World, US, Culture, Market, and Sci-Tech News Aggregation from MSM and Independent News
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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is starting to dismantle the legal industrial complex pushing for mass migration by cracking down on immigration lawyers who file fraudulent asylum claims.
DHS directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Tuesday to develop policies to go after the attorneys who aid and abet illegals obtaining legal entry and status in the United States fraudulently, under a law already establishing penalties for document fraud. DHS said that ICE attorneys will have “greater authority to enforce the law.”
“For many years, millions of illegal aliens have committed fraud in our immigration system. No place is this more rampant than in immigration court,” DHS General Counsel James Percival said. “Protection claims like asylum are intended to cover unique and narrow circumstances, but it is standard practice for immigration attorneys representing illegal aliens to assert that virtually every illegal alien is going to be persecuted or tortured in his or her home country.”
The move is in line with other Trump administration attempts to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for certain groups, but will ostensibly make it more difficult for migrants to successfully gain entry into the United States using pro-immigration lawyers coaching them on how to make false claims. Under such guidance, aliens often assert that their lives are at risk in their home country, when they are nothing more than economic migrants looking to take American jobs and access welfare programs.
ASYLUM FRAUD CRACKDOWN.
For years, MILLIONS of illegal aliens have committed fraud in our immigration system — and no place is this more rampant than in immigration court.
Now, thanks to this directive, @ICEgov attorneys have greater authority to enforce the law and STOP the… https://t.co/9yvFZjTlPC
— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) May 26, 2026
President Donald Trump has issued an order increasing U.S. admission ceilings by 10,000 in 2026 to clear the way for white South Africans to come to the U.S. as refugees seeking asylum.
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Inflation continued to hit consumer wallets in April, likely keeping the Federal Reserve on the sidelines until the current wave subsides, fresh pricing data released Thursday showed.
The personal consumption expenditures price index increased a seasonally adjusted 0.4% for the month, putting the 12-month inflation rate at 3.8%, the Commerce Department reported. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for respective readings of 0.5% and 3.8%.
Excluding food and energy, core prices rose 0.2% for the month and 3.3% for the year, against estimates of 0.3% and 3.3%.
While the annual rates were in line with forecasts, the soft monthly readings could provide some hope that the burst in prices over the previous month had begun to ease.
The Fed takes in a wide dashboard of indicators, but uses the PCE measures as its prime forecasting and policy tool. Officials generally consider core a better indicator of long-term inflation trends as it excludes the volatile gas and groceries components.
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The Pentagon has reportedly spent months putting key military assets into position near Cuba, fueling speculation that the Trump administration is laying the groundwork for potential military action against the communist-led island nation.
U.S. military planners have quietly expanded naval deployments, surveillance operations and regional force positioning in the Caribbean as tensions between Washington and Havana continue to intensify according to a recent report from Politico.
The developments come after President Donald Trump signed an executive order earlier this year labeling Cuba an “extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security. The administration has accused the Cuban government of strengthening ties with hostile foreign actors, including Russia, China, Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, while allegedly allowing foreign intelligence operations to target the United States from just 90 miles off the Florida coast.
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Transgender athlete Becky Pepper-Jackson did very well last weekend at the West Virginia girls’ state track championships – maybe too well.
The Bridgeport High School sophomore placed first in the girls’ shot put and fourth in the girls’ discus in Class AAA at the West Virginia Secondary School Activities Commission’s (WVSSAC) state track and field championships, prompting the state attorney general’s offifice to notify the U.S. Supreme Court.
The problem? The student-athlete is the defendant in West Virginia v. BPJ, a case before the high court on whether state laws banning biological males from female scholastic sports violate the U.S. Constitution and Title IX, the federal ban on sex discrimination in education.
The American Civil Liberties Union has described the student as a middling athlete who poses no threat to competitive fairness in girls’ sports, a characterization disputed by West Virginia Solicitor General Michael R. Williams.
“As a high school sophomore, BPJ is not finishing ‘near the back of the pack,’ contra [the respondent’s brief], but is instead defeating every female – or nearly every female – in the State in these events,” he said in his letter to Supreme Court Clerk Scott Harris.
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday that his administration will seek to impose a 100 percent tax on any California residents who receive money from President Donald Trump’s newly created $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund.
Speaking to reporters, Newsom denounced the fund as a “slush fund” and pledged to block Californians from financially benefiting from it.
“Anyone from California that receives any of those funds, we want to tax 100 percent of those proceeds,” Newsom said during a press conference.
“He pardoned all of those folks that were beating up cops and absolved them, providing them 1.776 billion dollars,” Newsom said. “So not only do you get a pardon, you get rewarded. That’s why this is needed.”
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DUBAI: Iran’s state TV said Tehran had obtained a draft of an initial, unofficial framework for a memorandum of understanding with the United States on ending their conflict.
Under the framework, Iran would restore commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz to pre-war levels within a month, while the US would withdraw military forces from Iran’s vicinity and lift a naval blockade.
State TV said on Wednesday (May 27) the framework, which excludes military vessels and envisages Iran managing ship traffic through the strait in cooperation with Oman, was not yet finalised and that Tehran would take no steps without “tangible verification”.
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A number of South Carolina Republicans in the state Senate joined Democrats on Tuesday to defeat a procedural vote needed to advance a congressional redistricting plan. The effort sought to redraw the state’s seven U.S. House districts ahead of the 2026 elections, with the aim of creating a map that would favor Republican candidates in all seven seats and draw out the lone Democrat-controlled district under the current map.
The proposal stemmed from a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that altered interpretations of the Voting Rights Act regarding congressional districts on the basis of race. In response to the landmark ruling, a number of Republican-controlled states in the South moved to draw out districts that were drawn in order to be majority black under prior criteria.
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A federal court is trying to pull a judicial mulligan after the Supreme Court gave Alabama another shot at using its GOP-backed congressional map.
The Supreme Court threw out a lower-court order barring Alabama from using the congressional map the state adopted in 2023 and sent the dispute back to the lower court for another look. But a three-judge federal panel again blocked Alabama from using that map for the 2026 midterms.
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There is a chance this will not pass. The left does not want to let go of this.
Wisconsin voters to decide constitutional amendment banning DEI discrimination
A Wisconsin ballot initiative this fall would amend the state constitution to ban discriminatory Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives at government entities, including public universities.
Under Assembly Joint Resolution 102, government entities would be prohibited from “discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, public education, public contracting, or public administration.”
Before Wisconsin legislators can send a resolution to voters, the resolution must receive approval in two legislative years. Lawmakers first approved the proposed amendment during the 2023–24 session, then gave it second approval this January, sending it to voters this fall.
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A U.S. judge on Thursday declined to immediately block President Donald Trump’s executive order tightening rules on mail-in voting, but left the door open for the Democratic Party to challenge it again after the administration takes further steps to implement the measure.
Washington-based U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols wrote that the Democrats’ request for a preliminary injunction blocking Trump’s March 31 order, which directed his administration to compile a list of confirmed U.S. citizens eligible to vote in each state, was premature. The decision did not address whether Trump’s executive order was lawful.
Two major AI security flaws have been revealed; corporations aren’t building safeguards into their AIs and there is a security vulnerability in the code itself.
President Trump is seeking to protect his administration from criminal leaks to the press that have occurred since he first became President. The Office of Personal Management (OPM) is proposing a rule from the Trump administration that would create a blanket NDA for all 2 million Federal workers.
NY Mayor Zohran Mamdani has unveiled a $22 billion housing plan he says will build and/or preserve 400,000 “affordable homes.” As part of the plan, all work done to make it possible will have to be done with explicit approval and by the terms of the unions.
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Supporters of the measure have reached the number of necessary signatures, putting it one step closer to being on the November ballot.
A petition initiative in Oregon that supporters are seeking to have put on the November ballot would make it illegal to kill or injure animals in the state, a move that opponents say would effectively ban hunting and fishing in the state.
The proposed initiative, called the People for the Elimination of Animal Cruelty Exemptions (PEACE) Act, makes it a crime of animal abuse in the first degree if the person “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly” causes the death of an animal. The initiative also includes a provision extending sexual abuse of animals to include artificial insemination used on farm animals.
Per KATU2, supporters of the measure have reached the number of necessary signatures, putting it one step closer to being on the November ballot. The Secretary of State’s Office now has to verify the signatures.
The U.S. Fertility Rate for 2025 fell from the previous low in 2024 of 53.8 births per 1,000 females aged 15 to 44 to 53.1 births. The U.S. birthrate fell below replacement levels shortly after the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing pre-born human termination, or abortion, as it is commonly called.
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China now requires people working in AI at private firms to secure travel approval before leaving the country. According to Bloomberg, the restrictions apply to individuals working in state-owned firms, startup founders, and those employed by private companies, as the central government considers them important strategic assets. China has already been limiting international travel for key individuals such as senior researchers at public educational institutions, nuclear scientists, and even top executives of government-owned companies, but extending the restriction to private firms and individuals is an uncommon move, even for Beijing.
There’s no official guidance yet on which roles, expertise, or seniority will be included in the travel ban. However, Bloomberg sources say that the individuals added to the list were assessed based on their impact on China’s AI ambitions, not just where they work or their position within their company. This move is an expansion of a former government directive wherein some AI engineers had mandatory reporting of any overseas travel plan, although they were still free to go abroad as needed.
This shows that Beijing considers AI as a strategic advantage and that the people leading the industry are considered crucial for the country’s advancement. This news comes months after Meta’s surprise purchase of Manus AI, which China wants to unwind to prevent the U.S. from acquiring Chinese AI talent and intellectual property. Although the two aren’t directly related, the report says that the new policy is designed to protect against the leaking of key technologies, such as the one being developed by the Chinese startup that moved to Singapore.
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Millions of AI agents and tools around the world have been imperiled by a critical vulnerability that can allow hackers to breach the servers running them and make off with sensitive data and credentials to third-party accounts, a security researcher is warning.
The vulnerability is present in Starlette, an open source framework that its developer says receives 325 million downloads per week. Thousands of other open source projects are also vulnerable because they require Starlette to work. The framework is an implementation of the ASGI (asynchronous server gateway interface), which allows large numbers of requests to be efficiently processed simultaneously. Starlette is the base of FastAPI and other widely used frameworks for building services in Python apps, as well as many others.
ASGI, and by extension Starlette, have access to servers running the MCP (model context protocol), which allows AI agents from major providers to access external sources, including user data bases, email and calendar accounts, and all manner of other resources. To connect with these external systems, MCP servers store credentials for each one, making them especially valuable storehouses for attackers to breach.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-48710 and under the name BadHost, is trivial to exploit and works against most systems that aren’t behind a properly configured firewall. Besides FastAPI, other widely used packages—including vLLM, and LiteLLM—are also affected. BadHost affects Starlette versions prior to 1.0.1, which was released Friday.
“A single character injected into the HTTP Host header bypasses path-based authorization in Starlette, the routing core of FastAPI,” researchers from Secwest wrote. “Through FastAPI, this primitive (now tracked as CVE-2026-48710 and branded BadHost by the discoverers) reaches a large segment of the Python AI tooling ecosystem: vLLM (where the bug was discovered), LiteLLM, Text Generation Inference, most OpenAI-shim proxies, MCP servers, agent harnesses, eval dashboards, and model-management UIs.”
BadHost carries a severity rating of 7 out of 10. Secwest said the classification “materially understates” the threat it poses to people using other apps that depend on Starlette. X41 D-Sec, the security firm that discovered it, described it as having “critical severity.” X41 D-Sec partnered with fellow security firm Nemesis to create an online scanner that can check if a given server is vulnerable.
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Members of the Iranian security forces stand guard under a large portrait of Iran’s new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, during a memorial to mark the 40th day since his father, Ali Ayatollah Khamenei, was killed in US-Israeli joint strikes.
Majid Saeedi/Getty Images
Iranian media said on Tuesday that Tehran’s negotiators were seeking the release of around $24 billion in frozen assets abroad as part of a process aimed at ending the war with the United States.
The report by Tasnim news agency came as a top Iranian delegation was in Qatar, and after Tehran said it was finalising a 14-point framework for a deal on ending the war, which began with US-Israeli airstrikes against Iran on 28 February.
“Iran’s frozen assets are to be released during the course of the negotiations, and this amount is estimated at $24 billion in accordance with the 14-point memorandum of understanding,” Tasnim quoted an unnamed source close to the negotiating team as saying.
Around half of that sum “should be made available at the start of the announcement of the memorandum,” it added.
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Happy Wednesday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. The Sine Qua Non Sequitur is spending the day providing sweater vests to disgruntled sociology professors who’ve had previous complaints about Canada.
The alternative universe that the “journalists” at The New York Times and The Washington Post write about is filled with stories about an ever-widening rift in the MAGA movement. Accoding to the fiction, people on the right are becoming disenchanted with President Trump. I keep looking for signs of it in the real world and have not yet been able to find any.
In fact, it looks like Trump’s influence in the Republican Party is stronger than ever. GOP candidates that the president endorsed have been cleaning up in recent primaries and runoff elections. Last week we discussed the Democrats’ excitement about Texas Senate candidate James Talarico. Some polling showed Talarico looking good against Republicans Senator John Cornyn and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who were facing each other in a runoff.
I got quite a few emails and comments after that the Republicans simply needed to get the runoff election behind them in order to begin focusing on Talarico. Well, that happened last night, and the contest wasn’t even close. This is from Catherine:
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a hardcore MAGA warrior endorsed by President Donald Trump, has won the Republican Senate primary run-off race against incumbent Sen. John Cornyn.
The biggest race of Primary Election Day 2026 in Texas was between Cornyn and Paxton. After a long period of widespread speculation, Trump finally declared a week ago that he was backing the Texas attorney general to win the Senate primary runoff. “Ken Paxton has gone through a lot, in many cases, very unfairly, but he is a Fighter, and knows how to WIN… KEN PAXTON WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!” Trump wrote.
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On Tuesday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “Balance of Power,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) said that picking up Raul Castro in Cuba wouldn’t be difficult, but he thinks that, due to a desire by Castro to avoid dying in prison, “Raul Castro is going to leave the country, along with his family” “before we pick him up.”
Scott said, “Well, let’s remember, the Cubans were supporting — were defending Maduro, and that took, what, seven minutes to take out Maduro? So, it won’t take much to pick up Raul Castro. And the people of Cuba are already –.”
Co-host Kailey Leinz then cut in to ask, “You expect that to happen?”
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A massive tank of caustic chemicals burst at a Washington paper mill Tuesday morning, killing an unknown number of workers and sending others to hospitals, officials said.
The tank failed around 7:15 a.m. at the Nippon Dynawave Packaging Co. plant on Industrial Way in Longview, the Longview Fire Department (LFD) said in a joint statement with the company. Ten people went to hospitals in the area, including nine plant workers and one firefighter, while some remain unaccouted for, according to KGW. Officials said the identities of the dead and wounded will not be shared until relatives have been informed.
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