Concerns over Mitch McConnell’s health are escalating into a critical issue for the Republican Party. A neighbor of the 84-year-old senator told the Daily Mail that she feared he might have been dead when he was carried out of his Capitol Hill residence last month.

Around 8:30 a.m. on Sunday, June 14, emergency responders took the Kentucky senator to the hospital in an ambulance, reportedly following a suspected cardiac arrest. Since that day, McConnell has remained out of the public eye, and while his staff offers minimal updates, it is assumed he is still hospitalized.

A resident from McConnell’s neighborhood recounted, “When he came out, I actually wondered if he was dead. He did not look good. He was not conscious. His eyes were closed, he had oxygen tubes strapped to his nose.”

Footage taken by onlookers captured McConnell being wheeled on a stretcher, revealing only his bare feet, while off-camera accounts painted a frantic scene before the ambulance’s arrival.

“I knew by his aides running in and out that it was something serious,” the neighbor remarked. She also noted, “There weren’t a lot of sirens. That was the thing that was interesting.”

The neighbor, who went out into the street to see what was going on, found two of the senator’s aides ‘obviously distraught’ and ‘crying’. Within moments, two police officers carrying emergency medical packs were rushing into McConnell’s home.

She believes those officers were the first responders on the scene. A police vehicle, she noted, is ‘pretty well always’ parked down the street whenever McConnell is in town.

Then came the convoy. ‘Then another vehicle comes, then another,’ she said, until an EMT unit arrived and McConnell was brought out on the stretcher and driven away – again, she said, without sirens.

Afterwards, an unmarked car sat in front of his house for a couple of hours, the neighbor said.

‘We never heard anything,’ she added of the days that followed. ‘It barely made the news.’

Asked whether the incident seemed to have been kept quiet, she answered simply: ‘Very quiet.’

Emergency dispatch audio indicates responders were sent to the senator’s home on June 14 following reports of an unconscious person suffering an apparent cardiac arrest, with CPR already under way.

McConnell’s office announced that day only that the senator had been ‘admitted to the hospital’ and was ‘receiving excellent care.’ 

Nearly four weeks later, it has still not been said what happened inside the home, what exactly he is being treated for, or when he will return to the Senate. 

Now, in another worrying development, other neighbors have described a string of concerning incidents at the property dating back to the beginning of this year. They all also noted a visible deterioration in the octogenarian senator who is routinely helped by aides from his SUV to his front door.

One male neighbor tells the Daily Mail that, just a few days prior to the June 14 incident, he had witnessed McConnell’s staff carrying the senator’s slumped body out of a wheelchair.

‘I was able to get a good look at his face,’ the man said. ‘He was pale, with a blank stare, and his mouth hanging open.’

These accounts pile fresh pressure on a GOP clinging to a razor-thin Senate majority. Were McConnell to die or resign, Kentucky would face a special election.

Republicans have scrambled to knock down rumors the McConnell is already ‘brain dead’ amid his weeks-long hospitalization, but his condition remains shrouded in secrecy.

Even President Trump has offered little assurance. ‘I have no idea how he’s doing,’ he told reporters this week.  

Neighbors also told the Daily Mail that they almost never see McConnell’s wife, 73-year-old Elaine Chao.

They couple have been married since 1993, with Taiwan-born Chao having served as Transportation Secretary in Trump’s first term.

A Capitol Police officer who is often posted on the block to watch over McConnell’s house confirmed to the Daily Mail that he never sees Chao enter or leave the residence.  

Chao, it has since emerged, was in China when her husband was rushed to the hospital and stayed there, meeting Chinese Vice President Han Zheng in Beijing on June 17, for three days after the senator unconscious was carried from their home.

A spokesperson for Chao said the long-planned trip supported her family’s philanthropic endeavors and that ‘the Senator’s health did not warrant an immediate return to the US.’

McConnell, the longest-serving party leader in Senate history, stepped down from the Republican leadership at the start of 2025 and announced last February that he would not seek an eighth term. He is due for retirement in January 2027.

A childhood polio survivor, he has faced mounting health concerns since 2023, when a fall left him with a concussion and a broken rib. That year, he suffered two notable ‘freezing’ episodes, abruptly stopping speaking mid-sentence in front of television cameras for about 20 to 30 seconds.

He has fallen several times at the Capitol since, and has at times used a wheelchair.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune and other Republicans have offered detailed accounts of phone conversations with the senator since the June 14 incident.

Thune’s spokesman said: ‘They had a lengthy and substantive conversation that covered a variety of topics, including national security.’ 

Senate Republican whip John Barrasso said via a spokesman that he had a 20 minute call with McConnell.

But Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear has publicly requested an update on his condition.

‘Over the last several weeks, Kentuckians have grown increasingly concerned about the health and well-being of Sen. McConnell,’ Beshear wrote in a letter to McConnell’s office. ‘I am requesting the Senator provide an update on his current health status.’

On a street where blacked-out SUVs and security details barely merit a second glance, multiple residents told the Daily Mail they are shocked McConnell has not retired from office at this point. 

‘God bless them,’ the neighbor who watched the stretcher go by said of the senator and the staff who surround him. ‘I would have retired. But for them, this is their life. They don’t know anything else.’

The State Department deserves commendation for halting New York City International Affairs Commissioner Ana María Archila’s attempt to engage with Amir-Saeid Iravani, Iran’s envoy to the United Nations, particularly during this tense period of conflict between the United States and Iran. This development, however, presents a significant challenge for Mayor Zohran Mamdani: Is he prepared to distance himself from the overtly anti-American elements within the Democratic Socialists of America?

In response to the situation, Mamdani has attempted to mitigate the backlash by claiming that Archila was not authorized to undertake such diplomatic efforts. However, his decision to neither dismiss her nor enforce any disciplinary measures indicates a reluctance to take decisive action.

Moreover, Mamdani has yet to plainly state just how profoundly wrong Archila’s actions were, which fuels further speculation.

This raises an important question: Does the mayor harbor a preference for the authoritarian regime in Tehran over the U.S. government?

It is possible to stand against US military interventions without aligning with a regime responsible for decades of hostility and bloodshed against Americans. Yet, certain members of the Democratic Socialists of America openly support the Islamic Republic, seemingly because of its mutual disdain for the United States.

DSA factions make apologies not just for Hamas’ atrocities against innocent Israelis, but for last year’s murder of two Jews outside the Capital Jewish Museum in DC, for Russia’s war on Ukraine and for crimes against humanity committed by the Chinese Communist Party and the lunatics who rule North Korea.

As Jonah Goldberg notes in an excellent X essay, the “DSA has an expressly no-enemies-to-the-left approach”; other members are supposed to stay silent even when its affiliates call for the overthrow of the Constitution and US democracy itself.

Is the mayor just a pretty face covering for these radicals, or does he have principles that oppose this profound anti-Americanism?

If so, he needs to start saying so, and to purge the extremists he’s hired to help run New York City.

Archila, for one, has brazenly hijacked the Office of International Affairs, turning it into a puppet agency for the DSA’s internationalist agenda. 

This is confirmed by an internal OIA memo — uncovered by City Journal — mandating that diplomatic outreach be “focused . . . on deepening relations with foreign leaders who share Mamdani’s worldview” — one aligned with the DSA.

Traditionally, the office sought to cultivate global sister city relationships, exchange best practices, attract foreign business and support the city’s relations with the diplomatic community (including collecting the occasional parking fines from scofflaw diplomats).

Reaching out to Iran and to the Maduro regime that’s devastated Venezuela, as Archila also tried to do, is a clean different thing, and a vile one.

If the mayor didn’t authorize or endorse Archila’s plan to sit down with Iran’s UN rep, he should fire her.

More: He needs to sit down with his peeps and get every anti-American radical out of his administration.

Mamdani has quietly broken with the DSA on some points, most notably by keeping Jessica Tisch in charge of the NYPD, and largely letting her run policing as she deems fit.

Now that Archila’s put the question on the table, he’s obliged to go beyond pragmatism to principle . . . unless he hates America, too.

Your move, Mr. Mayor.

The United States bids farewell to its last iron lung-dependent polio survivor, who passed away following the failure of the vintage machine that sustained her life. The device, a staple from the 1940s, had finally succumbed to the ravages of age, rendering repairs impossible.

Martha Ann Lillard, aged 78, died on June 26 after spending more than seven decades reliant on the apparatus that kept her breathing.

Her struggle with polio began on her fifth birthday in 1953, a day etched in her memory that she could recall vividly until her final days.

“I woke up, it was sunny outside, and as I attempted to sit up, I felt a searing pain in my neck,” Martha reminisced to KFOR last month. “I couldn’t lift my head off the pillow,” she shared from her home in Shawnee, Oklahoma.

Within four days, Martha lost consciousness, her ability to breathe and move devastated by the virus. It was the iron lung that ultimately stabilized her and gave her a second chance at life.

‘They usually didn’t like to put children in because they fought it, but I didn’t,’ she said. Iron lungs are airtight metal tanks which generate negative pressure to force patient’s lungs to expand and contract if they are unable to do so naturally.

Lillard was able to live a relatively normal life up until recently, but everything changed when she contracted Covid twice, as well as shingles.

At the same time, Lillard’s lifesaving iron lung started to break down, with her family explaining that the pieces were too old and hard to find to repair before her death.

‘Some of the parts are from the chevs of the forties, and they’re hard to locate,’ her sister, Cindy McVey, said. ‘We have a spare motor, but we don’t have anyone to put it back in if we needed it.’

After being diagnosed with polio, Lillard spent six months in the hospital learning to breathe on her own.

She was required to live in the iron lung for 23 hours of the day, with the remaining tiny sliver of spare time used to rehab her paralyzed limbs.

But perhaps surprisingly, Lillard explained that she enjoyed the feeling of going into the iron lung because of her exhaustion.

‘When I got in it, I was tired,’ she said. ‘Always getting in there felt wonderful.’

Still, polio ravaged Lillard’s early childhood, as she had to learn how to walk again and the disease severely disrupted her early life.

For instance, Lillard never attended prom and she was only able to go to school for one hour per day.

She was forced to take high school classes over the phone, but could not graduate since everything she needed for a diploma was not being offered by the district.

Lillard learned she had polio two years before a vaccine was widely available in America in 1955.

Until then, polio killed or severely paralyzed millions around the world, and thousands in the US.

Though Lillard tried other, more modern respirators, she ultimately stayed loyal to her trustworthy iron lung.

‘None of them could get up to 21 pounds [per square inch], which is what I needed to breathe,’ she told the outlet. ‘So they just weren’t effective.’

When she was at her healthiest, Lillard only used the iron lung for about nine hours at night to sleep.

A GoFundMe fundraiser to honor Lillard’s legacy after her death said she ‘spent her life as normally as possible’ despite living with just 25 percent lung capacity, scoliosis and a paralyzed right arm.

‘She was incredibly creative, painting, writing poems, and composing music for the left hand piano,’ the fundraiser read.

‘Even as post-polio syndrome continued to affect her, she maintained a wonderful fighting attitude, making the most of what she had left and enjoying life as much as she could,’ it continued.

Lillard would typically use a portable ventilator when not inside the iron lung. However, her quality of life changed when the pandemic rolled around.

‘She didn’t really require a caretaker until Covid-19,’ McVey, her sister, said. ‘She fixed her own meals and, and took care of everything herself.’

A public obituary for Lillard noted that she died of long-haul Covid.

Shortly before her death, Lillard was unable to breathe on her own when lying on her back and unable to sit up by herself.

She had been living inside the iron lung for 24 hours a day in the months leading up to her death.

However, the aging equipment had also begun faltering, which included an instance last year when a tornado knocked out Lillard’s power.

Her husband, Baha Seleh, was forced to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on Lillard until she received further aid.