House Judiciary Committee Republicans are blaming the Biden administration's "failure to enforce U.S. immigration law" for the release of a 16-year-old illegal immigrant and suspected MS-13 gang member, who is now charged with the murder and sexual assault of a 20-year-old autistic woman in Maryland.

The interim report, which will be published on Tuesday, states that "a tragic example of the failure to enforce U.S. immigration law under Secretary [Alejandro] Mayorkas’ watch is the murder and sexual assault of 20-year-old Kayla Hamilton in Aberdeen, Maryland in July 2022."

The suspect, who was arrested in January, is an illegal immigrant and alleged MS-13 gang member, who police said entered the U.S. via Rio Grande City, Texas as an unaccompanied child in March 2022 and was transferred to a woman identified as his aunt in Frederick, Maryland.

Amid growing concerns of security risks to members of Congress, more than 50 senators have been issued satellite phones for emergency communication, people familiar with the measures told CBS News. The devices are part of a series of new security measures being offered to senators by the Senate Sergeant at Arms, who took over shortly after the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The satellite phone technology has been offered to all 100 senators. CBS News has learned at least 50 have accepted the phones, which Senate administrative staff recommend senators keep in close proximity during their travels. 

In testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee last month, Senate Sergeant at Arms Karen Gibson said satellite communication is being deployed “to ensure a redundant and secure means of communication during a disruptive event.”  

Gibson said the phones are a security backstop in the case of an emergency that “takes out communications” in part of America. Federal funding will pay for the satellite airtime needed to utilize the phone devices.

Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, a Republican, signed a combination bill Monday protecting minors from gender transitions and protecting unborn babies after 12 weeks’ gestation.

The measure provoked several extremely pro-trans Democratic senators to engage in an unprecedented filibuster of the entire legislative session and barrage the bill with unserious procedural motions designed to bog the process down.

“Protecting our children is critically important,” state Sen. Kathleen Kauth, a Republican, said at the bill signing. “I brought LB 574 because we have too many kids who are being swept up in what is a social contagion, and being told that … if they just switch their gender, they’ll be fine, everything will be great. That’s not true.”

A group of former officials who served in the Trump administration are planning to support Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.

The group of at least 100 people calls itself “The Eight-Year Alliance,” according to Fox News, saying they want a candidate who can serve for eight years, which would be two terms in office.

The group said it wants to avoid former President Donald Trump “immediately becoming a lame-duck president.”

The government shouldn’t prevent Americans from expressing their religious beliefs. But that’s exactly what the state of Washington is trying to do.

Brian Tingley is a licensed marriage and family counselor. For the past 20 years, Tingley’s deeply held religious beliefs have been the source of the guidance he offers his clients, who come to him voluntarily.

Many come seeking Tingley’s advice because his religious beliefs are consistent with their own, and they seek help to align their lifestyle with biblical teachings.

Washington state, however, wants to intervene in these private conversations and rewrite Tingley’s beliefs by telling him what he can and cannot say. State legislators passed a law that restricts counselors from helping people who are wrestling with gender dysphoria.

The state’s counseling censorship law prohibits counselors from engaging in conversations that might encourage a “change in an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.”

Black Lives Matter has plunged into a battle to stay afloat despite millions in donations from celebrities – and a $73million handout from Silicon Valley Bank before its collapse.

Co-founder Patrisse Cullors splashed out more than $12million on luxury properties for the foundation before her resignation in 2021.

But the group defended the ever-expanding portfolio, saying they would 'increase transparency' but would not give much more detail over a sprawling $6million 6,500-square-foot Studio City compound in Southern California.

At the height of the protests over the death of George Floyd in May 2020, celebrities were quick to donate millions to the cause, as well as the now-collapsed SVB.

The situation with nuclear safety at the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant (ZNPP) is 'extremely vulnerable," International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi said on Monday, calling on parties to agree on the plant's protection.

"Ukraine’s #ZNPP this morning lost all external electricity for 7th time during conflict, forcing it to rely on emergency diesel generators for power; nuclear safety situation at the plant extremely vulnerable. We must agree to protect plant now; this situation cannot continue," Grossi tweeted.

Earlier in the day, the power plant said that it had switched to operation on diesel generators due to the shutdown of the last high-voltage line. The cause of the shutdown of the high-voltage line is under investigation. The radiation levels remain within the normal range.

In a new and original film from Ickonic Media, we hear the heartbreaking stories from people who lost loved ones to fatal doses of morphine and Midazolam. Each year, tens of thousands of elderly and terminally ill patients are quietly euthanised in NHS facilities. In hospitals, care homes and hospices, behind closed doors, their deaths are hastened in what appears to be a caring and humane way. But how has this practice of euthanasia – illegal in the UK and carrying a life prison sentence - become so widespread and acceptable? And why are people who are nowhere near the end of their lives being given killer ‘cocktails’ of drugs that are used in many US states for executions?

The deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, has described the perpetrators of the attack on the Belgorod Region as "scumbags" who "should be exterminated like rats."

"As for these scumbags - there is no other way to call them - one can characterize them in different ways. The only question is what is to be done about them? You just have to exterminate them like the rats they are and not even take them prisoner," Medvedev said.

"Whatever chatter you hear from Kiev about how sabotage attacks of this kind have nothing to do with them, it is all a lie, of course. An absolute lie," he pointed out when asked by TASS whether the fact that the sabotage was carried out by Russian citizens absolved Ukraine of responsibility for the saboteurs' attack on the Belgorod Region.

Ukraine’s military intelligence agency developed plans to conduct covert attacks on Russian forces in Syria using Kurdish help, according to a document leaked to a Discord chatroom and published by the Washington Post. Although Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky halted the planning in December, the leaked document is based on intelligence gathered as of January 23. It describes how the planning progressed and how such a campaign could proceed if the Ukrainian president decides to activate it.

The Ukrainian Defence Ministry’s military intelligence service has plans for deniable attacks to avoid implicating Kiev and to divert Russian resources from Ukraine to Syria. The document details an “alternative analysis” of potential targets and the “likelihood of escalation” from Moscow “if Kyiv decided to advance the plan.”

Despite this revelation, Maj. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, the chief of Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, declined to comment, suggesting that Ukrainian authorities are trying to keep this leak under wraps.

In Bakhmut/Artyomovsk, all of NATO, all 31 member nations, were defeated by a restaurant owner and a bunch of convicts, is how I saw someone describe it. That of course caricatures the situation somewhat (Wagner is well-organized), but it’s not that far off. And that spells a serious problem for NATO.

All of those 31 members may have lots of control over their media, but in the end you can’t endlessly deny being defeated.

So what will NATO do now? They will double down, and then again. And at the end of the “doubling down road” lie nuclear weapons. Not Russian nukes, because as my friend Wayne wrote the other day, their high-precision hypersonic missiles make nukes look crude and primitive, Middle Ages territory. But NATO/US never developed such weapons. They spent 10+ times as much money on weapons, still do, and -comparatively – ended up with bows and arrows.

A slump in the use of private jets in the US could suggest that wealthy individuals are reducing their spending in response to the rising threat of recession in the next 12 months. 

Bloomberg data shows private jet flights across the US peaked in early 2022 and have been sliding ever since. Takeoffs and landings fell 4.5% in the first quarter compared with the same quarter last year. The drop accelerated to 9.3% in April compared with an 8.6% decline in March, possibly a sign demand is crumbling. 

Developers looking to build thousands of wind turbines off the Mid-Atlantic and New England coast are coming up against a force even more relentless than the Atlantic winds: the Iron Law of Megaprojects, offering a warning of the trouble ahead for green-energy projects. 

The Iron Law, coined by Oxford Professor Bent Flyvbjerg, says that “megaprojects” — which cost billions of dollars, take years to complete, and are socially transformative — reliably come in over budget, over time, over and over. 

From Boston’s Big Dig to California’s high-speed rail to New York’s 12 years-overdue and 300% over-budget East Side Access rail project, big boondoggles routinely demonstrate the validity of the rule. 

Offshore wind projects are not immune to the Iron Law, regularly experiencing vast cost overruns before a single watt is generated.  

The New York state government, looking to replace oil- and gas-fired powerplants with hundreds of wind towers off Long Island, set out in 2019 to create an offshore wind supply chain from scratch, beginning with a massive state-funded turbine fabrication facility about 100 miles north of New York City on the Hudson River. 

Ground still hasn’t even been broken, but the budget certainly has: The price of that Port of Albany facility has already doubled from $350 million to $700 million. An additional $100 million may be needed for equipment costs, raising the final price tag to $800 million. 

A simulated war-game has pitted Chinese hypersonic weapons against the US Navy’s newest aircraft carrier the USS Gerald R. Ford. Photo: AP

Hypersonic weapons could be “catastrophic” for the most potent aircraft carrier group in the US fleet, according to war game simulations run by a team of military planners in China.

Over 20 intense battles, Chinese forces sank the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier fleet with a volley of 24 hypersonic anti-ship missiles, in a simulation run on a mainstream war game software platform used by China’s military.

In the scenario, the US vessels are attacked after continuing to approach a China-claimed island in the South China Sea despite repeated warnings.

A paper detailing the war game was published in May by the Chinese-language Journal of Test and Measurement Technology. It is the first time the results of simulated hypersonic strikes against a US carrier group have been made public.