Drudge Retort: The Other Side of the News
Friday, October 23, 2026

- 10/23/26 4:17 PM ET

Ukraine's military on Friday struggled with a still-slowed Starlink satellite system despite President Trump's promise a day earlier that SpaceX owner Elon Musk had restored the service.

Connections with Starshield " the military version of Starlink, a major tool for Ukraine to defend itself from missile and drone attacks from Russia " continued to fail in most of the country if drones flew faster than 100 mph, The Wall Street Journal reported.

"The speed limits on Starlink and Starshield are still there, and the speed has not been restored," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in remarks on Friday.

He said Ukraine hopes SpaceX and the Trump administration will fully restore the service: "We count on such decisions."


James Talarico releases new ad EXPOSING Elon Musk and Ken Paxton (one min yt short)


With just 11 days until the midterm election, Texas Democrats have a chance to win two key congressional seats in districts that President Donald Trump won by 10 points in 2024, a Washington Post-Schar School poll finds. Exasperated by the high cost of living and a deportation agenda that a majority says has gone "too far," voters in one of the South Texas districts surveyed appear closely divided; in the other, they lean toward the Democrat. Read more


Lay's drastically rebrands after disturbing finding: 42% of consumers didn't know their chips were made out of potatoes

A 2021 survey found that 42% of consumers didn't know Lay's were made out of the spuds. Read more


After years of debating how driverless cars should tell the world no one is at the wheel -- flashing text, audio alerts, custom lights -- the feds just stepped in with a single answer: cyan.


A Florida mayor was arrested Wednesday on theft and fraud charges alleging that she illegally enriched herself and family members through a COVID-19 small business relief program launched under her administration, according to the state's attorney general. Kissimmee Mayor Jackie Espinosa is being charged with grand theft, a second-degree felony, and organized scheme to defraud, a first-degree felony, according to Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier. Espinosa is accused of improperly appropriating $50,000 in funds through the city's Business Boost 2.0 program, according to the arrest warrant.


The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday issued an opinion finding that illegal aliens are not entitled to a bond hearing under the Constitution, regardless of how long they remain in custody. The decision is a significant win for President Donald Trump's mass deportation agenda, as it defeats one of the more pervasive challenges to keeping illegal aliens in custody pending deportation.


Four years after North Texas home builder Scott Sherman completed a federal prison sentence for mortgage fraud, his new construction materials business received a $600,000 cash infusion. The financial boost came from a blind trust set up to prevent Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, from any overlap in their personal investments and their actions as elected officials. But previously unreleased records from the attorney general's 2023 impeachment investigation show the trust was far from blind and did not shield the Paxtons from its business dealings, including the investment in Sherman's business. Before long, Wildcatter Sand Services and Grayson County Sand and Gravel, which Sherman built with his father, grew into a vast enterprise with various locations and subsidiaries. And along the way, some of those businesses stopped paying taxes to local governments, including school districts.


Remember when President Donald Trump put his son-in-law in charge of negotiating a grand bargain in the Middle East, back in his first term? Understandable if not, given that no grand bargain emerged and the region is more on fire than ever courtesy of the U.S. and Israel's disastrous war with Iran, the atrocities of the Israeli-Palestinian war in Gaza, and a raging conflict between Yemen's Houthi rebels and a Saudi-led coalition. Yet Jared Kushner is more than one of the many ghouls who have clambered over a track record of failure right back into Trump's second-term White House, where he's still a top envoy. He also got owned by the Dutch, according to an excerpt from Matthew Cole's new book, Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed's Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East, published in Vanity Fair. Read more


Thursday, October 22, 2026

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said the record-setting judgment should encourage more states to take the tech industry to trial.


The first case of New World screwworm in wildlife in the United States has been found in an elk in Texas, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Wednesday. The elk was discovered on a game ranch in Pecos County and was reported after being harvested by a hunter, the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service said.


More than 1,250 people were evacuated from a major US naval installation in Bahrain in March after Iranian attacks threatened American personnel and their families. Five people affected by the departure told MS NOW the evacuation was chaotic, leaving military families to deal with trauma, housing instability and rising expenses months after fleeing the Gulf country.


A Minnesota man is opening up after he saved nearly 20 children when their school bus driver suffered a medical emergency. "I really felt like it was my duty," Ebro Ahmed, 27, told ABC News. "Also, too, it's kids we're talking about, you know. Even if I were to die, it would still be worth it."


Staffers for US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth broke a globe used by Gen. Dwight Eisenhower during World War II after the Trump Cabinet official demanded that it be moved to his office in the Pentagon. The Washington Post reported on Thursday that Hegseth wanted the historic 30-inch globe delivered to his office because he found its historical significance "attractive." Read more


Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville said he would rather see Republicans keep control of the House by five seats than watch Democrats win the chamber by the same margin, warning that a "nightmare" razor-thin majority would leave party leaders "hostage to the DSA."


Billionaire technology investor Peter Thiel said he's skeptical of the U.S. war with Iran and does not believe the United States should have launched it, putting the major Republican donor at odds with President Donald Trump over one of the administration's defining foreign policy decisions. Thiel's remarks, delivered on Oct. 12 at a private event, are his most explicit statements to be revealed publicly about the war with Iran and come less than two weeks before the midterm elections in which Trump's party is grasping to maintain power in Congress.


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