The Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Maine, Troy Jackson, apologized for remarks in which he said he believed Jewish residents of Maine were rejecting the term "genocide" to describe Israel’s war in Gaza because of the Jewish persecution during the Holocaust.

In comments to Jewish Insider, Jackson said he had misspoken, stating that he apologized "for the pain that caused."

"I believe what’s happening in Gaza is genocide, and I also understand that word carries particular weight for many Jewish families given the Holocaust — the genocide of six million Jews. In trying to acknowledge that, I misspoke and made a generalization about Jewish Mainers’ views that doesn’t reflect what I mean to say," Jackson said in a statement.

Jackson's remarks sparked immediate backlash Tuesday on social media.

"This statement cannot be real. It must be a dark dark dark parody," Dan Senor, the co-author of "The Genius of Israel," wrote on X.

"Completely out of the closet," Fox News host Mark Levin wrote on X.

"Dude could get a matching tattoo," Fox News political analyst Guy Benson wrote on X, referring to Graham Platner's Nazi tattoo.

"Jackson should not be within 10’points of [Sen. Susan Collins] when the totals post, just as Collins blew out the polls six years ago. Jackson is dull and ill-informed —cliche volcano, mostly spewing out of DSA-rewrites," Fox News contributor and conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt wrote on X.

"Well, that’s a sh---y thing to say," former GOP congressman and anti-Trump personality Joe Walsh wrote on X.

"Bro what," GOP consultant Matt Whitlock wrote on X.

Jackson’s apology attempts to salvage political damage from his broad remarks about the Jewish community as he wages a nationally watched Senate race in a bid to unseat incumbent Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, which is a highly competitive race. It also underscores the challenge Democrats face as they look to condemn what they see as humanitarian concerns in Israel’s war in Gaza while, at the same time, expressing sensitivity to the antisemitism Jewish communities still face elsewhere in the world.

Jackson, a former gubernatorial candidate who received the backing of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) earlier this year, became the party nominee to replace former candidate Graham Platner. Platner abandoned his Senate campaign after news of past aggressive behavior to women and an allegation of sexual assault sparked concerns among top party leaders. For his own part, Platner denied any wrongdoing.

But since securing the nomination at a Maine Democratic convention in late July, Jackson has sought to continue many of Platners’ progressive policy items, such as passing Medicare for all, increasing taxes on the country’s top earners and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

He has also continued Platner’s position on Israel.

Like many other progressives that align with the DSA, Jackson has listed ending U.S. aid to Israel among those other top priorities and, in his interview earlier this week, reiterated that stance in an interview on Tuesday with local media before making his comment about the Jewish community in Maine.

He was asked what he sees as the greatest foreign policy challenge facing the United States.

Jackson began answering by reiterating his cautious posture towards the U.S. - Israel relationship and his hesitancy to write a "blank check" in support of Bejamine Netanyahu’s government — someone Jackson maintains is a war criminal. He also remarked that, despite what he saw as clear evidence, some voters wouldn’t frame the conflict in those terms.

"It’s unfortunate that there are people here in Maine that don’t like to use that term only because they’re Jewish and what that means to them with the Holocaust. It fits that description. It is. It’s an unbelievable thing that’s happened there that people that are innocent are being murdered and it is a genocide," Jackson said.

Jackson’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital on questions about whether he had faced pressure from other Democrats to issue an apology.

Having secured the nomination, Jackson will face off against Collins in the Nov. 3 general election.

A Kansas dog is being hailed by police as a "loyal companion" after it sought help for its owner who had fallen and was unable to get up.

The Leawood Police Department released bodycam footage showing an officer first encountering the dog in the middle of the road while patrolling a residential neighborhood.

"The officer noticed the dog was on a leash, but there was no owner in sight," police said.

Video showed the dog barking at the officer. The officer replied to the dog, "Hi, why don’t you go on back home?"

The Leawood Police Department said the officer then "followed the dog about half a block to its home, where he found the garage door open and the homeowner on the floor, unable to get up."

"The resident had been there for more than three hours," according to police.

Bodycam footage showed the officer following the dog up a driveway, where another dog had emerged.

"Is this where you live?" the officer asked the dogs.

After spotting the resident, the officer said, "Hi, are you OK?"

"Thanks to the resident’s loyal companion, our officer was able to find them and get them the help they needed," police said. "The resident was treated by medical personnel and is now recovering safely at home."

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a blockbuster challenge to ICE's mandatory detention policy after the Trump administration asked the justices to review the case this week. 

The outcome of this case will determine whether criminal noncitizens held in detention while awaiting deportation are entitled to bond hearings after lengthy periods behind bars, a policy lower courts have repeatedly blocked. 

The decision from the High Court comes after Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul attempted in August to thwart the Trump administration’s efforts to have the case heard by pardoning a criminal alien who had been held in a detention center for nearly three years, effectively rendering the case moot.

While Solicitor General John Sauer agreed in September that the case was effectively dead, he vowed to find a new case to settle whether criminal noncitizens are entitled to bond hearings under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

This story is developing and will be updated.

Brianna Coppage may have lost her teaching career, but she certainly didn't take a pay cut.

The "Double Lives of Suburban Wives" star told Fox News Digital that her adult-content business has transformed her family's finances, revealing that her most successful month brought in a staggering $550,000.

"Oh, my best month was 550,000," Brianna told Fox News Digital.

The figure marks a dramatic departure from her former life as an English teacher at St. Clair High School in Franklin County, Missouri. In 2023, Coppage was placed on administrative leave after her adult-content work was discovered. She later resigned from her position.

Asked whether she now makes more in a single month than she previously earned in an entire year as a teacher, Brianna didn't hesitate.

"Yes," she said.

And despite the controversy that followed the end of her teaching career, Brianna said she wouldn't go back even if given the opportunity.

"Never. Never," she told Fox News Digital when asked whether she would accept her teaching job back tomorrow.

"Yeah, just the lifestyle and the time and being able to just be in control of myself and in my business," she continued. "It's changed my family's life and just everything for the better."

Brianna is one of the women featured on TLC's "Double Lives of Suburban Wives," which follows six couples in the St. Louis area navigating marriage, parenthood and suburban life while maintaining careers creating adult content.

According to TLC, what began as a financial pivot for Brianna and her husband, Phillip, quickly became a lucrative business. But that success came with consequences when Brianna's online career was publicly exposed and she lost her teaching job.

Brianna told Fox News Digital that she still struggles with whether losing her career was justified.

"I think … it's a difficult concept to even wrap my mind around," she said. "So obviously like professions have a level of professionalism, but also they couldn't cite anything that I technically broke."

"So was I really doing anything wrong? I don't know," she continued. "I think it's on a basis of morality."

Brianna also pushed back on what she described as a misconception surrounding her former employment.

"There was no like morality clause, which is a lot of… there's a misconception about that, that I signed something or a clause, a morality clause," she said. "There wasn't one. So I don't know."

While losing her teaching career forced Brianna onto a different professional path, she said the financial impact of her new work has been life-changing.

"My family was able to pay off all of our debts. I paid off my student loans," she told Fox News Digital. "So I stopped putting groceries on credit cards."

"Like yeah, it just is so freeing, and I don't know, it's been life-changing."

That financial freedom is one of the central tensions explored on "Double Lives of Suburban Wives," where the women weigh the benefits of their unconventional careers against the judgment and loss of privacy that can accompany them.

For Brianna, the cost has been significant.

"I think the greatest thing it has cost me is the privacy, the lack of privacy," she told Fox News Digital.

Being thrust into the public eye has sometimes left her feeling as though people forget there's a person behind the headlines.

"And being in the public eye, it's like, I'm not a human anymore," Brianna said. "I'm not normal just like everybody else when truly I am. Like we are human beings too."

But when weighing that loss against what her new career has made possible for her family, Brianna said the benefits extend far beyond her income.

"I think the greatest thing it has afforded is just memories and time with my family that I wouldn't trade for the world," she said.

Brianna said her own upbringing has shaped how she views the opportunities she can now provide for her children.

"Like growing up, I grew up fairly poor. And I mean family vacations and letting my kids experience things that I never would have is really priceless."

But despite the financial success and freedom Brianna says the career has given her family, she stopped short of saying she would encourage her daughter to follow the same path.

Asked how she would respond if her daughter came to her as an adult and said she wanted to pursue the same kind of work, Brianna said her first priority would be making sure she understood what she was getting into.

"I want to raise, you know, my daughter to be open-minded. Don't judge other people. It's okay if people are different," Brianna told Fox News Digital.

"So if she came to me, first, I would want her to have all the correct information. Is she safe? … It's not something that I'm going to encourage," Brianna said.

Still, she said she would offer her daughter the same acceptance she wants from others.

"But also just as I want people to love me and respect me and not judge me, I would give her that same …  that same love and respect."

Her success hasn't eliminated the complications that come with mixing marriage and business.

Brianna and Phillip's relationship became another major storyline on "Double Lives of Suburban Wives," with viewers watching the couple confront trust and boundary issues while simultaneously juggling life as parents and business partners.

Brianna told Fox News Digital that the demands of those overlapping roles require constant communication.

"I think that with everything we're juggling, being parents, spouses, business partners, lifestyle, content creators, there is a lot to communicate about and a lot of boundaries to establish, and no relationship is perfect," she said.

She added that she was glad viewers were seeing some of those difficulties rather than an artificially polished version of their marriage.

"I like that this is on the show honestly, because it does show that no marriage is perfect and people go through struggles," Brianna said. "But I think at the end of the day, it matters how you work through that."

When asked whether she considered Phillip's actions cheating, Brianna drew a distinction.

"It wasn't a physical act, so no," she said. "But yeah, definitely a breach of trust and a betrayal."

The couple turned to therapy as they worked through their problems.

"There's been a lot of learning and taking accountability," Brianna told Fox News Digital. "Without that, I don't know where we would stand."

"Being in therapy and working on communication boundaries and taking ownership of our mistakes has really helped," she continued.

The debut episode of FOX News Podcasts’ "the Girls" delivered an unfiltered conversation where no subject was off-limits, as the hosts discussed the Lindsay Clancy trial, Ms. Rachel's political activism, the realities of grief and more.

Each episode features a rotating cast of women with distinctive voices and experiences spanning news, politics, sports, comedy and culture. Thursday’s premiere brought together Fox News’ Harris Faulkner, Rachel Campos-Duffy and Kat Timpf, former secretary to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo Melissa DeRosa and former ESPN host Samantha Ponder.

The conversation got intense as Ponder weighed in on Clancy, the Massachusetts woman charged with murdering her three young children, whose trial ended in a mistrial last month.

"If I’m a mom and this has been done to my kids, I want this woman put away forever," Ponder says in a preview clip.

"You can say things were hard, [but] you still gotta be in prison."

The group also debated whether children’s entertainer Ms. Rachel is a bad influence because of her political activism, with Timpf defending her and Faulkner questioning how much parents should know about the political views of children's entertainers.

"Is Ms. Rachel bad for kids? I don't think it's that deep," Timpf said.  "She just sings songs... I still listen to Michael Jackson. Where do you draw the line? I grew up listening to Nirvana. I love Kurt Cobain. I wore flannel. I've yet to shoot up heroin," she added.

Faulkner said that parents should consider the political views children may absorb from online personalities.

"When she says she wants to do away with ICE, when she says that she’s more for letting those people come across our border illegally, when she says those things — why do I know that about her?" Faulkner said.

The premiere also took a more personal turn when Timpf opened up about losing her father shortly before becoming pregnant with her second child.

"Not to make it weird, but I think about death pretty much all the time because my dad died," Timpf said.

Timpf said she had spoken to her father the morning he died and later learned from a doctor she had never met that he had suffered an aortic dissection after initially going to the hospital with a stomach ache.

Her father had been intensely focused on his health, which made his sudden death especially difficult for her to process.

"He was very fit. He would not drink out of a plastic water bottle," Timpf said. "When he died, he was going up north for a day of sailing."

Timpf said the loss left her questioning whether people have any real control over their health or fate. She noted that her mother also died before turning 60 and that she battled cancer during her first pregnancy.

"I almost learned the wrong lesson of like, ‘What can you do?’" she said. "Do I want to live forever? I’m scared so much to die."

The conversations capture the podcast's freewheeling nature, covering an array of topics across news, politics, sports, comedy and culture.

"the Girls'" is available on Fox News Digital, Apple, Spotify, YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.

Fox News' Brian Flood contributed to this report.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor denied a Brooklyn mother's emergency bid to enroll her Asian American son at an elite New York City high school, alleging that a city program geared toward admitting students from economically challenged neighborhood into the school discriminates against Asian students.

The lawsuit centers on allegations by Yi Fang Chen, whose son was denied admission to Stuyvesant High School, that New York City’s revised admissions requirements intentionally discriminate against Asian students while increasing enrollment among Black and Hispanic students. Chen filed the lawsuit in April, accusing the city of violating the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

"Delayed justice is always frustrating, but we remain confident that the courts will ultimately uphold core equal protection principles and ensure that no student, including our client’s son, is treated as less deserving of educational opportunities because of their race," Dean McGee, an attorney for the plaintiff with Pacific Legal Foundation, told Fox News Digital.

Sotomayor did not offer an explanation Monday for denying the emergency bid, which stems from a lawsuit pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Chen's son, identified as M.P. in court documents, scored a 558 on the Specialized High School Admissions Test — a requirement for admission. He was just three points shy of being admitted for the school year, but the lawsuit argues that M.P. would have been admitted if the city had not raised the cutoff score, a change attributed to the city reserving 20% of its admissions for students deemed "economically disadvantaged." The change was part of Mayor Bill de Blasio's expansion of the Discovery program in 2018.

The program was limited to students who attended middle schools where at least 60% of students were considered economically disadvantaged, meaning some economically disadvantaged students could be excluded from the program if their school fell below the threshold.

No student admitted through the Discovery program this year scored higher than 495 — at least 66 points below the cutoff for students admitted based solely on the SHSAT without economic disadvantage considered.

Although nearly three-quarters of Asian American students in New York City come from low-income families, many attended middle schools that did not meet the 60% Economic Need Index threshold.

The lawsuit points to internal communications from the New York City Department of Education and the Mayor's Office that Chen's attorneys allege show the program's intent was to increase enrollment of Black and Hispanic students at the expense of Asian students.

"Yi Fang Chen’s son was denied a seat at Stuyvesant because the City turned a program meant to help economically disadvantaged students into a tool for racial engineering—one that actually excluded disadvantaged children throughout the city," Dean McGee, an attorney with Pacific Legal Foundation, said in a statement. "Equal protection means treating kids as individuals, not as demographic statistics."

Welcome to October. For those of you who may have missed it, Joe made the call to the bullpen as he takes a couple of days off to hit the golf course. I'll be on the mound covering Screencaps today and Friday. So keep my inbox full.

I'm going to start this Thursday morning edition off by celebrating the Yankees advancing to the ALDS thanks to a complete domination of the Red Sox in what was an absolute joke of a Wild Card Series.

By no means is the work done, and I'm not popping any champagne, but you want to know what's better than winning a Wild Card Series? Beating the Boston Red Sox in that series.

You want to know what's even better than that? Sweeping them and making it about as lopsided as a series can get. That's what happened. The Red Sox scored just two runs in the two games while the Yankees hung 18 on them.

The Yankees pitching was phenomenal. The bats are alive. They're playing with a ton of confidence and not even Sonny Gray and a neck covered in sticking stuff could shut them down.

What a series, but as I said, the work isn't finished. It's onto Tampa Bay and a Rays team that I expect is going to put up much more of a fight than Boston did.

It's October now, and it's time to show up when the lights are bright.

You don't have to tell NFL sideline reporter Melanie Collins that. She doesn't hesitate when the lights are bright. She brings it each and every day, no matter what the situation is.

Wednesday was a perfect example of that. It's the middle of the week and the last day of the month of September. Eyes are on baseball, and she fires off a farewell post to the month that was and it has folks talking.

Collins put together a complete package. She included football. She included inspirational quotes. And she included a few selfies to round it all out.

You're not going to find a much better send off for September than that. This is how you stay one step ahead of everyone else.

Melanie Collins has done it again. Let's get to the emails (keep those coming) and get the rest of this column rolling, shall we?

- Neil writes:

Hey SeanJo, congrats on your daughter's wedding, I gotta know, how much did you stress over your father of the bride toast? I revised mine 18 times and sent it to my sister who writes for a living, and while she may have had a constructive edit or 2 her overriding comment was, you're never getting through this without crying. Not only no tears, but it was a tight 8 minutes that killed. After reflection I realized, nobody was here for me, and that has set me free when daughter 2 gets married. Best wishes to the newlyweds, may their future be blessed!

Thanks for reaching out. I didn't stress about it at all. Mainly because I wasn’t asked to do it. I didn’t have to wait until the ceremony to realize that nobody was there for me. I knew that immediately.

Our focus leading up to the wedding was to get as much as we could exactly the way our daughter wanted it. That went for the planned speakers as well. There were two, and I wasn't one of them.

She might have been worried that her old man was going to say something inappropriate or embarrassing and she's probably right. I would. I did write her a note that she read the morning of her big day and that was far more impactful than any toast I would have delivered anyway.

- CPT Kelly G writes:

Hello Joe,

Here's my homemade sourdough bread boule.

- Homebrew Bill writes:

They were on sale and I had time to fire up the smoker. Cheers!

You had to. I don’t see much of a choice. Ribs on sale plus time equals firing up the smoker. Nobody does it better than you do Homebrew Bill. Keep sending me your meat.

- Bob writes:

Hey Sean, greetings from North Las Vegas. Another nice weekend on the patio with football and the grill! Can’t go wrong with cheese burgers and fries. Threw a flat iron on the grill with some Roma tomatoes. Sean we appreciate you and everyone at Outkick. Continue the great work you do.

Thanks Bob for the support and for sending me your meat (keep it coming). It doesn’t get much better than hanging out on the patio, enjoying football, and firing up the grill.

- Galen in SBNC writes:

Hey SeanJo,

Great to see you answering the call from the bullpen for the Wild Card Round. Hopefully, you nail Thursday and Friday so you can relieve the pressure of a "must win" on Sunday. Trust your stuff...it's what got you here!

Haven't shown you my meat in a while and I thought this one would be special enough for a Playoff bullpen call. Started my 69th birthday (a very special number in the Sophomoric humor that can be ScreenCaps Nation) with a dozen raw oysters overlooking Sunset Beach NC. Went home and grilled a couple of extra think Filet Mignons with loaded baked potatoes and asparagus. Quality entertainment!

I know how much SC "Respects Summer" and I agree, so it was a kick in the ol' goodybag to have to break out the grill light for the first time this Fall...but, it was well worth it!

Now, it is on to living my 70th year in this beautiful, free country of ours!

Galen, that's all I try to do every time out. I try not to overthink anything and just trust what has gotten me here. Most of the time it works out. Happy 69th and, as one with a sophomoric sense of humor, it is a very special one.

Thanks for reaching out. Thanks for sharing your meat and don't forget, there are year-round maniacs who fire up the grill even when there's snow on the ground.

-------------------------

That's it for the first day of October. Enjoy your Thursday and if you aren't looking forward to the Buccaneers and Cowboys on Thursday Night Football, there's still a Wild Card Series to settle.

The Phillies and the Braves get the primetime slot their fans were crying about not receiving in the first two games of this series. The winner gets to face the Dodgers in the Division Series.

Keep the emails coming. I'll need a few for Friday and Sunday. The inbox is open and remember I want to see your meat.

I'll take anything and everything else as well at . Go follow and and feel free to slide into the DMs.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers rookie Jalon Daniels will make the first start of his career on Sunday as he goes under center for an injured Baker Mayfield.

Now, before we get to that, let’s remember that the NFL world is filled with cliches. Players and coaches love saying, "We gotta take it one quarter at a time," "Each week is a season," "We’re trying to go 1-0 each week" – well, you get the picture.

Well, the former Kansas Jayhawks star dropped a new one on Wednesday as he talked to reporters ahead of the Buccaneers’ Week 4 game against the Green Bay Packers. He was asked if he was going to be able to stay calm when it’s his turn to take the field.

"Absolutely. I think that one thing I learned in college was, you can't be the thermometer, you have to be the thermostat," he said. "You have to be someone who comes in and is able to set the temperature of the room, not test the room and try to be able to blend in with it. If a team is low, I have to be able to pick it up to be able to make sure that they're even.

"If we're high, then I have to be able to be low to be able to make sure that we're even. I try to be as even-keel as possible. I think that being able to go out there and have that even-keeled feel, the team around you feels that."

Love it when a new cliché drops, especially one you can use randomly in everyday life.

But there’s another cliché to use when it comes to the Buccaneers’ Week 4 game – "must win."

It’s usually reserved for a team that is vying for a playoff spot. However, for Tampa Bay, it’s used here to save the season. The Buccaneers face the stark reality of dropping to 0-4 and a Mount Everest-type climb to get back into contention with Mayfield out for the next three weeks at least with a dislocated right thumb.

Daniels will get a real shot to show what he’s made of against the Packers.

"For us, it's just trying to get a win," coach Todd Bowles said when asked about trying to get a win. "(Jalon Daniels) is not playing by himself. Everybody has to do their job. We've got to coach it the right way on both sides of the ball, including special teams. He's got to play and just do his job.

"We've got 21 other guys that (are) going to be out there playing with him, so he's not by himself. It's (a) nervous (feeling) but it's exciting at the same time because you get to see somebody play. No matter where you come from, your first NFL game has to come at some point, whether you're a first-round pick or whether you're a free agent. You've got to touch the field for the first time at some point, and then you've got to play. He's just got to play."

Of course, Daniels tapped Mayfield for some advice before the pivotal matchup.

"He simply put it as: you've been dreaming of this opportunity, just stay composed, play as yourself," Daniels said. "Don't try to be anybody else besides you, and go out there and just go make football plays."

The way the Bucs look this season – it’s easier said than done.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told the "Ruthless Podcast" that 2,210 terrorists have been apprehended under the Trump administration’s aggressive approach to solving illegal immigration.

"Underneath President Trump, we’ve arrested, so far as my numbers walking into here, 2,210 terrorists in this country," Mullin said in an exclusive interview released Thursday morning. "Most of them came over and claimed asylum, gave a fake name. Some of them we caught, but a lot of them came in and… the Biden administration was just cutting them loose."

Mullin said that under the Biden administration, 97% of individuals DHS encountered were released within 27 hours.

Earlier this month, ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, DHS announced that it had detained 2,150 known or suspected terrorists.

Mullin noted that these individuals were classified as terrorists. "There's a difference between a suspected terrorist and a terrorist watch list," the secretary explained to the co-hosts. "These were terrorists."

Mullin said the arrests resulted from a new administration-wide approach to illegal immigration.

"One directive we had is we're no longer just playing defense," Mullin told the hosts. "We're on the offense. President Trump has given us the authority to go on the offensive. For instance, cybersecurity. We're no longer sitting there and just protecting as you try to attack us. We're swimming upstream now. We're going after the people that are coming after us. We're aggressively going after individuals. I want to put you on offense."

Mullin rose quickly to the Cabinet post. He served in the House before winning election to the Senate in 2022. President Donald Trump nominated him to lead DHS in March, and the Senate confirmed him 54-45 on March 23.

"I thought I was busy as a senator," Mullin said of his move to DHS. "I haven't slept through the night. I'm not joking when I say this. I haven't slept through the night in six months," the Oklahoman added.

With just over a month to go until the November midterm elections, podcast co-host Josh Holmes commended the secretary for his job performance as immigration remains a polarizing political issue.

"You also inherited a department that the reason it was shut down is that Democrats have demagogued everything to do with border security and ICE in particular," Holmes told Mullin. "Under the previous DHS administration, there was some kind of prioritization of the lowest-hanging fruit of deportations rather than what you're talking about, which is that people need to get the hell out of here as fast as possible."

FOX News deals may be compensated for or earn a commission if you buy through our links.

October Prime Day is less than a week away, but you don't have to wait until Oct. 6 to find a good deal. This week, we're seeing strong discounts across fall fashion, tech and home. Our first pick is this pair of Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, now 50% off on Amazon. The cotton-blend fabric has added stretch for a comfortable fit while helping the jeans hold their shape.

We're just days away from Amazon's October Prime Day starting Oct. 6, so now’s the time to get your wish list ready. We're watching prices on home, tech and fall essentials to find the deals worth shopping. — Jaclyn Kaufman, Associate Production Editor

with this Acer charging station, currently 40% off.

with this American flag doormat, now $18.

with a new Shark hair dryer, now 44% off.

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Columbia women’s Switchback IV jacket: $37.77 (46% off)

Why it’s worth it: It easily fits in your hiking or camping gear, and the hood stows away on nicer days. The Omni-Shield sheds rain and dries fast.

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Here are three items our team bought recently.

"I usually do my hair using the two-step Dyson Airwrap round brush and roller. However, the Dyson Airsmooth seemed like a good alternative for days when I want to get ready in under 20 minutes." — 

"The Anker Nano Smart Display charges really fast and has a display to show your battery percentage. I love that you can switch the charger into battery protection mode, which is designed to help protect it from overcharging or overheating when left plugged in overnight." 

"We just celebrated my husband's 40th birthday. He moved to Texas nearly 15 years ago, but now acts more Texan than I do. So what better way to celebrate than with a new pair of boots? He said the leather feels soft and moves with your foot from the first wear."

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This vacuum cleaner is perfect for pet owners with its anti-tangle technology. It can lay nearly flat to reach under furniture and has three modes: use as a crevice or pet tool in Eco mode, the straight vacuum head, and Turbo mode.

he canvas upper gives them a polished casual look, while a memory foam insole adds cushioning. They are roomy, easy to slip on and machine washable.

Prime Day sales are the perfect time to upgrade your tech. The listed original price is more than $750, but it's currently at a massive discount. This HP laptop features 11 hours of video playback, a 720p HD camera and temporal noise reduction.

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Select furniture sets start at $699.

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A former fraternity leader at Northern Arizona University was sentenced to two months in jail on Wednesday for his role in a hazing incident that led to the death of a student.

Carter Eslick, 20, pleaded guilty to a felony hazing charge in Coconino County Superior Court for the Jan. 31 death of Colin Daniel Martinez. Eslick served as the Delta Tau Delta pledge master at the time of the incident.

Martinez died at a Delta Tau Delta off-campus house due to alcohol poisoning, with an autopsy finding a blood-alcohol content of 0.45% shortly after his death.

During the hazing, Martinez was among a group of four pledges who drank two bottles of vodka to ensure that they vomited, according to NBC News.

Hazing witnesses said they attempted to monitor the sleeping Martinez for signs of alcohol poisoning, adjusting his sleeping position multiple times.

Eslick told the court, where Martinez's parents were present, that he takes "full responsibility for the hand I played in that ritual."

The sentencing comes amid headlines regarding the mysterious deaths of two students at Ole Miss — one of whom was in a fraternity — and an alleged frat cocaine distribution ring at Penn State.

One of the Ole Miss students who was found dead this past week, Robert Strang, was a Phi Delta Theta fraternity brother. He was found at an off-campus home. Authorities found packages of kratom, a commercially available drug that has been derided as "gas station heroin," at the sites of both deaths. However, its role in either death was not immediately clear.

Phi Delta Theta has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

"The loss of two young lives is a profound tragedy," the fraternity said in a statement. "Phi Delta Theta joins the University of Mississippi and the broader Ole Miss community in mourning Robert and Aidan Hamilton and extending our deepest sympathies to their families, friends, chapter brothers, classmates, and all those who knew and loved them."

"These losses reinforce the importance of a collective commitment to health, safety, and well-being on college campuses today. We encourage the Phi Delta Theta community to keep the Strang family, the Mississippi Alpha Chapter, and everyone affected by these tragic losses in their thoughts," the statement continued.

For as fun and exciting as the Chicago Cubs were during stints of the regular season, they proved to be anything but in their short-lived playoff stint against the San Diego Padres.

The Cubs limped into the NL Wild Card series in San Diego, losing four of their last six games to close out the year, while also carrying a pieced-together stable of pitchers, with the staff being plagued by what felt like countless injuries. It was no secret that if Chicago wanted to find any modicum of success, it would need the bats of Pete Crow-Armstrong, Alex Bregman, and the team's bats to deliver.

All they managed to deliver was, well, nothing.

The Padres blanked the Cubs 8-0 in Game 1 of the three-game series, with Chicago managing just three hits. The Cubs were able to finally get one run across the plate in Wednesday's Game 2 in the fourth inning, but were sent packing after falling 4-1 in a contest that saw the club record five hits.

The Cubs scoring one run across two games after leading MLB in total runs during the regular season by a considerable margin of 18 may feel like a bit of a shock, but not after taking one quick glance at the box scores.

Crow-Armstrong, who could be the unanimous NL MVP, went 0-for-7 across the two games against San Diego, striking out four times in the process. Bregman, the veteran leader in the clubhouse, went 0-for-8 with four strikeouts as well.

Going two consecutive games without a base knock is by no means a rare occurrence in Major League Baseball. With the Cubs being incredibly reliant on the bats of Bregman and PCA, and the situation being just a three-game series, those two being blanked is something that simply could not happen if Chicago wanted to have any chance at advancing.

The Cubs' offense no-showing in San Diego will garner plenty of buzz, but the truth of the matter is that the club did not have anything close to enough firepower in its bullpen to present any belief that a World Series run was on the table.

Chicago entered the postseason with three starting pitchers and another seven relievers on the injured list. The writing was very clearly on the wall that the Cubs' fun run, which included a historic campaign from Crow-Armstrong, was due to come to an aggressive halt.

OXFORD, Miss. – Two Oxford, Mississippi vape store clerks are facing federal drug charges after investigators say they traced purchases made by two University of Mississippi students before their deaths, according to court documents detailing.

Yahya Mohamed Mosleh and Islam Yahya Mosleh are each charged with possession with intent to distribute a controlled substance, the documents show. 

According to a DEA affidavit, bank records linked Aidan Hamilton to purchases at Puffs Vape Tobacco & Beer and Robert Strang to Express Mart #7 before investigators recovered similar suspected kratom products at both death scenes. Authorities also describe undercover purchases and the seizure of more than 500 suspected kratom-related products from the Oxford vape shop.

The affidavit dated Sept. 25 says investigators were still awaiting toxicology results from the medical examiner at the time.

The charges come as officials await the toxicology results from the deaths of Ole Miss students Aidan Hamilton, 18, and Robert Strang, 20. Both students were found dead with similar packages of synthetic kratom found to be in their possession, court documents say. The Mosleh's aren't accused in either deaths.

Packaging on the kratom items found near both men were labeled "Smax, Pseudo-DHM" tablets, which is a "Kratom like substance at gas stations or tobacco shops" that people buy for the "narcotic like effect," according to the court documents.

In September, Hamilton made multiple purchases at Puffs Vape, Tobacco and Beer Store in Oxford, where employees Yahya Mohamed Mosleh, 51, and Islam Mohamed, 18, were arrested Friday on a state-level charge of possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute, according to officials. Court documents did not establish that the kratom discovered near Hamilton at the time of his death originated from that store. One of those purchases occurred the day before Hamilton was found dead.

According to court records, a confidential law enforcement informant visited Puffs Vape, Tobacco and Beer Store and inquired whether the store carried "7 O Kratom based pills." A store clerk responded "yes," then opened a drawer beneath the register and produced a package of kratom.

Mosleh allegedly told the informant to "be quiet" about the pills and to be careful taking them because "people were dying from them."

Over 500 units of kratom was seized from the vape store along with THC cartridges, gummies, pre rolls, and other suspected THC substances.

Fox News' Samantha Daigle contributed to this report.

Another year, another miserable first round playoff exit for the Boston Red Sox.

Gone are the days of 2004 (and 2007, 2013 and 2018). After owning the New York Yankees — and baseball — for the better part of 15 years, the Red Sox have lost their grip on their rival, and the league.

Speaking of grip ...

Fans spent the night digging into Boston's Game 2 starter, Sonny Gray, after images of the Red Sox pitcher's neck went viral on social media after ... something ... appeared to caked onto the back of it during the latter stages of last night's start.

That's right. As if the Red Sox didn't just embarrass themselves enough on national TV for two straight nights, we now have cheating allegations flying as the organization limps into the offseason on quite possibly the most sour note of all time.

Take a look, and judge for yourselves:

Thoughts? First impressions?

Look, I've watched Sonny Gray all season. The guy has been touching his neck like that since the first pitch in Cincinnati back in March. That alone means nothing to me, because it's just what he does.

It's also important to note that this stuff on Gray's neck didn't appear at all until the fifth inning, best I can tell. Doesn't mean it wasn't there, but it just wasn't at all an "issue" until the final few batters of Gray's outing.

Obviously, fans are convinced it was pine tar. Even Jomboy — the media company MLB bought a stake in last summer — put out that long video accusing Gray of using "sticky stuff."

By the way, that's pretty rich coming from a VERY FAIR AND BALANCED outlet like Jomboy, which is made up of 90% Yankees fans.

Glad MLB partnered with them! But that's neither here nor there.

I'm not telling you Gray had pine tar on the back of his neck or not. He's a 36-year-old veteran who is probably going to retire here in a few days. At least that's what he's hinted at this season. He's most likely done.

Why would he risk this in what could be his final big league start? No idea. Doesn't make a ton of sense to me.

These pitchers nowadays are also patted down like they're going through a TSA line after every single inning. It's not exactly as simple to pull off as it was a decade ago when this stuff was all over the sport. That's sort of the point.

Not saying it wasn't something on his neck, just saying it probably deserves a little more context. Gray never addressed what was on his neck in the postgame press conference with reporters and umpires never raised eyebrows about what was there.

And if it was pine tar, perhaps Red Sox manager Chad Tracy should've just left Gray in there instead of yanking him at 70 pitches and turning it over to a bullpen that promptly got shelled?

He seemed to be doing just fine, skip!

"F--- them picks," Los Angeles Rams general manager Les Snead once wore on a T-shirt as the team celebrated a Super Bowl championship in 2022.

The Dallas Cowboys appeared to have taken a shine to the mantra as team owner Jerry Jones goes all in to get his team back to glory.

The Cowboys agreed to trade a 2027 sixth-round pick and a 2028 second-round pick to the Pittsburgh Steelers for cornerback Joey Porter Jr., early Thursday, according to multiple reports. The team later confirmed the deal.

Porter was dealing with a back issue and a contentious contract negotiation with the Steelers, which led to the inevitable trade three weeks into the 2026 regular season. He had an interception, 52 tackles and a sack last season.

"Here I come ... Dallas," Porter wrote on his Instagram Stories, confirming a deal was in place.

Porter was inactive for the first three Steelers games of the season. He had already been ruled out for Pittsburgh’s Thursday night game against the Cleveland Browns.

Jones had already made clear in the offseason he was willing to give up draft capital to reshape his roster. Though the team didn’t pull the trigger on a trade for Las Vegas Raiders star Maxx Crosby when they seemingly had the chance, the Cowboys went out and got a whale to bolster their secondary.

He told 105.3 The Fan in September the team was "in play" to make another trade with a focus on the defensive side of the ball. The trade came weeks later, but better late than never.

Dallas has already allowed an average of 387 yards per game – third-worst in the league above the Detroit Lions and Indianapolis Colts. They head into Week 4 with a point differential of plus-6, but have losses to the New York Giants and Baltimore Ravens already on their docket.

The Cowboys have wheeled and dealt over the last 13 months or so.

Dallas traded Micah Parsons right before the start of the 2025 season to the Green Bay Packers for Kenny Clark and some draft picks. The Cowboys then used picks to trade for Quinnen Williams, who was with the New York Jets, during the season.

Now, there’s no excuse.

Jones had a little extra pep in his step after the team beat the Washington Commanders in Week 2. Everyone knows the 83-year-old billionaire is willing to do what it takes to get one more Super Bowl. Porter is another piece to make those dreams come true.

Scientists recently discovered traces of an ancient disease in an unlikely place: the pages of a 1,000-year-old gospel book.

The discovery, which centered on the York Gospels, was announced by University College Dublin (UCD) in early September.

In a study recently published in Science Advances, UCD researchers traced thousands of years of evolution of the sheeppox virus using ancient DNA preserved in manuscripts and animal remains.

The highly contagious disease affects sheep but is not known to infect humans. Researchers detected its DNA in the animal skins used to make parchment, according to the university.

The York Gospels were written in Canterbury in the late 900s by Anglo-Saxon scribes and were later brought to York Minster — where they've been housed for centuries.

Unexpectedly, researchers found traces of sheeppox virus on parchment made from calfskin and goatskin, suggesting either cross-species infections or contamination during the parchment-making process.

Comparing the manuscripts with DNA recovered from Bronze Age sheep teeth, researchers found that sheeppox has plagued livestock for over 3,700 years.

In a statement, UCD described the York Gospels as a "biological time capsule" that preserved evidence of the virus for centuries.

"The research reveals that sheeppox has threatened livestock for more than 3,700 years," the university said.

"Unlike other skeletal material, teeth can preserve genetic evidence of infection over thousands of years, providing a valuable record of past outbreaks."

Sheeppox can spread rapidly through flocks and can be deadly, particularly for young animals — making outbreaks a potentially serious threat to livestock-dependent communities.

"A highly contagious disease, sheeppox spreads rapidly and can affect large portions of a flock in a short time," UCD said.

"The disease is particularly dangerous because it can cause very high mortality rates, especially in young animals, and dramatically reduce productivity by damaging wool, meat and milk yields."

Louis L'Hôte, a Ph.D. candidate at UCD who was the lead author of the study, told university officials that the discovery shows parchment can preserve traces of animal pathogen DNA for centuries.

"It is possible that archives and libraries around the world also contain the genetic traces of disease outbreaks in animals in the past," said L'Hôte.

"These genomes help us understand how these pathogens evolved and how they affected past societies — such as sheeppox virus, which we show has been affecting Eurasian sheep herds for at least three-and-a-half millennia."

L'Hôte added that the pathogen remains a threat today — and that studying its ancient DNA could help researchers better understand how to eradicate it.

"People around the world are still fighting against this pathogen — there is currently an outbreak of sheeppox in Greece, causing much economic damage," he said.

"We find that unlike the smallpox virus, the sheeppox virus genome was very stable over the last few millennia," he added.

"This might mean that genetic changes before this point were very important to how the sheeppox virus evolved to infect its host, which may help us fight the pathogen in the future," he added.

Fox News Digital reached out to L'Hôte for further comment and insight. 

A growing number of ancient DNA discoveries have shed new light on diseases that afflicted humans and animals centuries ago.

Earlier this year, scientists discovered smallpox DNA in centuries-old Chilean mummies — providing the first evidence of the disease in that part of South America during the early colonial period.

At Yale, researchers analyzed ancient DNA from a 16th-century Italian ruler and found evidence that he died of malaria, helping resolve a centuries-old mystery surrounding his sudden death.

Netanyahu praises heroic bystander for preventing ‘another 9/11’

Iran leaders 'overstayed their welcome' in US after talks stalled

 GOP senator joins push for AI liability  

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Think about what you would be most upset to lose if something happened to your computer. For me, it would be the photos and videos you cannot replace. But your computer may also hold years of tax returns, medical records, scanned IDs, insurance paperwork, legal documents and other files you would hate to suddenly lose access to.

That is exactly what makes ransomware so damaging. It can lock or encrypt files so you can no longer open them, then the attacker demands money to give you access again. Even if you pay, there is no guarantee you will get everything back. By the time a ransom message appears on your screen, a lot of the damage may already be done.

The smarter move is to prepare before that ever happens. Here are the steps I would take to protect the files you care about most and make recovery a lot easier if ransomware ever hits.

Our free CyberGuy LIVE class has ended, but you can still watch the full replay. Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson walks you through five practical ways AI can help you organize your health history, remember important appointment details, understand complicated medical information, research prescriptions and prepare smarter questions for your doctor. No technical experience is needed.

Watch the free replay + downloadable checklist now at

Before choosing a backup method, make a short list of your most important files. You do not have to organize your entire computer in one afternoon. Start with family photos and videos, recent tax returns, medical and insurance records, passports or scanned IDs, mortgage or lease documents, wills, financial statements and work or creative projects. Include files stored in your Downloads, Desktop and Documents folders if they are important to you.

Give files clear names and place them in easy-to-find folders. For example, you might create folders called "Taxes," "Medical," "Home," "Family Photos" and "Important IDs." This makes it easier to back up the right material and find it later. Avoid keeping the only copy of a document in an email inbox, on a phone or inside a single computer folder. Those locations may be convenient, but they should not be your entire backup strategy.

A backup is another copy of a file stored somewhere else. If your computer fails, is stolen or becomes infected, you have a way to recover your information. One commonly recommended approach is the 3-2-1 backup strategy: keep three copies of important data on two different types of storage, with at least one copy kept somewhere separate from your main device or location. For many households, a practical setup might include the files on your computer, a regularly updated external drive and a trusted cloud backup or storage service.

Keep an external backup drive disconnected when you are not using it. If it remains attached to an infected computer, ransomware may be able to reach files on that drive too. Cloud services can add another layer between your files and your computer. Before relying on one, check what it covers, how much storage is included and how file restoration works. Also remember that cloud storage and cloud backup are not always the same thing. A storage service may sync changes across devices, while a backup service may provide separate copies or previous versions that can help with recovery.

Automatic backups are helpful because you do not have to remember to run them every week. But an automatic backup does you little good if you cannot restore anything from it. Choose a few files occasionally and confirm that they appear in your backup location. Then try restoring a copy to a different folder. This can uncover problems with permissions, file selection or an expired account before you are dealing with an emergency. Protect backup and cloud-storage accounts with strong, unique passwords and multifactor authentication. Multifactor authentication requires another form of verification beyond your password and can make it harder for someone to get into your account if your password is compromised.

Pay attention to the date of your most recent successful backup. A backup that has not run for months may be missing your newest family photos, tax records or work. Also look at whether your service keeps previous versions of files. Version history can be useful if something is accidentally deleted, overwritten or encrypted. Check your provider's retention and recovery policies so you know how far back you can restore files.

Ransomware can start with a deceptive email, text message, website, attachment or download. A few habits can help reduce the chances of letting it onto your computer in the first place:

If files suddenly will not open, filenames or extensions have changed or a ransom message appears, act quickly. What you do next can help limit the damage and protect any clean backups you still have.

Disconnect the computer from Wi-Fi and unplug its Ethernet cable if one is connected. This can help stop ransomware from reaching shared drives, other computers or network resources. Also, disconnect external hard drives or other backup storage if you can do so safely. If you cannot disconnect the affected computer from the network, powering it down may help stop further spread. Disconnecting it first is preferable because shutting down the computer can erase information from memory that may be useful during an investigation.

Do not start deleting encrypted files or the ransom note. They may contain information that helps identify the ransomware involved. If a ransom message is displayed, take a photo of it with another device so you have a record of what appeared on the screen. Do not open additional suspicious files, install random recovery programs or follow instructions in the ransom note without first getting professional guidance.

Paying does not guarantee that you will receive a working decryption key or get your files back. The FBI does not support paying ransomware demands and recommends that victims report ransomware incidents.

If this is a personal computer, contact your security provider or a reputable computer-repair or cybersecurity professional. You can also report ransomware to the FBI through the Internet Crime Complaint Center at IC3.gov or contact your local FBI field office. If the affected computer belongs to your employer, stop using it and contact your IT or security department immediately. Do not attempt to clean or restore a work computer yourself unless your organization instructs you to do so.

Do not reconnect an external backup drive to an infected computer. The affected device should first be evaluated, cleaned or rebuilt so you do not accidentally expose a good backup to the same ransomware. Once the computer is clean, you can restore files from a backup created before the ransomware infection. If you do not have a usable backup, recovery can be much more difficult. Some ransomware variants have free decryption tools available, but there is no universal tool that can recover every encrypted file.

Strong security software can add another layer between your important files and ransomware. Look for real-time protection that continuously monitors for malware, suspicious downloads and other threats instead of relying only on occasional manual scans.

A firewall can also help monitor network activity and block suspicious connections, while tools such as password managers and scam protection can help reduce other ways attackers may try to get into your accounts or devices.

Security software can lower your risk, but no product can guarantee that every threat will be stopped. That is why it should work alongside safer online habits and a separate, tested backup that gives you another way to recover your files if ransomware gets through.

Get my picks for the best 2026 antivirus protection winners for your Windows, Mac, Android and iOS devices at

You do not need to spend hours managing your cybersecurity. Once a month, set aside a few minutes to check the protections you already have in place.

This routine is not complicated, and it does not require you to become a cybersecurity expert. The goal is to make sure that if ransomware, a device failure or another problem hits, you already have another copy of the files you care about and know how to get them back.

Ransomware can turn years of family photos and important records into files you suddenly cannot open. For me, security software and safer online habits are only part of the protection I want in place. I also want a separate backup of anything I would be devastated to lose, and I want to know that backup actually works before I need it. Spending a few minutes each month checking updates, backups and account security can put you in a much better position if ransomware ever hits.

If ransomware locked your computer today, how confident are you that you could recover the photos and documents you care about most? Let us know by writing to us at

Copyright 2026 CyberGuy.com. All rights reserved.

The NASCAR community is rallying around Hall of Famer Darrell Waltrip.

Waltrip and his family announced in a statement last week that he had been diagnosed with frontotemporal degeneration (FTD), complicated by possible chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). NASCAR star Ross Chastain said Waltrip has been a staple of the sport for Chastain’s entire life.

"Sad. I mean, Darrell's a guy that I've known his name my entire life, and then I've gotten to meet him just a few times. Yeah, it's just, it's sad to think of age and everything that they said the announcement is, I read it just like everybody else did, and I haven't talked to anybody," Chastain told OutKick in a recent interview on behalf of Busch Light.

Chastain said that he and the community will support Waltrip however they can. Waltrip’s family said his condition was likely caused by injuries sustained during his illustrious racing career.

"While this disease will inevitably progress, thankfully it is currently limited to some minor noticeable symptoms," the statement, put out by Darrell and his wife, Stevie, said. "As a result, he will be stepping further away from the public limelight. Be assured, Darrell is happy and otherwise healthy — spending his time with his wife, Stevie, two daughters and his three young grandchildren. We are all grateful for your continued prayer, love and support!"

The family signed the statement with Waltrip’s famous "Boogity! Boogity! Boogity!" catchphrase, which he said as a NASCAR on FOX analyst at the beginning of every race. Waltrip was a broadcaster for 19 years before retiring in 2019.

He has made a few brief appearances in the booth since his retirement, with his most recent appearance coming in March at Darlington, when he delivered his trademark catchphrase.

As a driver, Waltrip is a three-time NASCAR Cup Series champion and a Daytona 500 winner. His 84 Cup Series wins are the fifth-most in NASCAR history.

They don't hate them because they're White. 

A myriad of White fans have supported the WNBA since the league's inception, and they've backed Black players like Maya Moore, Lisa Leslie and Sheryl Swoopes with the same enthusiasm as they have White players like Sue Bird, Diana Taurasi, and Lauren Jackson.

They don't hate them because they're "new," either. Players and media all want to see the league grow because it puts more money in their pockets or eyeballs on their stories.

No, the reason there is such contempt for Indiana Fever fans — who seem to endure a new slight or attack every week — is for one reason: They're viewed as conservative.

Former ESPN anchor Cari Champion put it about as plainly as possible in a podcast a couple weeks back when she said Fever star Caitlin Clark is "an avatar for middle America" and represents a fan base that "wants to spread hate." Translation: People who live in live flyover states are likely to be as backward as they are bigoted.

A couple months earlier, CNN contributor Leah Asmelash wrote a column entitled: "How the right wing decided to care about women's basketball in Indiana," in which she zeroed in on conservatives' support for Clark and fellow Fever guard Sophie Cunningham.

Before that, the Guardian's Manny Fidel published a piece entitled "The right's fury over Caitlin Clark is about everything except Caitlin Clark," with Fidel noting how "politicians, pundits and fans from across the right decried the decision" of Clark being left off the Olympic team. How he knew that the fans upset with the snub were on the right is unclear. That has simply become the assumption.

First off, there is no way to know whether the majority of Fever fans are conservative or not. It's likely that most of them have simply been lured in by the two most popular players in the WNBA. One is Clark, who built an unprecedented fan base during her time at Iowa, where she was half Magic Johnson and half Steph Curry — pulling up from 28 feet several times per game while leading the nation in scoring and assists three times. The other is Cunningham, who, in addition to having end-your-marriage looks, is as effervescent and engaging as anyone in the sport. Her devoted following preceded any political stances she took.

Nevertheless, these players' fans have been labeled "right wing," and that has predictable consequences in a league that overwhelmingly leans the other way.

The most recent example, of course, is Aces forward A'ja Wilson furiously charging toward a Fever fan in the fourth quarter of Tuesday's playoff game in Indiana after he (gasp!) pointed at her and said "that (foul) is on you. As OutKick's Dan Zaksheske pointed out, none of the announcers or pundits on the Amazon Prime broadcast came to the fan's defense, and it was Wilson who later said that she was disrespected.

This seems to keep happening, evidence be damned. In August, Aces guard Jackie Young had two fans removed from their seats at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis for "chirping all game," but an investigation determined that the fans hadn't violated any code of conduct.

Last year, then-Chicago Sky forward Angel Reese claimed Fever fans hurled racist comments her way, but again, an investigation yielded no proof. And in 2024, then-Mercury center Brittney Griner said "I don't appreciate the new fans that sit there and yell racial slurs at myself, my teammates and the people they play against."

We know what "new" fans she was talking about, but there wasn't a morsel of evidence backing up her words.

Unsurprisingly, no player, coach or mainstream media member has challenged any of these narratives. Why? Because they desperately want these so-called right-wing fans to be the villains. And when the evidence doesn't cooperate, it threatens their worldview and causes considerable consternation.

It's sort of like when the Mueller report failed to establish criminal collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. How many anti-Trumpers saw that and went "phew! The president isn't conspiring with a hostile foreign power!"? Approximately zero. Because they were seeking affirmation, not information.

The WNBA is a league in which coaches, such as Cheryl Reeve, say that those who want to separate biological males and females in sports "don't want transgender people to exist." It's an organization in which players such as Wilson and DiJonai Carrington decry "white privilege." And a good chunk of the media who cover them walk in lockstep with their ideology.

In their minds, fans ignoring such politics aren't everyday people who just want to watch hoops. They're deplorables.

Perhaps the most egregious tweet regarding this matter came from USA Today writer Prince J. Grimes, who introduced his column Tuesday by writing "You can say A'ja Wilson overreacted, but in a split second of looking up, she perceived a fan's forward movement as a threat. In the context of everything with that fanbase, I can't blame her."

No doubt there's a great deal of hate surrounding Fever fans. But it's not coming from them —it's coming toward them.

Piers Morgan says Charles Spencer's public apology isn't enough.

The British broadcaster told Fox News Digital he is still pursuing legal action over what he calls defamatory passages in Spencer's memoir, "Swan Song: Diana, My Sister," even after Spencer acknowledged a factual error and apologized.

"He's published an egregious defamatory lie about me, and that lie remains in copies of the book being sold all over the world, including the United States," Morgan told Fox News Digital. "Although he's rushed out an apology and admitted that it was completely untrue what he said about me, he hasn't removed it from the book."

"My legal team has been in touch with him and his publishers demanding that they remove the book from sale and reissue the book without the offending pages," Morgan said. "It's not just a one-off reference. We're talking about several pages here."

Spencer denied that Morgan had sued him, prompting Morgan to release correspondence from his lawyers showing they had contacted Spencer and his publisher, The Sun reported.

Morgan wants any damages paid to The King's Trust, a youth charity King Charles III founded in 1976 as the Prince of Wales.

Fox News Digital reached out to Penguin Press, the U.S. publisher of "Swan Song," and Althorp for comment.

The book incorrectly identifies Morgan as the editor of the Daily Mirror when Mirror Group newspapers published photographs of Diana exercising in a gym in November 1993, People magazine reported. According to the outlet, Morgan was working at The Sun at the time and didn't become editor of the Daily Mirror until 1995.

Spencer acknowledged the error but stood by his recollection that Morgan was "surly and annoyed" when Spencer called Morgan to tell him he was not welcome at Diana's 1997 funeral.

"Earl Spencer's account of his conversation with Piers Morgan is accurate," read a statement published by People magazine. "Mr. Morgan was surly and annoyed when Earl Spencer called personally to tell him that he was not welcome at his sister's funeral."

"The book then records Earl Spencer's assumption that Mr. Morgan's response was because he was editor of the Daily Mirror when the Mirror Group had published highly intrusive photographs of Princess Diana at the gym," the statement continued.

"As a historian, accuracy is important to Earl Spencer. He therefore wishes to clarify that his assumption was incorrect. Earl Spencer apologizes to Mr. Morgan for this error."

People reported that the passage will be corrected in the second edition of "Swan Song." Spencer has not withdrawn his account of the conversation itself, only his mistaken assumption that Morgan was editor of the Daily Mirror at the time.

Morgan said the error casts doubt on the accuracy of other claims in the memoir, including Spencer's account of what King Charles allegedly said after Diana's death.

"He's claiming to be a historian," Morgan said. "He says he's written this as a work of historical record to set the record straight about his sister, Princess Diana, one of the most talked-about people, obviously, of modern times. But he makes incredibly incendiary allegations against our now-king, Prince Charles, in which he claims that within hours of Diana dying, he spoke to Prince Charles on the phone and Prince Charles sounded as giddy as a lottery winner with excitement that Diana had died."

"It's hard to imagine a more disgusting thing to say," Morgan said. "I don't believe for a moment that Charles was like that. In fact, I had Paul Burrell, Diana's former butler, on my show last week saying that he saw the prince in Paris within hours of Diana dying and the man was a broken man. [He] was utterly grief-stricken. So why this matters about what happened to me is that people have been questioning the accuracy of his memory of these phone calls with King Charles."

In the book, Spencer recalled a conversation with then-Prince Charles about whether Diana's sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, then 15 and 12, would walk behind her coffin during the funeral procession. Spencer said a royal aide informed him about the plan and that he opposed it. Charles then called Spencer, leading to what Spencer described as a heated exchange.

"Prince Charles continued his stream of anger, without me interrupting," Spencer wrote. "Then he stopped. I assumed the pause signaled an effort to bring himself under control, but then he unleashed down the phone what I have always taken to be his pent-up contempt for Diana, and his horror that the world was so bowled over by her death. 'Rest assured,' he hissed, 'we'll forget her soon enough!'"

Spencer wrote that he was "so stunned" that he took a few seconds before replying, "I can't believe you just said that," and hanging up.

A Buckingham Palace spokesperson said in a statement, "While we do not comment on books as a matter of principle, His Majesty is mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and color memory in ways others do not recognize, even many years after such a loss."

A palace spokesperson told Fox News Digital they had no further comment.

Spencer has stood by the account, telling the BBC, "I'm telling the truth."

Morgan rejected Spencer's account.

"I can't imagine for a moment [the king] would say that about the mother of his children," Morgan said. "This goes to the heart of the credibility of the book. If he can get something so grotesquely wrong about me over several pages, which is so easy to check and prove he got it wrong, then why should we believe him about anything he says about King Charles? That's why it matters."

Morgan also disputes Spencer's recollection of their phone call.

"His account of how he did that and how I was with him is completely untrue," Morgan said. "He says that I was snarling, I was rude, I was all these things. I would simply ask people, how realistic is that? This guy's just lost his sister. Is it likely that I, as a newspaper editor who was very friendly with Diana, friendly with her mother and Earl Spencer's mother, that I would treat a family member in a snarling or rude manner? I don’t think it is."

"At the end of the call, I said to him that I would like him to pass on my deepest condolences to his mother, who I knew very well. And he said he would do that and thanked me. That's not a snarly, rude conversation."

Morgan said he wrote about the phone call in his 2005 book, "The Insider."

"I put it to people that if he's so wrong about the tone of my conversation with him that week, then why should we believe him when he says that Charles was giddy with excitement?"

Spencer told People magazine during an interview at Althorp that his duty as a historian is "to lay down facts."

"And that's what I'm doing," he told the outlet. "There's no viciousness. I'm not resentful or bitter or any of those things."

Spencer said his priority was to honor his sister.

"The central person, the only one that really matters, is Diana," he said.

America's birthrate has fallen to just 1.57 births per woman, a level that one Christian leader warns could reshape the nation's future if the trend continues.

"For every 200 people in a population, they'll be replaced by only 157," Communio founder and President J.P. De Gance told Fox News Digital. "We're at the cusp of a major civilizational bottleneck."

Now, Communio is launching a nationwide "Family and Civilization" campaign, obtained first by Fox News Digital, urging churches to take a more active role in strengthening marriages and families.

The initiative argues that churches, not government, have historically helped rebuild family life during periods of societal decline and can do so again by encouraging healthy relationships before they reach crisis.

"Our message to churches is we should be helping," De Gance said. "Our young people know this, right? We shouldn't be talking to our kids more frequently about a great college, a great career over and above. These are good things, but they shouldn't be spoken of in exclusion to seeking and being intentional about relationships."

According to De Gance, the loneliest and unhappiest segment of the population are unmarried young people.

"And the reality is, the loneliest people in America right now are not the elderly and are not the widow, it's the unmarried in their 30s are disproportionately the most likely to say that they're lonely," De Gance said. "And if parents understood that this means that their kids are more likely to die 15 years shorter — that's what the public health data says — they would be probably sharing a different message to their kids in youth, in high school, in those college years and to be intentional with their relationships in their 20s."

In addition to churches encouraging marriage, De Gance said it is also on parents to encourage their children, as marriage is often the last thing prioritized when it comes to a child’s future career and life decisions.

"Nine out of 10 parents say it's important that their kids have a fulfilling career, but only 2 in 10 or 1 in 5 parents say it's important that their kids get married, and only 1 in 5 say it's important that their kids have children, right," De Gance said. 

"Now the reality is, our kids, our young people, are actually doing what they're being taught to do. That they're seeking material well-being over and above these enduring, lifelong goods of close connection through marriage and family. What we're hoping to do is inspire churches to cast vision positively around marriage and family," he said.

A 2023 study from Pew Research found nearly half the parents who responded to the survey said that it is not very important or not important at all to them for their kids to marry, or even have kids themselves. 

Being financially independent, having careers, and earning a college degree ranked much higher for parents than their kids getting married or having children. 

Part of their ask to churches and pastors, De Gance said, is to encourage churches to talk about marriage more.

"Look, 85% of all churches spend nothing in the area of marriage and relationship ministry. Ninety-one percent have nothing for singles," DeGance said. 

"But one thing they can do this Sunday and in future Sundays is always talk aspirationally, preach aspirationally about the beauty of Christian marriage, help folks, aspire to it, lay out that great mystery that the Apostle Paul talks about in Ephesians 5, that human marriage is actually the symbol, the sign of Christ's sacrificial love for his bride, the church? And that's something a church can do right now, so that our young people are always thinking about it. And aspire to it, and then provide the practical guidance to be able to seek it out," he said.

Another thing churches can do, De Gance said, is to bring young people together, both inside and outside of church, in order to help spur more marriages.

"We can become a lot more strategic after that, where we're creating environments where people meet in real life. We should not abdicate our responsibility to technology and dating apps, right," he said. 

"Church should be a venue where young people meet, form community, have fun outside of spiritual and faith formation. The local church used to be the hub for civic life. And it's our message that given the loneliness and isolation, the church is perfectly positioned, to be that hub once again."

He said he holds on to hope that society will be reminded of the beauty of marriage by witnessing it.

"There's an old saying in economics, ‘A trend that can't go on forever, won't,’ and the reality is, our current decline isn't going to continue," De Gance said. 

"At some point, there will be a major rebound. I'm filled with hope, and I'm also an optimist that those who grasp the great good of married life and seek the happiness that's most frequently found in it. These are the folks that are most likely to marry, the most likely to have kids. It's going to bring about a significant renewal and revival in the West. We think that the church can accelerate that."

The legacy media have decided we are facing mankind’s doom. The phrase "AI apocalypse" crops up on numerous news sites, from Reuters to The Economist. Other outlets have gone with "AI doomsday" or other formulations that look like they come from Revelation.

Journalists aren’t entirely to blame, either. The problem is being spammed into our culture by a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) industry experts, conspiracy theorists, and Chinese-sponsored social media. Turn to CNN, and it asks, "Will AI really kill everyone? How, exactly?" Meanwhile, Axios writes, "Here's how AI could kill us all (if the worst fears come true)." Scared? That’s the goal.

Here’s a sentence from CNN that sums up pretty much every warning you can read anywhere: "‘It really is about literally everyone on the planet dying, like the last human drawing the last breath,’ said Nate Soares, the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and the coauthor of ‘If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All.’"

Subtle.

But it’s also very familiar. It reads like every apocalyptic warning we’ve had in the past 50 years. Let’s recap: Killer bees (at least that got us some classic "Saturday Night Live" John Belushi humor), then murder hornets, the more recent version. Supervolcanoes or the earthquake that will sink California into the sea. Fracking, meteors, pandemics (ahem!), economic collapse, space aliens and lots more.

The media especially love stories tied to weather because those are good year-round. We’ve had global cooling (1970s), global warming, or the Al Gore-inspired version called "climate change." That’s good no matter what happens. Go back to the late 1800s, and the press warned about global cooling. Then it warned about warming in the 1930s during the Dust Bowl. Then the Cold War brought us cooling, and so on. A 1975 New York Times piece cautioned, "Scientists Ponder Why World's Climate Is Changing: A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable." I guess it was pretty evitable, and, yes, that’s a word. (Thank you, Susie Dent.)

We even had pollution, DDT and the hole in the ozone layer as well. None of those make the news much now because we have moved on to other timely crises. 

Those of us who follow the media are used to all this. It all comes from the Fear Industrial Complex. That’s a mixture of governments, NGOs, politicians, activists, journalists and business people who want us all scared. Because scared people don’t do what we want. We do what they want. And they don’t want us to ask questions while we do it.

Fund the cause! Support the issue! Don’t you care about ______? How dare you?

Oh, wait, I know where I heard that last line before.

"Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg," as she is sometimes described, popularized it. No one embodies the flexible nature of the fear freakout better than she does. She broke onto the scene in her native land protesting climate change. She famously rebuked the U.N. Climate Summit with the scolding quote, "How dare you?" Then, when that drifted from the news, she took up "Free Palestine," even appearing on one of the phony boat flotillas to Gaza and bashing Israel and anyone who doesn’t agree with her. Mark my words, she’ll be whining about AI soon enough. If you are a leftist activist, you need to keep your name in the news on whatever the protest du jour is.

It doesn’t even matter whether the cause of the day is real or not. Look at our ever-changing climate. The press is so convinced it is right about global warming that it doesn’t report when it is wrong. Former CBS News anchor Scott Pelley, who used to cover the environment, actually compared climate change skeptics to Holocaust deniers and claimed, "There comes a point in journalism where striving for balance becomes irresponsible." That’s from 2006, around the time of former Vice President Gore’s "An Inconvenient Truth." Twenty years later, we are still alive … inconveniently.

For those in the Fear Industrial Complex, that lack of balance is an everyday occurrence, moving from one fear-inducing cataclysm to another. And if you don’t go along, you are, as Pelley put it, a "denier." Yet, back in May, even the New York Times ended up reporting, "Why Scientists Retired the Dire Climate Scenario Used for Over a Decade." Turns out, the claims were overblown. I’m not surprised.

All of this is reminiscent of the Michael Crichton book "State of Fear." I say "book" because it was politically incorrect, so it never got a movie treatment, even though adaptations of his works have brought in billions of dollars, including "Jurassic Park," "Westworld" and "The Andromeda Strain." In "State of Fear," environmental extremists cause disasters and blame them on climate change.

One character in the book made a point I will never forget: "Industrialized nations provide their citizens with unprecedented safety, health, and comfort. Average life spans increased fifty percent in the last century. Yet modern people live in abject fear. They are afraid of strangers, of disease, of crime, of the environment. They are afraid of the homes they live in, the food they eat, the technology that surrounds them."

Sure, some of this can be blamed on a media tendency to go with, "If it bleeds, it leads." But it’s a bad day when our science — on AI, climate, robots, and more — is being decided by science fiction. Speaking as a sci-fi author, leave that territory to us. You buy our books, so we can thrill, entertain, and, yes, even scare you. That’s not the job of journalism.

Remember that the next time you read about the end of the world.

About one in eight new cancer cases worldwide in 2024 — 2.3 million cases — have been linked to infections, according to a new analysis from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).

The researchers identified 12 specific infections that were linked to human cancer cases, including Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori), human papillomavirus (HPV), hepatitis B virus (HBV), hepatitis C virus (HCV), Epstein–Barr virus (EBV), Kaposi sarcoma-associated herpesvirus, Schistosoma haematobium, HTLV-1, Opisthorchis viverrini, Clonorchis sinensis, Merkel cell polyomavirus and HIV.

The following five infections contributed to nearly all the global cases.

"The findings underscore the major role that infection control can play in reducing the global cancer burden," said study co-author Dr. Harriet Rumgay, a scientist in the Cancer Surveillance Branch at IARC, in a press release.

"Despite progress in vaccination and screening, infection-related cancers remain a major global challenge, with the burden falling disproportionately on populations in low- and middle-income countries."

The researchers say many of these cancers could have been prevented through vaccination, treatment or screenings.

The study, conducted in France, analyzed cancer data from 2024. The findings were published in The Lancet Oncology on Sept. 28.

The study had several limitations, the researchers acknowledged.

Because the study used population-level estimates rather than tracking individual patients over time, the results depended on the quality of available cancer data in each country.

Additionally, it only included infections already proven to cause cancer, so the total impact could be underestimated.

"We know that there are certain infections that we are exposed to over our lifetime that may result in an increased risk of certain cancers," Dr. Joshua Cohen, medical director of the Gynecologic Cancer Program of City of Hope Orange County in Irvine, California, told Fox News Digital.

"However, most cancers are not caused by infection."

HPV is one of the most common drivers of cancers that arise along the rectum, vagina or cervix, as well as the oropharynx (back of the throat), according to Cohen, who was not involved in the study.

"Eighty percent of the population has been exposed to certain types of HPV strains," he said. "About 40,000 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with these cancers each year."

For most people who are exposed to HPV, the body will clear the virus on its own, Cohen said.

"We don't know why some patients' immune systems allow them to clear the HPV infection and some don't."

Another very common cancer, although less so in the U.S., is gastric cancer, he noted, which is linked to H. Pylori, an infection in the stomach.

"We don't screen everybody for H. pylori in the U.S. — it's more common in other parts of the world, like Southeast Asia."

However, those who have peptic ulcer disease or significant epigastric pain should talk with a gastroenterologist about getting screened and treated for H. pylori, the doctor advised.

There are things people can do to reduce the risk of infection-related cancers, according to Cohen.

"As a patient, the most important thing is to think about your health, what you can do to prevent yourself from developing these infections or your family," he said.

"And if you do have one of these infections, what can you do to reduce your risk of developing a subsequent cancer?"

Cohen emphasized that Americans have access to an HPV vaccination that can help prevent many of these infections.

"If you’re under the age of 45 and you've not had an HPV vaccination, there is various good safety data that you should get vaccinated," he said. "That will cover, at least in the U.S., most risks regarding oropharyngeal cancers, vaginal cancers, cervical cancers, penile cancers and anal cancers."

The doctor reiterated that developing one of the listed infections doesn’t necessarily mean someone will develop cancer.

"The vast majority of patients who have an HPV infection or H. Pylori, or even hepatitis B or C, are not going to develop cancer," he said.

But because these infections have been associated with certain cancers, it’s important to seek treatment for them.

Symptoms such as epigastric pain (pain or discomfort in the upper middle part of your abdomen), acid reflux, abnormal vaginal bleeding or pain with swallowing could be related to medical conditions that may be associated with certain infections or cancer, the doctor warned.

"There are steps we can take as doctors to keep you safe and hopefully reduce the risk of developing cancer for those that have had an infection," Cohen added.

The Federal Aviation Administration broke its all-time record for air traffic controller hiring this year, bringing on 2,235 trainees as the agency works to reverse years of staffing shortages across the nation.

The FAA surpassed its fiscal year 2026 goal of hiring 2,200 air traffic controller trainees, marking the most hired in a single fiscal year in agency history, the Department of Transportation told Fox News Digital exclusively.

The agency also reached its highest certified controller staffing level in a decade, with 11,027 certified professional controllers as of Sept. 30, up from 10,694 at the end of fiscal year 2025, according to the DOT.

"We’re recruiting, hiring, and training more air traffic controllers than ever before—and the numbers show it," Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told Fox News Digital.

"Thanks to President Trump, we've shaved months off the hiring pipeline, dramatically expanded our collegiate training programs, and inspired thousands of young gamers to pursue this exciting career," Duffy said. "This is an important milestone, but not the finish line as we work to reverse decades of staffing shortages."

The record comes less than five months after the FAA unveiled an aggressive three-year workforce plan aimed at rebuilding a controller workforce strained by staffing shortages, mandatory overtime and lengthy training timelines.

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford had offered a stark assessment of the problem during congressional testimony last December, warning lawmakers that the agency would "never" reach adequate staffing under its previous structure.

"We’ll never catch up," Bedford said. "The system is designed to be chronically understaffed."

The FAA's 2026-2028 Air Traffic Controller Workforce Plan, first reported by Fox News Digital in May, called for hiring 2,200 controller trainees in fiscal year 2026, 2,300 in fiscal year 2027 and 2,400 in fiscal year 2028.

The agency finished the fiscal year 35 trainees above its first benchmark.

The latest numbers also show growth among controllers who have completed training and become fully certified.

The FAA entered fiscal year 2026 with 10,694 certified professional controllers and ended it with 11,027, a net increase of 333. The agency's workforce plan identifies 12,563 certified professional controllers as the staffing target needed to meet forecast demand.

That leaves the FAA 1,536 certified controllers below its target as it enters fiscal year 2027.

The DOT told Fox News Digital it does not have an exact timeframe for reaching that benchmark, but said the administration is "supercharging" hiring and expanding its Enhanced Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative.

The record follows another major hiring year in fiscal 2025, when the FAA brought on 2,028 controller trainees, its highest total since 2008.

The administration has moved to accelerate the hiring and training pipeline as the FAA contends with retirements and other workforce losses.

The FAA said in its May workforce plan that roughly 4,000 controllers were in the training pipeline at the time, including approximately 1,000 previously certified controllers training at new facilities.

Becoming a fully certified controller can take more than two years for a new hire, depending on the complexity of the facility where they are assigned.

The administration has also worked to retain experienced controllers while accelerating the pipeline for new ones. Nearly 400 retirement-eligible controllers were retained through a new bonus structure, while DOT says changes to the hiring process have shaved more than five months off the time it takes to bring on new recruits.

The FAA has also expanded its Enhanced Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative, allowing qualified graduates of participating college programs to bypass the FAA Academy and report directly to facilities for on-the-job training.

The hiring surge comes as the Trump administration undertakes a broader overhaul of the nation's air traffic control system, backed by $12.5 billion for upgrades including telecommunications infrastructure, new radios and radars, and electronic flight strips. The FAA is also expanding simulator-based training and exploring artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to better manage air traffic demand.

The record-setting year marks the first step in the FAA's three-year hiring push. The agency is targeting another 2,300 controller trainees in fiscal year 2027 and 2,400 in fiscal year 2028.

"This is an important milestone," he said, "but not the finish line."