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Considering how it looked in the moment, George Lombard Jr. may have avoided the worst.

The bombshell decision comes more than 10 years after Bisesar plunged a knife into the chest of Rosemarie Junor, 28, inside a downtown Toronto Shoppers Drug Mart on Dec. 11, 2015.

Chris DeMarco went through the list of reasons why Stewart deserves her eighth All-Star nod next month.

America At 250: Survey Finds Enduring Patriotism, Growing Anxiety

Authored by Karlyn Bowman and Nicole Penn via RealClearPolitics,

As we approach the nation's semiquincentennial celebrations, the American Enterprise Institute released a new public opinion survey exploring Americans' views about the nation's past and present. The survey is part of AEI's America at 250 initiative, and it expands on a survey conducted 30 years ago by the Public Agenda Foundation in NYC.

Americans continue to endorse many of the ideals the founders championed, and they worry about their erosion. Nearly eight in 10 believe Americans take their freedoms for granted, while only 19% say Americans appreciate the freedom we have.

More than two-thirds of Americans believe that society has to teach kids what it means to be an American, while three in 10, 31%, believe this is something that happens naturally as they grow up. Three-quarters think high school students should be required to study the Declaration of Independence this year as part of the nation's 250th anniversary, including 61% of Gen Z-ers. Twenty-nine percent nationally say they have read the Declaration in full, while 45% have read it in part. Slightly more than a quarter, 26%, say they have not read the document. Still, 85% said they could give a good answer to what the 4th of July holiday actually celebrates, while 13% said they would be more comfortable looking it up.

Americans don't want to gloss over their history, and 65% said it was important to have public discussions of the nation's historical failures and flaws. In another question, 90% said it was very or somewhat important for high school students to learn how slavery and racial discrimination shaped the country. Forty-two percent said the public schools these days do not pay enough attention to the harm done to African Americans in U.S. history. Still, 75% in another question agreed with the statement "America is not perfect, but the country's leaders have worked hard to make it better." To this group of Americans, it was important to teach the country's failures and flaws but also its successes and strengths.

The survey revealed some significant gaps between members of the Gen Z cohort and baby boomers. Thirty percent of the Gen Z-ers strongly agreed that the Founding Fathers deserved respect for how they created the country compared to 60% of baby boomers. Two-thirds of Gen Z compared to 89% of boomers said they were very or somewhat proud to be an American. There were also big gaps between the parents surveyed in 1998 and parents today. Parents today are less likely to see the country and its history positively and also less likely to insist that schools teach positive claims about it.

Karlyn Bowman is a senior fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute where she studies public opinion. 

Nicole Penn is the assistant director of AEI’s Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies department.

Tyler Durden Wed, 06/17/2026 - 23:25

The Padres have arguably one of the most aggressive president of baseball operations in the sport. A.J. Preller isn’t afraid to take the leap when it comes to Major League Baseball’s trade deadline. Last summer, the Padres made the deal of the deadline when Preller acquired Mason Miller from the Athletics. Padres president of baseball...

The Home Run Derby is getting a makeover.

China's Alibaba Unveils AI Brains Designed To Power The Next Generation Of Robots

Authored by Jijo Malayil via Interesting Engineering,

Chinese firm Alibaba has launched its first embodied AI model family, which links large language models with real-world robotic actions.

The Qwen-Robot suite includes three distinct models, each targeting a different layer of physical intelligence.Unitree/YouTube

The Qwen-Robot suite was developed by Alibaba's Tongyi Lab and is undergoing pilot testing with selected Alibaba Cloud enterprise clients.

The suite comprises three models focused on navigation, manipulation, and world modeling for robots operating in physical environments.

Alibaba said the models enable machines to perceive, reason, and interact with the real world, joining a growing global push to advance embodied AI beyond traditional chatbot applications.

Robots meet reasoning

Alibaba says its Qwen family of AI models has become very good at understanding the physical world. These models can recognize objects, understand spatial relationships, follow complex visual instructions, and reason about real-world environments. For example, a model can understand a command such as, "Go to the kitchen, find the red cup, pick it up, and place it on the shelf."

However, understanding a task is different from actually performing it. While a vision-language model (VLM) can describe the steps needed to complete a task, it cannot directly control a robot's movements.

The challenge is connecting human language and visual understanding with the motor actions required to interact with the physical world.

This problem is difficult because robot training data is very different from internet data. Information collected from navigation systems, robotic arms, vehicles, and cameras comes in different formats and is expensive to gather. Simply combining all this data often creates conflicts rather than improving performance.

To address this, Alibaba developed the Qwen-Robot Suite, which includes three specialized models. Qwen-RobotNav focuses on movement and navigation. It helps robots follow instructions, navigate to locations, track targets, and support autonomous driving.

According to its website, Qwen-RobotManip focuses on physical interaction. It enables robots to grasp, move, and manipulate objects using a large training dataset collected from different robotic systems. Qwen-RobotWorld acts as a world model, predicting how environments may change and helping robots understand the likely outcomes of their actions.

Together, these models aim to enable robots to understand instructions, interact with objects, navigate environments, and make decisions in the real world.

Physical AI accelerates

Alibaba showcased Qwen-RobotNav on a Unitree Go2 quadruped powered by NVIDIA Jetson Thor hardware and a single low-resolution camera. The robot successfully navigated an unfamiliar apartment, following spoken instructions across multiple rooms without preloaded maps, while maintaining an inference latency of 196 milliseconds.

The company claims that Qwen-RobotManip, its robotic manipulation model, was trained on more than 38,000 hours of open-source data covering object handling and interaction tasks. According to Alibaba, the model recently achieved the highest score in the generalist category of the RoboChallenge real-world robotics benchmark, earning a process score of 59.83 and a task success rate of 45 percent.

The company also unveiled Qwen-RobotClaw, a robotics agent framework that enables Qwen models to use the Qwen-Robot suite as physical-world tools. In one demonstration, an agent searched for a restroom, identified an out-of-order sign, and independently rerouted to another location. Alibaba further open-sourced Chat2Robot, a browser-based platform for testing embodied AI interactions.

As competition in embodied AI intensifies worldwide, Alibaba has expanded its ambitions beyond language and multimodal software with the launch of its Qwen-Robot models. The move reflects a broader industry shift toward creating AI systems capable of understanding and interacting with the physical world.

Alibaba's move comes as competition in physical AI accelerates globally. In the US, Google DeepMind is advancing Gemini Robotics, while Nvidia is expanding its robotics ecosystem through Cosmos, Isaac, and GR00T. Start-ups, including Physical Intelligence, Skild AI, and Figure AI, are also developing general-purpose robotic intelligence, according to the South China Morning Post.

China is strengthening its position by pairing its manufacturing advantages with growing investments in AI software for autonomous decision-making. The sector now spans AI developers, robotics firms, and EV makers. Companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, Unitree, AgiBot, UBTech, Galbot, Spirit AI, GigaAI, Xpeng, and Xiaomi are actively pursuing embodied AI technologies.

Tyler Durden Wed, 06/17/2026 - 23:00

A beloved Bay Area mom of two, wife, and coffee shop owner vanished without a trace months ago and now investigators hired by the family are seeking surveillance video they believe will give a clue as to what happened to her.

‘I’M the boss,” President Trump joked when he arrived a bit late to a meeting with G7 leaders in France Wednesday.

Caitlin Clark and Nike have revealed her new signature shoe, the Caitlin 1.

The Liberty extended their win streak to eight games Wednesday with a 96-95 win against the Chicago Sky.

The "Stand By Me" star assured fans in a social media post that he's doing fine, and also shared a snippet of some new music he's working on.

The "Stand By Me" star assured fans in a social media post that he's doing fine, and also shared a snippet of some new music he's working on.

The Madison Square Garden station was repainted in the Knicks' iconic blue-and-orange scheme on June 1 to honor the New York team’s first finals appearance since 1999.

The Raiders’ Fernando Mendoza continues to be put into the greatness category. When Curt Cignetti, his former Indiana coach, appeared as a guest on “The Rich Eisen Show” on Wednesday, Cignetti wasn’t shy to call his quarterback great and say, “You learn from the great ones.” Eisen was quick to ask Cignetti what he learned...

Finally, after 210 official ticker-tape parades, the Knicks get their turn to enter the Canyon of Heroes.

On the eve of one of the city’s biggest celebrations in years — a parade for the NBA champion Knicks — the Yankees got the party started early.

Dozens of doppelgangers entered Jalen Brunson lookalike contest in Washington Square Park on Wednesday for a chance to win $5,000 — but only one young fan took home the cash.

Drug Czar On How She Is Taking On The Cartels And China

Authored by Darlene McCormick Sanchez via The Epoch Times,

The dim tunnel passage hugs narrow, winding concrete steps that lead 55 feet down, with a ceiling no higher than 4 1/2 feet, making it a claustrophobe's nightmare.

The underground passage stretching from Tijuana, Mexico, to a warehouse in California near the Otay Mesa Port of Entry known as "Buy 4 Less" is about 2,000 feet long and features reinforced walls, rail, ventilation, and electrical systems.

Sara Carter, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, at her office in Washington on June 8, 2026. Carter was sworn in to the role in January. Her office coordinates anti-narcotics policy for 19 federal agencies. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of California said on June 1 that the tunnel had been discovered during a Homeland Security investigation involving a suspected drug smuggling operation.

Four people were charged with conspiring to distribute more than a ton of cocaine worth $45 million. Authorities said the discovery dealt a blow to the Jalisco New Generation cartel.

"Hundreds of millions of dollars of narcotics have probably made their way through this tunnel. Imagine the national security implications of that," drug czar Sara Carter told host Jan Jekielek on a recent episode of EpochTV's "American Thought Leaders."

Power Play

Carter said federal agencies have been turning to technology to help combat cartels, although she couldn't disclose details. She said the cartels' use of tunnels to transport illicit drugs shows that they are feeling U.S. pressure along the border.

"They're having a much harder time getting their product across the border because we've shut it down," she said.

Carter attributes it to the Trump administration's whole-of-government approach to stop the flow of illicit drugs into the country, at the border and beyond.

Carter was sworn in this January as the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, which coordinates anti-narcotics policy for 19 federal agencies. The office leads the Trump administration's effort to reduce illicit drug manufacturing, trafficking, drug use, and overdose deaths.

"Our Homeland Security task forces, now under President Trump, have the capability ... to do what's needed to cut off the heads of the snake," she said.

Carter attributed President Donald Trump's efforts to close the border to illegal immigrants and designate cartels as foreign terrorist organizations as significant factors in reducing the flow of drugs across the border, and ultimately driving overdose deaths.

Yet Carter said the cartels aren't the only problem fueling drug use in the United States - adversarial nationals are also part of the problem.

"We have adversaries that have contaminated our supply chain. We have cartels that couldn't care less," she said.

Carter acknowledged the Chinese Communist Party's involvement in the precursor chemicals to make fentanyl distributed by the cartels.

"It is unrestricted warfare," she said.

"I have already spoken with Chinese counterparts about this. I have made it very clear that we understand, and we know where these precursor chemicals are coming from, and that it will not be tolerated."

Carter said China has been put on notice to disclose such chemicals in shipments coming into the United States. Likewise, she has been talking to Mexican officials about safeguarding their own ports against the importation of illicit drugs.

At U.S. ports, the government is also working to hold private industry accountable. If cargo ships are caught with precursor chemicals, then the federal government will hold them accountable, she said.

"We're looking at all kinds of new technology, technology that was unheard of in the past," she said. "How can we implement this technology to ensure that the cargo that is coming in is clean?"

Cooperation Through Strength

Carter said that countries understand that Trump is willing to wield U.S. power to stop the drug trade, putting nations on notice around the world.

Trump's military operation in Venezuela resulted in the arrest of former Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, who had a $50 million bounty on his head as the alleged leader of the De Los Soles cartel, which was designated as a foreign terrorist organization.

"One of the best operations I've ever seen conducted," Carter said. "We have done what we said we were going to do. There were no more games."

She also said that the amount of cocaine and other drugs flowing from Venezuela has dropped since Maduro's capture.

Trump's projection of strength has led to unprecedented cooperation from both Mexico and China, she said.

One example is a February operation in which the United States provided Mexico with intelligence that they used to take down the Jalisco New Generation cartel's kingpin, Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as "El Mencho."

Mexican officials cooperated with the United States, sending in the Mexican National Guard and special forces to confront the cartel's leader, Carter said.

"We said, 'Look, here's the information, go get them,' and they did, and we'd never seen that before, not like that, not in that same way, not with that cooperation," she said.

Likewise, China's Ministry of Public Security has been uncharacteristically cooperative, she said. FBI Director Kash Patel traveled to China in November 2025 to meet with his counterpart to discuss stopping the flow of fentanyl precursor chemicals.

During Patel's visit, the Chinese regime agreed on a plan to stop fentanyl-related chemicals as part of its deal with the Trump administration to crack down on the lethal synthetic opioid.

Two milligrams of fentanyl - the size of a few grains of salt - can be fatal. The drug has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.

'Don't Give Up'

Overdose deaths have been decreasing, but Carter said there are still far too many.

She said 68,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2025, down from a high of 112,000 in 2023. Some have attributed that decrease to a reduction in the amount of fentanyl found in street drugs.

Carter said she does not consider it an overdose when a person orders what he believes to be Adderall online and then dies because the pills are laced with fentanyl.

"This is unacceptable. This is the United States of America," she said.

Members of Congress look on as President Donald Trump signs the Secure America Act in the Oval Office in Washington on June 10, 2026. The $70 billion package funds Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations through the end of Trump’s term in office in fiscal year 2029. Alex Wong/Getty Images Tyler Durden Wed, 06/17/2026 - 22:35

So homer-happy were the Giants on Wednesday that even Luis Arraez got in on the power party aided by the balmy conditions in the Braves’ bandbox.