The National Guard Bureau, the District of Columbia National Guard and the U.S. General Services Administration have awarded apartment-hotel rental company Placemakr $292 million to provide up to 2,000 “apartment-style lodging units” for troops assigned to the Joint Task Force-District of Columbia mission, the Guard announced. The contract, the largest interagency lodging acquisition in the history of the Guard, comes as part of ongoing support for the Trump administration’s “Making D.C. Safe and Beautiful” executive order.The length of the D.C. task force’s mission, which kicked off in August 2025, has made current lodging arrangements unsustainable, a Guard release stated. Mobilized troops have been staying in hotels throughout the region.The Guard is hoping a long-term housing remedy will improve overall quality of life and flexibility for those mobilized while reducing taxpayer expenses, the release stated. The acquisition process was reportedly completed in under three months, “despite an agency-level vendor protest, which was reviewed and denied.”“This contract delivers stable, secure housing for our soldiers and airmen while achieving significant cost savings for the government,” Monica Williams, executive director of acquisitions and head of contracting activity for the National Guard Bureau, said in the release. “We were able to move quickly to meet…

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles! We are in a bit of a dull period for sports. We don’t have a ton of the major sports going on at the moment. The NBA has taken a break from Summer League (which set viewership records, by the way). The NFL mini-camps haven’t officially started. The NHL does have free agency going on, but most of the bigger names are signed. That leaves us with just baseball, which is fine by me – I love betting on it. Luckily, we have some great games today as well, like this one between the Mariners and Rangers.The Seattle Mariners are really frustrating because on paper this looks like a team that should be running away with not only their division, but among the best in the American League. That is not the case, unfortunately. The Mariners are 51-52 for the season and have been pretty poor on the road with a 21-29 record. I keep waiting for this team to turn it on, but they are just average. Their offense struggles regularly. The pitching staff is still dominant, but they aren’t getting the support needed. Today the Mariners get arguably the best…

Fearing that its new plans for the U.S. military draft pool won’t work, the Selective Service System wants to create a computer simulation to test scenarios for its national mobilization.The “Readiness Simulation” project comes as the U.S. government is about to change its draft registration system. Since 1940, men within a designated age range have been required to register with the Selective Service. But under a proposed rule, men aged 18 to 26 will be automatically registered starting Dec. 19, 2026. The Selective Service System will work off data contained in other federal databases.Questions remain about how prepared the Selective Service System is to handle the change. “SSS currently relies on manual analysis, legacy modeling approaches, outdated assumptions, and historical datasets that do not fully reflect modern demographics, communications channels, throughput constraints, or operational readiness conditions,” warned the agency in a Request for Quote for the Readiness Simulation tool.The deadline for vendors to propose their simulation models is Aug. 14.The computer simulation will explore multiple areas. These include evaluating staffing and resource requirements, comparing mobilization and police scenarios and assessing the operational impact of surge conditions. In addition, the system will “identify throughput risks, delays, and bottlenecks” and support executive…

In today’s article, Jeremy Tremp reviews the GOYOJO GRL335 thermal optic. This 4x optical scope offers an attractive price point with a professional-grade sensor and easy operation. How does it perform? That’s what Tremp sets out to discover. The optic was provided by GOYOJO Optics for the review. There is a moment in every shooter’s life when technology catches up with imagination. The GOYOJO GRL335 brings a professional-grade 384×288 thermal sensor to a price point that first-time buyers can actually reach. For many of us, when we think of thermal vision we immediately picture those old 80s action movies like Predator, or more modern video games. But in this day and age owning such technology for ourselves is becoming more and more commonplace, as well as affordable. When the GOYOJO GRL335 arrived at my door, it marked my first step into that world. And mounting it atop my Springfield Armory Heatseeker felt like the perfect way to experience thermal for the first time. This was not just a new optic. It was a new way to see. The Details of the GRL335 Opening the box, I expected something fragile and overly technical. Thermal optics still feels like advanced gear, even…

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles! The latest revelations about the purported first ransom note in the Nancy Guthrie case appear inconsistent with a kidnapping for ransom, according to a retired FBI negotiator.”The fact that they wanted to cut off communication quickly suggests that they may not have had kidnapping for ransom as a primary motive, even though that’s what this says,” said Jason Pack, a retired FBI supervisory agent. “It doesn’t seem like how a usual kidnapping goes down.”He said typical kidnappers want to keep communication channels open to negotiate payment and maintain leverage over the victim’s family, making the reported demand for no further contact highly unusual.NEW DETAILS FROM NANCY GUTHRIE RANSOM DEMAND REVEALED, ‘HER LIFE IS IN YOUR HANDS’: REPORT “The most telling sign is this no negotiation, no further contact line,” Pack told Fox News Digital. “Genuine kidnappers wanna keep the line of communication open.”The sender did, however, incorporate known pressure tactics, including setting a deadline, making threats and telling the family that Guthrie knew what would happen if they failed to comply, Pack said.But cutting off communication before the deadlines passed was also unusual, he added.NANCY GUTHRIE RANSOM NOTE CLAIMED THAT SHE HAD…

Bugging out of the city and into the country during an SHTF scenario would be very stressful, to put it mildly. Hopefully, you and your family would be able to bug out quickly, but the trip to your bug out location would probably take a while. Once you finally got there, everyone would be eager to relax and get some rest. That would be a mistake. I’m not saying no one can sleep at a bug out location, but I am saying that you’ll want to take turns standing guard. During certain scenarios, desperate people could pour out of the cities and into the country, looking for food and water. Even more likely, marauders could invade remote homes, knowing the police are too busy to respond and the neighbors are too far away to help. This is why, if you do have a bug out location (or are searching for one), you need to make sure you can defend it. Here are the top factors you need to take into consideration when it comes to defending a bug out location. 1. Make Sure the BOL is Worth Defending If your bug out location is not worth defending, then what’s the…

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles! Secret Service is giving a behind-the-scenes glimpse inside the strategy to protect President Donald Trump and guests at Friday night’s rescheduled White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) Dinner.The originally scheduled event in April was done before it even started after a crazed gunman bolted through a security check point, and was later accused of trying to assassinate the 47th president.”Our agency grows and adapts from every event we secure, and we have engaged with WHCA to ensure attendees are given timely information in the unlikely event on an emergency during the event,” Anthony Guglielmi, Secret Service’s communications director, told Fox News Digital.Guglielmi noted that Secret Service’s protection plan worked during the April 25 dinner when agents stopped Cole Allen of California after he alleged descended from the 10th floor of the Washington Hilton Hotel, where the dinner is historically held, and attempted to breach security barriers. He allegedly fired one shot from a shotgun before tripping and falling, after which he was quickly detained. One Secret Service agent was shot and sustained minor injuries.FIRST ON FOX: WHITE HOUSE REVEALS WHO’S JOINING TRUMP AT CORRESPONDENTS’ DINNER — AND WHO CAN’T ATTEND The rescheduled dinner…

This article was originally published by Joshua Mawhorter at The Mises Institute.  Contrary to the popular assumption that centralized political power was necessary to destroy slavery, federal power spent much of its history protecting and enforcing the institution. This privatized costs for a privileged few and socialized and diffused the costs onto others in society. This is a common reality with any state intervention; indeed, it is the point of state intervention. It should be noted that slavery was historically normal (not just) and free labor was the true “peculiar institution.” As this author has argued on numerous occasions, slavery can exist wherever one person can overpower another and forcibly expropriate production from him, but—being economically costly to maintain—slavery usually required the legal protection of state power to privatize gains to a slave oligarchy and socialize costs onto others. The Constitution accommodated slavery, Congress protected it, federal courts upheld it, and federal officers enforced fugitive slave laws. Only after certain slaveholding states attempted to leave the Union—explicitly citing slavery as a principal cause of secession—did the federal government cease acting as slavery’s protector and begin acting as its destroyer. The American nation-state was willing to abandon its decades-long legal protections of chattel slavery in exchange for keeping the Union together by force. In the sharp assessment of Lysander…

If you’re a gardener with an overflowing harvest, or a prepper working to build a ready-to-eat food stash, you already know the value of canning. But here’s the thing: most of the time, you’re not going to eat canned green beans, carrots, or tomatoes straight from the jar. You’ll use them in meals. So why not skip a step and can full meals instead? That’s why I’m a big fan of canning hearty soups. Not only are they shelf-stable and long-lasting, they’re also ready to eat straight out of the jar. Great to have for emergencies, power outages, or just busy evenings. No cooking required. Just open, heat, and eat. One homesteader who really knows her stuff is Jamie from Guildbrook Farm. She’s canned dozens of batches of soup including Senate bean soup, ham and pea soup, ham and potato, German-style ham and green bean soup, and more. In this this video, she talks about why she likes to pressure can soup and some key rules for canning soup safely. She also shares her recipe for ham, potato, and corn soup. For those who prefer to read, I typed it up below. Why Pressure Can Soup? Let’s clear this up…

TAMPA, FL – While the SEC was holding its annual kickoff to the upcoming football season this week in Florida, the bigger conversation was transpiring in Washington, D.C., around the ‘Protect College Sports Act’.After being passed through the Senate Commerce Committee in June, Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) are racing against time for the legislation aimed at creating guardrails around NIL, eligibility issues, transfers and even a conference realignment, with the SEC and Big Ten not providing their support for the bill in its current form.CLOCK IS TICKING AS SENATORS TED CRUZ, MARIA CANTWELL PUSH FOR SEC, BIG TEN BUY-IN ON COLLEGE SPORTS BILLThe bipartisan bill was largely created to help navigate college athletics back into a realistic situation, and out of courtrooms. After years of lobbying Congress for help, which led to the SCORE Act being created before this latest bill, there is a growing dissension between parties on how much actual help is wanted at the federal level.After meeting numerous times this week, the revisions currently being discussed have not been presented to either conference as of Thursday evening.Does August recess for Congress creates invisible line in the sand?Obviously, time is of the essence, which Senate Majority…