Just days after reports surfaced that the former Homeland Security secretary is divorcing her husband of more than three decades, Noem shared an emotional video on Instagram addressing the end of her marriage.
Instead of sympathy, however, many commenters mocked Noem and revived some of the hilarious controversies that have followed her in recent years.
U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem testifies during a House Judiciary Committee hearing in the Rayburn House Office Building on March 04, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Heather Diehl/Getty Images)
In the video, Noem told followers she was “devastated” by the recent developments and said her family had been “blindsided” by the intense public scrutiny.
She also asked supporters for “privacy and prayers” as she navigates the difficult period.
The post came after Noem’s mother claimed the former South Dakota governor has begun divorce proceedings against husband Bryon Noem following months of public scandals surrounding the couple.
According to those reports, Bryon had already moved out of the family’s South Dakota ranch.
While Noem may have hoped to receive support, many Instagram users instead flooded the comments with well-deserved trash talk.
Several referenced the controversy surrounding Noem’s admission that she shot and killed her dog, Cricket, while others argued her political decisions had made it difficult for them to feel compassion.
Some commenters called the situation “karma,” while others accused Noem of seeking sympathy after spending years as a polarizing political figure.
“Should have never been DHS secretary,” one person wrote, according to Radar Online.
“You’re fired!” another wrote.
“Are you still married?” a third asked. “Is your husband still wearing your lingerie?” a fourth chimed in, referencing reports that Bryon Noem’s cross-dressing fetish had damaged the marriage.
News of the divorce follows months of headlines surrounding Bryon’s alleged online activity.
Reports claimed he maintained secret relationships with fetish models and engaged in explicit online communications under an alternate identity.
The allegations generated widespread media attention and reportedly placed additional strain on the couple’s marriage.
Kristi Noem has not publicly addressed those specific allegations against her husband.
The pair married in 1992 and share three children together.
Their relationship had already been the subject of public speculation in recent years amid persistent rumors about marital troubles, although Noem repeatedly denied reports of her own alleged affair with longtime political adviser Corey Lewandowski.
For now, Noem says she is focused on her family as the divorce moves forward.
Unfortunately for her, it seems that social media commenters are also focused on her family.
Target has just about everything, but if you’re headed on a “Target run” this month, don’t miss your chance to check out some of the store’s new grocery items.
Mashed – Fast Food, Celebrity Chefs, Grocery, Reviews
In fact, Collin has a memoir on the way, and he promises that it will detail the many ways in which Kate Gosselin was an absolutely horrible mom.
So some fans were shocked today by Collin’s announcement that he’ll be joining the cast of Season 5 of Special Forces: World’s ToughestTest.
TV personality Kate Gosselin arrives at NBCUniversal’s 2015 Winter TCA Tour – Day 2 at The Langham Huntington Hotel and Spa on January 16, 2015 in Pasadena, California. (Photo by Angela Weiss/Getty Images)
It’ll be his first major reality TV appearance in years — and one that comes with an interesting family connection.
Collin’s casting is especially notable because his estranged mother competed during the show’s inaugural season in 2023.
Fox announced the new cast on Wednesday, revealing that Collin will compete alongside a wide-ranging group of celebrities in the physically and mentally demanding competition series.
Kate’s experience on the show was memorably (and hilariously) short-lived.
She was forced to leave the competition during the first episode after suffering an injury, ending her journey almost as soon as it began.
Now, three years later, Collin will get his own chance to tackle the grueling Marine-style training course — one designed to push contestants to their absolute limits.
Unlike traditional reality competitions, Special Forces doesn’t feature weekly eliminations or audience voting. Instead, celebrities are tested through a series of military-inspired challenges that measure physical endurance, mental toughness and emotional resilience.
Season 5 was filmed in the jungles of Malaysia and premieres on September 24.
Collin announced his involvement on Instagram today.
“I’m so excited to announce that this fall, you can watch me take on the challenges of Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test!
This experience was so special to me, and I met some truly incredible people along the way. I can’t wait for you all to watch us tackle these challenges together. See you soon!
This season’s other celebrity recruits include Candace Cameron Bure, Ruby Rose, George Santos, former NBA player Matt Barnes, boxer Alycia Baumgardner, actor David Charvet, Brandi Glanville, Oliver Hudson, former NFL star LeSean McCoy, figure skater Maxim Naumov, influencer Hannah Stocking, Breana Tiesi and Alexia and Mauricio Umansky.
The reality competition isn’t the only major project on Collin’s calendar.
His memoir, In the Shadow of Eight: Surviving the Reality of My Childhood, is set to hit stores on October 13.
The book will detail his upbringing in one of reality television’s most famous families, including his strained relationship with Kate and the difficult experiences he says he endured as a child.
Collin has spoken publicly in recent years about his childhood and his complicated relationship with his mother, while maintaining a close bond with his father, Jon Gosselin.
Now, with a memoir on the way and a return to reality television just weeks away, he’s preparing for what could become his most high-profile chapter since Jon & Kate Plus 8 first made him a household name.
And now, she’s revealing that she resorted to desperate measures to support her struggling husband early in their relationship.
Jelly Roll and Bunnie Xo attend the 68th GRAMMY Awards at Crypto.com Arena on February 01, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Brianna Bryson/WireImage)
Yes, before Jelly Roll became one of country music’s biggest success stories, he and Bunnie were simply trying to survive.
The podcast host is now opening up about the difficult years before her estranged husband’s career took off, revealing she worked as an escort to help keep them financially afloat while the aspiring musician chased his dreams.
“I was turning tricks to pay our bills,” Bunnie said on the latest episode of “Dumb Blonde.”
“I literally went on tour with him and was seeing clients just to fund our life at the time.”
Despite speculation that she entered the relationship with significant savings, Bunnie insisted that wasn’t the case.
“I had sugar daddies at the time that were paying for all of this,” she explained, adding that the couple “literally had nothing” when they got together in 2015.
“We were two kids who literally had nothing… We were still in the streets. We were making money as it came,” she said.
Long before Jelly Roll was selling out arenas and topping the charts, Bunnie said his concerts drew only a handful of fans.
She recalled attending some of his earliest performances, where crowds numbered around 20 people.
“And it was crazy because within the first three years of us being together, the crowd started doubling,” she remembered.
The singer — whose real name is Jason Bradley DeFord — would eventually become one of country music’s biggest crossover stars. But according to Bunnie, those early years were defined by financial uncertainty and doing whatever they could to get by.
The revelations come just months after Jelly Roll, 41, filed for divorce from Bunnie in May, citing irreconcilable differences.
The couple married in Las Vegas in 2016, but Bunnie said the relationship began to unravel over the past year and a half as she pursued IVF treatments in hopes of starting a family.
She described the experience as “one of the loneliest, darkest journeys,” revealing she suffered multiple miscarriages and lost several embryos.
“It completely wrecked me,” she said. “It wrecked me emotionally, spiritually, physically… I became a shell of the person I was because I’m doing [IVF].”
According to Bunnie, the emotional strain created distance between the couple.
During the IVF process, she said she and Jelly Roll “stopped communicating.”
She also made a heartbreaking admission about how she viewed their relationship.
“I think that it’s safe for me to say that I always loved my husband a little bit more than he loved me,” Bunnie said.
“I was like always protecting him and always making sure he was okay and like always chasing him, and I literally was the glue that held us together.”
Her candid comments offer a deeply personal look at both the sacrifices she says she made during Jelly Roll’s rise to fame and the struggles that ultimately preceded the end of their nearly decade-long marriage.
Unless Donald Trump lets him out of prison early, as he has with so many other criminals.
Disgraced singer R. Kelly leaves the Leighton Criminal Courts Building following a hearing on June 26, 2019. (Photo Credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
He is not having a good time in prison
This year, attorneys representing the disgraced rapper, whose real name is Robert Sylvester Kelly, filed a formal request with the Office of the Pardon Attorney in the US Department of Justice.
They are asking the Trump regime, and more specifically Donald Trump himself, to commute the disgraced rapper’s prison sentence.
At present, Kelly is expecting to be released from prison in 2045.
By that time, if he remains alive, he will be nearly 79 years old.
Kelly’s case is complex and involves multiple convictions.
In his request, Kelly is asking Donald Trump to use executive clemency, a controversial yet unfortunately important political power to commute his sentence.
At present, the request is listed as “pending” on the Office of the Pardon Attorney’s website.
In 2025, Kelly’s attorney accused federal authorities of conspiring to steal the disgraced rapper’s mail.
His legal team also alleged that federal authorities both pressured witnesses to testify and recruited a white supremacist to kill him behind bars.
(This alleged assassination plot by the federal government does not sound terribly plausible; Kelly does not challenge any existing power structures.)
Will Trump do it?
Kelly was convicted in 2021 for violations of the Mann Act and Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).
In 2022, he was convicted for the production of child sex-abuse material.
His combined sentences span about 31 years.
Kelly is incarcerated at FCI Butner Medium I, a federal prison facility in the small town of Butner in the middle of northern North Carolina.
With luck, he’ll remain there for almost all of the next two decades. But what if fortune is not so kind?
Donald Trump appears to be a man consumed with the appearance of importance and displays of what looks to him to be strength.
Many believe that Savannah Chrisley’s outspoken support of him led to the pardons for her horrible parents. In other cases, pardons or commutations followed sizable donations to Trump, directly or indirectly.
Ultimately, few can say what Trump will do. It is up to his capricious whims, and there is little to no recourse once executive clemency is implemented.
Kelly presumably has very little to offer Trump at this point, either financially or in terms of optics and star power. With that in mind, one can only hope that nothing comes of this request.
Dancing With The Stars pro Gleb Savchenko is living a custody nightmare.
Three years ago, his ex-wife was allowed to temporarily move overseas for work.
His daughters are now 15 and 8. She hasn’t brought them back, as they’d agreed.
Savchenko is asking the court to set things right.
Gleb Savchenko attends the world premiere of 20th Century Studios “Avatar: Fire and Ash” at The Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, California on December 01, 2025. (Photo Credit: Leon Bennett/Getty Images for 20th Century Studios)
One year in Hong Kong has turned into three … and counting
TMZreports that Savchenko has filed a request for emergency child custody.
The professional dancer shares two daughters, Olivia and Zlata, with his ex-wife, Elena Samodanova.
When the former spouses split, they agreed that the girls would temporarily relocate to Hong Kong with their mom.
According to Savchenko’s filing, both daughters were supposed to return to the United States by June 30, 2024.
When that never happened, he writes in his filing, Samodanova refused to return them. And he says that he has paperwork to back things up.
According to Savchenko’s filing, his ex-wife signed a Post Judgment Agreement in 2023.
That agreement allowed her to “temporarily” move both children with her to Hong Kong.
This was to last for a period of one year, and was simply so that she could work on a project in the area.
But Savchenko accuses his ex of having “obtained permanent Hong Kong residency, enrolled the children in an expensive private school, got the children a cat, became engaged, and had another child with her fiance.”
All of this amounts to putting down roots on the other side of the planet, he argues.
He says that Olivia does not want to return to her mother
“This has functionally forced me to travel to Hong Kong each year to visit my children,” Savchenko lamented in the filing.
He says that this is something “which I have consistently done despite Elena’s efforts taken to drastically limit my access to our daughters.”
As such, he is asking the court for “temporary sole legal and sole physical custody” of Olivia, who is 15, pending further court involvement.
According to Savchenko, this is what Olivia wants. (In the US, a 15-year-old is generally given real input in their custody situation, with some exceptions such as child safety.)
His filing says his ex has made verbally abusive and disparaging comments to their daughter. He also writes that he fears Olivia’s wrongful retention or even abduction if she is forced to spend time with Samodanova.
For now, Savchenko is focusing on his request for full custody on Olivia, as she is currently with him. 8-year-old Zlata seems to still be with Samodanova.
The court has ordered both exes to attend a child custody mediation on August 5, followed by a formal hearing later that month.
Most child-abduction cases are from parents or relatives, often due to custody disputes. International custody spats can be particularly painful.
Sometimes, one parent wrongfully retains kids because it’s the only way to keep them safe. Other times, a bad parent wrongfully retains the children because, if they follow the rules, the courts will protect their children from them.
But many cases involve parents who love their children but no longer love one another. The kids are just caught in between.
Member’s Mark products aren’t meant to leave a lasting mark on Sam’s Club members’ wallets. For folks shopping in July, these items will be even cheaper.
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GiveWP is the most popular fundraising and donation tool on WordPress, powering over $500 million in donations. It integrates with Akismet to ensure that spammy or potentially fraudulent submissions get filtered out. Recently, some Give users saw an unusually high level of false positives on their donation forms: legitimate donation submissions that were being marked as spam.
We investigated and found that the donation forms were being sent to Akismet for checking after each step in the donation process: once after choosing an amount, again after the user entered their name, again after they entered an optional message, etc. To Akismet, this looks like sudden repeated submissions from the same user, all with similar content (better known as spam).
Akismet supports rechecking content, but only if the integration includes the recheck_reason parameter. If that parameter is present, Akismet knows not to classify the repeated duplicate (or nearly duplicate) checks as part of a spam attack; however, if recheck_reason is omitted, this kind of consecutive similar content looks very similar to spam, and Akismet blocks it.
We reported the root issue to Liquid Web, and they quickly addressed it and released a fix in version 4.16.0. This kind of collaboration is what makes Open Source great!
We’re planning on bringing automatic integration review to more clients and platforms, so stay tuned for more tips and insights.
WordPress 7.1 Beta 1 is ready for download and testing!
This beta release is intended for testing and development only. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, use a test environment or local site to explore the new features.
How to Test WordPress 7.1 Beta 1
You can test WordPress 7.1 Beta 1 in any of the following ways:
WordPress Beta Tester Plugin
Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream.
The scheduled final release date for WordPress 7.1 is August 19, 2026. The full release schedule can be found here. Your help testing Beta and RC versions is vital to making this release as stable and powerful as possible. Thank you to everyone who contributes by testing!
If you encounter an issue, please share it in the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums. If you are comfortable submitting a reproducible bug report, you can do so via WordPress Trac. You can also check your issue against this list of known bugs.
WordPress 7.1 will include new features that were previously only available in the Gutenberg plugin. Learn more about Gutenberg updates since WordPress 7.0 in the What’s New in Gutenberg posts for versions 22.7, 22.8, 22.9, 23.0, 23.1, 23.2, 23.3, 23.4, 23.5 and 23.6.
What’s new in WordPress 7.1?
WordPress 7.1 delivers a more complete set of styling controls, a smoother media experience, and a more personalized admin experience. Notes have evolved to add inline notes with @mentions and rich text formatting that make asynchronous feedback feel more powerful. New styling features unlock long requested features to style how blocks look across screen sizes and to style interactive states, all without writing custom CSS. Various client side media improvements means better format support, improved performance, and more resilient uploads when adding media to your site. A new inline cropping tool brings a fresh and more robust experience to editing images. Finally, the admin experience becomes easier to navigate with an ever present admin bar in the editors, improvements to the command palette, and various quality of life improvements. Underneath it all, developers get an expanding set of APIs to build on, and site owners get better support for a truly global audience.
New suite of Notes features
Notes continue to grow into a fuller collaboration experience, making asynchronous feedback between teams faster and more expressive.
Text Formatting: Notes now support inline formatting like bold, italic, code, links and adding emoji; each with a respective keyboard shortcut, so feedback reads clearly without breaking your flow.
@mentions: Type “@” in a Note to pull up a searchable list of collaborators and tag someone directly, so feedback points at the right person without leaving the sidebar.
Leave notes anywhere: Start more than one conversation on the same block instead of folding every comment into a single thread, making it easier to track distinct pieces of feedback.
Inline notes: Leave a note on a text selection instead of on an entire block.
Show more / show less: Long notes now collapse by default with a toggle to expand them, keeping the margin tidy while you write.
Style it your way, on any screen
WordPress 7.1 takes a major step toward built-in responsive design and interactive styling, letting you achieve looks that once required writing custom CSS.
Responsive styling: Define how a block looks at different screen sizes directly in the editor, for both Global Styles and individual blocks without the need of writing custom CSS.
Viewport breakpoint customization: Theme authors can now define their own responsive breakpoints in theme.json, giving more flexibility for how responsive controls behave on a given site.
Interactive state styling: Style how blocks respond to interaction, like a button changing color on hover or focus, using a standardized set of controls for both Global Styles and individual block instances.
A smoother media experience
Uploading, editing, and browsing media keeps getting more capable and more reliable.
Client-side media processing: Image and media processing moves into the browser, now with broader format support that includes HEIC (the default format for iPhone photos), UltraHDR, AVIF and WebP support built in, plus GIF-to-video conversion for lighter, more efficient files. Uploads are also more resilient, with a progress indicator and automatic retries if your data connectivity drops off.
New Media Editor Modal: A dedicated modal for editing images replaces the inline cropping tool, bringing cropping, rotation, and metadata editing together in one streamlined workflow.
Smarter galleries: Gallery blocks can automatically pull in and sort media already attached to the current post, cutting down on manual set-up.
View attached images: After you upload images to a post, the inserter will automatically surface them in a new Attached images section to make it easier to find relevant images.
Infinite scrolling by default: The Media Library grid view now loads additional items automatically as you scroll, rather than requiring a click on “Load more” especially handy for sites that handle large media libraries. This can be disabled under your user profile.
A more personal, more navigable admin
These meaningful upgrades make the WordPress admin easier to move around in and more consistent with how you like to work.
Persistent toolbar (Omnibar): The admin toolbar now travels with you into the Site Editor and Block Editor, with a series of polish improvements throughout.
Command palette improvements: Moving through the dashboard and editor with the command palette (Ctrl/Cmd+K) is more refined to make finding what you need even faster! Now results are grouped into Recent, matching and Suggestions sections instead of one flat list.
Admin color scheme in the Site Editor: The Site Editor now reflects your chosen admin color scheme instead of always using a fixed background.
DataViews and DataForms iterations: Continued refinement of the components behind managing lists of posts, pages, patterns, and templates, alongside the forms used to edit them.
Excerpts in the Posts list: The Posts list view now shows a short excerpt for each entry, making it easier to identify the post you’re looking for without opening it.
Visual revisions: This release adds a picker activity layout for browsing history in more detail, clearly labeled autosaves in the timeline, and an autosave notice that opens straight into the visual revisions view. Global Styles revisions get a small polish too, swapping the active style’s text label for a badge.
A dedicated Identity section: Site identity settings like your title, tagline, and icon are now live in their own clearly labeled section of the Site Editor, making them easier to find and update.
On This Day Widget: A new widget resurfaces what you published on this date in past years, right on your dashboard. A small nudge to look back on what you’ve written, and a reason to write something new today.
Allow Changing Comment Parent: Fixing a misthreaded comment used to mean editing the database directly. WordPress 7.1 adds an editable “In reply to” control to the Edit Comment screen, letting you pick a new parent from a dropdown of the post’s other comments. It’s scoped to the same post, so this is about untangling threads, not moving comments across posts.
New blocks and block-level enhancements
WordPress 7.1 release brings a handful of block refinements that give more control with fewer steps.
Playlist Block: A new block for adding a collection of audio files to a post or page, with an optional waveform visualization that shows the audio’s shape as it plays; a more visual way to present podcasts, music, or audio content without using any third-party plugins.
Tabs Block: A new block for organizing content into clickable tabbed panels instead of showing everything at once. It’s a cleaner way to present related content without overwhelming the page.
Background gradients: Background gradients and background images no longer conflict. The gradient used to get silently overridden by the image, but now they combine and display together. This fix extends beyond the Group block to Verse, Accordion, Pullquote, Post Content, and Quote block.
HTML block editable content: The HTML block now supports editable nested blocks. This is great to use for AI-generated content, which often arrives as raw HTML.
“Mark as decorative” for images: A new toggle on the Image block lets you hide purely decorative images from screen readers for a better accessibility experience.
Smarter shortcode handling: Pasting or converting a shortcode into the Embed block now creates a proper Embed block instead of leaving raw shortcode text behind, and the Shortcode block gains block-specific transforms of its own.
Built for a global audience
WordPress 7.1 continues work to make Core reflect the full diversity of its worldwide community, with progress toward supporting Unicode email addresses so usernames, slugs, and email addresses can better represent users everywhere.
Built for developers
WordPress 7.1 continues to expand the foundation developers build on.
Abilities API expansion: Continued refinement of the Abilities API with improved querying, filtering, and input validation, giving developers and AI tooling a more reliable foundation to build on.
Block Bindings for list items: Block Bindings now extend to List Item, making it possible to connect more block content to dynamic data sources without custom code.
Custom icon registration: New functions let plugin and theme authors register their own icons for the Icons block for use throughout the block editor.
Enforced iframed editor: The post editor now always runs inside an iframe, isolating the editing canvas from admin styles for more predictable rendering. Blocks using Block API v2 or lower should be updated to v3 for compatibility.
wordpress/theme stabilization: The package theme authors use to build block themes gets an architecture and API review, laying groundwork for a more stable, and better documented theming foundation going forward.
Connectors authentication improvements: The Connectors screen now also supports username and application-password login – a more familiar way to connect plugins and services. This release also closes a security gap where browsers could auto-suggest saved credentials into the API key field.
With so much in progress for WordPress 7.1 Beta 1, this is still only the beginning; expect continued refinement with each Beta and RC release ahead of the final release on August 19, 2026.
Just for you: a Beta 1 haiku:
Seeds of Seven-One, Notes, styles, media, and tools— Test, and watch them bloom.
