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Whitmer remains silent on protesters' 'Death to America' chants while weighing in on war in Israel, election

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Whitmer remains silent on protesters' 'Death to America' chants while weighing in on war in Israel, election

Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer remained silent on protesters recently chanting, “Death to America” at an anti-Israel protest in her home state, but did weigh in on whether President Biden’s handling of the war in the Middle East could cost him the battleground state in November. 

“The state of Michigan is always going to be a close race, no matter what, under what scenario. I will share, though, as I’ve had conversations with people both in my Jewish community and in the Arab American and Muslim and Palestinian community, that a lot of people are hurting right now. A lot of people are one degree of separation from someone who’s lost their lives, whether it was on October 7, or is in the war in Gaza,” Whitmer told NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker on Sunday morning when asked whether Biden’s handling of the war in Israel could cost him Michigan’s vote in the general election. 

“And so I’m trying to keep an open dialogue to stay focused on how we support these beautiful diverse communities here in Michigan.” 

BIDEN CAMPAIGN: WE DON’T WANT THE VOTES OF ‘DEATH TO AMERICA’ PROTESTERS IN MICHIGAN

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer speaks to supporters at a rally at the Crofoot Ballroom on November 6, 2022, in Pontiac, Michigan. (Sarah Rice/Getty Images)

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Whitmer’s response came after Welker highlighted to the governor that Michigan has the largest population of Arab-Americans, and that nationally, polling shows that less than 20% of Arab-Americans would vote for Biden as war continues raging in the Middle East. 

WHITE HOUSE CONDEMNS ‘DEATH TO AMERICA’ CHANTS IN MICHIGAN, REP. RASHIDA TLAIB AND GOV. GRETCHEN WHITMER MUM

Earlier this month, viral video circulated online showing protesters at an Al-Quds Day rally in Dearborn chanting, “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.” Whitmer has remained silent on condemning the chants, while the Biden administration condemned “these abhorrent and antisemitic remarks in the strongest terms” in comment to Fox Digital last week. 

Local activist Takek Bazzi (Middle East Media Research Institute)

The Biden campaign responded “No” when Fox Digital asked last week whether they still want votes from people who chanted at the rally on April 5.

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‘DEATH TO AMERICA,’ ‘DEATH TO ISRAEL’ CHANTS POUR OUT OF MUSLIM PROTESTERS IN MICHIGAN ON LAST DAY OF RAMADAN

President Biden speaks about inflation and supply chain issues in Los Angeles.  (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud also publicly denounced the chants, calling them “unacceptable and contrary to the heart” of Dearborn.

Abdullah H. Hammoud, mayor of Dearborn, speaks during an interfaith prayer vigil for Aaron Bushnell outside the Henry Ford Centennial Library in Dearborn, Michigan, on March 3, 2024. (Photo by JEFF KOWALSKY / AFP) (Photo by JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP via Getty Images)

“Over the weekend, video emerged of a rally in Dearborn where some attendees were chanting statements that were unacceptable and contrary to the heart of this city,” he said.

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Democratic Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a member of the House’s left-wing Squad, has declined to condemn the chants, even when confronted by a Fox Business reporter last week.

ACTIVIST WHO SPURRED ‘DEATH TO AMERICA’ CHANTS CALLED FOR ISRAEL’S ‘ABSOLUTE ANNIHILATION’ IN UNEARTHED VIDEO

Most columnists floated Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, D-Mich., as a good replacement for Vice President Harris on Biden’s re-election ticket. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Welker did not specifically ask Whitmer about the protest earlier this month or the chants, but her lack of condemnation on the matter for more than a week has resulted in critical op-eds and outrage from state Republicans

Fox News Digital reached out to Whitmer’s office again Sunday, asking whether she condemns the chants, but did not immediately receive a reply. The governor’s office previously did not return Fox Digital’s other requests for comment as videos of the protest first circulated online. 

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DEARBORN MAYOR SAYS BIDEN CAMP’S TRIP TO MICHIGAN WAS ‘DEHUMANIZING,’ PURELY FOR ‘POLITICAL MEANS’

During her “Meet the Press” appearance, Whitmer was also pressed on whether she agrees with some Democrats who have described the war in the Middle East as a “genocide” on Gaza, but she declined to weigh in on terms that “divide us.” 

“I’m not gonna weigh in where I know that a lot of these terms are used to inflame and divide us. I’m gonna stay focused on being productive and hoping that we can have some peace very soon,” she responded. 

Fox News Digital’s Michael Lee contributed to this report. 

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South Dakota

SD Lottery Powerball, Lotto America winning numbers for June 27, 2026

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The South Dakota Lottery offers multiple draw games for those aiming to win big.

Here’s a look at June 27, 2026, results for each game:

Winning Powerball numbers from June 27 drawing

03-16-28-30-59, Powerball: 11, Power Play: 2

Check Powerball payouts and previous drawings here.

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Winning Lotto America numbers from June 27 drawing

03-08-18-22-39, Star Ball: 06, ASB: 02

Check Lotto America payouts and previous drawings here.

Winning Dakota Cash numbers from June 27 drawing

02-21-25-30-32

Check Dakota Cash payouts and previous drawings here.

Winning Millionaire for Life numbers from June 27 drawing

26-32-38-51-52, Bonus: 05

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Check Millionaire for Life payouts and previous drawings here.

Feeling lucky? Explore the latest lottery news & results

Are you a winner? Here’s how to claim your prize

  • Prizes of $100 or less: Can be claimed at any South Dakota Lottery retailer.
  • Prizes of $101 or more: Must be claimed from the Lottery. By mail, send a claim form and a signed winning ticket to the Lottery at 711 E. Wells Avenue, Pierre, SD 57501.
  • Any jackpot-winning ticket for Dakota Cash or Lotto America, top prize-winning ticket for Lucky for Life, or for the second prizes for Powerball and Mega Millions must be presented in person at a Lottery office. A jackpot-winning Powerball or Mega Millions ticket must be presented in person at the Lottery office in Pierre.

When are the South Dakota Lottery drawings held?

  • Powerball: 9:59 p.m. CT on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday.
  • Mega Millions: 10 p.m. CT on Tuesday and Friday.
  • Lucky for Life: 9:38 p.m. CT daily.
  • Lotto America: 9:15 p.m. CT on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday.
  • Dakota Cash: 9 p.m. CT on Wednesday and Saturday.
  • Millionaire for Life: 10:15 p.m. CT daily.

This results page was generated automatically using information from TinBu and a template written and reviewed by a South Dakota editor. You can send feedback using this form.



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Wisconsin

The retired college professor fighting a $313 trespassing ticket in Wisconsin thinks he’s part of a national struggle | Fortune

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The retired college professor fighting a 3 trespassing ticket in Wisconsin thinks he’s part of a national struggle | Fortune


“Lake Michigan has sort of got a personality,” Paul Florsheim said wryly, as if describing an old friend rather than the center of a legal battle that has consumed the last year of his life. “It changes its moods all the time. I go all throughout the year, even in the bitterest part of winter, because it’s just beautiful down there. You have these ice flows, and they’re sort of like volcanoes, and the waves come crashing through these structures. It’s like another world.”

Florsheim has been walking that world, a stretch of the Lake Michigan shoreline in Shorewood, Wis., a small village north of Milwaukee, for more than 50 years, since his childhood. He walked it with his parents. He walked it when he returned to his hometown in 2008 after 30 years away. He walked it with his dog in the early mornings, before anyone else was out, in every season.

Courtesy Florsheim’s stepdaughter Jessica Lakind and her mother Marcy Lichterman

And when the recently retired UW-Milwaukee professor walked the route last year, the Village of Shorewood issued him a $313 trespassing ticket for doing so. Now, he’s one face of a growing trend: America’s public waterfronts are increasingly … less so.

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Florsheim’s legal fight is winding its way through the Milwaukee County Circuit Court, on his way, he hopes, to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Florsheim thinks the stakes are considerably larger than one man’s morning walk. He sees the same dynamic at work in the Texas Supreme Court’s June 19 ruling that handed Elon Musk’s SpaceX effective control over Boca Chica Beach—known locally as “poor man’s beach”—and in the wave of data center projects now competing for access to Great Lakes freshwater.

“If we don’t stand up for what is ours, sort of collectively ours, we’re going to regret it down the road,” he told Fortune.” People don’t want to give up what belongs to them, just as members of the citizenry. And I do think that’s what’s resonating right now.”

Exclusivity in the public realm

Florsheim’s case began when his neighbor—a dentist who built a boathouse on the beach and monitored foot traffic from it—began calling cops on walkers. When Shorewood issued him the ticket, Florsheim’s first instinct was to fight it. When the village lawyer called before the Dec. 2024 trial and encouraged him to settle, warning of mounting court fees, Florsheim declined. When the trial began, it drew a packed courtroom, and the NPR member station story previewing it became the most-read piece in the station’s history, per Florsheim.

He’s well aware about what makes his case unusual. “A water policy professor at UW told me, ‘I’ve been waiting for a case like this my whole life.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean? This must happen all the time.’ She said, ‘No, it doesn’t. People probably get tickets with some regularity for walking on the private part of the beach, but nobody fights them.’” The retired professor, the grandson of the founder of Florsheim Shoes, paused: he had the resources to lead the charge. “The average person would not be doing what I’m doing. I’m retired, so I have the time. Would I be doing this if I was hiring a lawyer? The honest answer is probably no.”

Courtesy Florsheim’s stepdaughter Jessica Lakind and her mother Marcy Lichterman

Wisconsin, like most states, recognizes the “Ordinary High Water Mark”—the line where exposed shoreline ends and open water begins—as the boundary of public ownership. But where many states allow the public to cross private beachfront in transit to reach those publicly held waters (also known as “riparian” access) Wisconsin grants landowners exclusive control over that strip of shoreline. You can boat, fish, or swim freely if you’re in the water, but you just can’t set foot on the sand to get there.

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The charge rests on Doemel v. Jantz, a 1923 Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling that Florsheim has spent months researching. He said he contacted the archivist at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, which sits on Lake Winnebago where the original dispute originated, finding that it involved a dairy farmer’s right to walk his cattle through the privately owned property to get to the publicly owned water. If his cattle remained in the public water, he was golden; if they crossed that barrier onto sand, not so.

The municipal judge who ruled against him in January wrote a 16-page opinion—extraordinary for a small municipal court—holding that she was bound by Doemel, but that it “probably should be revisited and perhaps overturned.” On June 22, Florsheim’s attorneys filed their response brief with the circuit court, arguing the land he walked is owned by the state of Wisconsin, not his neighbor. “It is decidedly not his land; it is the public’s land,” the brief states. The access to that land, Florsheim argues, doesn’t require a public vote to be protected. “The access to the beach is part of the public trust doctrine, which is baked into the state’s constitution,” he said. “So even though there hasn’t been a vote, there really doesn’t need to be, because it is established.” A hearing is set for August 13.

He is also clear about where his fight sits in the broader picture. His “bitter feud,” he says, is not with the dentist. “My bitter feud is much more with the village, because they should be protecting the rights of the general citizenry rather than the property owners on the beach.”

The ‘poor man’s beach’ in Texas ceded to SpaceX

A similar phenomenon playing out some 1,400 miles south. On June 19, the Texas Supreme Court unanimously ruled that SaveRGV, the Sierra Club, and the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas had no legal standing to challenge SpaceX’s closure of Boca Chica Beach during rocket launches. The state’s attorney general had intervened to defend SpaceX throughout, never reaching the constitutional question of whether a 2009 amendment, backed by 77% of Texas voters protecting public beach access, outweighed a 2013 law written specifically for SpaceX. The court dismissed on standing. “The affected public has no remedy to enforce their constitutional right to access their own beach,” Marisa Perales, the attorney for the groups, told Fortune. That same week, Musk became the world’s first trillionaire following SpaceX’s record-breaking $75 billion IPO.

Boca Chica Beach is a free, undeveloped eight-mile stretch of Gulf shoreline near Brownsville—the southernmost city in Texas—where Highway 4 dead-ends at the water and SpaceX’s Starbase launch towers loom to the north. The stretch of Gulf shoreline, known locally as “poor man’s beach,” is the last wild, free, publicly accessible beach on the southernmost tip of Texas.

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The Boca Chica takeover had been proceeding on the ground regardless of the litigation. SpaceX employees voted to incorporate the area as the city of Starbase in 2025; just as the county handed the new municipality authority to close the beach during launches. In Feb., Starbase officials voted to annex 7,133 additional acres near the beach, much of it within the Boca Chica Wildlife Refuge. The court ruling removed the last legal obstacle. “Starbase is clearly Elon Musk’s company town,” South Texas Environmental Justice Network co-founder Bekah Hinojosa told The Texas Tribune. Neither the Village of Shorewood, the Texas General Land Office, a lawyer representing the environmental groups, nor SpaceX responded to Fortune’s requests for comment.

Data centers in the Midwest and afar

Closer to Florsheim in the Midwest, over 220 data centers are planned across the Great Lakes region, drawn by the basin’s freshwater—21% of the world’s surface supply—for server cooling. Microsoft is investing $20 billion in data centers at Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, a community that straddles the Great Lakes basin line and can divert lake water. Midwest Environmental Advocates—the same nonprofit representing Florsheim—sued after Racine, Wis. withheld public records on a data center’s water consumption for seven months. Fewer than one-third of data centers currently track water usage, and in Great Lakes states the reporting obligation falls on public water systems, not the corporate users drawing from them.

“A lot of these data centers want to be near the Great Lakes,” Florsheim said. “The question of what is in the public domain, and should we allow that to become privatized — that’s what’s ringing. It’s not just the beach. It’s the water. It’s who owns the resources that belong to all of us. And I think people are standing up.”

The problem goes beyond the Great Lakes region as well, and well beyond the country’s shorelines. In July 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to use “federally owned land and resources for the expeditious and orderly development of data centers,” fast-tracking construction on Department of Energy sites and opening military bases to proposals.

The order’s reach has extended to places once considered untouchable: in Northern Virginia, data center construction has pushed directly against Manassas National Battlefield Park, a Civil War site that saw 541,000 visitors in 2024, bounded on three sides by federal land, as part of a broader buildout that has made Virginia home to 663 operating data centers with another 595 planned, facilities that collectively handle roughly 70% of the world’s internet traffic. The pattern is consistent: public land, identified as available, converted to private use.

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Florsheim still walks the beach and plans to keep walking it as he awaits the August 13 hearing.

“It’s become much bigger than my little spat on the beach,” he said. “I do feel confident that we will eventually prevail.”



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Detroit, MI

Rick Mahorn returns to coaching Detroit basketball with BIG3 Amps

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Rick Mahorn returns to coaching Detroit basketball with BIG3 Amps


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Hartford, Connecticut may be Rick Mahorn’s hometown, but Detroit has his heart.

The original Pistons’ “Bad Boy” has worn many hats in basketball, from player to coach to broadcaster, but now he is back in the coaching realm leading Detroit’s BIG3 team, the Detroit Amps. 

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“The city has always been good to me, I figured I have to give something back,” Mahorn said about coming back and representing Detroit. “The fact is that I made Detroit home and one thing about Detroit, it’s always going to love me and Imma love Detroit.”

Mahorn spent 18 seasons in the NBA and won the 1989 championship with the Pistons. After retirement in 1999 as a Philadelphia 76er, he started his coaching career with the Atlanta Hawks, and the “coaching phase” never faded. 

Serving as the assistant coach for the Detroit Shock for four years, he helped lead them to two championships and moved up to the head coach position before the franchise was relocated. 

Years later he joined the BIG3 when it launched in 2017 as the head coach for the Trilogy and won the league’s first ever championship, along with its first ever Coach of the Year Award. He recently stepped back into coaching for the BIG3 as the Amps coach. 

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Along with his love for coaching, his love for the Pistons was at the heart of it. In between each coaching position, he took a break to focus on being a color analyst for the Pistons radio network and recently completed his 20th season in that role. 

“It keeps calling me back, but the thing I love about coaching is that you have to ‘each one, teach one,’” Mahorn said.  “Someone taught me as a coach, that kept me on the straight and narrow, making sure I was always positive about what I do for a living, but basketball opens up so many avenues.”

Founded by Ice Cube and Jeff Kwatinetz, the BIG3 played its inaugural season in January 2017 with eight teams. It expanded to 12 teams in 2019 but dropped back to eight with new cities and logos. 

Detroit was a part of the rebrand with the Detroit Amps, also known as the Detroit Amplifiers, and they joined the league last season.

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Although this isn’t Mahorn’s first rodeo coaching in the BIG3, or coaching Detroit basketball, it is his first season coaching the Amps after taking over the role following the former coach, hall of famer George Gervin. 

Mahorn technically never left the Detroit fan base, and has continuously been connected with the Pistons, but it is still a great feeling for him to be back coaching on Detroit’s side for the Amps. 

“What they do to me is keep me young. You think you getting old and the next thing you know you’re coaching some young guys,” Mahorn said. “I want them to have the respect of being a professional. The fact is they’re the ones carrying the torch later.”

Ice Cube or Kwatinetz weren’t in attendance Saturday, but Ice Cube’s son, Oshea Jackson Jr., was present and working with CBS Sports on interviews. 

Other celebrities came out to support, like Pistons forward Ronald Holland, former Detroit Amps head coach and hall of famer George Gervin, and local artist Payroll Giovanni, who performed at halftime of the Amps game. 

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Week two of season nine kicked off Saturday, and the Amps continued their losing streak, falling to 0-2 after a 51- 44 loss to Miami 305. 

This isn’t the only time Michiganders will see the league this season at Little Caesars Arena. It will be back for week six on July 23. 

“Detroit is a beautiful city — it’s a hardworking city,” Mahorn said. “One thing about Detroit: they embrace everybody that comes back, that’s done some things — the championships I have in my repertoire, but it’s just the fact that I just love Detroit.”

BIG3 WEEK TWO RESULTS 

Game 1:  Dallas Power 50, LA Riot 33

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Game 2: Chicago Triplets 51, DMV Trilogy 49

Game 3: Miami 305 51, Detroit Amps 44

Game 4: Boston Ball Hogs 51, Houston Rig Hands 36



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