For the first time in nearly 35 years, a British monarch has addressed a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress.

King Charles III, no doubt sensitive to the recent political friction between the U.S. and Britain over the matter of the war in Iran, noted at the outset Tuesday night that these are “times of great uncertainty, in times of conflict, from Europe to the Middle East, which pose immense challenges for the international community and whose impact is felt in communities the length and breadth of our own countries.”

Charles emphasized, however, that even in such times, it remains clear that America’s and Britain’s destinies are entangled and that the two countries share a special “bond of kinship and identity” that is “irreplaceable and unbreakable.”

After reassuring lawmakers that his presence stateside was not “part of some cunning rearguard action” and lauding the American founding fathers both as “bold and imaginative rebels with a cause” and inheritors “of the British Enlightenment,” Charles hyped the need to build upon and renew the Anglo-American partnership, particularly in the military space.

On the theme of renewal and in an apparent nod to President Donald Trump’s repeated insistence that North Atlantic Treaty Organization members boost their defense spending, Charles noted that the U.K. “has committed to the biggest sustained increase in defense spending since the Cold War.”

RELATED: Pentagon floats ousting Spain from NATO, punishing allies for not toeing the line on Iran

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British Prime Minister Keir Starmer committed last year to spending 2.5% of GDP on core defense by April 2027. The U.K., which spent an estimated 2.3% of GDP on defense in 2024, has since entertained the possibility of increasing spending to 3% in the next Parliament — an increase that Starmer said would be made possible by reductions to aid spending.

Charles, speaking weeks after the Trump administration signaled an interest in pulling the U.S. out of NATO, said the military alliance is as relevant now as it was during the Cold War and “in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when NATO invoked Article Five for the first time.”

The king — who acknowledged that “the commitment and expertise of the United States Armed Forces and its allies lie at the heart of NATO” — suggested further that the alliance was imperative to keep “North Americans and Europeans safe from our common adversaries,” singling out Ukraine as a nation now in need of defense.

Charles closed his speech with an apparent knock at isolationism, stating, “I pray with all my heart that our alliance will continue to defend our shared values with our partners in Europe and the Commonwealth and across the world and that we ignore the clarion calls to become ever more inward-looking.”

The last royal address to Congress was given by Charles’ late mother, Queen Elizabeth II, in the wake of the Gulf War. Elizabeth similarly spoke with interest about nurturing Britain’s “long-standing friendship with the people of the United States.”

“We want to build on that foundation and to do better,” said the queen. “And if the going gets rough, I hope you can still agree with your poet Emerson, who wrote in 1847, ‘I feel, in regard to this aged England, with a kind of instinct, that she sees a little better on a cloudy day, and that, in storm of battle and calamity, she has a secret vigor and a pulse like a cannon.’ You will find us worthy partners, and we are proud to have you as our friends.”

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​Alliance, Britain, British monarch, Congress, Defense spending, Foreign entanglements, Gulf war, International community, Isolationism, King charles, King charles iii, Military, Monarch, Nato, Queen elizabeth ii, Shared values, Speech, United states armed forces, Us congress, War in iran, Politics 

The advocates of enforced age verification promise safe and secure technologies that protect user privacy.

Age verification mechanisms have, they insist, developed sufficiently, users need not fear, and skeptics’ arguments are relics of a bygone time. The newest security protocols, they argue, have rendered the privacy and cybersecurity concerns once attached to age verification outdated.

But promises of what can, theoretically, be done by public policy often founder when implemented — when practical, technological, and human constraints mount a counteroffensive against the best-laid plans of academics’ white papers.

If privacy is to be forfeited, the citizenry can demand evidence that their sacrifice will yield significant benefits, but the data provided so far gives little assurance.

The claims of robust security can be dispensed with: Age verification services routinely succumb to hacks, data breaches, leaks, and sloppy data-management practices. These failures publicize users’ government-issued documentation and other personal information.

The latest case study from the European Union lends no assistance to the advocates of age verification.

Only hours after Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, announced the EU’s new age verification platform, soon to be made available — and mandatory — to the continent, the app proved rotten.

Security consultant Paul Moore, as reported by Politico, claimed to have hacked the app in under two minutes. He found in the application myriad deficiencies, including one that enabled users to evade the verification process altogether. The EU repaired its code, but Moore quickly dismantled the updates.

The EU has stumbled, joining a lengthy list of compromised verification platforms. Count among their number Outabox, AU10TIX, and two third parties employed by Discord. Add to these a breach of IDMerit, which alone compromised 1 billion records of personal data.

In March, hundreds of security and privacy academics signed a letter “call[ing] for a moratorium on [age verification] deployment plans” — at least “until the scientific consensus settles on the benefits and harms” of the technologies in question.

The manifest dangers of age verifications remain unresolved, even as regulators rush to enact mandates that would precondition access to everyday digital services on the user’s willingness to give up sensitive information about himself to vulnerable digital databases.

“Two critical issues have not been addressed: whether age assurance is efficacious and what the potential damages to general security and privacy are,” the letter reads.

Besides the privacy failings, the letter raises another inconvenient question: the efficacy of age-verification regimes. If privacy is to be forfeited, the citizenry can demand evidence that their sacrifice will yield significant benefits, but the data provided so far gives little assurance.

RELATED: The FBI should get a warrant before reading your messages

J. David Ake/Getty Images

The implementation of the Online Safety Act in the United Kingdom was met with a rush of British users resorting to virtual private networks, which allowed them to circumvent the age verification process.

Australia attempted to bar minors from major social media platforms, instituting age verification to effect the mandate. And yet, according to the findings of the Molly Rose Foundation, “three fifths (61%) of [12- to 15-year-olds] who previously held accounts on restricted platforms continue to have access to one or more active accounts.” Moreover, seven in 10 children called it “easy” to dodge the law.

Children are by nature troublemakers and hell-raisers. They carry these qualities — at once endearing and enraging — into the digital world. The government cannot ensure that children remain safe online, because it cannot love or know children as parents can, nor can it monitor children’s operations in the digital world.

Age verification is sold to credulous legislators as the one-size-fits-all fix for a world populated by innumerable young people, diverse in their abilities, proclivities, desires, and weaknesses. As extant age verification mandates demonstrate, noncompliance is, quite literally, at the fingertips of minors enterprising enough to best the regulatory requirements they confront.

No government knows enough about any given child or what he does every day to parry his every thrust. Once more, the responsibility comes home to parents, who must raise and protect their children as vigorously in the digital world as in the physical one.

From one vantage, it seems logical to support enforced age verification. But the technological and human facts of the case reveal the policy’s manifest dangers and scant chances of success.

Traditional child-protection standards lodge primary responsibility for children’s formation and well-being in the family — with parents. The digital world is novel, but human nature is eternal. Even in the digital world, the remedy is to be found at kitchen tables, not in legislatures.

​Age verification, European union, Social media platforms, Personal data, Social media restrictions, Free speech, Censorship, Eu, Opinion & analysis 

A ProPublica investigation portrayed a pregnant mother, Cherise Doyley, as a victim of Florida’s “fetal personhood policies” after she was forced mid-labor into a virtual court hearing and told she would be compelled to undergo a cesarean section if an emergency developed. However, the story, which numerous left-leaning outlets and advocates amplified, overlooked an important detail that Doyley’s doctors claimed sparked the drastic intervention to protect her unborn baby’s life.

A transcript and video of the hearing obtained by Blaze News revealed additional details about the hospital’s decision to alert the state about Doyley’s case.

‘We were concerned that she would not want to act in the best interest of her infant, even if it came to that.’

In Sept. 2024, Doyley, a doula and then-student midwife, arrived overnight via ambulance at the University of Florida Health in Jacksonville after her water broke while over 41 weeks pregnant, according to the hospital’s doctors.

Doyley had been receiving prenatal care from UF Health throughout her pregnancy and had adamantly expressed that she wanted to have a vaginal birth after cesarean section, instead of a fourth C-section.

By her 12th hour of contractions, Doyley was forced to attend a court hearing via Zoom video call from her hospital bed. Joining her on the call were Circuit Court Judge Michael Kalil, lawyers, and hospital staff.

Judge Kalil explained to Doyley that the state had filed an emergency petition requesting that the court order her to undergo a C-section. He called these types of hearings “extraordinary,” noting that such petitions are “infrequently filed.”

The order granting the emergency petition for declaratory judgment explained that the petitioner, the state of Florida, had “a compelling interest in the preservation of the life of an unborn child and the protection of innocent third parties, such as Unborn Child, who may be harmed by the parental refusal to allow or consent to life-saving medical treatment.”

Doyley, who insisted that she had not been notified in advance, repeatedly requested her own legal representation or a patient advocate before proceeding with the hearing. This request was denied after Kalil and the state prosecutor concluded that there is no constitutional right to legal counsel in emergency civil proceedings.

RELATED: The truth about the brain-dead mother giving birth — and why it’s the right choice

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The hearing: What the transcript shows

Arguments in the hearing began with Dr. Erin Burnett, an attending physician at UF Health, detailing Doyley’s medical history, including noting that the pregnant mother had never had a successful vaginal birth in her three prior pregnancies. According to Burnett, these included a failed induction at 42 weeks with her first child, an attempted trial of labor after cesarean with her second that ended in a repeat C-section after a uterine infection with her newborn, requiring a two-week NICU stay, and potential fetal heart rate decelerations during her third labor that also resulted in a C-section. Burnett further testified that Doyley had a “uterine window,” or thinning of the scar tissue from a prior C-section, which increased the risk of uterine rupture.

Burnett acknowledged the risks associated with C-sections and that Doyley had “some very bad experiences” trying to heal from those prior surgeries, including suffering from hematomas that required drains and other complications that impacted her ability to care for her children during her weeks-long recovery.

When Doyley arrived at UF Health around 2:00 a.m., Burnett stated, she was experiencing contractions, had ruptured membranes, and was three centimeters dilated. Burnett assessed that Doyley was unlikely to have a successful vaginal birth because, during her time at the hospital, dilation had progressed only to five centimeters and her contractions had become less frequent. For a successful vaginal delivery, the cervix must fully dilate to 10 centimeters.

Without a C-section, Burnett expressed concern that the unborn child might sustain brain damage or brain bleeds.

“I think the most, or more, concerning thing was her fetus,” Burnett testified. “When she got here, the fetal tracing was much more reassuring. But for the past six to eight hours, the fetus has lost what we call fetal heart rate variability, which … essentially tells you if the baby is getting acidotic or not.”

Burnett claimed the baby’s heart rate had dropped to the 50s, whereas the typical range is in the 110s to 160s. She explained that when the baby’s heart rate returned to normal, it was then that the hospital recommended a C-section, per its protocol, hoping to avoid another potential heart rate drop that could lead to an emergency.

When staff approached Doyley about this, she refused and “made the comment that if her baby dies, so be it,” Burnett alleged.

She stated that Doyley’s alleged comment about her unborn child’s life, which was not mentioned in the ProPublica articles, was what sparked the hospital’s intervention.

“We were concerned that she would not want to act in the best interest of her infant, even if it came to that,” Burnett said.

Jenny Van Ravestein, the then-division director of women’s services at UF Health Jacksonville, reiterated the reason that the hospital decided to intervene. Van Ravestein testified that the “concern from my nurses … and from the physician, I truly believe, was about the welfare of this infant.”

While Van Ravestein was not on site to witness the interaction firsthand, she alleged that “when I was put on speaker [phone] with the patient in her room, she said that the baby could just die, it was okay if the baby just died, she was not going to have a C-section.”

“I heard her say, ‘I’m not gonna have a C-section. If the baby dies, the baby just dies,'” Van Ravestein alleged again a few moments later.

“That, to me, was what was extremely upsetting to my team,” Van Ravestein added.

Transcript and video of the hearing reveal that Doyley did not explicitly deny making the remarks, but did claim they were “taken out of context.”

Referring to Van Ravestein, Doyley told the judge, “She actually was not in the room, so this statement is being taken out of context, which makes sense because she was over the phone. But the statement was in regards to, if it is my life or the baby’s life, the baby’s going to have to die. And I stand on that because I have three other children that I have to take care of.”

Van Ravestein testified that as a result of Doyley’s alleged comments about her infant, the hospital staff reached out to risk management and the hospital insurance program, which instructed her to contact the hospital’s legal team, setting off the chain of events that led the state attorney’s office to file an emergency petition.

While ProPublica’s reporting noted that Van Ravestein said she and her staff were “very concerned about the baby’s welfare,” the outlet did not include her statements about Doyley’s alleged remarks.

When reached for comment about why it did not include these alleged remarks by Doyley, ProPublica told Blaze News, “We stand by our reporting. In the hearing, neither Dr. Burnett nor Jenny Van Ravestein testified that they directly heard Ms. Doyley make that statement, and Ms. Doyley disputes that she said this. It’s secondhand information that has not been substantiated and therefore wasn’t included in the story.”

The State Attorney’s Office confirmed that the hospital reported Doyley’s case partly due to the alleged comments she made about her preborn baby’s life.

“UF Health alerted the State Attorney’s Office that a 41-week, full-term baby was facing grave risk of death without medical intervention,” the State Attorney’s Office told Blaze News. “The mother was refusing that care. In accordance with our legal duty, our office brought the matter before the Circuit Court, which held an evidentiary hearing. After hearing from the mother and medical professionals, the court determined a cesarean delivery was necessary to protect the child’s life and mother’s health.”

“The State Attorney’s Office does not make medical decisions — we ensured the court was presented with the facts so a judge could make his determination under the law,” the office added.

Dr. John Davis, professor and chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Florida College of Medicine, Jacksonville, told Doyley during the hearing that the hospital has been recognized for its low C-section rate and performs them only when required.

“I think I can say … to a reasonable degree of medical certainty, you are not going to be able to deliver vaginally,” Davis testified, stating that it was his understanding that she had never dilated beyond seven centimeters during any of her previous pregnancies.

“The longer this labor goes on, there are increasing likelihood of complications for the baby — infection, brain damage, death — but also increasing risk of complications for the mom, including infection, uterine rupture, and death.”

Doyley’s response and the risks

Several times during the hearing, Doyley stated that she was willing to consent to a C-section in the event of an emergency. Hospital staff on the call acknowledged Doyley’s expressed openness to an emergency surgery.

“Where we were at this morning, where she was refusing regardless, is much different than where we’re at now,” Burnett told the judge.

“I’m very happy that she has consented in the event of an emergency to undergo a C-section. … When we initially kind of initiated all this stuff, she was in a much different state of mind.”

Although Doyley agreed to the C-section in an emergency, she disagreed with the doctor’s evaluation of the urgency of the situation. She argued that the baby’s heart rate was normal and pointed out that the doctor had not checked her dilation status for at least four hours.

“For them to say that I have not made any cervical change and that the baby’s life is in danger without exhausting all options is completely false,” Doyley told the judge. “And I feel it all boils down to people, doctors, thinking that they know and understand my body better than me.”

She also stated: “I am concerned about the well-being of my child, but at the end of the day with my background, I can read a trace just like they can. And there’s nothing that is saying that this is an emergency situation that I have to be rushed into a C-section within a hour.”

Doyley emphasized that the risks associated with a C-section are significantly higher than those of a vaginal birth and that she had “a major complication” with each of her prior C-sections.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which sets guidelines for pregnancy and birth care, strongly endorses VBAC for patients with one prior C-section and considers it reasonable to offer the option for those with two. However, it does not outright endorse or oppose VBAC for women who have undergone three or more prior C-sections, citing limited data. However, the group firmly stands behind a pregnant patient’s “right to refuse treatment, even treatment needed to maintain life.”

‘This case demonstrates that Florida is committed to both protecting innocent life and upholding the rule of law. Hospital staff and the judge lived up to that in this situation.’

Doyley, who accused the hospital staff of pushing for surgery based on “a lot of what-ifs and maybes,” highlighted ACOG’s guidelines to the judge, stating that the organization “do [sic] not have any specific policy that says that someone cannot have a vaginal birth after three C-sections.”

“Any time you go into childbirth, whether you do a vaginal or a C-section, there’s inherent risk to the mother and the baby,” she added. “So if it’s between them choosing whether I have to live or the baby has to live, I did tell them that I want to live. I have other children out here in the world that need me.”

Dr. Christina Francis, a board-certified OB-GYN speaking on behalf of the American Association of Pro-Life OBGYNs, detailed the risks of VBAC in a statement to Blaze News, stating that “there’s not a lot of data out there on … women laboring with three or more C-section scars.”

Francis cited one study, which she noted was “a little bit of an outlier,” that showed uterine rupture risks were under 1% for multiple prior C-sections. Other studies, she stated, showed a risk of uterine rupture from 2% to 3.5%.

“The way we counsel most patients with that many C-sections is, because of that increased risk, it likely is safer to do a scheduled repeat C-section,” Francis said.

Francis also addressed the data on repeated C-sections, calling it “very mixed” and stating that many studies show the risks associated with repeat surgeries are “actually higher than a woman going through a trial of labor, even if she has that many previous C-sections,” including risks of hemorrhage and infections.

“It really is not a clear decision, I would say,” Francis remarked, emphasizing the importance of “shared decision-making” between a pregnant woman and her doctor, describing it as “a travesty” that Doyley felt unsupported by hospital staff.

During her testimony, Doyley rejected claims that there was nothing else the doctors could do to help her achieve a natural birth. She repeatedly insisted that UF Health transfer her to another hospital where she could receive a second opinion. UF Health staff explained that a transfer was unlikely to occur on such short notice, since another hospital would first have to agree to accept her as a patient.

She criticized the hospital for not having “one person of color that is on this floor working,” adding, “I have 20 white people against me.” She accused the hospital staff of trying to take her rights away, comparing it to “slavery.”

“Just knowing what we know, as far as black maternal health in America and how black women are three times more likely to die during childbirth, a lot of that comes from medical negligence and medical racism, where we have a group of white doctors that think that they know what is best for black bodies and black babies,” she testified.

At the conclusion of the multi-hour hearing, Kalil determined that Doyley could continue laboring to attempt to have a natural birth but that the hospital could force Doyley to undergo a C-section in the event of an emergency, to which Doyley agreed. The judge’s order defined emergency events as fetal bradycardia, fetal heart tracing category 3, or signs of uterine rupture.

The infant was ultimately delivered via C-section after doctors said her heart rate dropped overnight for seven minutes, ProPublica reported. While Doyley recovered from the surgery, the baby was brought to the NICU due to respiratory distress and placed on a continuous positive airway pressure machine to assist with her breathing.

The court’s jurisdiction in the matter terminated upon the child’s successful delivery.

A spokesperson for UF Health Jacksonville declined to comment, citing privacy regulations that prevent the hospital from discussing patient information.

RELATED: ‘PRAISE GOD!’ Florida defeats radicals’ attempt to enshrine nearly limitless abortion as a right

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The reaction to Doyley’s case

Progressive advocates have used Doyley’s experience to argue that Florida’s pro-life laws have gone too far and infringe on pregnant women’s medical freedom.

ProPublica wrote that while “mentally competent patients typically have the right to choose their medical care — or refuse it,” pregnant patients do not. The outlet highlighted this as an “inconsistency” in Florida, noting that the state has championed expanded medical autonomy for patients wishing to avoid vaccines and fluoridated water.

“In Florida and many other states, court-ordered medical procedures are just one of the ways pregnant patients’ rights are restricted. The effort to chip away at those rights is rooted in the concept of fetal personhood — that a fetus has equal and, in some cases, more rights than the woman sustaining it,” ProPublica wrote, claiming that “even a state prisoner on a hunger strike has more rights to make medical decisions” than a pregnant woman.

Francis suggested that the hospital’s intervention may have been driven by concern over serious complications and potential malpractice liability.

“As the ProPublica piece is referring to, I don’t think that it probably centered around placing the personhood of her preborn child ahead of the consent of the patient,” Francis said, adding that Doyley’s case “highlights a significant problem in this country” that has “nothing to do with abortion laws or fetal personhood laws” but rather a fear of malpractice lawsuits. A 2023 American Medical Association report found that 62.4% of OB-GYNs had faced a lawsuit.

The author of the ProPublica report, Amy Yurkanin, seemed to give Kalil some credit for his ruling, stating that judges in these cases are in a “difficult position.”

During an interview with WJCT’s “First Coast Connect,” Yurkanin stated, “I think he did try to thread the needle really with his ruling.”

“The hospital wanted him to court-order a C-section. He declined to sort of issue that blanket court order,” she remarked.

State Rep. Berny Jacques (R) shared his thoughts on Doyley’s case with Blaze News.

“This case demonstrates that Florida is committed to both protecting innocent life and upholding the rule of law. Hospital staff and the judge lived up to that in this situation,” Jacques said. “It’s especially refreshing that in a time when we’re seeing a lot of activist judges who ignore the law to score political points, the judge in this case simply followed the law as written and did the right thing.”

Jacques added that he wishes the mom and child “all the best.”

When Blaze News contacted Kalil for comment, the Fourth Judicial Circuit’s general counsel stated that the court “is unable to provide any comment or participate in any public discussions regarding these matters.”

Doyley did not respond to requests for comment.

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​Cherise doyley, Csection risks, Fetal personhood, Florida, Jacksonville, News, Preborn, Prenatal care, Pro-choice, Pro-life, Propublica, Uf health jacksonville, Unborn child, University of florida, University of florida health, Politics 

Some like to imagine that the digital world has freed us from the physical one, that computing lives somewhere above the friction of pipelines and permits and power lines, in a clean, abstract place we have named, without irony, the cloud. That illusion is dispelled when a transformer shortage causes a delay in the construction of data centers.

To give a sense of the amount of energy throughput required to keep building, the following numbers come from federal laboratories and utility research organizations: In 2023, American data centers consumed approximately 176 terawatt-hours of electricity, or 4.4% of all the energy the country used. By 2028, that figure is expected to reach somewhere between 325 and 580 terawatt-hours. By 2030, data centers could account for between 9% and 17% of national electricity consumption. Virginia, which already hosts more data-center capacity than any other state, could find itself directing between 39% and 57% of its electricity to the machines by decade’s end.

The political consequences are becoming visible at an unsettling pace.

What Sightline Climate reported in February 2026 is clarifying in its plain arithmetic: At least 16 gigawatts of data-center capacity were supposed to come online in the United States during 2026. Of that, roughly five gigawatts were under construction. The remaining 11 gigawatts had been announced but showed no construction progress. Given this delay, between 30% and 50% of the year’s projected capacity is unlikely to exist by year’s end. The buildings are failing to rise not because of any shortage of ambition or capital, but because the electrical systems that would bring them to life are themselves a constrained resource.

Tech acceleration, electricity slowdown

The technology industry tends to describe its obstacles as temporary inconveniences, friction to be optimized away. The power problem is not that kind of obstacle. A modern data center, before it is a real-estate asset or a monument to computational ambition, is an electrical system. IT equipment can represent 95% of its total demand. Cooling systems are themselves power-electronics loads. For the highest-performing AI facilities, operators have begun to omit traditional backup protection for their servers, relying instead on software checkpointing and restart logic, because the weight of the electrical infrastructure has become something to work around. “Construction complete” does not mean the facility can be turned on. Completion requires that the utility interface, the internal electrical architecture, the backup strategy, and the thermal system are synchronized and tested. The construction is the least of it.

The physical bottleneck is in a part of the supply chain that is rarely mentioned. Distribution transformers, the equipment that turns high-voltage transmission power into the voltages that buildings can actually use, are in short supply. Lead times that ran three to six months in 2019 stretched to 12 to 30 months by 2023. Large power transformers are custom-made, difficult to substitute, expensive to stockpile, and dependent on grain-oriented electrical steel, aluminum, and copper, all of which faced their own post-pandemic constraints. When a hyperscale campus needs utility service, substation capacity, and specialized transformer equipment at the same moment as the broader grid, delay is the usual result.

RELATED: How AI could decide the midterms — with $200 million to sway your vote

Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing/Getty Images

Why they weren’t ready

A relevant historical parallel is the railroad age. There is a structural similarity beyond the lazy metaphor that “data centers are the new railroads.” The railroads began as a private development wave and became a problem of political economy. They forced changes in public regulation, organizational form, and the distribution of costs and benefits that their builders had not anticipated. The data center is following a similar path. American electricity demand is being reshaped at a pace unseen since the postwar industrial boom, but with a crucial difference: Today’s growth arrives in enormous concentrated parcels, in specific counties, on venture-capital timescales. The grid, in contrast, expands on utility and regulatory timescales. These are not the same.

The political consequences are becoming visible at an unsettling pace. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ordered PJM Interconnection, a regional grid operator, in December 2025 to write clearer rules for serving AI-driven data centers. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation reported in 2025 that 13 of its 23 assessment areas face resource-adequacy challenges over the next decade. The Energy Information Administration announced in March 2026 that it was launching pilot studies on data-center energy use, covering electricity consumption, cooling systems, server metrics, and site characteristics. For two decades, data centers were background infrastructure. The regulatory apparatus of the federal government now wants new instruments to see them clearly.

The grid at a crossroads

Maine, in April 2026, approved the first statewide moratorium on large-scale data centers in the United States, halting approvals for facilities above 20 megawatts while a state council studies grid, air, water, and cost impacts. Only Democrat Gov. Janet Mills’ veto stopped the push (for now). In Mississippi, a lawsuit accused a major AI company of operating gas turbines near Memphis without the required permits, the speed-to-power logic having collided with environmental permitting. In March 2026, the Trump administration announced a pledge under which major hyperscalers agreed to build or buy new generation and cover the cost of power-delivery upgrades rather than passing those costs to households. Whatever the durability of that commitment, the political signal is clear: Once officials begin publicly assuring households that they will not be asked to subsidize AI infrastructure, the issue has moved from sectoral regulation to the politics of fairness.

The “cloud” always involved a rhetorical stance. It described a physical system as if geography, electricity, and equipment lead times were incidental to it. The transformer shortage, the interconnection queue, and the emergency turbines pierce through that description. The internet reappears as pipes, wires, substations, permits, emissions, and cost-allocation fights. It arrives in a specific county, draws on a specific grid, and asks specific communities to absorb consequences that were designed, by the grammar of cloud computing, to belong to no one.

Delay is the form this revelation takes. It forces governments to decide what may be built, at whose cost, and on whose timeline.

​Tech 

The family of a 25-year-old man is mourning his loss after he was stabbed in the heart over a dispute about a chicken dinner, according to Wisconsin police.

Mikayla Kloth, 27, allegedly attacked Lukas Rosch at her apartment in Okauchee on Friday after he came over to cook chicken drumsticks.

‘About a week before the incident, Rosch told people that Kloth had bitten his thumb and that he was scared of her.’

Lac La Belle Village police said they arrived at the apartment at about 6:50 p.m. to find the man lying on his back and a landlord applying pressure to his chest.

Kloth admitted that she stabbed her longtime boyfriend because she wanted to go out for dinner that evening, and he wanted to cook instead, according to police.

Police said they asked Kloth if there had been a struggle, and she replied, “No, I did stab him.”

Kloth also told police she got angry after Rosch grabbed the knife by the sharp edge, and she went on to plunge the knife into his chest.

“She admits, ‘I stabbed him. You have to take me to jail? OK.’ She didn’t hesitate with her discussion with officers,” said Waukesha County Court Commissioner David Herring in court.

Rosch was transported to a hospital but was later declared dead.

Kloth faces one count of first-degree intentional homicide and if convicted could face life in prison.

She also admitted that she should have just gone to a bar instead.

The family of the victim released a statement about the incident.

“We are completely broken at the tragic and senseless loss of our son, Lukas John Rosch, the most loving, giving, kind-hearted person anyone could ever meet,” the statement reads. “We are just asking for privacy at this time as we try to process.”

RELATED: Illegal alien allegedly bites 3-yr-old’s face in horrifying attack — DHS blames lax Biden immigration policies

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that about a week before the incident, Rosch told people that Kloth had bitten his thumb and that he was scared of her.

Kloth’s cash bond was set by a court commissioner at $2 million.

Okauchee is an unincorporated area inside the Village of Lac La Belle.

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​Mikayla kloth, Stabbed in the heart, Murder over chicken dinner, Dinner dispute death, Crime 

Everything feels more expensive in 2026, and health care is no exception.

While gas prices and grocery costs tend to dominate the political conversation, health care affordability remains one of the biggest financial pressures on working families.

One major reason is a lack of real competition. More than 95% of health insurance markets in the United States are highly concentrated, dominated by one or two companies with the power to drive up costs and limit consumer choice.

That is exactly why the Trump administration’s antitrust policy is so important.

The Trump administration has not hesitated to confront corporate behavior that distorts markets or threatens American interests.

The Federal Trade Commission’s new health care task force signals that President Trump understands what Washington too often ignores: When markets stop working for everyday Americans, government needs to step in to restore competition, lower prices, and protect consumers.

Trump’s antitrust policy, which is pro-consumer, pro-competition, and grounded in common sense, is making real progress toward that restoration.

FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson made that clear last year when he said the agency would stop “picking winners and losers” and focus instead on removing regulatory barriers that suppress innovation and hurt the American people.

That approach reflects a return to the traditional consumer welfare standard, the idea that antitrust enforcement should focus on whether consumers are actually being harmed by reduced competition. This ensures regulators are focused on results and not politics.

The results on this are clear. The Trump administration has not hesitated to confront corporate behavior that distorts markets or threatens American interests.

For example, the FTC has challenged the left’s toxic corporate practices like DEI and environmental, social, and governance investing. Earlier this year, Ferguson sent a letter to 42 big law firms, warning them that their use of DEI constituted an anticompetitive business practice and could bring legal consequences.

The FTC has tackled ESG too, threatening litigation against investors who attempt to block U.S. coal production in favor of a “net-zero” energy agenda, among other actions.

Meanwhile, the antitrust cases against Meta and Google are still moving forward because the concern is real: These companies have become so powerful they can choke off competition and influence what millions of Americans see online.

Last year, the Trump administration also secured a $2.5 billion settlement with Amazon over its unethical business practices.

RELATED: Hospital consolidations and ‘nonprofit’ tax breaks are driving up medical costs

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This is what Democrats fail to understand about Trump. He is willing to take on corporate power to ensure markets work for the people.

That is also why the administration made the right call in stepping away from absurd Biden-era enforcement like the case against Pepsi over discounts offered to large retailers. During inflation, the last thing Americans need is government attacking lower prices.

The same logic applies to strategic deals that strengthen America against foreign adversaries. The Trump administration allowed the Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks merger to move forward after Biden blocked it. A stronger American tech company would be better positioned to compete with Huawei, the Chinese giant tied to espionage and intellectual property theft.

Trump’s team understands what the last administration did not: Antitrust does not exist in a vacuum. Competition matters, but so does national security.

Trump’s antitrust agenda is revealing a broader shift away from ideology and back toward realism. By restoring the consumer welfare standard, his administration is focusing on protecting consumers, strengthening domestic industry, and defending American interests.

Trump and Ferguson understand that antitrust policy can push back on ideological coercion, protect America’s competitive edge, and make life more affordable for working families, all while keeping consumers and competition at the center of the analysis.

For families being squeezed by rising health care and grocery costs, this is real relief. The FTC may fly under the radar, but under Trump it has become an important part of a broader America First agenda built on common sense and affordability.

​Antitrust policy, Dei, Hospital consolidations, Inflation impact, Meta and google, Trump, Trump administration, Economy, Opinion & analysis 

Last week was a hard one for the atheists. President Trump read from the Bible in the Oval Office, and a federal court upheld the right of Texas to display the Ten Commandments. You can just hear the weeping and gnashing of teeth.

A recent legal challenge, one of many in a long line of church-state disputes, raises a now-familiar question: Can the government display the Ten Commandments without violating the First Amendment?

If government exists to protect what is of highest value, then it cannot remain agnostic about the source of those values.

Predictably, the answer from modern critics comes quickly. We have lived under an ACLU regime for 50 years, which has gaslighted us into believing any such display is wrong and illegal. The atheist insists that any public reference to the Bible is unconstitutional. The pluralist adds that if one religious text is displayed, then all must be.

Together, they present what appears to be a dilemma: Either scrub public life of all religious content, or open the floodgates to every creed imaginable.

Both claims, however, rest on a fundamental misunderstanding of the American founding.

To see why, we need to begin with the principles that shaped the United States itself. These are the principles articulated most famously in the Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration does not speak in the language of neutrality. It speaks of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” It grounds human equality in the fact that we are “created” and “endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

These are not neutral or secular claims. They are claims rooted in what philosophers have long called natural theology: the idea that reason and creation reveal truths about God.

The First Amendment must be read in light of these founding principles, not in isolation from them.

The text itself is straightforward: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Notice what it does not say. It does not say that the government must be silent about God.

It does not say that public institutions must pretend religion played no role in the nation’s founding. And it certainly does not say that acknowledging moral truths found in Scripture is forbidden.

What it prohibits is the establishment of a national church and the interference with religious worship.

This distinction is crucial. The founders were not secularists in the modern sense. Many of them (though differing in theological detail) shared a conviction that moral law is grounded in God. That conviction did not lead them to impose a church on the people, but neither did it lead them to erase God from public life.

That is where the Ten Commandments come in.

For centuries, the Ten Commandments have been understood not merely as a religious text, but as a concise summary of the moral law. Prohibitions against idolatry, murder, theft, perjury, and covetousness form the backbone of legal systems throughout the Western world. Even those who reject their divine origin often recognize their ethical clarity.

But here is an often-overlooked point: When the Ten Commandments are displayed, they are displayed as a whole.

This matters because critics frequently attempt to reduce them to commandments five through 10. We can call this the “horizontal” commands governing human relationships. But the full Decalogue begins with the “vertical” commands: to worship God alone, to reject idols, and to honor His name and His day.

To display all 10 is to acknowledge that law is not merely a human construct. It reflects an order that begins with God and extends to human society. That idea is foundational to American law.

This fact is why the atheist objection fails. The claim that the First Amendment requires strict secularism reads modern assumptions back into an 18th-century document. The founders did not believe that public acknowledgment of God violated liberty. On the contrary, they believed liberty depended on it.

Without a grounding in something higher than human will, rights become negotiable and law becomes an instrument of power rather than justice. The very idea of equality (so central to the American experiment) loses its foundation.

The pluralist objection fares no better. It assumes that fairness requires equal representation of all religious claims in public displays. But the United States was not founded on a principle of religious equivalence. It was founded on a particular understanding of God, law, and human nature. This was an understanding shaped by Christianity.

RELATED: Why do state schools bankroll people who despise the state?

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The Christian nature of American law does not mean that citizens of other faiths are excluded. The First Amendment ensures they are free to worship without government interference. But freedom of worship is not the same as a requirement that the state treat all religious claims as equally foundational to its own identity.

A courthouse displaying the Ten Commandments is not making a claim about every religion. It is recognizing the historical and philosophical roots of its own legal system.

And this brings us back to the central issue: What is the role of government?

If government exists to protect what is of highest value, then it cannot remain agnostic about the source of those values. The founders were clear: These rights come from God. To acknowledge that is not to establish a church; it is to affirm the very basis of the nation’s laws.

Displaying the Ten Commandments alongside the Declaration of Independence is not a constitutional violation. It is a historically informed reminder of where our ideas of law and equality come from.

It tells the truth about the American founding.

In an age increasingly confused about the source of its own principles, telling that truth and teaching it to the next generation is the right thing to do.

​10 commandments, Antichristian, Atheists, Bible, Christianity, Declaration of independence, First amendment, Founding principles, Legal systems, President trump, Role of government, Texas, Opinion & analysis 

On April 25 at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington Hilton in D.C., 31-year-old California resident Cole Tomas Allen allegedly rushed a security checkpoint armed with a shotgun, handgun, and knives, firing multiple shots in an attempt to target Trump administration officials.

President Donald Trump, first lady Melania Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and others were safely evacuated with no serious injuries to attendees; Allen was quickly apprehended and later charged with attempted assassination of the president. Prior to the incident, he had sent a manifesto to family expressing his motives.

When BlazeTV host Liz Wheeler heard the news, she was shaken but not necessarily surprised by yet another act of political violence from the left.

“The left will keep committing or trying to commit hideous acts of violence against us until they can’t. … There is no rhetoric that exists, no argument that can be constructed that will persuade them to stop,” she laments.

This isn’t just a gut feeling either. On this episode of “The Liz Wheeler Show,” Liz points to a recent poll that captures how deeply committed the left is to using political violence to advance its agenda.

According to an April 2025 poll conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute in partnership with Rutgers University’s Social Perception Lab, 56% of self-identified left-of-center respondents said murdering Trump would be at least “somewhat justified,” with 14.1% calling it “completely justified.”

Liz is horrified by these numbers.

“Fifty-six percent of people on the left — that’s not just the mainstream media and the loudest influencers on X and YouTube, the freaks of the Democratic Party and Congress. This is over half of Democrats,” she says. “That means if you walk up to someone on a street, you meet a neighbor, a co-worker, and you find out that they voted for Kamala Harris or that they lean left, they are more likely than not going to justify a potential assassination of Donald Trump.”

As much as she disagrees with left-wing ideologies, Liz cannot fathom harboring such hatred for her political opponents that she would hope for their murder.

“There’s no circumstance that I can possibly hypothetically construct in my mind where I would ever under any circumstance justify the assassination of even the most horrific Democrat operator that I can think of — ever,” she declares. “There would be no justification for that. It’s illegal. It’s immoral.”

Democrat voters, she argues, are “being formed specifically to believe this.”

Liz shares data from a 2025 Skeptic Research Center report showing that the more education a person has, the more likely they are to condone violence as a means of social change.

“Of people who have a high school diploma or less, 23% agree that violence is often necessary to create social change. Of people who have some college or an associates degree, only 20% agree with that. If you have a bachelor’s degree, 26% agree with that … if you have a graduate or professional degree, suddenly that number jumps all the way to 40%,” she reads from the study.

The same trend emerged for the question: “If you are protesting something unjust, it is reasonable to damage property.”

“This is not a coincidence that … the number of years you spend in colleges and universities correlates to your exponentially increased support for political violence,” says Liz, highlighting the left’s stronghold on academia.

All considered, one thing is clear to Liz: Political violence is no longer confined to the fringes; it’s “mainstream leftist.”

To hear more of her analysis, watch the episode above.

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​Assassination attempt, Attempted assassination, Blaze media, Blazetv, Cole thomas allen, Donald trump, Leftwing ideologies, Leftwing violence, Liz wheeler, Mainstream leftist, Political violence, Skeptic research center, Social change, The liz wheeler show, Washington hilton, Whcd, Whcd assassination attempt