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When a trio of masked teens tried to rob a man aboard a Chicago bus Saturday night, the 54-year-old fought back, police told CWB Chicago.Chicago police told the outlet the man was riding a northbound Ashland bus near 57th Street around 11:22 p.m. when the three males approached him and demanded his property while aboard the bus.'This will continue to happen all over the city. Can't stand at the bus stop. Can't ride the CTA bus. Can't ride the train.'Investigators told CWB Chicago the trio began taking items from the man, including a chain necklace that was later recovered from one of the suspects.A witness told WGN-TV in the station's video report that the suspects were "talking about shooting him, blowing his brains out."But the man soon decided he wasn't going to give up his stuff without a fight.Police told the outlet the man reached into his bag, pulled out a “sharp object,” and fought with the robbers.The suspects battered the victim before fleeing the bus, and CWB Chicago reported that officers initially were dispatched after a bus panic alarm generated a “person with a knife” call.But as the investigation unfolded, police learned the three ski mask-wearing teenagers targeted the passenger who fought back, the outlet said.CWB Chicago said police recovered a knife at the scene.More from the outlet:Then came the plot twist: While officers were sorting out what happened on the bus, 911 operators received another call from the 5600 block of South Justine Street from a caller reporting that his 13-year-old little brother had been stabbed in the hand.When officers arrived, they quickly connected the dots. According to a police report, the wounded 13-year-old, his older brother, and another individual at the Justine location turned out to be the robbers. Police also recovered the victim’s chain necklace at the scene.RELATED: Plucky elderly man who uses a walker fights back in brutal fashion when much younger male unleashes attack on him with wrench Police told CWB Chicago that Chicago Fire Department personnel treated the victim, who suffered a cut on his hand, and then took him to St. Bernard Hospital; he was listed in good condition.Two of the alleged robbers suffered what police said were minor injuries, and paramedics also treated them the outlet said, adding that the three suspects were arrested and charges were pending as of Sunday morning.A number of commenters reacting to the station's video report about the incident were up in arms:"The mayor will give the 3 criminals the key [to] the city for such bravery," one commenter wrote sarcastically."Every law-abiding citizen should invest in a [Firearm Owners Identification Card], firearm training, and the [Concealed Carry License]," another commenter said. "Stay ready for the Devil.""A 54-year-old man taking on three young punks and only having a laceration on his hand ... bravo!!!" another commenter wrote. "And glad they caught and arrested the three thugs; just too bad they will be released, if they aren't already, due to [Illinois Democrat Gov. JB] Pritzker's absurd Safe-T Act.""In a future plea deal, charges of assault with bodily harm and aggravated robbery will be reduced to fare evasion — probably," another commenter predicted."This will continue to happen all over the city," another commenter lamented. "Can't stand at the bus stop. Can't ride the CTA bus. Can't ride the train."Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

The Los Angeles School District superintendent resigned on Sunday, just four months after federal agents raided his home and office.On Feb. 25, the FBI executed search warrants at Alberto Carvalho’s office and his San Pedro home. Carvalho was placed on paid administrative leave a couple of days later.'Because I believe our schools must remain focused on students and learning without distraction, I am resigning as Superintendent of LAUSD effective today, June 21, 2026.'The reason for the raids has not been publicly revealed. However, some reports indicate they may have been connected to an investigation into a company that received $3 million from the district to develop an educational chatbot for students. The company went bankrupt, and the chatbot was never fully delivered.Carvalho, who became superintendent in 2022, has not been charged with any crimes. He has denied any wrongdoing.Carvalho sent a resignation letter on Sunday to the Los Angeles Unified School District and Board of Education members, the Los Angeles Times reported.Carvalho’s letter did not address why he was stepping down from his position. However, he seemed to refer to the investigation as a “distraction.”RELATED: FBI raids home and office of Los Angeles school superintendent, outspoken critic of ICE raids Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images“It has been a great honor to serve you,” Carvalho wrote. “Over the past four years, together, we have made historic progress — gains that belong to our students, our educators, staff, and our communities.”“Placing students first has always guided my work,” he continued. “Because I believe our schools must remain focused on students and learning without distraction, I am resigning as Superintendent of LAUSD effective today, June 21, 2026.”RELATED: Thousands of students drop out of Los Angeles schools over 'climate of fear' from deportations, superintendent says Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesAn LAUSD spokesperson told WTVJ that the district’s Board of Education “acknowledges receipt of the letter of resignation from Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho, effective June 21, 2026.”“The Board remains steadfast in its commitment to ensuring stability, continuity, and continued progress through strong leadership. Our focus remains unchanged: providing every student with a high-quality education, supporting our dedicated workforce, and maintaining the trust of the communities we serve,” the statement read.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

For American leftists, Father's Day — like Columbus Day — constitutes an annual opportunity to publicly unload their baggage, air petty resentments, and express their depravities in creative ways. This Sunday was no different over at the New York Times.Days after a liberal rag north of the border ran an article calling for the abolition of Father's Day, America's supposed newspaper of record endeavored to make Father's Day about a reality-averse woman.'The cultural elite['s] contempt for dads runs so deep.'In an essay published on Sunday titled "To My Daughter, My Gender Was Never Complicated," trans-identifying woman Zach Ellams discussed both her imagined fatherhood and her daughter's absorption of the corresponding lunacy.Ellams notes at the outset that while she has been "living as a trans man" since she was 18, she had to "learn how to be a trans dad" after she and her lesbian "wife" had a child.This learning process apparently consisted of Ellams simultaneously developing confidence in the lie while indoctrinating her daughter — a little girl whom Ellams calls Elliot and who has apparently wondered about her mother's new facial hair; stated she too wanted to grow a beard and tried to convince other children it was possible; told teachers about her mother's breast-removal surgery; and asked her mother about her phantom breasts — "How long did you have breasts for, Dad?"Whether Ellams or her lesbian partner gave birth to the girl is unclear.RELATED: Actress Elliot Page mocked ruthlessly after trying to define 'healthy masculinity' Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty ImagesThe essay concludes with Ellams noting, "I thought I was teaching Elliot how to be happy and secure. Yet all along she had being doing that for me."Critics blasted the Times over its decision to mark Father's Day with an essay about a dysphoric mother.Investigative reporter Matt Taibbi called the essay an "all-timer," noting he didn't "know where to put it on the funny-vs-horrifying axis."Alex Berenson, a former reporter for the Times, congratulated his former paper for "perfectly catching how the cultural elite view men and fatherhood this Father’s Day — yes, to the Times, being a dad is something you do to feel better about having your tits cut off. Cannot make it up.""The cultural elite['s] contempt for dads runs so deep we don't even get to speak for ourselves," Berenson also said."The New York Times celebrated Father’s Day by saluting the real heroes: left-wing gender goblins who think mentally ill women mutilating themselves, mainlining hormone injections, and playing daddy dress-up are the true embodiment of fatherhood," wrote Sean Davis, CEO of the Federalist."'Liberal women let men have even one single thing challenge': impossible," quipped conservative commentator Michael Knowles.The X account for Prager University simply asked, "What are we doing here?"Ellams' essay was published just days after the surgically mutilated lesbian actress formerly known as Ellen Page attempted to define "healthy masculinity," suggesting what's ultimately needed is more weeping and banana consumption.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Last month, I wrote here that the AI bubble was about to pop and that when the subsidies ran out, the bill would land on the customer. The whole thing rested on one ugly fact: The companies selling AI were losing money on nearly every power user and pretending otherwise.I figured we had a year or two before the cracks really showed. Maybe three. But the receipts started landing within weeks. What I got wrong wasn't the diagnosis, but who would blink first. I figured the pain would start at the bottom, with small shops priced out when their renewals came due. Instead, it started at the very top, with the richest companies on earth — including several of the same outfits building and selling the stuff.The message was: Get on board or get left behind.The implications are massive. Let's review.Uber torched its entire AI budget in four monthsUber's CTO, Praveen Neppalli Naga, told the Information in April that the company had already burned through its full 2026 AI coding budget. Four months in. Gone.The culprit was Anthropic's Claude Code. Uber rolled it out to its engineers in December 2025, and usage roughly doubled by February as adoption climbed from a third of the organization to better than four-fifths. By April, Naga was, in his words, back to the drawing board, because the budget he planned for the year had vanished in a third of it. Per-engineer costs were reportedly running anywhere from $500 to $2,000 a month.On the "Rapid Response" podcast, Uber president Andrew Macdonald admitted he can't connect all that token spend to anything customers can actually see. Asked whether the AI was producing more useful features, he said flatly, "That link is not there yet" and that the spending gets harder to justify when AI isn't free.Uber dropped roughly $3.4 billion on R&D in 2025, with AI a big chunk of that. Now the company has slapped a cap on it. Employees get $1,500 worth of tokens per coding tool each month, and the company is still trying to figure out what, exactly, it bought.Microsoft revoked its own people's Claude Code licensesMicrosoft is canceling internal Claude Code licenses across its Experiences + Devices division, the group behind Windows, Teams, Outlook, and Surface. The cutoff is June 30, 2026, which happens to be the last day of Microsoft's fiscal year.The pilot launched in December 2025. Engineers liked Claude Code so much that they started ditching Microsoft's own GitHub Copilot CLI for it. Six months later, the company is pulling the plug and herding everyone back to Copilot. Token billing turned what looked like a flat seat license into a runaway tab, and Microsoft's finance people reached the same conclusion Uber's did.Remember, this is Microsoft. They put money into Anthropic. And they still couldn't justify keeping the lights on for their own engineers to use the tool.Meta flipped from 'tokenmaxxing' to 'tokenminimizing'"Tokenmaxxing" was Silicon Valley's newest bit of corporate slang, and it means exactly what it sounds like: Burn tokens to hit a target, climb a board, prove you're "innovative." Output optional.For two years, Meta pushed staff to use AI for everything. Internal leaderboards tracked who burned the most tokens, handing out titles like "Token Legend." The message was: Get on board or get left behind.Now the memo reads differently. In June, Meta told roughly 6,000 employees the company clamping down on AI costs by capping token usage and building an internal dashboard to track who's spending what. The Information called it "tokenminimizing," and the company admitted internal AI use alone is on track to cost billions this year.Here's the context that makes it sting. Meta raised its 2026 capital expenditure forecast to between $125 billion and $145 billion, nearly all of it AI infrastructure. It also announced about 8,000 layoffs in April, roughly 10% of the company, with cuts beginning May 20.RELATED: Shadowy companies are selling access to your smart TV — and its data JDawnInk/Getty Images So: Meta is spending more on AI than ever, fired thousands of people to help pay for it, and now can't afford for the survivors to actually use the thing. Got it.Amazon shut down its AI leaderboardAmazon ran an internal leaderboard called KiroRank that scored employees on AI usage. The idea was to gamify adoption and reward the heaviest users.It worked a little too well. Staff started "tokenmaxxing," assigning AI agents pointless busywork just to climb the board. Some reportedly used AI for tasks they could have knocked out faster by hand, burning compute to chase a number. First reported by the Financial Times, Amazon killed KiroRank at the end of May. Senior VP Dave Treadwell's message to the troops: "Please don't use AI just for the sake of using AI."That’s the whole problem in one sentence. Amazon wanted adoption. What it got was theater. Employees gamed a metric that had nothing to do with whether any real work got done.The tokenmaxxing hangoverThe sticker shock is showing up everywhere. TechCrunch reported in early June that a Priceline employee watched a routine Cursor renewal come back four to five times more expensive. One financial operations director described companies blowing through their entire 2026 token budget by April and quietly panicking.Fortune's Jeremy Kahn put a headstone on it in late May: "Tokenmaxxing is dead." Companies raced to burn tokens and reward people for it, then discovered that adoption metrics aren't business outcomes.For two years, the answer to "should we use AI" was always yes, and the only argument was how fast. The question has quietly changed to "what did we get for it," and a lot of companies don't like the answer.What this actually meansIn May, I argued that AI companies were running loss-leading subscriptions, burning investor cash to buy the market, and hiding the real cost behind a subsidized price. You weren't paying for the product. You were getting a subsidized demo, with the price hike scheduled for after you got hooked.What I didn't see coming was how fast the subsidizers would start cutting themselves off.The companies with the deepest pockets are first in line to ration it, and several of them are the very ones building and selling it. They looked at the invoice and realized they can't afford their own product. Uber's CTO said the budget was blown away. Meta is building dashboards to meter its engineers. Microsoft, an Anthropic backer, is canceling licenses. Amazon found out its own people were manufacturing fake demand.These aren't scrappy startups running out of runway. They're the richest companies on earth, with effectively bottomless access to capital, and they all hit the same wall at roughly the same time.It's not just them, either. On June 14, the Economist ran a piece called "Companies are scrambling to curtail soaring AI costs," and the best line came from an executive at a big U.S. tech company who called the coming squeeze "an absolute nightmare." His point: A large company runs hundreds of software programs, and once each one ships its own AI agents, the bills stack up fast. Ramp, the corporate-card provider that can see its clients' actual spending, figures AI bills have jumped 13-fold in a year. Its heaviest 1% of users now average around $7,450 per person per month, against $11 for the typical customer. Even Sam Altman has called mounting customer costs a serious problem, which is a strange thing to hear from the man selling the tokens.At current prices, AI costs more than it returns, and even the companies selling it can't make the internal math work.The lessonAI has real uses, and I lean on it every day. But economics don't care how you feel, and you can't meme your way around a compute bill that climbs every month a power user gets better at burning tokens. That's not hypothetical. It's the whole reason the firms selling AI are the first ones rationing it.If you run a business and you have bet the whole thing on API calls to somebody else's model, look hard at that dependency. When the companies building these models can't afford to let their own staff use them freely, what do you think happens when your renewal lands?There are alternatives, and they're getting absurdly cheap. The Economist notes that a mid-tier model like Anthropic's Sonnet can run about 1/20 of what its flagship Opus costs. Kimi, an open-weight model from the Chinese startup Moonshot AI, runs about 1/20 of that. Stack those up, and a lot of routine work runs at a rounding error next to frontier pricing. "Send the easy jobs somewhere cheaper" is a real strategy now, not a compromise. You don't have to stay locked into a vendor that is quietly rationing its own product.The bubble isn't bursting with a headline. It's bursting with a memo. A budget revision. A canceled license. A quiet decision to ration the tool you were told would change everything.And the people who sold you the revolution? They’re the same ones pulling the plug.