US State Department spokesperson Tommy Piggott tells Al Jazeera that the United States is working to create conditions for “good faith conversations” between Lebanon and Israel, while accusing Hezbollah of trying to derail diplomacy through attacks and threats.
Published On 7 May 2026
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
A video circulating widely on social media that appears to show a prominent California Muslim advocacy leader urging supporters to be “strategic” about how they express certain views publicly is drawing backlash and renewed scrutiny of the organization’s ties to state funding.
The clip, shared on X, appears to show Zahra Billoo, executive director of the California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations CAIR-CA, discussing how supporters should approach expressing controversial sentiments in public versus private settings.
Fox News Digital has not independently verified the full context of the remarks or the complete video.
In the video, Billoo appears to caution against posting certain views publicly, using an example to illustrate what she described as a lack of “strategic” judgment.
“Now imagine your LinkedIn profile says, ‘I hate all Zionists,’” Billoo says in the clip. “Not strategic. Right? … You may say that sitting around Kahwah House on a Friday night, but you’re not going to say it on your LinkedIn.”
ISLAMIC ACTIVIST ORGANIZATION DEMANDS DEMOCRATIC SENATOR APOLOGIZE FOR RECENT BILL MAHER APPEARANCE
Zahra Billoo, executive director of the California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations CAIR-CA, stands with community members at a public event. (Photo By Liz Hafalia/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
She adds that supporters should think in terms of “strategic versus reckless.”
The footage quickly prompted reaction from commentators and political figures online.
“Notice, the message here isn’t ‘don’t hate people and don’t be bigots,’” Guy Benson, a FOX News political analyst and FOX News Radio host, wrote on X. “The message is ‘we must hide our hatred and bigotry more strategically.’”
FOX NEWS ‘ANTISEMITISM EXPOSED’ NEWSLETTER: WHO IS HASAN PIKER AND WHY CAN’T DEMOCRATS CONDEMN HIM?
Republican National Committeewoman Harmeet Dhillon also reacted to the clip, writing “Wow.”
Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal, amplified the video, linking it to broader concerns about CAIR-CA and its role in California public life.
MINNESOTA FRAUD PROBE FUELS IRS CRACKDOWN CALLS ON NONPROFIT ACCUSED OF HAMAS LINKS
The renewed attention comes as CAIR-CA faces scrutiny over funding highlighted in a recent City Journal report, which found the group has received roughly $40 million in state-administered funds in recent years, much of it tied to federally funded programs.
An OIG report reveals FBI agents were urged to avoid communications with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR. The composite image shows the FBI headquarters and Muslims praying at a CAIR event in Falls Church, Va. (Fox News)
The report revisits longstanding allegations about CAIR’s historical connections to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, claims the organization has denied, calling them “baseless” and part of a broader defamation campaign.
The scrutiny comes as some Republican-led states have taken action targeting the group. In December, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the state would designate CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organizations at the state level, following a similar move by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
Those actions do not carry the same legal weight as a federal terrorist designation, which can only be made by the U.S. State Department. CAIR has challenged the moves, arguing they are unconstitutional and defamatory.
Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Greater Los Angeles Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, leads a press conference with CAIR California leaders amid calls from House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith for an IRS investigation into the group’s tax-exempt status. (Leonard Ortiz/Digital First Media/Orange County Register via Getty Images)
CAIR has consistently maintained that it is a civil rights organization focused on protecting Muslim Americans from discrimination and says its funding is fully accounted for and subject to oversight.
The scrutiny also comes as California Gov. Gavin Newsom has recently spoken out against rising antisemitism.
“A 46-year national high in antisemitic assaults should alarm EVERY American,” Newsom wrote on X. “We must confront hate and antisemitism directly and reject hate wherever it appears. Every person deserves to feel safe in our country.”
A spokesperson for the governor’s office did not directly address the circulating video but said the administration works with a range of nonprofit organizations through community initiatives and engages with both Jewish and Muslim leaders across the state.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
The office also pointed to efforts to expand security funding for religious institutions, strengthen hate crime laws and support Holocaust and genocide education initiatives.
Fox News Digital reached out to CAIR-CA and Billoo for comment.
Fox News Digital’s Louis Casiano contributed to this report.
Bihar Cabinet expansion: Newly appointed minister Nishant Kumar said, “I will work as per the principles of my father and under the leadership of the current Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary. Whatever responsibility has been assigned to me by the party leadership, I will fulfill it with full sincerity and the process of development will continue.”
FEATURE: Ubuntu doesn’t just mean GNOME – or Wayland. Alongside the default edition of Ubuntu 26.04 last week, editions with seven other desktops were released, five of which still offer X.org.
Just under a fortnight ago, we covered the launch of Ubuntu 26.04. Ubuntu’s default desktop is GNOME, and this version contains GNOME 50, which is Wayland-only. It can still run X11 apps, but you can’t log in using X.org any longer – which also means many traditional X11-based tools, from desktop recording to remote control to logging in over the network, no longer work. There are alternative ways to do most things, but work habits may need to be adjusted.
You’re not obliged to use GNOME, though. There are multiple officially approved Ubuntu flavors: they’re still Ubuntu, with the same core OS built from the same versions of the same components, and the same additional apps – but with different desktops.
To gain their official status, all the flavors are built solely from FOSS code from Ubuntu’s own repositories, and they must follow Canonical’s standards: so, for instance, they all use Firefox and Thunderbird, packaged as snaps, plus LibreOffice, and they don’t include rival packaging tools such as Flatpak. They’re all developed by volunteers from the community, rather than by Canonical itself; the company merely provides the building blocks: the component packages, the bug-tracking tools, and so on. Most use Canonical’s installation program, Subiquity, but a few use the cross-distro Calamares installer instead, and some use this to offer some optional extra applications on top of the standard Ubuntu ones.
GNOME is a highly opinionated desktop. It’s been thoroughly stripped down, removing things like menu bars found in most computers’ graphical environments. Some people like it, finding it clean, simple, and good-looking. Others find it restrictive and limiting. Most Ubuntu flavors offer a desktop experience resembling Microsoft Windows, although possibly simplified or with a different default arrangement of the components. The main exception is Ubuntu Unity, which offers a layout that’s more like Apple macOS – but driven by Windows navigation keystrokes and shortcuts.
All the flavors differ from the official GNOME version in one significant respect. LTS editions of Ubuntu get five years of updates and fixes for free (and another decade if you sign up for the Ubuntu Pro services, which is free of charge for up to five machines). This includes the GNOME desktop – and only GNOME. The LTS releases of the flavors have different support lifespans, with at most three years of support. You can still join Ubuntu Pro, but the desktop and graphical apps that aren’t part of the baseline GNOME-based Ubuntu won’t get updates after three years.
In essence, this means two things. If you choose one of the flavors, you should upgrade every two years when a new LTS appears. Alternatively, if you want a traditional desktop but want to stay on GNOME and its five years of updates, then your best bet may be to install GNOME Flashback and use that.
In the website’s own order, the flavors are:
There are also two others we won’t look at here, because they use the same desktop as other editions, differing only in the preinstalled apps. Edubuntu uses the standard GNOME desktop, and comes preinstalled with a collection of educational apps aimed at school-age children. Ubuntu Studio uses the same KDE Plasma desktop as Kubuntu, and bundles an assortment of apps aimed at creative artists, including audio, graphics, video, photography and publishing. Edubuntu uses the stock GNOME desktop, and Ubuntu Studio the same Plasma desktop as Kubuntu, so the resource comparisons for those flavors apply to them equally – plus the space taken by their additional applications.
Not included in this list is Ubuntu MATE. It still exists, but there’s no version 26.04. The latest Ubuntu MATE is 25.10, which is in support for a few more months, so if you want the MATE desktop’s GNOME 2-style experience, we’d suggest version 24.04, which will be supported until 2027. Project lead Martin Wimpress has stepped down to focus on his new project, Nøughty Linux. Ubuntu MATE is a popular version, and we suspect that some new maintainers will step up and that MATE will be back in the Ubuntu fold soon, perhaps in version 26.10.
Kubuntu is the oldest of the official Ubuntu flavors, and in its early years was the only one with its own full-time paid member of the Canonical team working on it. Today, like all the others, it’s a completely community-driven effort.
Kubuntu 26.04 comes with KDE Plasma 6.6.4, the latest update to Plasma 6.6, whose release we covered in February.
Like the GNOME edition, Kubuntu defaults to offering only Wayland, but unlike with GNOME, you can install X.org and log in using it if you prefer.
Over its decade of support, Plasma 5 received considerable optimization, and later versions used comparatively little disk and memory. Plasma 6 has undone a lot of this work, and Plasma 6.6 is one of the most resource-heavy desktops in the FOSS world. In our testing, a full install of Kubuntu “Resolute” took 11.24 GB of disk, excluding its half-gig swapfile. That’s more than any other flavor, including the GNOME version. It uses about 1.1 GB of RAM at idle, which is the same as GNOME.
KDE Plasma 6.0 appeared in February 2024, making it too late for Ubuntu 24.04. As such, this is the first LTS version of Kubuntu with Plasma 6. If you like both Ubuntu and the KDE environment, this is a good choice – but it’s one of the biggest and heaviest forms of Ubuntu there is.
Lubuntu 26.04 is almost the reverse of Ubuntu. In its stock form, it’s the lightest-weight flavor of Ubuntu. It uses LXQt 2.3.0 as its desktop, a lightweight desktop environment with a Windows-like layout. LXQt has optionally supported Wayland for a couple of years now, but Lubuntu ships with plain old X.org and nothing else.
Sadly, this isn’t the latest version – LXQt 2.4.0 appeared shortly before the Resolute Raccoon release, so it was too new to be included. The Lubuntu team may well make an upgrade available as an optional update later, though – it has done so before. Lubuntu uses the same Calamares installer as Kubuntu.
LXQt is very simple, and not as customizable even as its own ancestor LXDE. For instance, placing the taskbar vertically doesn’t work well – window buttons display sideways, meaning that few of them fit, and they’re hard to read. Worse still, the setting to add more rows of buttons doesn’t work. At least in recent releases, the start menu’s search box is automatically cleared after you launch an app. LXQt is well into its version 2.x generation, while its forerunner LXDE never even got to version 1.0 – but even so, LXQt still feels unfinished.
We also had some driver issues in VirtualBox, and even with the Guest Additions installed, we had to pick the safe but unaccelerated VBoxSVGA GPU to get to the desktop at all.
The login screen offers three session types. Lubuntu gives the default desktop. The LXQt Desktop option has the same layout, but with no theme or icons loaded, so it’s not very usable. The third is Openbox, which gives a totally blank desktop with only the window manager. That’s perfectly usable if you know your way around it, but BunsenLabs 13 offers a better Openbox experience.
For this release generation, Lubuntu is somewhat lighter than its siblings, but not drastically. Its ISO file is a modest 3.6 GB. Like Kubuntu, on our 8 GB test VM, it configured a swap file of just half a gig, which disguises a significant disk footprint: it takes a hefty 10.1 GB of space, with all the optional apps the installer offers. That’s a lot for what’s meant to be the lightweight flavor.
If you’re happy with a plain old horizontal taskbar and the basic apps, and if you only have 2-3 GB of RAM, Lubuntu is the lightest full desktop Canonical can offer you – but it’s not as slim as it used to be.
Ubuntu Budgie 26.04 contains the latest version of the Budgie desktop environment, originally developed for the independent Solus distro.
This release uses Budgie 10.10.2, and the desktop is now Wayland-only. This effort has been underway for some years, and we reported on early Enlightenment-based efforts, then a later change of approach which led away from Enlightenment. Earlier this year, Budgie 10.10 completed the switch.
Budgie is built using GNOME tooling such as Gtk4 and the Vala programming language, but avoiding bulkier components such as the Javascript-based GNOME Shell. This makes it relatively slim, and it does look great. It can be configured in a Windows-like layout with taskbar, but Ubuntu Budgie ships it with a top panel and a 3D-look dock at the bottom center. The Welcome screen has a Makeover & Layouts tool that makes it easy to pick different themes and desktop layouts without manual customization.
It’s not only one of the best-looking flavors, it’s also one of the lighter ones. The ISO takes 3.8 GB, and excluding its 4 GB swap file, a full install takes 7.86 GB of disk space, and uses just 805 MB of RAM at idle. This vulture and Budgie are not well acquainted, but if you want a decorative but lightweight pure-Wayland setup, then check out the Resolute Budgie.
Ubuntu Cinnamon 26.04 also offers a modern, Windows-like desktop that looks good. The Cinnamon desktop, here version 6.4.13, is taken from Linux Mint, a third-party Ubuntu-based OS.
Cinnamon is based on a fork of GNOME Shell, so this is not a lightweight environment, but even so it has advantages. It still uses X.org, so all your X11 apps will work. Unlike MATE, it has good support for fractional scaling – handy for HiDPI displays.
We like its retro-Ubuntu-style orange-and-brown default theme. The apps and accessories are a slightly odd mix of Cinnamon and GNOME components, meaning that some apps have traditional title, menu, and toolbars, and others have the GNOME-style combined control and hamburger menus. Linux Mint itself is more coherent here.
It’s a middleweight remix: the ISO is 5.25 GB, and it uses just over a gig of RAM at idle. Excluding the 4 GB swap file, though, it uses a reasonable 8.5 GB of disk, which isn’t bad.
For MATE exiles looking for a relatively traditional Windows-like environment, this will do the job – but it’s bigger and more demanding.
Ubuntu Kylin 26.04 is the latest release of the special edition of Ubuntu aimed at the Chinese market, but it also offers US English as an option, and works well for anyone.
Ubuntu Kylin has its own home-grown desktop, UKUI 4, which is also used in some other Chinese distros. It’s a colorful modern take on the basic Windows-style design, and it’s based around X11 for the traditionally minded.
Saying that, though, like Lubuntu, it had some difficulties with the display in our VM, and we needed to install the guest additions for it to display properly, and we still saw some display glitches.
The session type menu on the login screen, oddly, contains four different desktops. Two, called lightdm-xsession and kylin-wlcom, didn’t work; ukui opened the normal Ubuntu Kylin desktops. A final one labeled ubuntu to our astonishment opened a full GNOME 50 desktop. That definitely shouldn’t be in there, and casts some doubt on the quality control process for this flavor. We removed it and all its associated dependencies, and the UKUI desktop seemed unaffected.
Having these unnecessary extras lying around may be connected to why Kylin Resolute had such a big memory footprint: a whopping 1.4 GB, the biggest memory footprint in this roundup. Excluding the swap file, its disk usage is 10.2 GB, which is on the high side – although if you’re so untidy you leave Clutter lying around forgotten, this is perhaps not so surprising.
Ubuntu Unity remix is back! Ubuntu Unity 26.04 has returned, after skipping the 25.10 release due to a shortage of manpower. Several new volunteers have stepped up, as the README credits:
Introducing new maintainers and contributors (welcome Tomasz, Gautham, Kavish, Alfred, Lexi and Azzy!)
It also thanks Aaron Rainbolt, Andreas Hasenack, c4pp4 from gentoo unity7, Erich Eickmeyer, Jeremy Bicha, Sebastien Bacher, Skia, and Thomas Ward. This goes to show that the Unity environment does still have enthusiastic supporters out there, as well as this vulture. Several bits of plumbing have been replaced with equivalents that are newer and still actively maintained, although there is a list of known issues.
Ubuntu Unity 26.04 is not an LTS release, although the underlying OS will receive updates and the team will support it for as long as it can. Longer term, the hope is that the Lomiri environment, formerly known as Unity 8 and which had an experimental 24.04 release, will be mature enough to form the basis of Ubuntu Unity 28.04.
We’re still really glad to see it back, and in our testing, it seems stable and usable. It’s not a lightweight setup any more, though: in our testing, a full install took just under 10.7 GB of disk and consumed a little over 1 GB of RAM at idle. That’s not terrible – Kubuntu is even bigger – but there’s room for some pruning and trimming.
Xubuntu 26.04 is the 20th anniversary release of Xubuntu – after Kubuntu, it’s the next oldest of the official remixes. It is simple and quite minimalist: there’s no welcome screen, no flashy dock, no fancy themes or anything. It has a very simple desktop layout, with a single panel at the top of the screen, an unlabeled app-launch menu, desktop icons for the home directory and trash, and nothing else. This classic look is now well enough established that it’s replicated by the Debian sid-based Xebian distro.
All flavors of Ubuntu offer a minimal install, which includes little more than the Firefox web browser. Xubuntu goes quite a bit further. The minimal installation option installs what used to be called Xubuntu Core. It’s the basic Ubuntu OS, and the Xfce desktop, and that’s all. This contains no additional applications or snaps whatsoever, not even a web browser.
If you want an extremely compact edition of Ubuntu to add your own apps to, this is the one. Better still, it is available as a separate minimal edition, with its own distinct ISO file you can download.
Standard Xubuntu is a 4.8 GB ISO file, takes 7.9 GB of disk when installed with all the trimmings, and uses about 880 MB of RAM at idle. Xubuntu Minimal is a 3 GB ISO, it takes just 4.5 gigs of disk, and uses 685 MB of RAM.
Compared to the others, this means that a default install of Xubuntu takes about 2.5 GB less disk space than Lubuntu, and only about 20 megabytes more RAM – while being far more customizable. But compared to that, Xubuntu Minimal is the smallest Ubuntu flavor of all.
Xubuntu Minimal is also the easiest flavor from which to completely remove snap support. We’ve got no problem with snap – it works, does the job, and it makes life much easier when it’s time to upgrade your OS.
Best of all, the implementation is simple and clean enough that we understand it. Trying to wrap our head around how the Flatpak infrastructure works made us think of H.P. Lovecraft (or more saliently, Charles Stross): there are tentacles down there, and nightmare horrors from before time. Bring in OStree as well, and it all turns a bit CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN.
Still, different people like different things, and there’s no accounting for taste. We know lots of folks dislike Snap but are fine with Flatpak. If you want a simple clean version of Ubuntu, with a desktop that can easily look like the lamented Ubuntu MATE in a few clicks, then Xubuntu is your best bet. If, on top of that, you want to remove Snap, then you can whip it out of Xubuntu Minimal with a couple of commands.
We tested on the latest VirtualBox 7.2.8, hosted on a quad-core Core i7 Mac with 32 GB of RAM. We assigned all the VMs 8 GB of RAM and two CPU cores, with 3D graphics acceleration enabled and 128 MB of virtual VRAM. We left the disk size on the default 25 GB and traditional BIOS firmware. We did a full install of all the flavors, saying yes to optional drivers and codecs, local apps, and any extra packages the installer offered.
We downloaded all the remixes on the day of release, using BitTorrent (and we left them seeding for 24 hours to help anyone else trying to torrent them). We installed all updates using the command line:
sudo -s
apt update
apt full-upgrade -y
snap refresh
Then we cleared the APT cache, and just in case, cleaned up any superseded updates – not that there were any, just days after release.
apt autoremove -y
apt purge
apt clean
We put these in order of which is the biggest (on disk) down to which is the smallest. Less is more: the less code you have installed, the less there is to go wrong, the less to be attacked or exploited, and the more of your computer’s efforts are spent on you, rather than wasted by inefficient code – or lazy coders.
| Flavor | Desktop | ISO size (GiB) | Disk usage (GiB) | RAM usage (MB) |
| Kubuntu | KDE Plasma 6.6 | 4.72 | 11.24 | 1,141 |
| Ubuntu Unity | Unity 7.7.1 | 3.9 | 10.68 | 1,067 |
| Lubuntu | LXQt 2.3 | 3.65 | 10.18 | 858 |
| Ubuntu Kylin | UKUI 4 | 5.29 | 10.17 | 1,443 |
| Ubuntu Cinnamon | Cinnamon 6.4 | 5.27 | 8.47 | 1,065 |
| Xubuntu (full) | Xfce 4.20 | 4.83 | 7.86 | 882 |
| Ubuntu Budgie | Budgie 10.10 | 3.84 | 7.86 | 805 |
| Ubuntu | GNOME 50 | 6.07 | 7.73 | 1,139 |
| Xubuntu (minimal) | Xfce 4.20 | 3 | 4.5 | 685 |
Depending on what you want, there are lots of good reasons to skip over the mainstream Ubuntu GNOME desktop and choose one of the official flavors instead.
If you want a rich, flexible, and very complete Windows-like desktop, then Kubuntu is a solid choice. The Plasma ecosystem has a huge catalog of supplementary apps and tools that integrate very well into the desktop. Kubuntu is big, though, and it’s very complex to customize.
KDE Plasma has a lot of enthusiastic admirers, and the Reg FOSS desk has got a lot of flak for criticizing it. We’re sorry, but we have yet to change our mind. To our eyes, KDE’s graphic design is clunky and unattractive. The Plasma desktop and all KDE apps are over-cluttered with redundant options; for instance, they sport not one but two About options on the Help menu, one with info about that specific app, and the other with general information about KDE as a whole – which, crucially, does not tell you what version you’re running. The configuration options are similarly cluttered. This is not an environment we could recommend to beginners or less-technical folks, although it’s great for tinkerers.
If you want a modern Wayland-based environment, a Windows-like layout, and great looks, then Ubuntu Budgie is great, and it’s light and fast, too.
Our personal favorite remains Ubuntu Unity: if you know how to navigate Windows with the keyboard, everything works, but with Mac-like looks – and a more powerful mouse-driven UI than macOS itself. (We love the indicators showing how many windows an app has open, and the ability to open a new empty one with a middle-click.) An honourable mention goes to Ubuntu Budgie: it doesn’t do anything startlingly original, but it’s a great-looking middleweight.
But overall, for us, there is a clear winner here.
You may have heard of Wallace’s Two-out-of-Three Theory:
SPEED – QUALITY – PRICE
Pick any Two.
Well, just once in a long while, something offering all three comes along. Xfce is that desktop. It’s solid code, older even than KDE 1.0, and very stable. It’s fast, because it’s small, but you get 3D compositing to use your fancy GPU. You can have a GNOME-style overview. You can even add a tiling window manager if that’s your thing. And it’s cheap: because it was first written some 30 years ago, this is small, tight, heavily optimized code, so it’s frugal with your computer’s resources.
You get speed, and quality, and a low price (in usage). That’s an unbeatable bargain. True, it’s not the prettiest, but as we said a few weeks ago, Zorin OS Lite shows that Xfce can look great with a lick of paint and some polishing. Start at Xfce-look.org and find something appealing. For instance, if you like it retro, then Chicago95 looks amazing. ®
Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt reposted a scathing AI-generated ad on X on Tuesday, which cast the city as a bleak hellscape under its current leadership.
In the viral video, created by film-maker Charlie Curran, flames engulf the Hollywood sign; a socialist militia patrols the streets; and California’s political brass, including governor Gavin Newsom, mayor Karen Bass and former vice-president Kamala Harris, are depicted as royal bourgeois who care little for their subjects’ plights.
Then, a hero emerges to save the day. It’s Pratt, or at least a vigilante Batman-esque version of him.
The repost comes a day before Pratt was set to face his opponents in the mayoral race – incumbent Karen Bass and city council member Nithya Raman – at a debate.
For weeks, Pratt, a former reality TV star, has taken Bass and Raman to task over hot-button issues like wildfire response, homelessness and public safety.
In a 19 April post, Pratt wrote: “it’s easy for Karen Basura and Nithya Raman to claim ‘crime is down’ when they simply stop enforcing it. 60K open air drug zombies commit multiple felonies every single day.”
Bass and Raman did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the AI video.
As of Wednesday, the clip had amassed 3.6m views. Former Florida governor and 2016 presidential candidate Jeb Bush called it “maybe the best political ad of the year”.
It’s unclear whether Curran, who also did not immediately respond to a request for comment, is connected to Pratt’s campaign.
Steve Caplan, a political advertising expert who teaches at the University of Southern California, said AI-generated campaign ads could become common in the future. “They’re cheap, fast and consultants hate spending money on production. You can crank out rapid response in hours,” he said.
The shock value and attention-grabbing nature of the Pratt AI video may not translate to voter turnout, according to Caplan.
For one, workers in Hollywood, which has seen an exodus of production, may bristle at the promotion of AI. Los Angeles, he noted, is also a Democratic-majority city.
“In an election where Democrats will turn out, it’s a pretty narrow base to work from,” he said. “The notion that there are enough voters who would align with this message to win in an election like LA – I’m highly skeptical of that.”
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
Derek Dooley has traded his coaching headset for a suit and American flag pin. Last fall, the former Tennessee head coach mounted a bid for one of Georgia’s U.S. Senate seats in this year’s high-stakes midterm elections.
Dooley said he plans to be “the last man standing” after the primary and the general election. He is leaning on leadership skills developed during his coaching career — primarily in the Southeastern Conference — as he continues his pitch to undecided voters. His time in the SEC also allowed him to build relationships with Nick Saban and Kirby Smart.
Over a decade under Smart, Georgia has reached three College Football Playoff national championship games, winning consecutive titles in 2021 and 2022. Yet that success has at times been overshadowed by off-field headlines, particularly speeding-related incidents involving players — at least one of which resulted in a fatality.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE SPORTS COVERAGE ON FOXNEWS.COM
Georgia Bulldogs head coach Kirby Smart tells the students section to calm down during the fourth quarter of an NCAA football game at EverBank Stadium in Jacksonville, Fla., on Nov. 1, 2025. (Corey Perrine/Florida Times-Union)
“The best thing Kirby has done is he’s won a lot of games,” Dooley told Fox News Digital Tuesday in an exclusive sitdown interview.
“I worked with Coach Smart at two different locations. I’ve known him for a long time and I have a tremendous amount of respect for what he’s doing for the program. But when you’re dealing with young people and young people make mistakes. I’m very confident that Coach Smart is teaching them the right values and teaching them how to act right and has a disciplinary system that corrects that behavior.”
Dooley continued, noting that athletics serves as a vehicle for instilling values in young adults and introducing preventive measures to help them avoid decisions that could negatively affect their futures. “That’s what athletics is good for … And at some point there’s only so much you can do, but I’m very confident in what Coach Smart is doing, and I know Georgia fans love the success we’ve had over the last few years.”
Dooley and Smart worked together as assistants at LSU beginning in 2003 under then-head coach Nick Saban. Dooley last coached in 2023 as a senior offensive analyst at Alabama, again working on a staff led by Saban.
Tennessee head coach Derek Dooley looks on during the Orange and White Game at Neyland Stadium in Knoxville, Tennessee on April 21, 2012. (Adam Brimer/News Sentinel Syndication)
In 2024, then-starting linebacker Smael Mondon Jr. and offensive tackle Bo Hughley were arrested on separate misdemeanor charges of reckless driving, booking records from the Athens-Clarke County Sheriff’s Office showed at the time. The Philadelphia Eagles selected Mondon in the fifth round of the 2025 NFL Draft.
“Please understand this: I’m defending the program, but I’m not defensive,” Smart told reporters at SEC media days in 2024. “I am going to stand up for my program because we have good kids in our locker room. We gotta do a better job.” Smart also confirmed that Georgia’s NIL collective had begun issuing fines to players as punishment.
MEMPHIS COACH TAKES SWIPE AT GEORGIA FOOTBALL PROGRAM OVER DRIVING-RELATED ARRESTS
Those incidents surfaced more than a year after Devin Willock and recruiting staff member Chandler LeCroy were killed in a car crash in 2023. Then-Georgia defensive lineman Jalen Carter was driving with a suspended license during the night of that fatal wreck in Athens, Georgia. Carter was later charged with misdemeanor reckless driving and racing. He pleaded no contest in March 2023 and was sentenced to 12 months of probation, a $1,000 fine and community service. He was also required to attend a state-approved defensive driving course.
Carter’s attorney, Kim Stephens, said in a statement that her client’s actions did not cause the January 2023 crash. Police alleged the SUV LeCroy was driving raced Carter’s vehicle in the moments leading up to the crash.
In March 2025, multiple Georgia players, including wide receiver Nitro Tuggle and offensive lineman Marques Easley, were indefinitely suspended by Smart. Last November, another offensive lineman, Nyier Daniels, was dismissed from the team following a high-speed, police-involved chase. Daniels allegedly drove more than 150 mph while attempting to flee police in Commerce, Georgia.
GEORGIA’S KIRBY SMART SAYS BIG TEN IS ‘MORE COMPETITIVE CONFERENCE’ THAN SEC AFTER CFP TITLE STREAK
Name, image and likeness (NIL) has become a hotly debated issue across Georgia and the broader college landscape.
As federal lawmakers weigh a greater role in regulating college athletics — a topic highlighted by former President Donald Trump’s recent “Saving College Sports” roundtable at the White House — Dooley cautioned against congressional intervention, arguing the NCAA should be given room to address its own challenges.
“Everybody should really care about (this issue). You’re looking at a guy whose been involved in athletics my whole life. I’ve seen what college athletics does, not just football, college athletics as whole does for young people. A lot of the values that it teaches, hard work, teamwork, accountability, personal responsibility, discipline (and) overcoming adversity. … I don’t not believe Congress should go in and try to fix college athletics…. We know what their track record is on that. But the NCAA does need some protection, we’ve got to give them a chance to fix themselves.”
Later this month, Georgia voters will decide which Republican candidate will advance to a likely June runoff, with the winner joining Independent candidates in the general election to face incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga.
Former football coach and Republican Senate candidate Derek Dooley speaks to supporters of President Donald Trump at an event hosted by Vice President JD Vance in Peachtree City, Georgia, on Aug. 21, 2025. (Megan Varner/Getty Images)
Dooley is among the Republican candidates in the race. He explained to Fox News Digital why he believes the timing is right to shift his focus from the gridiron to the political arena.
“I’ve (had) a 28-year career coaching football and just loved the impact you made on young people every day from all walks of life. And I was all in, never looked up for air and thought I was going to do that my whole career,” Dooley said. “But two things really happened… it started really after COVID and what happened under the last administration. I started seeing things in our country that I thought I’d never see in my lifetime, and it jarred me a little bit. It made me want to really get more engaged.”
Dooley’s father, the late Vince Dooley, was the legendary coach and former athletic director at Georgia. Vince Dooley coached Georgia to the 1980 national championship, a team on which All-American Herschel Walker was the standout running back. Walker won the Heisman Trophy in 1982.
Georgia Bulldogs head coach Kirby Smart hugs Vince Dooley after defeating the Auburn Tigers in the SEC Championship game at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia, on Dec. 2, 2017. (Brett Davis/USA TODAY Sports)
He added: “As I became more engaged, I realized Congress had changed. Not working for the people the way it used to. We’ve always had a lot of passionate debate, a lot of bitter disagreement. We always will and that’s okay. But at some point serious leadership would get in a room, we’d work together for the people and keep the ball moving forward for our country. That’s just not happening today.”
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
Georgia’s midterm primary election is scheduled for May 19. If no candidate receives a majority of the vote, the top two vote-getters will advance to a June 16 runoff.
Follow Fox News Digital’s sports coverage on X, and subscribe to the Fox News Sports Huddle newsletter.
Analysts said investor sentiment improved after indications that the US had paused aggressive moves around the Strait of Hormuz. However, derivatives data continued to signal caution, with aggressive call writing and subdued PCR levels pointing to a range-bound market despite the relief rally.
Indian markets are likely to open higher on Thursday amid positive global cues, as crude oil prices slumped.
Norbert Rücker, Head of Economics and Next Generation Research, Julius Baer, said: “The twists and turns continue. The United States called off safeguarding of trade through Hormuz again, keeping uncertainty high, and transits are down to a trickle for the time being. Oil prices dropped below $110 despite the persistent gridlock, possibly for the simple fact that these latest twists triggered some hostilities but not a pronounced escalation. “Politics aside, the oil market has moved past the initial shock reaction and has settled into a regime of deficit absorption by inventory draws. There is breathing room to deal with the supply shock beyond summer. Our views are unchanged; the current crisis should follow the historic pattern of a short-lived but intense price shock. Looking much further ahead, some years from now, the Strait of Hormuz very likely will have lost some of its strategic importance and economic threat, given the lasting shifts that already occurred in response to the conflict,” he said.
Ponmudi R, CEO of Enrich Money, said Global sentiment has strengthened amid growing expectations of a potential de-escalation in Middle East tensions. “Indications from Donald Trump that the US has paused its more assertive stance around the Strait of Hormuz, alongside expectations of Iran’s response to a US proposal aimed at resolving the conflict, have supported a recovery in risk appetite. This has translated into a relief rally across global equities, with Indian markets also benefiting from the improved tone.”
Gift Nifty at 24,550 signs a gain of 100 points.
ICICI Prudential Alternates said while India may continue to be impacted by global volatility, it remains constructive on equities given the favorable domestic macro indicators. Going forward, the environment is likely to become more differentiated, making bottom-up stock selection increasingly critical.
Meanwhile, global stocks, led by the Nikkei, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, are sharply higher.
However, derivative trading still signals caution.
From a derivatives standpoint, PCR near 0.61 suggests a cautious-to-bearish undertone, while aggressive call writing at 24,200–24,300 continues to cap upside, and the Put base at 24,000–23,800 reinforces support. Meanwhile, India VIX, which has been sustaining near 18, indicates a controlled volatility environment, supporting range-bound price action rather than trending moves.
Published on May 7, 2026
New Chief Minister of Bihar Samrat Chaudhary Is going to get his new cabinet today. There is cabinet expansion in Bihar today (Thursday, 7 May). The swearing-in ceremony has been held at Gandhi Maidan in Patna at 12.10 pm, in which about 30 ministers are likely to take oath.
The probable list of ministers that has come out from Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) includes the names of Vijay Kumar Sinha, Mangal Pandey, Ramkripal Yadav, Shreyasi Singh, Lakhendra Paswan, Rama Nishad, Pramod Kumar Chandravanshi, Arun Shankar Prasad, Sanjay Singh Tiger. He has been a minister in the past also.
New potential faces of BJP quota
At the same time, if we talk about new faces, names of Kedar Gupta, Nitish Mishra, Mithilesh Tiwari, Engineer Shailendra and Shweta Gupta are also coming to the fore.
Also read: Big decision of Samrat Cabinet in Bihar, name of Sitamarhi Hospital changed, many schemes approved
Minister from JDU Kota
Nitish Kumar That Shravan Kumar, Ashok Chaudhary, Lacey Singh, Madan Sahni, Jama Khan, Sunil Kumar can become ministers from JDU’s quota. He has been a minister in the past also. Apart from this, among the new faces, Ratnesh Sada, Bulo Mandal, Bhagwan Singh Kushwaha, Damodar Rawat can become ministers.
Who will be the minister from the quota of Manjhi-Paswan and Upendra Kushwaha?
Santosh Suman from Jitan Ram Manjhi’s HAM, Sanjay Singh from Chirag Paswan’s LJP R, Sanjay Paswan can become ministers. These people were ministers in the past also. Upendra Kushwaha’s son Deepak Prakash, who was also a minister in Nitish government, can become a minister from RLM.
There may be 36 ministers in Bihar cabinet
The rules say that according to the number of MLAs in Bihar, there can be 36 ministers including the Chief Minister. Chief Minister Samrat Chaudhary is from BJP quota. At the same time, both Deputy Chief Ministers Vijay Chaudhary and Vijendra Yadav come from JDU quota. Apart from the Chief Minister and two Deputy Chief Ministers, 30 ministers are likely to take oath today. In this situation, 33 posts will be filled and three posts can be kept vacant.
The Norwegian government has been heavily criticised for approving plans to reopen three North Sea gasfields nearly three decades after they were closed to help fill the gap in energy supplies created by the Middle East war.
Amid sharp price rises in oil and gas since the US and Israel’s attack on Iran in February, Oslo has also given its approval for oil and gas companies to explore in 70 new locations in the North Sea, Barents Sea and Norwegian Sea.
The decision by the Labour-run government goes against the advice of the country’s environment agency and has infuriated left-leaning parties.
“We live in troubled times,” the prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, said as he announced the decision, which would “create great value for the community, lay the foundation for good jobs throughout the country, ensure our common welfare and contribute to Europe’s energy security and safety”.
The Albuskjell, Vest Ekofisk and Tommeliten Gamma gasfields in the North Sea were closed in 1998. The government plans to spend 19bn kroner (£1.5bn) on restarting them by the end of 2028 with production to continue until 2048.
The gas will be sent by pipeline to Germany with light oil sent to the UK.
Norway set out the plan to expand its North Sea oil and gas production amid a row in the UK over the future of hydrocarbons in UK waters. The Labour government has banned new exploration licences, but the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, is under pressure to decide on whether to allow two projects which were granted licences under the previous Conservative government to go ahead.
Norway’s state oil company, Equinor, hopes to develop the Rosebank oilfield, while Shell is waiting for a government decision on its Jackdaw gas project. Climate campaigners have said the projects would undermine the UK’s climate agenda, while some industry experts have argued that domestic fossil fuels would lead to lower emissions than US imports and would bring greater economic benefits.
The 70 new areas of Norway’s seabed to be opened up for exploration include some closer to the coast than ever before. Companies have until 1 September to apply, and licences will be granted early next year.
The deputy leader and environment spokesperson for the Socialist Left party, Lars Haltbrekken, said the decision was madness and accused the government of greenwashing.
“It shows that the government is once again blatantly ignoring environmental advice from its own experts,” he said. “All the talk about responsible oil extraction is nothing but nonsense. It’s greenwashing through and through, with vulnerable and important natural areas being put at risk with full awareness.”
Expanding the area for exploration licences would not solve today’s oil crisis and could have “potentially catastrophic consequences for fish and bird populations”, he said.
“We are now risking oil drilling right up to the shoreline. If an accident happens, we have no chance of preventing an environmental catastrophe.”
Equinor has pumped record amounts of oil and gas since the US-Israeli war with Iran and the closure of the strait of Hormuz strangled the flow of oil and gas from the Gulf to the global markets.
It pumped 2.31m barrels of oil equivalent a day in the first quarter, according to its latest financial results, almost 9% more than in the same months last year and almost double the increase financial analysts predicted.
The company’s record fossil fuel production combined with surging market prices helped it to its highest quarterly profits since 2023, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused a gas supply shock across Europe. Equinor expects the current disruption to last well beyond any end to hostilities.
Norway’s energy minister, Terje Aasland, said: “Norwegian production of oil and gas is an important contribution to energy security in Europe. Development of new gasfields helps Norway maintain high deliveries in the long term.
“This has become more important after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East.”
The Norwegian prime minister’s office declined to comment.
Reference #18.2d4adc17.1778120410.314fadb
https://errors.edgesuite.net/18.2d4adc17.1778120410.314fadb