Author: Press Room

An Iranian national is accused of smuggling “large numbers” of illegal aliens, primarily from Iran, into the United States under former President Joe Biden’s administration, federal prosecutors reveal. This week, an unsealed indictment against 57-year-old Jafar Tafakori of Iran detailed an alleged southern border smuggling scheme that occurred from at least Dec. 1, 2022 through May 15, 2024. The indictment accuses Tafakori of illegally smuggling illegal aliens, mostly from Iran, across the U.S.-Mexico border for huge payments, some as much as $30,000 per alien. Prosecutors allege that Tafakori worked with other smugglers to coordinate shelter and travel, including airline tickets to get Iranian…

The US president claims to have “total control” of the waterway amid stalled talks US President Donald Trump has threatened lethal force against any Iranian boats suspected of laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz, claiming that Washington now has “total control” over the key waterway until Tehran agrees to a deal. The warning comes amid a maritime standoff in the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial transit route that accounts for approximately 20% of global oil and gas flows. Traffic has largely come to a standstill following the US-Israeli campaign against Iran and Tehran’s subsequent retaliation. Despite the fragile ceasefire that Trump…

Two separate rounds of materials testing have revealed the presence of cotton from East Turkistan, the occupied Uyghur homeland the Chinese Communist Party refers to by the colonialist name “Xinjiang,” in clothing on Labubus, a series of small impish dolls that have become an international sensation. “Independent laboratory testing of 16 of 20 Pop Mart Labubu dolls sold in the U.S. used isotopic testing to trace their cotton directly to Xinjiang — a region where forced labor is systematically embedded in cotton production,” the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC), whose researchers have helped uncover the expansiveness of China’s national…

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is monitoring employee activity across hundreds of popular websites and applications, including Google, LinkedIn, and Wikipedia, as part of an effort to collect data for training its AI models. Reuters reports that the social media giant has implemented a new employee tracking tool called Model Capability Initiative, or MCI, which captures keystrokes and mouse clicks from workers using their corporate computers. The initiative aims to gather real-world examples of how people interact with computers to improve Meta’s AI agent development. According to internal documents, the list of monitored sites extends beyond external platforms to include Meta’s own…

Pakistan’s capital of Islamabad has maintained its security lockdown throughout the week in the hopes that U.S. and Iranian negotiators might return to resume the talks that broke down last weekend. On Friday, President Donald Trump said his envoys are returning to Pakistan and Iran’s foreign minister appears to be en route, as well. Islamabad’s lockdown has been close to the pandemic in its intensity, with shops closed, streets empty, and office staff working from home. Public unrest with the stringent security precautions is growing, especially among laborers who cannot earn wages or find lodgings. “It is like we are…

Officers cut the symbol out of the religious head covering before returning it to him, Alex Sinclair has complained A lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has said that he was detained by police for wearing a kippah with the Israeli and Palestinian flags on it.Alex Sinclair said in a post on Facebook on Thursday that he had been sporting the kippah for 20 years due to “a messy ambivalence of my Jewish-Zionist identity” and it was never a problem.But a few days ago, a man approached him at a cafe in his hometown of Modi’in in central Israel,…

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) on Thursday published a memo that accused China of conducting “industrial-scale” theft of artificial intelligence (AI) technology from American firms. “The U.S. government has information indicating that foreign entities, principally based in China, are engaged in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distill U.S. frontier AI systems,” said the memo from OSTP Director Michael Kratsios, as first seen by the Financial Times (FT) on Thursday. “Model distillation” means harvesting the output from existing large AI systems to create smaller ones, rather like a cuckoo bird laying its eggs in the nests of…

Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and adviser Jared Kushner will head to Islamabad, Pakistan, on Saturday for another round of negotiations with Iran, and Vice President JD Vance “is on standby” and could potentially join them there. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced the plans on Friday afternoon, first on Fox News and then to reporters moments later. “As you know, and I spoke about it earlier this week, the president was flexible in granting an extension of this ceasefire. Throughout this time, the President has decided to dispatch Special Envoy Witkoff and Jared Kushner back to Islamabad. The Iranians…

The same leftist elites who enjoyed spasms of outrage for the better part of a year after the Saudi government was accused of murdering the Washington Post’s Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 now have zero problem accepting $200 million from those same Saudis when it means bailing out their precious Metropolitan Opera House. Well, now the bailout is dead, and everyone’s pretty upset and looking to blame the Bad Orange Man. According to the far-left New York Times, sometime last year, the 142-year-old Met went crawling to the Saudis for a bailout. In exchange for a $200 million endowment payable over…

President Donald Trump’s firm defense of the nation’s borders slashed the number of people with dreams of migrating into the United States, according to a 2025 poll just released by Gallup. “In 2025, 15% of adults worldwide who say they would like to move permanently to another country name the U.S. as their preferred destination, the lowest level recorded in nearly two decades of Gallup research,” said Gallup’s press release. Still, the 15 percent adds up to 134 million who would migrate into the United States if enabled by pro-migration Democrats, business groups, and establishment Republicans, such as amnesty advocates Rep.…