A child reportedly has been arrested for murder in connection with the death of a 12-year-old girl who was protecting her sister amid an alleged bullying incident at a Los Angeles school.

KCBS-TV said the Los Angeles Police Department did not provide many details about the individual arrested, stating only that the person is a minor arrested for murder. KNBC-TV said police noted the arrest Thursday.

‘On the afternoon of Feb. 17, Khimberly was trying to protect her sister. She stepped in when the school didn’t.’

The family of Khimberly Zavaleta Chuquipa, the girl who died, said she was struck in the head with a metal bottle at Reseda Charter High School on Feb. 17, KCBS reported.

Days after the incident, Khimberly was rushed to a hospital, where doctors discovered severe bleeding in her brain, KCBS said.

She spent days in a coma and underwent surgery, but Khimberly died at a hospital in late February, her mother told KNBC.

RELATED: Video: Alleged bully beats up crying 10-year-old girl, pulls her by hair to school restroom floor as other girls cheer attack

The victim’s family said she was trying to protect her sister amid an alleged bullying incident, KNBC reported.

“I’m devastated. I’m full of pain, thinking about how I will never see my daughter again,” Elma Chuquipa, Khimberly’s mother, told KNBC in Spanish.

The victim’s family filed a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Unified School District in March, accusing the district of failing to protect students from bullying, KNBC reported.

RELATED: Video: Female bully towers over and beats up elderly woman on Florida bus. Victim is left ‘battered and bruised’: Sheriff.

“On the afternoon of Feb. 17, Khimberly was trying to protect her sister. She stepped in when the school didn’t,” Robert Glassman, the family’s attorney, said during news conference last month, KNBC noted. “This tragedy really highlights and underscores the very real and very devastating consequences of unchecked bullying.”

What’s more, the family alleged that Khimberly’s sister had been bullied prior to the February incident, but the school “did not do anything,” KNBC added.

In addition, the family said that despite numerous attempts to get more information about what led to the February attack against Khimberly, the LAUSD refused to share details, KNBC reported.

The LAUSD said in a February statement that the incident “deeply saddened” administrators, KCBS noted.

“Our thoughts and condolences are with the student’s family, friends, and the entire school community,” a district spokesperson said, according to KCBS. “The District takes the safety and well-being of our students very seriously. We are currently cooperating with law enforcement in connection with this incident.”

Police confirmed last month that a homicide investigation was under way following Khimberly’s death, KNBC said.

“This arrest is an important step toward accountability, but it does not change the bigger truth: this tragedy was entirely preventable,” Glassman wrote in a statement, according to KCBS.

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​Los angeles police department, Child arrested, Girl killed, Bullying death, Los angeles unified school district, Lawsuit, Reseda high school, Bullies, Bullying, Crime 

Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, explained the steps she was taking to “deconstruct” limiting beliefs in her children about gender in order to make them into ultimate humans.

The resurfaced video was widely circulated on social media as her husband continues his campaign to expand his national recognition in preparation for a suspected 2028 presidential run.

‘At the end of the day, we’re all kind of in this place in history maybe where we’re recognizing what it is to ultimately deconstruct all these gender roles and ultimately be human.’

“I’ve given our boys dolls, even if they tear the head off,” Jennifer Newsom laughed in the video.

“I’ve given them dolls to learn that care and caregiving is not just an activity that’s reserved for women, but that it’s also an activity that is a responsibility of men,” she added.

“What I’ve done with both my daughters and my sons is if I’m reading a book and the protagonist is a male, I just change the ‘he’ to a ‘she,'” Newsom continued.

“And it just normalizes, for my sons in particular — I don’t just do it for my girls; I do it for my sons because I want them to see that women can be the center of a story. That women matter. That women are interesting,” she said.

She went on to offer her theory about how to “ultimately” become human.

RELATED: Gavin Newsom’s wife blames evangelicals and conservatives for holding back ‘woke’ abortion agenda in resurfaced video

“At the end of the day, we’re all kind of in this place in history maybe where we’re recognizing what it is to ultimately deconstruct all these gender roles and ultimately be human,” Newsom said.

“That’s exciting to me,” she added. “So I’ll just continue to kind of do my work and try and deconstruct all of these limiting narratives about ultimately what it means to be human.”

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​Jennifer siebel newsom, Jen newsom on gender, Woke gender roles newsom, Politics, Raising children to deconstruct gender 

While many eyes are focused on Iran, the Trump administration’s policies suggest that reasserting the Monroe Doctrine in the Western Hemisphere could rank among its highest geopolitical priorities. As laid out in the 2025 National Security Strategy, the Trump corollary “is a common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests.”

The moment is right. The case is overwhelming. And the window is closing.

What if America could project its dominance quickly, dramatically, and without firing a single shot? With one bold stroke, President Trump could expand America’s sovereign territory by nearly 20% and recover the largest unclaimed tract of land left on the planet.

Marie Byrd Land is the name for 620,000 square miles of Antarctica, a territory roughly the size of Alaska. It belongs to no nation and is governed by no sovereign power. It is desolate, largely uninhabited, and of enormous strategic importance. Claiming it would be the largest expansion of American sovereign territory since William Henry Seward’s purchase of Alaska in 1867.

The moment is right. The case is overwhelming. And the window is closing.

The territory carries an American name for a reason. Richard Byrd — a U.S. Navy rear admiral, aviator, and the most celebrated polar explorer of his generation — surveyed and mapped the region in the late 1920s, naming it for his wife. America has maintained a presence in Antarctica ever since, operating research stations, conducting flyovers, and asserting its right to make a claim. But it never has.

The 1959 Antarctic Treaty halted existing territorial claims and committed signatories to peaceful, scientific use of the continent. However, it did not require anyone to relinquish the right to make new claims. America explicitly reserved that right. Sixty-six years later, America still has not used it, and the world has changed considerably since Eisenhower signed the treaty.

The resource case alone justifies the move. Antarctica sits atop estimated offshore reserves of roughly 45 billion barrels of oil equivalent, plus coal, iron ore, and rare-earth minerals that remain largely uncharted. The Madrid Protocol, which added environmental protections to the treaty framework, currently prohibits extraction, but it is up for review beginning in 2048. That is only 22 years away.

A prohibition that depends on the continued goodwill of all signatories, including China, which acceded to the Antarctic Treaty in 1983, is a different kind of guarantee from actual sovereignty. One is a diplomatic norm. The other is a legal fact.

RELATED: America won’t beat China without Alaska

Damian Gillie/Construction Photography/Avalon/Getty Images

But the strategic case runs deeper than oil and minerals. The great infrastructure competition of the 21st century will be fought over low-earth-orbit communications networks, the constellation of satellites that will carry the world’s most sensitive data, military communications, and economic traffic.

Those networks require polar coverage. The physics is simple: Polar orbits deliver global reach, and the ground infrastructure at high latitudes controls latency, resilience, and network security. The northern approaches, Greenland, Iceland, and Svalbard, have been contested and militarized for decades. The southern pole has barely registered.

This is what a strategic choke point looks like. The world is learning that lesson right now in the Strait of Hormuz. The strait’s strategic importance was hardly a mystery, but for almost everyone, it was theoretical. Until it wasn’t.

Since the start of the U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign against Iran, 20% of the world’s oil supply has been trapped by a strip of water 21 miles wide, caught between great powers playing out a global strategic game. The results include the largest disruption to global energy supply since the 1970s; South Korea capping fuel prices for the first time in 30 years; and Bangladesh closing its universities to conserve power.

The world now understands, viscerally, what a choke point costs. The poles are the global choke points of satellite communications. The question is whether America secures its position before the lesson has to be learned the hard way.

The window between ‘no one is paying attention’ and ‘it is too late’ is shorter than Western governments typically think.

The answer cannot wait. In March 2025, Russia and China jointly announced plans to build new research stations in Marie Byrd Land. This was not a scientific gesture. It was the same playbook Beijing ran in the South China Sea: establish a presence, build infrastructure, wait for the world to normalize it, and then dare someone to undo it. It worked at Fiery Cross Reef. It worked in the Spratly Islands.

The window between “no one is paying attention” and “it is too late” is shorter than Western governments typically think.

Strategic ambiguity has its uses. It served American interests during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union could be managed through mutual deterrence and the goal was to avoid locking both sides into positions that could escalate. Ambiguity gave everyone room to step back.

That logic made sense when the Soviets were the main adversary. It makes considerably less sense when your adversary seeks to exploit ambiguity rather than be restrained by it.

The only power that benefits from murky Antarctic sovereignty today is China.

The diplomatic path is more navigable than it appears. Chile, Argentina, Britain, France, Norway, and Australia all hold Antarctic claims, some overlapping, which is its own absurdity. The British, Chilean, and Argentine claims have never been formally resolved; all three parties simply agreed to disagree and keep the treaty functioning. Marie Byrd Land overlaps with none of those claims. A U.S. sovereignty declaration would stake out genuinely unclaimed territory.

Moreover, it could catalyze something broader: a coordinated Western territorial framework that organizes allied claims, provides a legal architecture for resource governance when the Madrid Protocol comes up for review, and, most importantly, excludes adversaries from positions of strategic leverage before those positions become entrenched.

RELATED: What’s Greenland to us?

Leon Neal/Getty Images

The historical precedents are instructive. The Louisiana Purchase looked reckless in 1803. Napoleon needed cash, Jefferson needed room, and $13 million bought 828,000 square miles that doubled the size of the country. Contemporaries called it constitutionally dubious and geopolitically impulsive. They were wrong.

Seward’s Folly in 1867 — the purchase of 586,000 square miles of Alaska for $7.2 million — was mocked almost universally at the time. History was not kind to the mockers. In both cases, the critics had a point about process and a blind spot about geography. Marie Byrd Land is in that tradition: counterintuitive at first glance, obvious in retrospect.

And unlike those other two cases, the U.S. doesn’t have to pay a dime for it.

The objections are predictable. Treaty purists will say a claim violates the spirit of international agreement — but they are technically wrong. The treaty halted existing claims; it did not prohibit new ones on unclaimed land. The foreign policy establishment will warn of diplomatic friction with partners, a real concern. But allies with their own Antarctic stakes have more to gain from a coherent Western framework than from the current vacuum.

Environmentalists will invoke the Madrid Protocol — but a sovereignty declaration changes nothing about current extraction rules. The precedent argument — if America claims land, does everyone else? — has the weakest foundation of all. That scramble is coming whether the United States acts or not. The question is whether America shapes it or watches other countries take the lead.

A declaration of sovereignty on Independence Day would wrap a bold geopolitical move in the most durable possible American framing: expansion as destiny, strength as inheritance, and the republic still growing into its potential 250 years on.

Jefferson did not agonize about whether purchasing Louisiana would set an awkward precedent. Seward did not lose sleep over what Alaska said about the American appetite for territory. They saw geography, they saw the future, and they moved.

There is one large piece of unclaimed earth remaining. It carries an American name. Russia and China are already building there.

July 4, 2026, would be a fine day to make it official.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at the American Mind.

​Antarctica, Marie byrd land, China, America 250, South pole, Monroe doctrine, National security strategy, Antarctic treaty, Russia, Opinion & analysis 

After a decades-long decline, America is now in the throes of the worst fertility crisis in our nation’s history. A record number of people are not having children.

The big question is why?

Certainly the answer is multifaceted, but there’s one undeniable driver behind America’s as well as nearly every other country’s declining birth rates, says Lyman Stone, senior fellow and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies: the iPhone.

On this episode of “Rufo & Lomez,” Christopher Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman speak with Stone about how our most pervasive technology is wrecking the world’s fertility numbers.

While there are many drivers behind globally declining birth rates — infertility issues, financial difficulties, a genuine desire to have fewer children, and even a desire to have no children at all — iPhones, says Stone, are “little sterilization boxes that we all carry in our pockets.”

But it’s not a literal sterilization — “The research suggests that the radiation from them is actually harmless,” Stone says — but rather a social sterilization.

“[Smartphones] change how we socialize together. … Social media replaces in-person interaction; reading stuff online replaces in-person interaction, replaces intermediation in the physical world,” he explains.

“Increasingly, it’s not just that people have fewer babies; they have fewer first kisses; they have fewer one-night stands; they have fewer dinner parties; they have fewer every kind of social interaction … and so as social media and cell phones are just killing life together,” he adds.

This isn’t just speculation either. The data shows a major decline in face-to-face interaction starting in 2008 — just one year after the first iPhone hit the market.

Before 2008, fertility rates across the world would ebb and flow depending on a variety of circumstances, but following the invention of the iPhone, they’ve stayed consistently low, Stone explains.

The social isolation caused by the iPhone has resulted in a decline in marriage rates, which directly impacts birth rates.

Interestingly, statistics show that people who do marry young are having the amount of children they desire.

“There’s no gap between desired fertility and actual fertility on average for people who marry before age 26,” says Stone.

Further, countries that have “religious prohibitions” on iPhone usage for extended periods of the day have also maintained higher birth rates.

“So Israel with Shabbat or Muslim countries, where we know from cellphone data everybody turns off their cell phone for 20 minutes five times a day … still have high fertility,” says Stone.

iPhones, he explains, essentially turn off “the part of our brain that’s supposed to know your tribe and recognize your tribe and really want to have sex with your tribe.”

Simultaneously, it supplies “an endless stream of porn” to keep people sexually satiated without producing children.

To hear more about the factors behind the world’s declining birth rate, watch the full interview above.

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​Rufo & lomez, Chris rufo, Jonathan keeperman, Blazetv, Blaze media, Lyman stone, Fertility crisis, Declining birth rates, Declining marriage rates, Iphone 

A Florida teenager was arrested and charged with murder after police said they literally found his name on evidence left with gruesome remains of the victim.

The Palm Bay Police Department said it responded on Saturday to a report of vultures surrounding a closed, abandoned suitcase in Palm Bay.

Jones allegedly confessed to the killing to his girlfriend and told her he wanted to kill sex offenders. He allegedly printed out a list of registered sex offenders nearby.

When police arrived at the location, they found a black suitcase in tall grass emitting a strong odor and containing human remains.

A second suitcase was found with additional remains, according to an affidavit.

Police said they immediately suspected a 19-year-old named Lucas Sander Jones of Indialantic because they found an Amazon package addressed to him in one of the suitcases. They also found other personal belongings.

Detectives said they learned Jones was associated with 28-year-old Colie Lee Daniel, who had been reported missing six days earlier by his mother.

Police obtained a search warrant and found Jones at his residence with his girlfriend. They observed that Jones had several injuries, including visibly healed wounds and bruises. He chose not to speak to police.

His girlfriend, however, told police she saw Jones trying to wake up Daniel as he was lying on Jones’ bed on Friday, March 20. She also said that Jones had her drive him out to locations in Palm Bay to discard of two gray totes from her Honda Accord.

Police said they found blood and a knife at the residence.

Jones was charged with several crimes and released on bond, but as the investigation progressed, police determined the evidence justified a murder charge, and he was arrested again. He was charged with second-degree murder, dangerous and depraved without premeditation.

Another affidavit said that Jones allegedly confessed to the killing to his girlfriend and told her he wanted to kill sex offenders. He allegedly printed out a list of registered sex offenders nearby.

RELATED: 14-year-old stabbed and murdered after going on a bike ride in Florida. Police arrest a ‘homeless drifter’ for the crime.

Booking records indicate he was initially arrested for felony abuse of a dead human body and tampering with evidence.

While officials are still trying to determine what his alleged motivation might have been, they said that they believe he had some of the victim’s blood on slides of a microscope. WKMG-TV theorized that he might have been inspired by the serial killer show “Dexter.”

A local official said they are trying to develop the rural area, and if they do, he expects more bodies will be found in the area.

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​Sex offender killer, Dexter show killer, Lucas sander jones murder, Colie lee daniel murder, Crime