The U.S. military is moving rapidly to build and deploy advanced laser weapons after years of the defense industry failing to pursue directed energy arms, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Congress on Wednesday. Mr. Hegseth testified before the House Armed Services Committee on the Pentagon’s record $1.5 trillion defense budget for fiscal 2027 and said the military needs to be armed with hundreds of directed energy weapons. Mr. Hegseth disclosed in a prepared statement on the Pentagon’s posture, that laser weapons are one of the key high-technology arms being advanced by the Trump administration military buildup. “Directed energy weapons represent a transformative capability, yet the defense industrial base is currently postured to produce only a limited number of prototypes,” Mr. Hegseth said, noting “significant vulnerabilities and gaps” in military laser manufacturing capabilities. The secretary said he wants greater production with “tens to hundreds” of new laser and beam weapons. The Pentagon is reforming procurement, war fighting tactics and policy restrictions that will “demystify” directed energy arms and integrate them into the military, he said. The new approach will include developing new ways of using the weapons, along with better training and support infrastructure. The goal is to “ensure that these advanced weapons can be effectively fielded to our warfighters and employed on the battlefield,” Mr. Hegseth said. To achieve the laser weapons goals will require overcoming bureaucratic inertia and embracing new ways of thinking about high-technology warfare, Mr. Hegseth said.

David Morens, the top adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, received two bottles of wine delivered to his home in Maryland in June 2020 from Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, according to an explosive Justice Department indictment unveiled this week. In 2014, the company was awarded a $7.5 million federal grant to conduct coronavirus research, which it subcontracted to China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. In 2020, EcoHealth Alliance was awaiting another $7 million in National Institutes of Health grants. At the time, Mr. Daszak was most likely concerned that his company’s federal funding would be threatened because of the global outbreak of COVID-19, so he worked his sources inside the federal government to help muddy the outbreak’s origin, of which Mr. Morens happily obliged, for a kickback, of course. The wine included the following message: “This is the first of what I hope will be a continued series of expressions of gratitude for your advice, support and behind-the-scenes shenanigans in my battle against your bosses boss, his boss, and the ultimate boss on the Hill,” Mr. Daszak wrote. “It takes courage and commitment to do what you’ve done, given your job and the vindictive nature of the Administration. I am eternally grateful for that, and hope I’ll be able to return the favor one day. In the meantime … Cheers!” Mr. Morens, in acknowledging the gift, wrote back: “Now I’m actually going to have to do something to deserve it. Let me think.” He then identified acts he had done on behalf of EcoHealth Alliance and Mr. Daszak, which included writing a “scientific commentary that outlines the importance” of Mr. Daszak’s work, but without mentioning him by name or the grant. Mr. Dazak then promised more riches. “Consider this my phase II gift. Phase III might actually involve a meal - the Michelin starred restaurants are opening in Paris - DC and New York will do eventually!” he wrote.

That was one of the issues that arose during oral arguments at the Supreme Court in March when the justices took up the case. Justice Amy Coney Barrett said U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer’s vision relied on intent to make a home, which she said can be tough to discern. “Are we bringing pregnant women in for depositions?” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked. Other nations handle it differently, though. Most of America’s peers in Europe do not grant automatic citizenship at the same level as the U.S. The Supreme Court is expected to rule by the end of its term in June. All told, Pew estimated that 320,000 babies were born in 2023 to mothers in the U.S. without firm, permanent legal status. That works out to about 9% of the 3.6 million total births that year. Looking at illegal immigrant mothers specifically, the total was 300,000. That was down from a peak of 380,000 in 2006. The numbers dipped after that year, falling to just 215,000 around the start of this decade, before climbing back up as illegal immigration surged. Mr. Camarota said the births generally track the size of the illegal immigrant population, though with the caveat that fertility rates have fallen. That means that even though the number of illegal immigrants is at an all-time high, the rate of births to them is not. These mothers have diverse experiences. Among the illegal immigrants, the vast majority came to work or live with family. A much smaller number were illegal immigrants who came specifically to give birth. Experts say that number is difficult to pin down, though border hospital workers say it happens with some frequency.

Nearly 1 in 10 newborns in the U.S. in 2023 were delivered by mothers who were either in the country illegally or on a temporary visitor’s pass. The vast majority of those, some 260,000, would have been denied recognition of American citizenship under President Trump’s order restricting birthright citizenship, according to the Pew Research Center, which crunched the numbers. They were born to families where neither the mother nor father had permanent status in the U.S., meaning either citizenship or a green card. Most of the time, in some 245,000 cases, the mothers were illegal immigrants. In the other 15,000 cases, the mothers had some temporary visitor’s status. In about 60,000 other cases, the mother lacked permanent status, but the father did, meaning the child would have been eligible even under Mr. Trump’s policy. Looking more broadly, Pew said more than 4 million babies born in the U.S. from 2006 to 2023 would not have qualified for citizenship under Mr. Trump’s vision. The numbers highlight the stakes for the Supreme Court as the justices ponder the legality and constitutionality of Mr. Trump’s executive order, announced on Inauguration Day. Steven A. Camarota, a demographer at the Center for Immigration Studies who has conducted his own research on the situation, said many people tend to view illegal immigrants as either beneficial workers or detrimental criminals. The birth numbers show the reality is more complicated, he said. Illegal immigrants are often part of families at the lower end of the income scale, and they end up costing tens of billions of dollars in education and welfare payments each year. “You can’t ignore that,” he said. “That’s the reality here. If you tolerate widespread illegal immigration, you’re going to have enormous impacts on your taxpayers, your schools, your politics. Everything is going to be reshaped.” At the same time, he said, unwinding automatic birthright citizenship could be tricky. The U.S. doesn’t have the administrative structures in place to verify a mother’s status at the time of birth. 23년 미국 신생아의 거의 10명 중 1명은 불법 체류 중이거나 임시로 입국을 허가받은 산모에 의해 분만되었다. 퓨리서치센터가 그 인원수를 컴퓨터로 고속 처리한 결과에 따르면, 이 중 대다수인 약 26만명은 트럼프 대통령의 출생 시민권 제한 명령에 따라 미국 시민권 인정을 거부당했을 것이다.

Homeland Security has flagged more than 24,000 names on U.S. voter rolls that may be noncitizens who are ineligible to vote, the department said Thursday. DHS said those are names it has run through its national database and came up as suspects. They have been sent to Homeland Security Investigations, a division of ICE, for review. The department also celebrated the conviction of a Mexican man who’d been serving as mayor of a town in Kansas, even though he was not a citizen and had repeatedly voted illegally in elections. Jose Ceballos was serving as mayor of Coldwater, near the Kansas-Oklahoma border, when state authorities charged him last year with fraudulent voting. He said on multiple registration forms that he was a citizen, even though he had never attained that honor. DHS said he did apply for citizenship last year ? and lied on that form, falsely claiming he’d never done so before. Ceballos resigned his post as mayor in December after the charges were brought. DHS celebrated the new guilty plea. “This alien has now been convicted of illegally voting in American elections,” said Lauren Bis, acting assistant secretary at the department. Ceballos reached a plea agreement with Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach that dropped the most serious illegal voting charges and allowed him to admit to three counts of disorderly election conduct. The deal could help Ceballos avoid deportation. He also plans to continue to seek U.S. citizenship, according to The Kansas Reflector. Ceballos’s case was flagged after his citizenship application. The federal government under President Trump is also being more proactive, pushing to run all state voter lists through DHS’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE database.

Because I didn’t have a screen to hide behind, I actually watched the shot. I heard the crisp, explosive crack of the driver. I tracked the white speck as it launched into the Georgia sky, hanging there against the clouds before dropping precisely into the fairway. I felt the collective gasp and polite applause of the crowd. I experienced the moment with my own two eyes, rather than through a 6-inch digital viewfinder. As the day wore on, I found myself relishing the disconnection. There was no need to text anyone about where to meet for lunch; we simply made a plan and stuck to it. Or didn’t. If we got separated, we found each other the old-fashioned way: by looking. I wasn’t worried about the news, the stock market or the endless barrage of emails piling up in my inbox. I was fully, unapologetically present in a world of green grass, white sand and pimento cheese sandwiches. By the time the shadows grew long and it was time to leave, my initial panic had been replaced by a profound sense of peace. Walking back toward my car, I felt a genuine sense of dread. I didn’t really want my phone back. When I got it and turned it on, it immediately began to convulse with notifications ? dozens of texts, hundreds of emails, a cacophony of digital noise demanding my immediate attention. As I scrolled, I realized none of it was important. None of it mattered as much as the quiet perfection of the day I had just experienced. I survived the Masters without my cellphone. And honestly? By the end of it, I completely fell in love with a world where everyone is forced to just look up and talk to one another.

For the first few hours, I existed in my own little bubble. I was entirely out of touch, completely unreachable, floating in a glorious vacuum of immediate, physical reality. There were no pings, no buzzes, no digital demands on my attention. I wasn’t constantly calculating the optimal angle to document my presence for an audience of acquaintances who didn’t care. I was simply there. And so was everyone else. This was perhaps the most jarring and beautiful revelation. I looked across the sea of patrons lining the fairways and realized what was missing. Not a single person was taking a duck-lipped selfie in front of the azaleas. There were no teenagers attempting poorly synchronized TikTok dances near the concession stands. There was no chorus of obnoxious, marimba-style ringtones shattering the tense silence right before a critical putt. Instead, people were talking. To each other. Eye contact was being made. Conversations were happening in real time, uninterrupted by the sudden urge to check a notification. It was like stepping into a time machine set to 1995, only with better moisture-wicking fabrics. The true epiphany hit me on the fifth hole. Rory McIlroy was stepping up to the tee box. I was 3 feet away. Instinctively, my hand twitched toward my empty pocket. I needed to film this. I needed to capture the fluid, violent poetry of his swing on video. Why? Because that’s what we do now. We outsource our memories to silicon chips. But as I stood there empty-handed, a liberating thought washed over me: I am never, ever going to watch a blurry, poorly framed video of a golf swing on my phone. Never. It would sit in my camera roll, gathering digital dust until I ran out of storage space.

The Masters golf tournament doesnt allow cellphones, but it turns out life is better without them Let’s get one thing straight right out of the gate: I am a modern human being, which means my smartphone is less an accessory and more an external, glowing lobe of my brain. So when I recently secured tickets to the Masters (the holy grail of golf, the pristine emerald paradise of Augusta National), my excitement was immediately kneecapped by a terrifying realization: They don’t allow cellphones. At first, I objected. Violently. Well, internally violent, because one does not make a scene at Augusta. But in my head, I was throwing a tantrum of epic proportions. How was I supposed to survive 10 hours without access to my email, my text messages or the endless, mind-numbing scroll of social media? What if there was a national emergency? What if my family needed me? What if someone on the internet was wrong and urgently required my unsolicited opinion? How will the dozen people I communicate with daily on numerous threads survive without my witty quips? The Masters’ policy seemed draconian, a relic of a bygone era stubbornly clinging to relevance. Leaving my phone in my car felt like forgetting my child in the back seat. As I walked up the shady pathway to the course, I felt phantom vibrations in my pocket, a jittery mess of withdrawal. But then, something amazing happened. I took a breath. I looked around. And I realized that the sky hadn’t fallen. In fact, the world without cellphones was … spectacular.

Last month, the New York Post reported that children of the Iranian regime elite are “at prestigious universities across the U.S., including the University of Massachusetts, New York’s Union College and George Washington University.” Mr. Rubio’s State Department seems to be paying attention. In March, the department terminated the legal status of Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani, daughter of Ali Larijani, a former secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran. Ms. Larijani was a doctor who taught at Emory University in Atlanta before the university parted ways with her in January, reportedly under pressure from dissidents. In addition to Ms. Larijani, the Post identified five other high-ranking IRGC family members working at prestigious universities across the U.S. “I would think that there would be a security risk as Iranian academics have been critical in forming public opinion on the left in the U.S., essentially deceiving liberals into thinking that the regime is more progressive, when it’s still advancing the same hard-line agenda,” Janatan Sayeh, an Iran analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank, told the Post. He noted: “A lot of them are nephews and nieces, and it’s hard to track them because they don’t have the same last name as the regime leaders.” No matter. If U.S. intelligence can hunt down Iran’s leaders in their own country, then it should be able to identify where their family members live within the U.S. Then, all should be deported back to Iran. No one who identifies the U.S. as the “Great Satan” and advocates on behalf of the IRGC should be allowed to live and prosper in America.

Ms. Afshar entered the U.S. in 2015 on a tourist visa and was granted asylum in 2019. She became a green card holder in 2021, a year after her uncle was killed in a drone strike ordered by President Trump in his first administration. Last year, while applying for U.S. naturalization, Ms. Afshar revealed she had visited Iran four times since receiving her green card, an admission that undermined her initial asylum claim. Ms. Hosseiny came to the U.S. with her mother in 2015 on a student visa, was granted asylum in 2019 and received a green card in 2023. While living in the United States, Ms. Afshar “promoted Iranian regime propaganda, celebrated attacks against American soldiers and military facilities in the Middle East, praised the new Iranian Supreme Leader, denounced America as the ‘Great Satan,’ and voiced her unflinching support for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a designated terror organization,” the State Department claimed after revoking her and her daughter’s legal status. In 2022, IRGC Gen. Morteza Mirian, commander of the ground operations, claimed 4,000 relatives of IRGC “senior officials” live in the U.S., Canada and Europe. In 2019, Brian Hook, a special representative for Iran under Mr. Trump, told Iran International that “children of Islamic republic officials live rich and comfortable lives in the U.S. and other countries while Iranian people live in terrible conditions.” Mr. Hook said this showed “the regime’s hypocrisy.” It also shows weakness in the West’s immigration systems, which Iran has systematically taken advantage of throughout the years. “When we talk about the presence of agents of the Islamic republic, especially the IRGC, we should understand this is not random. It operates in layers.” Mehdi Ghadimi, an exiled Iranian journalist, told Fox News Digital last month. “They come as students or professors, but many have prior connections to the IRGC, and part of their role is to normalize the Islamic republic in universities and gather information on activists.”