From the first spark on January 7, until the rains came, Los Angeles residents wondered if losing their homes would be the worst thing to happen to them. Maui’s disastrous fire response wasn’t far from their thoughts. Suspicions grew. Now, with an announcement from city hall, their worst fears are being realized. Now, their safe old neighborhood is probably going to be turned into an urban planner’s “moonshot.” 

I hope Angelenos have learned the hard lessons of Minneapolis, Portland, and Seattle. When you hire people for office and they haven’t done the first thing to make you, the citizen, safer, they don’t know what they’re doing. It demonstrates that their priorities don’t match the job. And when the worst comes — riots, police conflict, floods, disasters, and fires — these leaders lack the intellectual reservoir from which to draw their responses and solutions. When that happens, citizens, you’re screwed.
This brings us to Karen Bass, which rhymes with — you know. 
After being confronted with the wave of competence from those who lost their homes in Pacific Palisades at that meeting with President Trump last Friday, Bass ignored it and, like the communist autocrat she…

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A plurality of Americans “strongly support” changing the federal law to ensure illegal migrants cannot get citizenship for their newly born children, according to a poll by Emerson College.
Thirty percent of registered voters strongly favor the rule change, while 27.5 percent of registered voters strongly oppose the change, according to the poll.

But an additional 15 percent “somewhat support” the change, and nine percent “somewhat oppose” the change.
So 45 percent oppose, and 37 percent support, curbs on birthright citizenship for the newborn children of illegal migrants. Nineteen percent said they are neutral on the issue.
There is also a deep divide between the two parties on the birth citizenship rules, which provided citizenship to roughly 400,000 children of foreigners in 2024.

“A majority of Republicans, 69%, support ending birthright citizenship compared to 25% of Democrats and 38% of independents who hold the same view,” Spencer Kimball, executive director of Emerson College Polling, said in a press release.
The poll results match a November poll for The Economist magazine.
Public opinion is important because President Donald Trump is pushing…

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New details have emerged about the U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter that collided with an American Airlines regional jet over Washington, D.C., late Wednesday night, sending both aircraft plunging into the Potomac River. According to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the military helicopter was conducting a continuity of government mission—an exercise tied to national security and emergency preparedness.
American Airlines flight 5342, which had 64 people on board and departed from Wichita, Kansas, went down near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport after striking the UH-60 Black Hawk. The three soldiers aboard the helicopter, a captain, a staff sergeant, and a chief warrant officer, were also killed, according to the Pentagon.
Hegseth described the Black Hawk’s flight as part of a “routine annual retraining of night flights on a standard corridor,” raising immediate questions about why a highly sensitive military mission was operating in such close proximity to civilian air traffic.
“Tragically, last night, a mistake was made,” Hegseth explained.
“We do know on our side who was involved. It was a fairly experienced crew, and that was doing a…

President Trump zinged a reporter asking if he will visit the site of the American Airlines plane crash. Trump signed a series of executive…

Authored by Aaron Gifford via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), Teach them how to learn, not what to learn. That’s the key concept for…

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Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative asset management firm, is all-in on Manhattan’s turnaround after the COVID pandemic crippled the commercial real estate market. 
The firm’s effort to buy 1345 Sixth Ave. from Fisher Brothers was widely hailed this week as a stroke of faith in the Manhattan office market — but it wasn’t the first mega-deal by the financial giant.
Last summer, Stephen A. Schwarzman-led Blackstone also signed the largest Manhattan office lease of 2024 at Rudin’s 345 Park Ave., where it decided to renew and expand from 720,000 to over 1 million square feet.
Blackstone is looking to buy 1345 Sixth Ave. from Fisher Brothers, a sign the firm is all-in on Manhattan’s turnaround.
Both moves reflect a change of heart by Blackstone, which said last year it was focusing less on office properties than on tech and industrial investments.
Blackstone’s pivot signals a remarkable — and to some analysts, unexpected — overall resurgence in the Manhattan office market, which many gave up for dead after the pandemic.

If the not-yet-certain 1345 Sixth purchase, first reported by Bloomberg, goes through, it…

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REPORTING from war zones is the best and worst job in the world.
I see horrific things and sometimes get scared witless.

Russia has issued an arrest warrant for The Sun’s defence editor Jerome Starkey

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What Russia really wants is to bury proper journalism, to stop reporters shedding light on Putin’s war crimesCredit: EPA

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The Sun’s Jerome Starkey pictured as artillery is fired in 2022Credit: Peter Jordan
But I get to tell amazing stories about ordinary people caught up in a conflict.
I won’t be stopped by the bully-boy threats from a sham Russian court in Kursk.
I have reported in these pages about innocent people maimed by cluster bombs.
We have given a voice to pensioners living in a Kharkiv bathroom because it is the only room without windows or outside walls that could be blown to bits by missiles.
We have told stories of babies born in bunkers.
Stories of parents who rescued stolen children from thousands of miles behind the front line.
Stories of civilians forced to wear uniforms to defend loved ones.
Stories of soldiers slain in blood-soaked trenches.
And I have interviewed captured Russian troops — some of them convicts press-ganged into Storm Z battalions.
In August I had…

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For several election cycles, the Michigan Republican Party has been broken. Issues like backroom deals, dishonest leadership, zero concern for election integrity, lack of…

U.S. President Donald Trump quickly politicized the air collision between an American Airlines Group regional jet and a military helicopter, blaming diversity, equity and inclusion programs for the nation’s most deadly commercial airline accident in over a decade.
Trump said he didn’t know the true cause of the deadly crash, but said he had opinions, reaching for his familiar attack on diversity initiatives. When pressed for evidence, Trump credited his conclusion to “common sense.”
“I have common sense, okay? And unfortunately, a lot of people don’t,” he said. “We want brilliant people doing this. This is a major chess game at the highest level, when you have 60 planes coming in during a short period of time.”

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The new U.S. border czar is expected to meet with Canada’s top public safety official on Friday just hours before President Donald Trump has promised to level new tariffs on Canada unless it helps deal with the flow of migrants and fentanyl across the border, according to two U.S. sources familiar with the planning.

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US President Donald Trump on Thursday blamed diversity policies under Barack Obama and Joe Biden for poor safety standards after a deadly crash in which a military helicopter collided with a passenger plane over Washington.
“I put safety first. Obama, Biden and the Democrats put policy first,” Trump said. “They actually came out with a directive: ‘too white.’ And we want the people that are competent.”

Veteran astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore took off to thew International Space Station (ISS) in the maiden crewed flight of Boeing’s Starliner in…

Senior officials within the Department of Justice (DOJ) have held discussions with federal prosecutors in Manhattan about the possibility of dropping their corruption case…

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says she is unsure which recommendations she will adopt from a recent COVID-19 response report she commissioned, but is emphasizing her commitment to considering all perspectives.
The COVID-19 Pandemic Response report, released on Jan. 24 by a task force Smith created in 2022, calls for the province to stop the use of COVID-19 vaccines on children and teens. The report also recommends medical professionals be permitted to explore the use of alternative treatments to fight the virus.
The opposition NDP, some doctors and academics, Alberta Medical Association president Dr. Shelley Duggan, and the Canadian Medical Association president Dr. Joss Reimer have criticized the report, calling it “anti-science.”
Smith said it’s important that “contrarian voices” are not silenced when it comes to science, and that her government would listen to “every voice” and make assessments based on evidence. She made the comments in response to a reporter’s question during an unrelated Jan. 29 news conference.
“I know there’s been a narrative, and the narrative has been enforced by shouting down contrarian voices,“ Smith said. “The evidence has…

President Donald Trump held a press briefing at the White House on Thursday morning to address the tragic aviation disaster that took place over the Potomac River near the Reagan Airport this week. When he entered the briefing room, he asked the press to observe a moment of silence to honor over 60 souls who

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