The late, great Judy Garland put her own twist on shepherd’s pie, turning a humble classic into an innovative dish worthy of special occasions.
Food Republic – Restaurants, Reviews, Recipes, Cooking Tips
Author: alaskaadmin
‘I am disgusted by how invested everyone is in a very clearly private family matter,’ Jelly’s daughter Bailee admonished fans. Continue reading…Country Music News – Taste of Country
‘I am disgusted by how invested everyone is in a very clearly private family matter,’ Jelly’s daughter Bailee admonished fans. Continue reading…The Boot – Country Music News, Music Videos and Songs
Uptown Records has officially relaunched under Republic Collective, marking a new chapter for the label during its 40th anniversary year. Danielle Price Sanders will lead the relaunched company as President, Uptown Records/EVP, Republic Collective, with Natina Nimene joining the executive leadership team as EVP, Urban Audience and Artist Relations, Republic Collective.
The announcement arrives with new music and recent activity from a roster that includes Yung Miami, G Herbo, Trap Dickey, Sunkis, 9B Meechie and producer ATL Jacob. Price Sanders said Andre Harrell built “one of the most influential record companies in music history.” Harrell founded Uptown in 1986 and developed a roster that included Mary J. Blige, Jodeci, The Notorious B.I.G., Heavy D and Guy. In a press release, Price Sanders explained that the relaunched label will support “the next generation of artists.” She also noted that Uptown will operate as part of Republic Collective alongside other Collective labels and in connection with Def Jam, led by Tunji Balogun and Kevin Lipson.
Yung Miami is among the artists at the center of the relaunch. Her April 2026 single “Spend Dat” debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 66 and rose to No. 34, giving her first Top 40 entry as a solo artist. The song also reached No. 25 on Billboard’s Hot Rap Songs chart and moved from No. 50 to No. 34 on the Hot Hip-Hop/R&B Songs chart. Yung Miami said Uptown “already feels like home” as she continues her solo career with the label.
G Herbo’s Uptown-released album Lil Herb debuted at No. 1 on Apple Music’s Hip-Hop Albums chart and featured the platinum-certified single “Went Legit.” Trap Dickey’s project The Ville included “Down South” featuring Key Glock, which passed 25 million streams and became the No. 2 most-added song at Urban Radio. The relaunched label plans more news and announcements in 2026.
Discover more about the world’s greatest R&B artists | uDiscover Music
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From Top Gear to Clarkson’s Farm, Jeremy Clarkson has been entertaining viewers for decades and decades.
Now, the iconic British television personality has had to break some difficult news.
Clarkson has cancer.
It was caught early, but it was aggressive. And treatment soon ran into complications.
PHOTO ONE
For as long as many of us have been alive, Clarkson has been a famous Top Gear presenter on the BBC.
He hosted from 1988 to 1999 and then again from 2002 until 2015.
Clarkson’s Farm is a more low-key series, and usually an uplifting one.
however, for the final two episodes of Season 5, he had some somber news to share with viewers.
“I’ve got cancer,” he shared, speaking to the camera.
Specifically, Clarkson has been diagnosed with prostate cancer.
He shared that the cancer is “aggressive,” but it had been discovered before it could spread too far.
“I disappeared off the other week and I had a biopsy,” Clarkson explained.
“And it is cancer, and it’s aggressive,” he detailed. “But it’s really early.”
Clarkson shared that he expects to be “fine” but warned that he will be out of action “for a while” as he undergoes treatments.
PHOTO THREE
At the time of the filming, he shared that he had known about the cancer “since May.”
The episodes aired in mid-June, but we have to emphasize that the show did not film in 2026.
Season 5 filmed between 2024-2025, so it seems likely that these two finale episodes are from 2025.
“I won’t know whether it’s worked or not until November, probably,” Clarkson predicted.
He then detailed: “The prostate, 10% of it’s dead, the 10% where the cancer is.”
At the very end of the season finale, Clarkson was in a hospital bed, telling the camera that his cancer treatment had involved complications.
“We started Season 5 with me in a hospital bed, and here we are at the end of Season 5, and I’m back in a hospital bed,” he quipped.
“What I wanted to say was if this is all successful, I’ll see you for Season 6, and if it isn’t, I won’t,” Clarkson grimly promised. “Take care, everyone.”
Fear not, as there are no indications that this aired posthumously.
In fact, Clarkson gave fans a vague preview of the finale episodes’ ups and downs hours ahead of the finale on Instagram.
Jeremy Clarkson Reveals Cancer Diagnosis, Treatment Complications was originally published on The Hollywood Gossip.
The Hollywood Gossip
Flames from burning gas stream into air on Aug. 23, 2018 at a facility within the Greater Prudhoe Bay Unit on Alaska’s North Slope. Prudhoe Bay and other fields hold vast amounts of natural gas that is routinely produced with the oil, then reinjected into the reservoirs because there is no ecomically viable way to send those known reserves to major markets. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)
The president of the United States urged lawmakers to do everything they can to make the long-desired Alaska natural gas pipeline a reality.
“It is in the national interest to bring Alaskan gas reserves to market at the lowest possible price for consumers,” the president said in an official message. “Every effort must be made to ensure timely completion of the pipeline at the lowest possible cost consistent with Federal regulatory policies.”
The president was Jimmy Carter. The year was 1979. The Alaska natural gas pipeline project was already several years old, with official presidential approval issued two years earlier. The 4,748-mile pipeline project, which Carter touted as “the largest privately financed energy project ever undertaken,” was to be completed by 1984 at a cost of $10 billion to $15 billion, according to the approved plans.
That project never happened, nor did any of the other iterations of an Alaska natural gas pipeline plan that followed.
Now, five decades later, Gov. Mike Dunleavy is describing an alternate version of the yet-unbuilt pipeline as an imminent megaproject.
“For decades and decades and decades, this gasline project has been a dream of many Alaskans. And we’re closer today than we ever have been,” he said in comments posted on Facebook on May 29.
As Carter did, Dunleavy uses superlatives to describe the plan. “That project will be the largest on the face of the earth, probably the largest in terms of investment ever,” he said in opening remarks on May 19 at the Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference in Anchorage.
Dunleavy has called the legislature into a special session to consider sweeping tax concessions that he says are necessary to make the project work economically. His plan, which the legislature is considering, would eliminate nearly all of its state and municipal property taxes on project-related infrastructure in exchange for the promise of a share of the revenues once gas starts flowing through the line.
The current project sponsor is Glenfarne LLC, a New York- and Houston-based company founded in 2011. Glenfarne, a privately held investment and management company specializing in energy, entered the Alaska gas pipeline history last year when it acquired 75% of a project promoted by the state-owned and state-financed Alaska Gasline Development Corp. It has never built or operated a major natural gas pipeline or LNG facility.
Glenfarne says the project would cost between $44.5 billion and $54.5 billion.
Decades of proposals
The Glenfarne plan, for a phased-in pipeline to carry natural gas from the North Slope to a liquefaction plant in Cook Inlet, is the latest in a long series of pipeline plans and campaigns that emerged over the past half century.
The oil fields on Alaska’s North Slope that have been producing since 1977 also hold vast quantities of natural gas, as is common in petroleum basins. Known natural gas reserves on the North Slope, mostly at Prudhoe, total about 35 trillion cubic feet, and experts say there is certainly more natural gas to be discovered.
So far that gas has been considered “stranded” — too isolated to be marketable. Instead of being sold to utilities or other users, the gas that is brought to the surface with oil produced on the North Slope is reinjected into the reservoirs, where it helps build pressure that will enable more oil recovery. Each day, about 8 billion cubic feet of natural gas has to be reinjected, an amount equivalent to the daily natural gas consumption in Japan in 2024.
The prospect of selling that gas tantalized Alaskans and the energy industry and inspired a wide range of proposals that have come and gone over the past decades.
Some proposals were for overland pipelines through Canada, as the Carter-approved plan proposed. The main alternatives to the Canada route have been plans for an “all-Alaskan” line taking gas from Prudhoe to Valdez, the site of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline marine terminal, or to Cook Inlet for processing into liquefied natural gas to be transported by tanker vessel. Other plans proposed shorter lines delivering to in-state markets and an over-the-top route that would skim the Arctic coast before connecting with a Mackenzie Delta pipeline in the Northwest and Yukon Territories — a Canadian project that, like Alaska gasline, never materialized.
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There have been plans for projects that would skip the pipeline construction altogether. In the early 2000s, BP experimented with a gas-to-liquids technology that might produce synthetic oil that could be shipped down the existing trans-Alaska pipeline. BP set up a facility in Nikiski for the project but closed it in 2009. Two pending proposals, one from a company called Qilak and another from a company called Polar LNG, call for natural gas deliveries directly from the North Slope by icebreaker. Even those are not new; the icebreaker idea was considered in the 1980s by Arco Alaska.
Also dating back to the mid-20th century are various task forces, commissions, coordinating offices, approved state and federal legislation, enthusiastic support from presidents, completed environmental impact statements and completed permits. There were various tentative agreements with oil producers, major corporations and Asian governments for participation the project. There were numerous special sessions of the Alaska Legislature — and, at the urging of project sponsors, financial inducements assembled by the state and federal governments.
A list of projects that surfaced through 2021 is available from the Alaska State Library, though it comes with a caveat: “It does not purport to be complete.”
Not one foot of gas pipeline has been laid, but plenty of space is taken up on Alaska library shelves by rows and rows of studies and reports produced since the 1970s.
Dunleavy insists that the Glenfarne project is different, though he conceded in a May 21 presentation that “people have heard about this project forever.”
In a presentation at the Sustainable Energy Conference in Anchorage, Dunelavy cited numerous factors that he said made the current plan different from past failed plans.
He listed energy disruptions caused by the war in Iran and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the rise of technologies that have dramatically increased the need for energy, the impending shortage of Cook Inlet natural gas that has long fueled Southcentral Alaska, the permits that the Alaska Gasline Development Authority already secured — plus the ardent support of President Donald Trump, who has pushed for aggressive resource development in Alaska since he returned to the White House in January of 2025.
“When you get all the geopolitical stuff that’s changed the world and then you get Trump 2.0 in here and data farms and cryptocurrency and electrification, it’s a different project,” Dunleavy said at the conference.
But Larry Persily, a veteran Alaska journalist and past head of the federal gas pipeline coordinating office that was originally established by President George W. Bush in 2004, sees a lot of wishful thinking surrounding the Glenfarne plan.
“We want to think it’s different. We want the pipeline. We want the revenues. We want the jobs. And we want the promise of affordable energy,” Persily said.
He cited ongoing “pep rallies” to help convince people that things are different this time, like the June 2 event hosted by the Greater Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce.
“We have a sales job, and it’s ginned up a lot of enthusiasm — misplaced, I believe,” he said.
Past optimism
Of the past plans, Persily said, the most similar to Glenfarne’s proposal was the Yukon Pacific plan for a LNG project, which emerged in the 1980s.
Yukon Pacific’s Trans-Alaska Gas System, also referred to as TAGS, envisioned a gas pipeline paralleling the trans-Alaska oil pipeline to a liquefaction plant in Valdez, from where tanker vessels would take LNG to Asian markets. The estimated price tag was $12 billion.
The Yukon Pacific plan was vetted through two environmental impact statements, one for the pipeline and one for the terminal. The company had permits in hand, including long-term federal and state right of way authorizations.
It had backing of the Bush and Clinton administrations. It had popular support, including from two-time Gov. and former U.S. Interior Secretary Wally Hickel, who founded Yukon Pacific in 1981 but relinquished his shares in the company to avoid any conflict of interest. It had some major corporate backing; in 1988, Yukon Pacific became a subsidiary of the CSX Corp., a major railway, transportation and real estate owner and operator.
What it lacked was economics to justify construction. The project was never built.
‘My way is the highway’
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the spotlight shifted from the LNG option back to the overland route through Canada.
Democrat Tony Knowles, elected in 1994 and reelected in 1998, concluded that the route through Canada was the most likely. He used a catchy phrase to describe his choice: “My way is the highway.”
He championed legislation and issued executive orders to encourage development. He proposed using $17 billion in railroad bonds for the project. And, like others before, he spoke confidently about the prospects for bringing the pipeline to reality.
“I believe Alaskans can be on the working end of a shovel building a natural gas pipeline within two years. After two decades of false starts and broken dreams, the economic and political stars are finally aligned in our favor. Natural gas is the fuel of the 21st century,” Knowles said in his Jan. 10, 2001, state of the state address.
Industry officials made similarly optimistic statements.
A month prior to Knowles’ state of the state speech, Dick Olver, then chief executive of BP Exploration and Production, predicted gas deliveries within seven years.
“It is no longer a question of ‘if’ North Slope gas will be commercialized, but ‘when’ and ‘how,’” Olver said in a Dec. 5, 2000, speech to the Alaska Support Industry Alliance, a trade group for oilfield service companies. “We believe ‘when’ will be no later than 2007, and there are three exciting options for bringing North Slope gas to market at the present time,” he said, going on to summarize the overland pipeline, LNG concept and gas-to-liquids options being considered by BP at the time.
Frank Murkowski, who served for 22 years in the U.S. Senate before becoming the governor who succeeded Knowles, exuded similar optimism.
“This administration has brought the long-held dream of construction of an Alaska natural gas pipeline to the threshold of reality,” Murkowski said in a Jan. 20, 2006, speech to the Alaska Support Industry Association’s Meet Alliance conference.
Murkowski’s efforts focused on a deal with the three North Slope producers — BP, ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil — for what was then a $20 billion project. Murkowski said the producers needed “fiscal certainty,” not just on natural gas taxes but on oil taxes.
Like Dunleavy, Murkowski called the legislature into special session to approve tax concessions he said were urgently needed to make the gas pipeline a reality. “We have been waiting 30 years,” he said in a speech at the start of what turned out to be two special sessions on the topic.
The idea of locked-in oil taxes was not popular and, according to several legislators, contrary to the Alaska constitution.
Sarah Palin, elected governor later that year, took a different approach, a state license for which companies would compete. She sponsored a bill called the Alaska Gasoline Inducement Act, or AGIA, which lawmakers approved in 2007. Lawmakers meeting in a special session the following year approved the Palin administration’s proposal to award the license — which came with a pledge of up to $500 million in state cost reimbursement — to TransCanada. Palin signed the bill on Aug. 27, 2008, officially granting the license.
The following week, after she was selected as the vice presidential candidate on the national Republican ticket, Palin portrayed the gas pipeline as a fait accompli.
“I fought to bring about the largest private-sector infrastructure project in North American history. And when that deal was struck, we began a nearly $40 billion natural gas pipeline to help lead America to energy independence,” Palin said at her Sept. 3, 2008, acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis. “That pipeline, when the last section is laid and its valves are opened, will lead America one step farther away from dependence on dangerous foreign powers that do not have our interests at heart.”
TransCanada’s AGIA plan fizzled, as did a competing plan pursued by ConocoPhillips and BP called Denali.
The fracking resolution that flooded the Lower 48 with cheap natural gas made an overland route through Canada less attractive than an LNG project delivering to Asian markets.
The iterations that rose from the ashes of AGIA, pursued through the administrations of Gov. Sean Parnell and Gov. Bill Walker, were new versions of the previously proposed LNG plans, including some attempts involving TransCanada and the major oil producers. The idea of keeping the project entirely in Alaska had some popular appeal in the state, as encapsulated in a bumper sticker seen in the early 2000s that proclaimed “CANADA my ass/it’s ALASKA’s GAS.”
Leadership of the project ultimately fell to the Alaska Gasline Development Corp., a state entity created by the legislature in 2010 in response to concerns about dwindling Cook Inlet gas supplies. AGDC’s takeover came in spite of a 2002 Department of Revenue report concluding that state ownership “would not likely improve the feasibility of the project or be valued by private sector project sponsors.”
AGDC in 2020 won authorizations from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to build and operate the LNG project, the same approval that Yukon Pacific received decades earlier.
State concessions demanded
As with Glenfarne, past project sponsors have argued that tax or other financial concessions are needed to make massive investment in a gasline worthwhile.
Those arguments date back to the 1970s, when the Northwest Alaska Pipeline Co., the main sponsor of the Carter administration-approved overland gas pipeline through Canada, requested that the state issue $1 billion in bonds to pay for the project.
John McMillan, the company’s chief executive, was dissatisfied at the time with the administration of then-Gov. Jay Hammond.
“Regarding the State of Alaska, we must confess to a sense of frustration. While the State is the principal beneficiary of this project and will realize more direct and indirect benefits from its construction and the sale of the Prudhoe Bay gas than anyone else, we have been unable to develop any positive progress with the State which would materially assist in the development of a financial plan to move the project forward,” McMillan said in prepared statements delivered on Oct. 15, 1979, to a U.S. Congressional committee.
While lawmakers in the Frank Murkowski era rejected the governor’s idea of linking oil taxes to the long-desired gas pipeline, their changes to the oil tax system led to federal bribery and political corruption convictions and jail time for several lawmakers and others, including Bill Allen, the chief executive of what was at the time the state’s largest oilfield service company.
BP, a party to the Murkowski negotiations and, later, a partner with ConocoPhillips in the Denali gas pipeline proposal, left the state in 2020 after selling off all its Alaska assets to Hilcorp.
Because of the AGIA provisions, the state wound up reimbursing TransCanada about $327 million from 2010 to 2015, accoring to one legislative tally. The state paid out another $65 million in late 2015 to acquire the company’s remaining share in the project. The buyout gave the Alaska Gasline Development Corp. access to the Canadian company’s engineering studies and other documents.
Altogether, Persily said, the state has spent more than $1 billion in the past 25 years on the yet-to-be-built gas pipeline.
That does not include items like the cost of the current special legislative session or the $500,000 that the just-passed state budget for the next fiscal year appropriated to the Department of Revenue to adjust the tax system to accommodate Glenfarne’s desired near-elimination of property taxes.
Sen. Bill Wielechowski, D-Anchorage, is among the lawmakers considering whether additional financial concessions that Glenfarne is seeking are justified. The deliberations follow a long history of unfulfilled gasline promises, he noted.
“I don’t think anyone’s opposed to giving them the tax break as long as they need it,” Wielechowski said of Glenfarne’s plan. “We’re just struggling with the lack of information and the feeling that we’ve been burned in the past.”
James Brooks contributed to this story.
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As we previously reported, Jelly Roll and Bunnie Xo have called it quits after ten years of marriage.
The news came as a shock to many — but there are those who say they saw it coming.
And one insider claims it came down to a difference in values — or at least the way these two have chosen to present their values publicly.
“There is just such a conflict in what’s going on. He’s preaching this Christian way of life. She’s posing mostly naked and talking about porn and penises on her podcast,” a source told the Daily Mail on Tuesday, referring to Bunnie’s “Dumb Blonde” podcast.
“At every turn she’s just kind of embarrassing him and wrecking every PR narrative that they’re trying to create. This is the talk of the town [in Nashville],”
Jelly Roll quietly filed for divorce in Tennessee in May, citing irreconcilable differences.
The filing came as a surprise to many fans, especially given how openly the couple had discussed their relationship, family life, and plans for the future.
Jelly’s pivot toward a more family-friendly image was on full display when he won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Country Album back in February.
“First of all, Jesus, I hear you, and I’m listening, Lord. I am listening, Lord,” he said in his acceptance speech before shifting his focus to Bunnie:
“Second of all, I want to thank my beautiful wife. I would have never changed my life without you. I would have ended up dead or in jail. I would have killed myself if it wasn’t for you and Jesus. I thank you for that,”
The insider noted that there might be a cynical component to Jelly’s new image, as “there’s so much money” in Christian music.
“He saw a lot of money in this market and told Bunnie to get it together. But she wouldn’t stay in line and it is destroying his brand,” said the source.
Meanwhile, the singer’s 18-year-old daughter from a previous relationship has expressed her disdain with the public’s interest in her father’s split.
“Oh & one more thing I am disgusted at how invested everyone is in a very clearly private family matter,” Bailee Ann wrote in an expiring TikTok post Tuesday.
She went on to call it “fkn crazy” that people are so invested, and she told those following closely along to “worry bout your house – not mine.”
“I’m not speaking on it – yet,” Bailee concluded.
Thus far, neither are Jelly or Bunnie. But based on the moving vans that were reportedly spotted outside of their home this week, it seems that they have every intention of going through with the split.
Jelly Roll & Bunnie Xo: Real Cause of Their Split Revealed was originally published on The Hollywood Gossip.
The Hollywood Gossip
At 93, Dame Joan Collins has held onto her youthful looks and attitude in a way that’s fascinating the public, as evidenced by these iconic red carpet looks.
Health Digest – Health News, Wellness, Expert Insights
Nearly 1 in 5 felony cases filed in Denver and resolved in 2025 was dismissed with no strings attached.
For misdemeanor cases, the rate was 1 in 4.
A criminal case might be dismissed for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, evidence falls apart. Law enforcement, prosecutor or lab errors can similarly derail a case. Or perhaps prosecutors decide that pursuing it no longer serves the interests of justice. These situations are a normal, inevitable and sometimes even desirable aspect of the legal system.
But other times, cases get dismissed because the system lacks the bandwidth to hold onto them. Heavy caseloads in prosecutors’ offices can lead to more of these dismissals, according to my recent research.
I am a professor who studies prosecutorial policy and decision making. I am also a co-manager of Prosecutorial Performance Indicators, a research and technical assistance project that collaborates with prosecutors’ offices across the country to promote transparency, equity and data-informed policy. Between 2021 and 2024, my research team partnered with elected district attorneys throughout Colorado to produce data dashboards that show statistics on criminal cases and outcomes.
My colleague Don Stemen and I then used data from that project to investigate how prosecutors responded to weekly fluctuations in their criminal caseloads. Weekly caseloads can vary by as much as 15% above or below the average across weeks in a Colorado judicial district, with a mean change of 6%. Our research shows that in weeks when active caseloads are higher, fewer cases get resolved via a plea deal. Instead, dismissal rates rise to compensate.
In other words, as cases pile up, more of them end up getting dropped.
Case outcomes in Colorado
In the American legal system, which relies on plea deals, guilty pleas account for an estimated 95% of criminal convictions across the country. Trials, though constitutionally guaranteed, are rare.
However, a notable share of cases do not result in a conviction at all.
Once a prosecutor has decided to file charges, cases can follow several pathways other than guilty plea or trial. Defendants may be screened for diversion programming, which redirects eligible individuals away from conviction and toward rehabilitative services, such as substance use or domestic violence offender treatment. They may also receive a deferred judgment, in which they initially plead guilty but avoid formal conviction if they can successfully complete conditions such as community service hours, counseling and remaining arrest-free for a set period of time. Other defendants see their cases dismissed outright by either a judge or prosecutor.
Across the half-million cases in our Colorado sample, about 45% were resolved in one of these alternative ways that avoided a criminal conviction.
Our sample includes all felony and misdemeanor cases resolved in 19 of Colorado’s 23 judicial districts between 2021 and 2024. Data was extracted from Action, the case management system used by prosecutors’ offices across the state, and shared by the Colorado District Attorneys’ Council.
Information from individual, public-facing data dashboards in the state show a similar reliance on alternatives to conviction. In the 20th Judicial District, which is Boulder, for example, 34% of felony cases resulted in a dismissal, diversion or deferred judgment in 2025. That was true for 50% of misdemeanors as well.
For misdemeanors in particular, this represents a 10% decline in the conviction rate in Boulder in just five years. It suggests that hundreds of defendants in less serious cases who would previously have been convicted now receive a different outcome each year.
Outright dismissals make up the bulk of misdemeanor nonconvictions in many jurisdictions. In the 18th Judicial District, which includes most of Aurora and Centennial, 56% of misdemeanor cases did not result in a conviction in 2025. Of those nonconvictions, 77% were dismissals.
Colorado’s dismissal rates do not appear to be outliers. Most prosecutors’ offices do not make their data available to researchers or the public, but more than 50% of all cases are routinely dismissed in some urban areas that do, such as Milwaukee and Philadelphia.
The pressure to dismiss
Prosecutors’ offices in Colorado are battling staff recruitment and retention shortages, with attorney vacancy rates above 50% in some offices.
Consequently, prosecutor caseloads have more than doubled in jurisdictions such as Golden, Colorado’s 1st Judicial District, where each prosecutor opened an average of four more felony cases or 122 more misdemeanor cases than they closed in 2025.
The rise of digital evidence, everything from body-worn camera footage to social media activity, has further increased the time and technology investment required to prosecute. Monthslong turnaround times for forensic testing create additional trouble, forcing prosecutors to proactively prioritize some cases for lab analysis over others.
Prosecutors’ offices across the U.S. are similarly struggling to hire and keep lawyers as they continue to grapple with technological challenges and case backlogs triggered by court closures during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In Anchorage, hundreds of cases were dismissed because there were not enough prosecutors available to move them toward trial in 2024. In 2019, the passage of Kalief’s Law, which established stricter evidence disclosure requirements for prosecutors, sent misdemeanor dismissals caused by failure to meet trial deadlines skyrocketing from 9% to 48% within five years in New York City.
Making prosecution more efficient
Case dismissals triggered by a lack of resources could be construed as the recalibration of a historically punitive legal system. Dismissing more cases, especially low-level cases involving defendants with little to no criminal history, may benefit society more than maintaining high conviction rates. After all, it is expensive to be tough on crime, and the evidence that mass conviction and incarceration improves public safety is thin at best.
Even so, these dismissals are symptomatic of a system in crisis. There are too many cases and too few resources to handle them.
If prosecutors’ offices are able to implement more rigorous early case screening, they are likely to eliminate weak cases faster and with less resource expenditure. This may be particularly effective if prosecutors also use their discretion to decline more undeserving cases up front, treating the use of taxpayer dollars on prosecution as something that requires deliberate justification rather than something that happens by default.
Research suggests that greater selectivity at early stages of prosecution reduces caseloads more efficiently than dismissals later on. Selectivity also spares defendants and victims from the prolonged uncertainty of a lingering case. Though moves in this direction would require an up-front investment by prosecutors’ offices, the long-term benefits may be well worth the effort.
Read more of our stories about Colorado.
Rebecca Dunlea receives funding from the Microsoft Justice Reform Initiative and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Politics + Society – The Conversation
Throughout history, rulers and political movements have used public spectacles of combat to evoke courage, sacrifice, collective strength and national purpose. From Roman gladiator contests to modern mixed martial arts, combat spectacles have served not merely as entertainment but as public rituals through which people experience belonging to something larger than themselves.
When President Donald Trump proposed staging a UFC championship event on the White House grounds as part of America’s 250th anniversary celebration, many observers treated it as another example of his affinity for spectacle and mixed martial arts, or MMA, a combat sport combining striking and grappling techniques from multiple martial arts disciplines. Yet the symbolism runs deeper than a president’s taste for theatricality and combat sports.
I’ve spent decades studying why people are willing to fight, sacrifice and even die for causes, and I see such spectacles illuminating an important psychological process known as identity fusion.
People belong to groups: families, nations, religions, professions, political movements, sports teams. Usually, these identities remain distinct from the personal self.
Identity fusion occurs when that boundary disappears. People do not just support a group – they experience it as an inseparable part of who they are. The group’s successes and failures become personal; threats to the group are experienced as threats to oneself.
The important question isn’t just what happens inside the cage – it’s what such spectacles can do for the audience. Public displays of courage, endurance and sacrifice can strengthen emotional bonds among spectators and deepen identification with the groups, causes or leaders they associate with those displays.
Research with soldiers and other front-line fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan, supporters of Ukraine, Palestinians in Gaza, Taiwanese concerned about a Chinese invasion, and participants in extremist movements shows that identity fusion predicts willingness to endure hardship, accept risk and make sacrifices for a collective cause.
This process does not necessarily produce violence. It can motivate volunteerism, mutual aid, military service and resistance to oppression.
It helps explain how public rituals that celebrate courage, sacrifice and collective strength can deepen commitment to groups, causes and leaders under conditions that appear irrational from a purely material perspective.
koyu/iStock Getty Images Plus
Why shared struggle matters
One of the strongest pathways to identity fusion is shared hardship. People who endure danger, suffering or intense challenges together often emerge with unusually strong bonds.
Combat sports play into this dynamic. Fighters publicly test themselves against pain, exhaustion, fear and possible defeat. Spectators witness not simply athletic competition but symbolic demonstrations of courage and endurance. The attraction lies partly in how character is being revealed under pressure.
For ancient Romans, gladiators embodied “virtus” – courage, discipline, endurance and willingness to confront death. Their appeal stemmed not merely from violence but from values they represented.
Modern mixed martial arts is often celebrated in similar terms: a proving ground for toughness, resilience and self-mastery.
In both cases, physical contests become moral dramas about sacrifice and human limits.
MMA has become politically important
The significance of combat sports extends beyond professional competition.
Across Europe and North America, mixed martial arts has become a focal point for segments of the contemporary far right. Organizations known as Active Clubs, now found in countries including the United States, Germany, Sweden, France and Britain, combine physical training with ethnonationalist activism, including recruitment, ideological indoctrination, public demonstrations and transnational networking among ethnic – particularly white – nationalist groups.
Gyms provide venues for recruitment and networking, but their deeper significance is psychological. Training and enduring hardship together and testing oneself before peers generates forms of trust and solidarity difficult to reproduce online. Political commitment becomes literal and embodied.
This helps explain why mixed martial arts has acquired unusual importance within transnational, ethnonationalist networks. Activists from different countries may possess distinct national identities, yet they recognize one another through a shared culture of physical discipline, masculine camaraderie and readiness for struggle. Combat sports provide a symbolic language that transcends borders, reinforcing a broader civilizational identity.
In this respect, mixed martial arts performs a role similar to military training camps, revolutionary youth movements and fraternal organizations in earlier eras. It creates bonds simultaneously local and international.
From Nero to the White House
The Roman emperor Nero was unusual not because he sponsored gladiatorial games – many emperors did – but because, as historian Thomas Wiedemann observed, he openly identified with the arena’s culture. Rather than maintaining aristocratic distance, Nero linked his public image to the virtues and popularity of spectacle.
Something similar occurs whenever political leaders align themselves with combat sports. The significance lies less in the sport itself than in what the spectacle symbolizes. A combat event staged as part of a national celebration transforms athletic competition into a ritual of collective identity and public values.
The White House UFC event was especially revealing because it linked a combat spectacle to the commemoration of the American republic’s 250th anniversary and to Trump’s own 80th birthday. Symbolically, it joined nationhood, leadership and martial virtue in a single public performance.
The symbolism also intersects with recent calls by administration officials, including the newly dubbed “secretary of war” Pete Hegseth, to restore a “warrior ethos” to U.S. military and civic life. The warrior becomes not merely a soldier but an ideal citizen: disciplined, courageous, physically formidable and prepared for sacrifice.
Illustration: Bettman/Getty Images
Why spectators experience awe
Mass rallies, military parades, religious pilgrimages, revolutionary festivals and combat spectacles can all produce moments in which individuals feel absorbed into something larger than themselves.
Such experiences do not automatically lead to political extremism. Most do not. But they help explain why people become deeply attached to groups and causes that provide meaning, belonging and a sense of shared destiny.
Spectacular public rituals – especially those involving violence and pain – often evoke what British political philosopher and politician Edmund Burke called “the sublime”: intense experiences of danger, terror and grandeur that transform fear into exaltation before overwhelming power.
The attraction of combat spectacles lies not merely in violence or entertainment. Their enduring power comes from transforming individual contests into collective stories of courage, sacrifice, identity and purpose. They reveal a fundamental human desire not only for security and comfort, but also for struggle, significance and belonging – as George Orwell observed in 1940 when reviewing the allure of Hitler’s autobiography, “Mein Kampf.”
In an age when established political institutions and movements command diminishing loyalty, combat spectacles provide more than excitement. They create communities of feeling and, under the right conditions, powerful engines of political commitment.
Scott Atran previously received funding for related research from the U.S. Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation.
Politics + Society – The Conversation