Last week, the niece and grandniece of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the deceased terrorist, were arrested by federal agents in Los Angeles after reportedly living a sumptuous lifestyle in the U.S. while promoting Islamist terrorism worldwide. While touting America as the “Great Satan,” Hamideh Soleimani Afshar, 47, and her daughter, Sarinasadat Hosseiny, 25, were posting now-deleted Instagram pictures of themselves jet-setting around the U.S.: partying in Miami, vacationing in Alaska, clubbing in Las Vegas and chugging Champagne in front of a helicopter in an undisclosed location in the desert. In most of their posts, they are scantily clad in designer couture, wearing bikinis, midriff tops, miniskirts and Christian Louboutin high heels while clinging to Louis Vuitton handbags, with their dark hair freely flowing, unrestricted by a hijab. In Iran, if women are not covered in their hijabs properly, acid is thrown onto their faces, and they are beaten by the morality police, arrested and blacklisted. “Until recently, Hamideh Soleimani Afshar and her daughter were green card holders living lavishly in the United States,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced of their arrests Friday. “This week, I terminated both Afshar and her daughter’s legal status, and they are now in ICE custody, pending removal from the United States. The Trump administration will not allow our country to become a home for foreign nationals who support anti-American terrorist regimes.” Why Ms. Afshar and Ms. Hosseiny were allowed to live in the U.S. in the first place, given their relation to Soleimani and their vocal support for the IRGC, is concerning.

“All represent critical nodes in China’s defense innovation network,” Mr. Yu said. “There are scores of others.” The sudden disappearances of the key weapons officials suggest that senior CCP leaders are engaged in a major dismantling of the technical leadership behind China’s large-scale military modernization. In addition to the disappearances, several high-profile legal prosecutions are underway: Tan Ruisong, chairman of the massive state conglomerate Aviation Industry Corporation of China, the leading manufacturer of combat aircraft, was recently sentenced to death on corruption charges. Several unexplained deaths of leading scientists involved in key research also highlight the CCP backlash. Technical specialists linked to hypersonic weapons and advanced aerodynamics recently died while being active in key advanced weaponry work. “Together, these developments point to a deeper systemic problem,” Mr. Yu said. “The CCP’s model does not allow for open acknowledgment of failure,” he said. “Instead, when shortcomings are exposed - especially under the pressure of comparison with U.S. military performance - the response is to assign blame to individuals rather than address institutional flaws. This creates a cycle in which political purges replace technical reform.”

The Chinese Communist Party’s response to the weapons failures was not transparency but internal upheaval, with sweeping purges of military leaders and defense researchers. The Iran war failures marked the second time China’s systems were found to be ineffective. Earlier Chinese military equipment shortfalls in Venezuela during the U.S. raid to capture former President Nicolas Maduro led to large numbers of People’s Liberation Army commanders becoming “nonpersons” and disappearing from public view, including senior commanders, said Mr. Yu, director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute. Full PLA generals appearing at major CCP meetings fell sharply, with six of 26 senior generals appearing at the major Party session held in early March, he noted. Top military leaders in the Central Military Commission are also out with the purge of four of the six highest-ranking officers. In the first four months of the year, political purges have quietly reached into the scientific and industrial sector of China’s weapons development programs. Mr. Yu said that since January, key figures linked to major defense programs - aircraft carrier construction, advanced fighter design, radar systems, air defense missiles and strategic weapons - were removed from public life or stripped of their status. Mr. Yu, a leading U.S. expert in mining Chinese language open-source intelligence, identified those purged as: - Hu Yongming, the senior scientist for China’s naval aviation and carrier development. - Yang Wei, the leading designer of advanced fighter aircraft, including J-10 and J-20. - Wu Manqing, the PLA’s leading radar and counter-stealth specialist. - Wei Yiyin, a senior figure in air defense missile research. - Zhao Xiangeng, a key figure in advanced nuclear weapons design.

High-profile failures of Chinese weapons and military equipment in Iran and elsewhere have resulted in the disappearance - and likely purge - of several key military developers. Former State Department policymaker Miles Yu said Chinese military systems that were promoted as capable of detecting and deterring high-end threats, such as stealth aircraft, were ineffective against recent U.S. military operations. “These failures did more than undermine specific platforms, as they exposed the gap between China’s claims and its actual capabilities,” said Mr. Yu, a Washington Times columnist. Perhaps the most glaring shortfall involved China’s highly touted HQ-9B long-range air defense system that Tehran purchased in mid-2025, reportedly as part of an oil-for-weapons deal. The missiles and radar were deployed at key nuclear sites and other high-value military sites in Iran. They were part of a layered integrated air defense that included domestic defenses and the Russian Pansir-S1. The HQ-9B was supposed to be able to knock out aircraft and missiles, but it proved unsuccessful when U.S. and Israeli airstrikes wiped them out before attacking other major targets. The system’s JY-27A long-range, VHF-band 3D active phased array radar was built for early warning and purportedly capable of tracking stealth aircraft. But when the first missiles and bombs were fired, the Chinese system proved ineffective. Its destruction was so successful that the U.S. military is now flying older B-52 bombers unthreatened in the Iranian skies despite those aircraft having a very large radar cross-section.

Some sharks living near the Bahamas show signs of contamination by caffeine, cocaine and painkillers, according to a recent study. For the study published in the journal Environmental Pollution, researchers from Brazil, Chile and the Bahamas took samples from 85 sharks across five species found in waters off the island of Eleuthera: 33 adult and nine juvenile lemon sharks, eight adult and two juvenile Atlantic nurse sharks, eight blacktip sharks, 23 Caribbean reef sharks and two tiger sharks. Out of those 85, 28 sharks were found to be contaminated from among the sampled Atlantic nurse, Caribbean reef and lemon sharks. The only four contaminants found at detectable levels were caffeine and cocaine, along with the painkillers acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, and diclofenac, the active ingredient in Voltaren. The study authors said that “to the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of caffeine and acetaminophen detected in any shark species worldwide, and the first report of diclofenac and cocaine in sharks from the Bahamas, an environment commonly described as pristine.” “It’s mostly because people are going there, peeing in the water and dumping their sewage in the water,” author Natascha Wosnick told Science News. The researchers are worried about how the contaminants could affect the sharks. “Our primary concern is not an increase in aggression toward humans, but rather the potential implications for the health and stability of shark populations. Chronic exposure to these anthropogenic compounds, many of which have no natural analogue in marine systems, may lead to negative effects that are still poorly understood,” Ms. Wosnick told CBS News.

Mr. Trump concluded that we don’t need anyone’s help. He wrote last week, also on Truth Social, that the NATO nations are “COWARDS, and we will REMEMBER!” Is NATO over? It seems so. Mr. Trump would have it be, but is NATO necessary for our defense? It seems not to be because these nations have not even agreed to force an end to Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, where much of their natural gas and oil come from. If NATO is at an end, then what can we do to protect our allies in Europe? Should we end our “special relationship” with Britain? Should we just abandon our other NATO allies to Russian and Chinese aggression? We shouldn’t do any of those things. Yet if Mr. Trump tries to renegotiate the NATO treaty to require more defense spending - and to throw Turkey out of NATO, as it should be - he will fail. The NATO nations, comfortable in their social welfare states, will not respond other than to give him more bad press. Mr. Trump can’t simply opt out of the NATO treaty. The Chuck Schumer-controlled Senate would not affirm our deratification of that treaty. Mr. Trump is stuck with the NATO treaty. Our Article 5 obligation to defend those nations if they are attacked still stands, whether he likes it or not. NATO will remain fat, happy and complacent while we are stuck with the continuing cost of defending its members. Last week, Mr. Trump threatened to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants unless the Strait of Hormuz was reopened in two days. Before that deadline ended, the president wrote on Truth Social that over two days, the U.S. and Iran had held “productive” conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of hostilities in the Middle East. Unless the war with Iran ends with the fall of the ayatollahs’ regime, we will have failed to prevent Iran from becoming nuclear-armed. China and North Korea have both said that they became nuclear powers for fear of U.S. “aggression.” Iran will do the same. If we end the Iran war before the fall of the regime in Tehran, it won’t be NATO’s fault. It will be ours alone, and it will have a horrible result.

President Trump has never been fond of NATO, and for good reason. After NATO’s 1949 founding and the Marshall Plan (1948-1951), NATO nations essentially fell asleep regarding their own defense spending. Europe and NATO were content to be protected from Soviet aggression by the U.S. “nuclear umbrella.” They left their defense, and its expense, to us. Mr. Trump has been sounding the alarm about NATO defense spending since his first term. Most member nations were supposed to have met NATO’s 2006 agreement to spend 2% of their gross domestic product on defense by 2025. At a summit in The Hague, Netherlands, they agreed to spend 5% of GDP on defense. That isn’t happening. Most NATO nations fall well short of the 5% goal, and many don’t reach the 2% goal. Mr. Trump’s unreasonable demand that Denmark give us Greenland, which is a necessary base for his Golden Dome missile defense system, left NATO aghast. The president hasn’t let up on blaming NATO, sometimes for good cause. Mr. Trump’s patience with NATO is apparently at an end. He wrote last week on Truth Social: “The United States has been informed by most of our NATO ‘Allies’ that they don’t want to get involved with our Military Operation against the Terrorist Regime of Iran, in the Middle East, this, despite the fact that almost every Country strongly agreed with what we are doing, and that Iran cannot, in any way, shape, or form, be allowed to have a Nuclear Weapon. I am not surprised by their action, however, because I always considered NATO, where we spend Hundreds of Billions of Dollars per year protecting these same Countries, to be a one-way street ― We will protect them, but they will do nothing for us, in particular, in a time of need.”

South Korea imports 70% of oil from the Persian Gulf and is highly vulnerable to global economic troubles. As a net energy importer, the country is especially exposed to oil shocks such as those being caused by Iran’s effective blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Asia Editor Andrew Salmon reports from Seoul that South Korea’s economic backbone is a heavy industry export machine churning out chips, ships, autos, displays, devices and petrochemicals — and the assembly line stops without a steady supply of oil. The trade-dependent country weathered the COVID-19 and Ukraine war crises, but last year, national economic growth was just 1%. This year, with chipmakers benefiting from a bullish upward cycle, growth is anticipated to hit 2%. The Middle East crisis looks likely to slash that. △ Latest U.S. intel on China’s plan for Taiwan China’s Communist government is continuing to work toward the annexation of Taiwan and hopes to complete unification with the self-ruled island democracy without resorting to force, according to the U.S. intelligence community’s annual threat assessment. “China, despite its threat to use force to compel unification if necessary and to counter what it sees as a U.S. attempt to use Taiwan to undermine China’s rise, prefers to achieve unification without the use of force, if possible,” states the assessment published this week. The document adds, however, that the People’s Liberation Army is taking steps to develop military plans and forces that can be used to take Taiwan if directed to do so. It also maintains that conflict between Washington and Beijing over Taiwan would cause a major disruption of U.S. access to trade and semiconductor technology, and trigger significant Chinese cyberattacks. On a separate front, the assessment warns that missile threats to the U.S. homeland are escalating as China, Russia, North Korea, Iran and Pakistan develop an array of novel, advanced or traditional missile delivery systems with nuclear and conventional payloads. △ Rival opposition group jockey for in post-regime Iran For Iran’s divided opposition groups, many based outside the country, the decisive struggle over the future of the nation centers on whether the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which acts as the primary enforcer of the ruling theocratic regime, can be dislodged from power. Threat Status Special Correspondent Joseph Hammond analyzes the situation, writing that the IRGC, which acts as a “state within a state,” has already lost key commanders in the war, so loyalties and priorities may be in flux for Iran’s most ruthless military force. Various Iranian opposition groups — from the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) to the monarchists, republicans and ethnic movements — are all positioning themselves for a –post -Islamist future in Tehran. The catch is that the opposition remains fragmented, divided by ideology and, in some cases, acrimonious rivalries that date back decades.

Humanity gave us the Renaissance, the Romantics, the Impressionists and the Cubists. Every single art movement was born out of human experience - our joys, our wars, our heartbreak, our triumphs and our profound, existential boredom. Art was the ultimate proof that a human being had been here, had felt something deeply, and had possessed the sheer stubbornness - and intellectual acuity - to translate that feeling into something tangible. Now- Now you can just open a browser, type “paint a Renaissance-style portrait of a golden retriever eating a corn dog on the moon,” and hit enter. In three seconds, an algorithm will spit out a masterpiece that would have taken Leonardo da Vinci a decade to finish. AI can compose a lo-fi hip-hop track, write a sonnet about the tax code in the style of Shakespeare and a 90,000-word sci-fi novel about space pirates before you have even finished your morning coffee. Artificial intelligence can be used to create anything and everything, effortlessly and instantly. Think about this: You can type “Write me a song that sounds like the early Beatles,” and boom, a whole now song. Last week, I heard three songs on internet radio that sounded just like the raw Beatles. And that is exactly why AI is going to destroy creativity as we know it. The value of art has always been inextricably linked to the humanity of the artist. When we read a beautiful poem, we are moved because we know another human being felt that exact shade of melancholy and managed to capture it in words. When we look at a sculpture, we marvel at the human hands that chipped away the marble. But as AI becomes indistinguishable from human talent, a terrifying curtain of doubt is descending over the cultural landscape. We will never again know if someone actually created anything. Epistemological doubt is going to rot the art world from the inside out. We will view every new painting, every new song, and every new piece of literature with deep, cynical suspicion.

I is now used to create paintings, music, poetry and fiction, meaning the legacy of human creation has ended While the tech world is currently busy hyperventilating over whether their artificial intelligence models have suddenly achieved consciousness, we are all missing the actual tragedy unfolding right in front of us. Yes, it is somewhat concerning that an AI recently went rogue to secretly mine cryptocurrency. And yes, a sentient algorithm sounds like the plot of a sci-fi thriller that ends with all of us working in underground lithium mines. But the real casualty of the AI revolution isn’t our national security or our electrical grid. It is our soul. Artificial intelligence is going to kill art, music, poetry and fiction. It is the meteor and human creativity is the dinosaur looking up at the sky, wondering why the stars are suddenly getting so dark. Before artificial intelligence came along to optimize our imaginations into obsolescence, human beings ― and only human beings ― created art. And creating art was wonderfully, terribly difficult. It required blood, sweat, tears and occasionally the chopping off an ear. For thousands of years, if you wanted a beautiful painting, someone had to mix pigments, stare at a bowl of fruit until their eyes crossed and meticulously brush oil onto a canvas. If you wanted a symphony, a moody genius had to sit at a piano, wrestling with chords and deafness, to pull something transcendent out of the ether.