid Moon people. Cavor names them Selenites—we never find out what they call themselves—and he wants to try to communicate with them. But Arnold chooses violence, so this first contact between neighboring species does not go particularly well. In a 2005 interview, Harryhausen spoke briefly about some of his frustrations with making First Men in the Moon. After pushing to get it made, he didn’t seem particularly happy with the film, and some of that was due to various technical problems that arose because of time and budget constraints. I’m not at all knowledgeable about different camera and lens types, but I think part of what he’s saying is that when they tried to match the rear projection scenes—that is, the scenes where the background is projected behind the live action—to the widescreen format of the new-at-the-time Panavision, the projections would end up distorted in the center. I didn’t notice this when I watched, and I couldn’t see it in any of the obvious rear-projection scenes when I went back to check. But I’m not a filmmaker, and it apparently bothered Harryhausen so much he was still annoyed about it forty years later. (To be fair, Harryhausen often comes across as annoyed in interviews in his later years. Maybe he was just a curmudgeon. Maybe we would all be curmudgeons if people kept asking us about CGI after spending a lifetime doing stop-motion animation.) Those time and budget problems are apparent in how this movie doesn’t really look like a Ray Harryhausen film for most of its runtime. The production didn’t have the resources to animate all of the Selenites—or, as Harryhausen said in 2005, “…We had to do it this way, because if I had animated them all I still wouldn’t be finished today.” With a few exceptions, the Selenites are mostly little kids dressed up in bug costumes, and they look like little kids dressed up in bug costumes. They’re pretty cute, and cute is definitely not what the film was going for. The only Harryhausen creature in the film is the giant centipede-ish thing Arnold and Cavor encounter in the caverns, and honestly that’s pretty cute too. I almost felt bad when the bug children zapped it dead and stripped all the flesh from its bones. The creature design is great, the animation is great, but the giant fellow is gone too soon. After a great deal of running around, getting captured, getting rescued, shouting, sneaking, fighting, and diplomacy that fails because Arnold keeps trying to kill the Selenites, it all leads to Arnold and Kate returning to Earth while Cavor stays behind. In the future of 1964, the explorers of UN 1 descend into the underground city, only to find that the Selenite civilization is gone. They surmise that Cavor had carried with him a virus that wiped them out, which is a dark and tonally jarring end to a film previously filled with wacky mad scientist hijinks. First Men in the Moon isn’t the best movie in the world, although it’s not the worst either. Some parts of it are charming, others are dull, and the cracks in the production show. I still find it interesting, however, as a film that deliberately, albeit awkwardly, splits the difference between different eras of sci fi cinema. It has a hokey floating sphere and a giant bug monster on one hand, but it also has nods to a realistic Moon mission and the facts of contemporary space travel. This was the time of the real Space Race, after all, and on screen films such as Destination Moon (1950), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), and Forbidden Planet (1954) had shifted the tone of sci fi cinema toward more seriousness and greater scientific accuracy. Sure, there were still monster movies, because there will always be monster movies, but space was becoming a more serious movie topic in the mid ’60s, even before 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) came along. First Men in the Moon tried to look backward and forward at the same time. It’s not entirely successful, because it doesn’t find a way to balance the tones and expectations of the two types of stories it’s trying to combine. The result is a film that ends up in “eh, okay” territory, but it also makes it feel very much like a movie that could only have been made after we knew we were going to the Moon, but before Moon exploration became a reality. What do you think of First Men in the Moon? Where does the so-called “Moon bull” belong in the ranks of Harryhausen creatures? Next week: We finish out our tour of Moon movies with one of my favorites. Watch Duncan Jones’ 2009 indie film Moon on Amazon and a few other places.[end-mark] The post <i>First Men in the Moon</i>: Old-Fashioned Victoriana for the Space Age appeared first on Reactor.

The U.N. Commission on the Status of Women is wrapping up this week amid historic disagreement between delegations over what it means to be a woman. You read that right. Diplomats at the annual international meeting focused on “women’s issues” are engaged in negotiations and backroom maneuvers to avoid clearly defining what they mean by the word “gender.” Last week when the meeting opened it was the first time in the Commission’s 70 years that the “agreed conclusions”—the negotiated document that the diplomats usually adopt by consensus—had to go to a vote. The U.S. diplomats requested that the Commission members take more time to negotiate a document that all countries could agree to, and then subsequently proposed amendments to the document that would have brought it more in line with U.S. policy. The U.S opposed the “ambiguous language promoting gender ideology,” as well as references to “sexual and reproductive health and rights,” which U.N. agencies use to promote abortion. But the Chair of the Commission on the Status of Women, Costa Rica’s Ms. Maritza Cha Valverde, used procedural machinations to require that the proposed U.S. amendments be packaged together, effectively killing their chances of passage. She was able to censor the countries that shared some of the U.S.’ objections to the document but were unwilling to join in opposition on all of them. Ultimately, the controversial “agreed conclusions” were adopted by a vote of 37 in favor, with six abstentions and only the U.S. voting “no.” This ideological battle is nothing new. The U.N. bureaucracy and European countries routinely push gender ideology and a radical abortion agenda under the guise of women’s rights and gender equality. And over the past several years they have labeled their opposition—those who hold traditional beliefs about the sanctity of life and the protection of the family—as “the pushback” or “anti-rights actors.” Last year, the newly reelected Trump administration opposed the business-as-usual progressive agenda at Commission on the Status of Women. And this year, the U.S. is taking its defense of women and girls a step further. As the new Promoting Human Flourishing in Foreign Assistance Policy illustrates, the Trump administration intends to “promote human flourishing” by opposing abortion, gender ideology, and DEI activities at home and abroad. After losing the vote last week, the U.S. delegation is now proposing a new resolution on the “Protection of Women and Girls Through Appropriate Terminology.” It seeks to reaffirm the original language from the 1994 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, which defines “gender” according to “its ordinary, generally accepted usage, as referring to men and women.” It rejects any expansion of the term to include “gender identity” or other subjective and ideological terms. Pro-life and pro-family organizations, including Family Watch International, are encouraging the many countries that consistently oppose radical gender ideology to join with the U.S. in sponsoring the resolution. While the U.S. resolution faces an uphill battle—some say insurmountable—these countries would be wise to support it nonetheless. A strong showing of support would challenge any assertion that customary international law has developed to expand the meaning of gender to include “transgender” or other so-called “gender identities.” Such support would build on the momentum of the successful vote late last year in the General Assembly to remove controversial “sexual orientation and gender identity” language from a resolution on implementing the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. And it would send a clear message to U.N. bureaucrats that U.N. Member States have the sovereign right to define U.N. policy through transparent processes. The dangers of gender ideology are not theoretical. Ms. Reem Alsalem, U.N. Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, has highlighted many of them in her recent report on sex-based violence against women and girls. Women’s dignity, privacy, safety, and opportunities are at stake when men can violate female-only spaces by claiming to “identify” as women.  Sadly, much of the world is only beginning to understand the horrific physical and psychological harms that those who have attempted to “transition” to another sex, boys and girls alike, have experienced under the euphemistically named “gender-affirming care” regimen of puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, and surgeries that aim to change the appearance of their bodies.   For too long, activists on the Left have insisted that abortion is necessary for women’s empowerment, that motherhood and family are impediments to personal fulfillment, and now, that “gender identity” is something real that others must validate. These are lies that hurt women and girls. In the decades since the Beijing conference, more people have come to recognize them as ideological deceptions that hurt men, women, and children alike. Now it’s time for more countries to confront those lies at the U.N., even when that means they’ll likely lose a vote. The post US Resolution to Protect Women and Girls Faces Uphill Battle at the UN appeared first on The Daily Signal.

A naturalized citizen born in Iraq is free from jail after facing charges for entering a Texas elementary school with a gun and tactical gear. Kyle Najm Chris, also known as Muhi Mohanad Najm, 39, allegedly walked into the front office of Zwink Elementary School in Spring, Texas, last Tuesday, wearing a load-bearing vest, a taser, and a holstered firearm. Authorities arrested Chris on Wednesday, and the Harris County District Attorney charged him with possession of a prohibited weapon, a third-degree felony, KHOU reported. The law prohibits carrying weapons on school premises. Authorities released Chris from jail Sunday after he posted a $75,000 bond, according to court records reviewed by The Daily Wire. Chris allegedly walked into the school’s front office after another visitor failed to close the door. A school employee asked Chris how he entered, and he said the door was unlatched. He reportedly asked if there was armed security on school property. After school staff asked him to provide an ID, he refused and left the school. While Chris has left jail, he remains under 24-hour house arrest with a GPS monitor, and the court has forbidden him from going near any property belonging to the Klein Independent School District, Fox 26 reported. Chris has a private investigator license. Chris did not open fire and his motives remain unknown. However, this incident follows a string of violent attacks allegedly perpetrated by naturalized citizens or children of naturalized citizens from Middle Eastern and African countries after President Donald Trump launched Operation Epic Fury in Iran. 1. Texas Shooting A gunman later identified as Ndiaga Diagne opened fire at a bar in Austin, Texas, on March 1, about 24 hours after President Trump announced Operation Epic Fury. Diagne, a naturalized citizen who was born in Senegal, killed two people and wounded 14 before police shot and killed him. He had been wearing a shirt with an Iranian flag and a hoodie reading “Property of Allah.” The FBI is investigating the shooting as an act of terrorism, possibly tied to the war. 2. Gracie Mansion Bombing On Saturday, March 7, Emir Balat, 18, and Ibrahim Kayumi, 19, allegedly attempted to detonate two improvised explosive devices, targeting protesters outside Gracie Mansion, the residence of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The protesters had been opposing radical Muslims. According to the Justice Department, both men expressed their support for the Islamic State, or ISIS. Balat’s parents, born in Turkey, are naturalized citizens. Kayumi’s parents reportedly came to the U.S. from Afghanistan and are naturalized citizens. 3. Old Dominion University On March 12, Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, 36, shouted “Allahu Akbar” before opening fire inside a classroom for the Reserve Officer Training Corps at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, according to an FBI special agent. Jalloh, a naturalized citizen born in Sierra Leone, killed an Army ROTC instructor and injured two others. Jalloh, who died of stabbing injuries after the ROTC students responded in self-defense, had previously been convicted of attempting to provide material support to ISIS. 4. Temple Israel Synagogue Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, 41, a Lebanese-born naturalized citizen, rammed a vehicle into the building of Temple Israel Synagogue in West Bloomington Township, Michigan, on March 12. He damaged the building and engaged in gunfire with armed security, who killed him. The FBI has described the attack as a targeted act of violence against the Jewish community. A source in Michigan’s Lebanese American community told CBS News that an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon killed the suspect’s two brothers and other family members. While America prides itself on welcoming legal immigrants who aim to contribute to this country, extremism expert Ryan Mauro warned that the U.S. government lacks the ability to monitor naturalized citizens from countries of particular concern. The post Iraq-Born Man Released From Jail After Bringing Gun, Wearing Tactical Gear, to Texas Elementary School appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Change of Pace: US, Israel Attack Iran's Energy Infrastructure In Bushehr