Tucker Carlson spoke with journalist and podcast host Ian Carroll this week for a lengthy talk about the deadly 2017 Las Vegas shooting, covering the slew of unanswered questions that remain about the nation’s deadliest mass shooting.
The duo also touched on mysteries surrounding the official narrative about the Charlie Kirk assassination.
In anticipation of the potential spread of conspiracy theories, the United States Department of Energy (DOE) has alerted the public to its plans to fly DOE helicopters over the Las Vegas Strip, as it plans to search for nuclear radiation leading up to this year’s New Year’s Eve celebration.
Part of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA’s) Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST), the Aerial Measuring System (AMS) will monitor the strip and surrounding areas for signs of background radiation that could point to a potential threat to the over 400,000 visitors expected to crowd the street during the annual holiday gathering.
“NNSA is making the public aware of the upcoming flights so citizens who see the low-flying aircraft are not alarmed,” the agency explained in June.
In a statement detailing the operation, the agency said that the flights, which began on Monday, will continue through Wednesday night’s New Year’s Eve celebrations. During each flight, the agency’s equipment-packed helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft fly directly over the 4.2-mile-long stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard, often referred to as “The Strip.”
“The public may see a Leonardo AW-139 helicopter, which is equipped with radiation-sensing technology,” the agency previously explained, adding that the helicopter will fly at “relatively low levels.”
During the Wednesday evening New Year’s Eve event known as “America’s Party,” Las Vegas authorities will close down The Strip to all vehicle traffic. At its peak, authorities will be responsible for the safety of hundreds of thousands of people as they watch an eight-minute-long firework show and an extended LED drone show.
According to the agency’s website, the DOE helicopters fly in a grid-like pattern at low altitudes of 150 to 300 feet and at an average speed of 80 miles per hour. The agency also noted that all flights of the DOE helicopters are conducted during daylight hours “to identify any unexpected radiation sources that might pose a threat during the event.”
One of President Trump’s biggest political adversaries stunned the political world after revealing that he won an unusual amount of money gambling in Las Vegas last year.
As The New York Times reported, Illinois Democratic Governor JB Pritzker released his 2024 tax returns on Wednesday as rumors circulate about him as a 2028 presidential candidate.
The returns revealed that Pritzker and his wife reported $10.7 million in adjusted gross income. But the biggest shock was the fact that he won $1.4 million playing blackjack in Las Vegas in just one trip.
Such an amount is surprising, especially considering Pritzker is not a professional gambler.
Pritzker, though, told reporters Thursday that there was nothing nefarious and that it was just his lucky night at the casino.
“I went on vacation with my wife, with some friends, I was incredibly lucky,” a smiling Pritzer claimed at a press conference. “You have to be in order to end up ahead in a casino anywhere.”
“I like to play cards. I founded a charitable poker match here in Chicago called the Chicago Poker Challenge that has raised millions of dollars for the Holocaust museum,” he said in an apparent attempt to tone down any accusations of cheating.
The price tag for the much-anticipated high-speed train between Southern California and Las Vegas has soared to $21.5 billion with warnings the number could keep rising.
The 218-mile railway will take passengers from Las Vegas to Southern California in just two hours, with a Metrolink connecting them to Los Angeles Union Station.
At speeds of up to 200 mph, Brightline West hopes that its project will promote a ‘car-free, care-free lifestyle’.
Earlier this year, Brightline West reported that the railway’s construction would cost $16 billion, double the initially projection.
But rising costs due to labor shortages, material cost inflation, and competition from other infrastructure projects has driven the cost up even further, according to Desert Sun.
To make up for the difference, the company has requested a $6 billion federal loan through the US Department of Transportation.
The company issued $2.5 billion in private activity bonds in February, which requires it to secure the necessary loan by November.
But if they can’t secure it, they may end up paying even more and be forced to repay investors early.
Initially, the railway was supposed to open in 2027, in time for the Summer Olympics in LA the following year, but the date has been pushed back to 2029.
Brightline West ceremonially broke ground on the project in April 2024 and preliminary construction has begun.
The all-electric trains will be built along the Interstate 15 median with new stations in Apple Valley and Hesperia.
The final stop in Rancho Cucamonga, California will connect passengers to LA on a pre-existing Metro line.
Brightline West claims taking the high-speed rail will be two times faster than the driving time which can take up to five hours.
They also boast that they will create more than 10,000 job during construction and 800 permanent operations and maintenance jobs.
It’s also environmentally friendly and is projected to save 325,000 metric tons of CO2 each year.
According to their website: ‘Brightline is the only private provider of modern, eco-friendly, intercity passenger rail service in America.’
Tourists may have deserted the gambling capital of the world but the number of homeless has skyrocketed. Among them are the ‘Mole People’ who dwell in the decaying tunnels below the Las Vegas Strip.
A petite blonde-haired woman in a red sundress, who goes by Natasha, emerges from her home under the Sahara Hotel and Casino on a sweltering late September day.
She is just one of an estimated 1,500 people, many of whom are drug, alcohol or gambling addicts, who live underneath the glittering Strip in a vast 600-mile system of storm drain tunnels built in the early 1990s.
At first glance she could be mistaken for an average tourist in town to play blackjack or see a show.
It’s not until she makes her way through the piles of garbage, including discarded shoes, a broken stroller, used syringes, old pizza boxes, dirty blankets, torn-open pillows, and leftover bags of junk food, and comes closer that you can see she’s missing a front tooth and has sores all over her legs that are a telltale sign of fentanyl abuse.
Natasha, from Anchorage, Alaska, admits she’s high but is also lucid enough to explain her situation and describe life in the tunnels because, she says, many who live alongside her cannot.
She has been underground on and off for two years.
‘When I first came on the Strip – I’ve been here for a year – I was living in a truck,’ she told Daily Mail.
‘Then my boyfriend died [of an overdose] and so I’ve been down here off and on for weeks. I never knew how bad the whole [homeless] situation was here.
‘People are sleeping in alleyways and living by dumpsters or they’re in shelters. The people in the tunnels don’t want to stop using drugs. It makes them happy.
‘They can’t do that with a normal lifestyle or any place where they have to follow rules.’
Since 2022, homelessness in Las Vegas (and the wider Southern Nevada/Clark County area) has risen sharply, according to federal Point-in-Time counts.
In 2022, there were just over 6,000 people counted as homeless on a single night. By 2023 that number grew to 6,566, and by 2024 it had jumped to about 7,906 — an increase of 20 percent in one year and about 36 percent over two years.
By contrast, Vegas has seen a sharp decline in tourism through 2025, with visitor numbers down more than 11 percent year-over-year in June and about 7 percent for the first half of the year.
Analysts say rising prices – bottled water can cost as much as $12 or $14 in hotels along the Strip and resort fees, parking and food costs have increased exponentially – along with weaker foreign currencies and a slump in international visitors have caused Vegas to be a city currently down on its luck.
International tourism has suffered the steepest drop: visitors were down by more than 13 percent in June alone.
Homeless people in Vegas do not have to live in the tunnels. They have the option of going to what locals call The Courtyard, the primary hub for unhoused people in the city.
Las Vegas residents were left outraged as congregants at an Ethiopian orthodox church continue to illegally park their vehicles on lawns and driveways.
Neighbors of the Hamere Noah Kidane Mihret and Saint Michael Ethiopian Church told KLAS they have repeatedly reached out to Clark County Commissioner Michael Naft and used the Fixit app as they were instructed, but nothing has changed in years.
‘We document that and we provide that proof and we have found that there’s no follow up,’ said Daria Wu, who gathered her fellow neighbors to discuss the issues they have faced during the services at the church.
These include a spike in speeding cars, vehicles running the stop signs and illegally parked cars.
‘It’s not great to sometimes have your driveway blocked by someone else’s car,’ Wu noted, as a recent morning ceremony brought more than 600 vehicles, most of which were parked illegally in front of county ‘no parking’ signs.
The swath of illegally-parked vehicles extended more than a mile, completely blocking some off some roads.
Church members have claimed the hundreds of illegally parked vehicles only come once a year, though residents say it is much more frequently that they are dealing with the issue.
A congregant also reportedly admitted that the parking jobs were illegal according to the signs, but was not an issue because the county has not enforced ‘no parking’ rules.
A judge ordered probation on Thursday for the teenager who fatally shot his father on December 28 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The accused is 16-year-old Lincoln Peterson. HIs mother said the deadly incident happened after the boy’s family took his electronics away because of his bad grades, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported on Thursday.
His parents reportedly believed he was “sneaking electronics” and a fight erupted.
“The teen said his mother had struck him with a belt, according to an adult certification order. He was running from his parents when he picked up a handgun sitting on top of a dryer and fired backward,” the article read. However, the teenager claimed he was unaware he hit someone.
It looks like America’s “special relationship” with Israel may have paid off big for an alleged pedophile: A senior official in Israel’s cybersecurity agency was arrested in Las Vegas for allegedly attempting to use the internet to lure a child into sexual abuse, only to be released on bond and somehow allowed to go back to Israel. There’s no indication he was covered by diplomatic immunity.
Tom Alexandrovich, who helps guide his country’s cybersecurity policy, was representing Israel at Black Hat USA, a professional conference in Las Vegas, when he was one of seven people swept up in a major, multi-agency sting operation earlier this month that targeted people seeking sex acts with minors. According to court records, on Aug 6, the 38-year-old Alexandrovich allegedly committed the felony offense of using computer technology in an attempt to lure a child into sexual abuse. That particular crime encompasses children under 16. The next day, he posted a $10,000 bond at the Henderson Detention Center.
As the news broke, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reflexively denied Alexandrovich had done anything wrong, claiming that “the employee, who does not hold a diplomatic visa, was not arrested and returned to Israel as scheduled.” Subsequently confronted with court records, Israel’s Cyber Directorate said the earlier false statement “was accurate based on the information provided to us,” and that Alexandrovich is now on leave “by mutual decision.”
It’s not clear why or how he was allowed to return to Israel, which has a reputation as a haven for pedophiles who prey on American children. Citing a Jewish watchdog group, a 2020 CBS News report found that, in just the previous six years, more than 60 Jewish Americans who’d been accused of pedophilia had fled to Israel, taking advantage of Israel’s “Right of Return” law that lets any Jew in the world enjoy instant citizenship. Though these individuals — who include both suspects and convicts — are technically subject to extradition to the United States, Israeli police have been accused of assigning low priority to these cases and — perhaps because of that — US agencies are accused of failing to aggressively pursue extradition.
Las Vegas police said Saturday that Tom Aleksandrovich, head of a division in Israel’s National Cyber Directorate, was the senior official detained this week during a professional conference he attended on behalf of the Israeli government. He was questioned on suspicion of online pedophilia.
Aleksandrovich was among eight people arrested in a large-scale operation targeting online child predators, led by Las Vegas police, who also issued a public statement about the arrests.
The operation, part of the Nevada Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force, included agents from the FBI’s Child Exploitation Task Force, Henderson and North Las Vegas police, Homeland Security Investigations, and the Nevada Attorney General’s office. All eight face felony charges of luring a child via computer for sexual acts. They were booked into the Henderson Detention Center, except one suspect who was booked into Clark County Detention Center.
Aleksandrovich attended the U.S. conference in an official capacity. Authorities said he was released following questioning on Wednesday, returned to his hotel, and flew back to Israel within two days.
Israeli officials emphasized that the incident “has no political implications.” The Prime Minister’s Office, which oversees the cyber unit, said Aleksandrovich was not arrested and returned on schedule:
“The employee informed the unit that during his trip to the U.S., he was questioned by local authorities on matters unrelated to work and returned to Israel as planned. The unit has not yet received further details through official channels. Should additional information arrive, the unit will act accordingly. At this stage, by joint decision, the employee has taken leave to address the matter until it is clarified.”
The oldest casino in Las Vegas is replacing all human dealers with electronic table games as soaring prices and tourist boycotts continue to drive visitors away.
The Golden Gate Hotel & Casino is ‘reimagining’ its casino floor and will no longer have live table dealer games, owner and Circa CEO Derek Stevens has revealed.
Although electronic table games have been in casinos around the globe for decades, the Golden Gate will be the first hotel in downtown Las Vegas to completely eliminate human dealers from all of its tables.
‘We’ve always embraced the future, and now we’re reimagining our casino floor with a high-energy electronic table games pit unlike anything downtown has seen,’ Stevens said in a statement to KLAS.
Although the CEO did not specify what inspired the change, he teased that visitors can expect ‘more excitement, faster gameplay, and all the newest machines’.
Industry experts expect the electronic table games market in the US to grow from $2.7 billion in 2024 to $4.9 billion by 2033, according to a recent study by Market Statsville Group.
Proponents of the tables argue the devices increase accuracy and efficiency, optimize casino floor space, increase revenue and reduce operating costs because they require fewer dealers and pit supervisors than live tables.
All Golden Gate table games members will have the opportunity to pursue roles in other departments or at other hotels in the Circa family.
Hellbound and Down 
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