Trump: Strait of Hormuz Open, ‘Ready for Full Passage’
President Donald Trump announced Friday that Iran has opened a key global shipping route, saying in a Truth Social post that the strait is “fully open and ready for full passage.”
“IRAN HAS JUST ANNOUNCED THAT THE STRAIT OF IRAN IS FULLY OPEN AND READY FOR FULL PASSAGE. THANK YOU!” Trump wrote.
He added in a separate post: “BUT THE NAVAL BLOCKADE WILL REMAIN IN FULL FORCE AND EFFECT AS IT PERTAINS TO IRAN, ONLY, UNTIL SUCH TIME AS OUR TRANSACTION WITH IRAN IS 100% COMPLETE. THIS PROCESS SHOULD GO VERY QUICKLY IN THAT MOST OF THE POINTS ARE ALREADY NEGOTIATED. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP.”
Iran’s foreign minister confirmed shortly afterward that passage for all commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz is open during a ceasefire tied to the conflict in Lebanon.
“In line with the ceasefire in Lebanon, the passage for all commercial vessels through Strait of Hormuz is declared completely open for the remaining period of ceasefire.”
Vessels must travel along a “coordinated route” established by Iran’s Ports and Maritime Organization.
Iran formally declared the strait open to commercial traffic Friday as part of a temporary halt in hostilities between Israel and Lebanon.
The ceasefire, agreed to on Thursday, began at 5 p.m. ET and is set to last 10 days.
Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Saeed Khatibzadeh, said Tehran remains committed to keeping the Strait of Hormuz open, while indicating that new arrangements could be introduced amid ongoing regional tensions, according to Turkish media.
Speaking on the sidelines of the Antalya Diplomacy Forum, Khatibzadeh said any changes would take into account security, safe passage, and environmental concerns. He added that the waterway has historically remained open despite lying within Iran’s territorial waters.
Former Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax Shot and Killed His Wife and Then Himself, Police Say
Fairfax County Police are investigating an apparent murder-suicide at the home of former Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax.
Justin and his estranged wife, Cerina Fairfax, were both pronounced dead at the scene. Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis shared the details of the crime in a televised press conference on Thursday, April 16, telling reporters that the former lieutenant governor shot and killed his wife before turning the gun on himself.
The estranged couple’s two teenage children, a boy and a girl, were both home at the time of the incident. Their son called 911.
“Everybody’s shocked, we’re shocked,” Davis told reporters, sharing that the couple was in the middle of divorce proceedings.
“We know that recently Mr. Fairfax was served some type of paperwork indicating when he was next scheduled to next appear in court for the ongoing divorce proceedings,” Davis shared. “That is something that we’re looking at as something that may have led to whatever happened last night that led to the murder of a mother and wife and a suicide.”
Davis shared that Justin shot Cerina “several times” before moving to a different part of the home to shoot himself. Shortly after midnight on April 16, the couple’s son called police.
Pirro’s prosecutors turned away at Federal Reserve headquarters after unannounced visit
Two prosecutors working for U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro showed up without warning at the Federal Reserve’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, asked to inspect a massive renovation project, and were denied entry. The episode marks the latest flashpoint in a running confrontation between the Justice Department and the nation’s central bank over a construction budget that has ballooned to $2.5 billion.
Carlton Davis and Steven Vandervelden, both hired by Pirro to serve as special counsels, spoke with construction workers at the site and said they wanted to tour the facility and check on the progress of the work, The Independent reported, citing a Wall Street Journal account. Fed personnel told the pair they needed pre-clearance, handed them contact information for the central bank’s legal staff, and sent them on their way.
The rebuff drew a sharp response from Pirro, who framed the visit as a straightforward inquiry into runaway spending:
“Any construction project that has cost overruns of almost 80 percent over the original construction budget deserves some serious review. And these people are in charge of monetary policy in the United States?”
The Fed, for its part, called in outside legal reinforcements. Robert Hur, the former special counsel who investigated President Biden’s handling of classified documents, now serving as an outside lawyer for the central bank, fired off a letter to Pirro objecting to the prosecutors’ arrival “without prior notice.”
Powell’s term as Fed chair ends on May 15. Trump has nominated Kevin Warsh to succeed him, and on the same Tuesday that Pirro’s prosecutors were turned away from Fed headquarters, the Senate Banking Committee announced it would hold Warsh’s confirmation hearing on April 21.
A $2.5 billion renovation and an 80 percent cost overrun
The numbers at the center of this dispute are hard to ignore. Pirro claims the Fed’s headquarters renovation has run almost 80 percent over the original construction budget. The total price tag now stands at $2.5 billion. No one in the fact record has disputed those figures.
The Federal Reserve operates with a degree of independence that few government agencies enjoy. That independence serves important purposes, insulating monetary policy from election-year pressure, for one. But independence from political meddling is not the same as immunity from financial oversight. An 80 percent cost overrun on a construction project would trigger alarm bells at any federal agency subject to normal congressional scrutiny.
Davis and Vandervelden, the two prosecutors who made the Tuesday visit, have handled other high-profile assignments for Pirro’s office. They were among the special counsels assigned to the effort to bring charges against six Democratic lawmakers who had urged members of the U.S. military to refuse illegal orders in a contentious video. That effort ultimately failed before a grand jury.
Oklahoma Principal Kirk Moore Tackled Armed Ex-Student While Taking a Bullet to the Leg
A 60-year-old high school principal in Oklahoma charged straight at a former student armed with two loaded semi-automatic pistols last Tuesday afternoon, taking a gunshot to his right leg and still managing to wrestle the shooter to the ground before anyone else was hurt. Surveillance footage from the lobby of Pauls Valley High School captured the entire confrontation.
Kirk Moore, who has spent more than 35 years in the Pauls Valley school district, heard a commotion and rushed to the lobby. What he found was 20-year-old Victor Lee Hawkins, a former student, pointing a firearm and ordering people to the floor. Moore didn’t retreat. He closed the distance, and Hawkins shot him in the leg. Moore kept coming.
DHS employee killed walking her dog by convicted felon who gained citizenship under Biden, officials say
A 40-year-old auditor for the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General was shot and stabbed while walking her dog in Georgia this week, allegedly by a 26-year-old naturalized citizen with a lengthy criminal record who received his citizenship in 2022 under the Biden administration, federal officials said Wednesday.
Lauren Bullis died during what authorities describe as a random, multi-location killing spree across metro Atlanta on Monday morning. The suspect, Olaolukitan Adon-Abel, a UK-born man living in Atlanta, faces charges of malice murder, aggravated assault, and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony. Two women are dead. A 49-year-old homeless man is fighting for his life.
The New York Post reported that the spree began outside a Checkers restaurant on Wesley Chapel Road in DeKalb County, where Adon-Abel allegedly shot and killed an unidentified woman. She died at a nearby hospital. Her name has not been publicly released.
At about 2 a.m., roughly 16 miles away, Adon-Abel allegedly opened fire on a sleeping homeless man outside a Kroger grocery store in Brookhaven. The 49-year-old victim was critically injured.
Several hours later, some 15 miles from the Brookhaven attack, the spree ended with Bullis. She had taken her dog, Sancho, out for a walk. A neighbor told 11 Alive it appeared the suspect was trying to sexually assault her. Bullis was found shot and stabbed. She did not survive.
Adon-Abel was arrested a short time later. Fox News reported that police tracked his silver Volkswagen Jetta using license plate recognition cameras, and that investigators believe he may have continued killing had he not been caught.
Brookhaven Police Chief Brandon Gurley was blunt about what investigators found, or rather, what they didn’t find.
“It is apparent to us that this was a completely random attack.”
Authorities still have not determined a motive.
A criminal record that should have raised every flag
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin laid out the suspect’s history in stark terms on Wednesday, tying the case directly to failures in the citizenship vetting process under the prior administration.
Mullin stated:
“He possesses a prior criminal record that includes convictions for sexual battery, battery against a police officer, obstruction, and assault with a deadly weapon, vandalism and now stands accused of murdering [DHS] employee Lauren Bullis by shooting and stabbing her while she walked her dog.”
Arrest records show that less than a year before Monday’s rampage, a 26-year-old by the name of Adon Olaolukitan was arrested last April in Savannah for groping four women in a matter of hours. He was sentenced to 120 days in jail and three years’ probation, and was ordered to undergo a mental health evaluation.
That means the man now accused of a double murder and attempted murder was walking free on probation when he allegedly carried out Monday’s attacks. It remains unclear whether his prior convictions predated his arrival in the United States, a fact the article noted was not immediately clear.
What is clear is that Adon-Abel became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2022, during the Biden administration. And that his criminal record, sexual battery, assault with a deadly weapon, battery against a police officer, apparently did not prevent that from happening.
Mullin points to new USCIS screening measures
Mullin used the case to draw a direct contrast between the Biden-era vetting process and the current administration’s approach. He wrote on social media:
“Since President Trump took office, @USCIS has implemented measures to ensure individuals with criminal histories and who otherwise lack good moral character do not attain citizenship.”
The implication is difficult to miss. Under the previous administration, a man with convictions for violent and sexual offenses cleared the naturalization process. Under the current administration, Mullin says, that would no longer happen. Whether those reforms would have caught Adon-Abel’s specific record is an open question, but the political contrast is one the administration clearly intends to press.
The broader debate over immigration vetting and public safety has been a central fault line in Washington. Newsmax reported that DHS leadership is framing Bullis’s killing as part of a wider argument over repeat offenders and the adequacy of screening for naturalization applicants.
That framing will strike many Americans as common sense. If a man has been convicted of battery against a police officer and assault with a deadly weapon, the question of whether he possesses “good moral character”, the legal standard for naturalization, should answer itself.
Democrats, of course, have spent years accusing Republicans of lacking commitment to the rule of law. Cases like this make that argument harder to sustain. The rule of law failed Lauren Bullis, not because enforcement was too aggressive, but because the system waved through a violent offender.
Who was Lauren Bullis?
A DHS spokesperson confirmed Bullis’s death in a statement Wednesday.
“We are deeply saddened to confirm that Lauren Bullis, a beloved member of the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General team has tragically passed away. She was a respected colleague whose contributions and presence will be greatly missed. We extend our heartfelt condolences to her family and friends, as well as to the families, friends, and communities of the additional victims.”
Bullis was 40 years old. She worked as an auditor, the kind of quiet, essential government work that rarely makes headlines. Her cousin, Lee Renfroe, wrote on Facebook that Bullis “was brutally murdered in a series of violent attacks in the Decatur GA area.”
Her family is now searching for her dog, Sancho, who went missing after the attack.
Mullin called the killings “acts of pure evil” and said they “devastated our department.” DHS declined to comment further about the suspect.
The system’s failure is the story
There are still significant unanswered questions. What court filed the charges? What is the full scope of Adon-Abel’s criminal history, and did any of it predate his time in the United States? How did a man with convictions for sexual battery and assault with a deadly weapon pass a USCIS background check? And why was he free on probation after the Savannah arrests less than a year ago?
These are not rhetorical questions. They point to specific institutional breakdowns, in the naturalization process, in the criminal justice system’s handling of repeat violent offenders, and in the probation apparatus that was supposed to be monitoring Adon-Abel when he allegedly went on a killing spree.
The political class has spent years debating immigration policy in the abstract, border walls, asylum rules, deportation priorities. This case is not abstract. A DHS employee is dead. Another woman is dead. A homeless man may not survive. The accused killer had a rap sheet that included violence against women and violence against police, and he was a naturalized citizen of the United States.
The accountability debate in Washington often feels disconnected from the lives of ordinary people. But Lauren Bullis was an ordinary person, someone who valued doing her job and living her life. She walked her dog. She went to work. She trusted that the system her own agency helped oversee was functioning.
It wasn’t. And the consequences of that failure are measured in body bags, not policy papers.
The Biden administration left behind a long list of unresolved questions about the standards it applied, and the standards it didn’t, across federal agencies. The naturalization of Olaolukitan Adon-Abel may prove to be one of the most consequential.
When a government grants citizenship to a man with a record of violence, and that man goes on to kill one of its own employees, the word “accountability” stops being a talking point. It becomes an obligation.
Small Business Administration Administrator Kelly Loeffler says the Trump administration has uncovered $200 billion in COVID-era fraud and is now moving to cut off suspected fraudsters from federal programs one state at a time, starting with California, where more than 111,000 borrowers have already been suspended from SBA services.
$200 billion and counting
Trump signed a presidential action on March 16 establishing a new task force to eliminate fraud, directing the use of “all available resources and authorities to fight fraud, close loopholes, enforce eligibility rules, and protect benefits for eligible Americans.” Loeffler sits on the task force alongside 10 cabinet members, with Vice President JD Vance providing leadership.
By Wednesday, the Daily Caller reported that the task force had already identified almost $6.3 billion in government contracts awarded to potentially fraudulent businesses. That figure sits inside a much larger universe of suspected abuse. Loeffler told the DCNF the administration has found “$200 billion in the aggregate from just COVID-era fraud.”
She framed the effort in terms any taxpayer can understand:
“I mean, here we are amid tax season, and Americans are being asked to send their tax bills. And so what Americans want to know is that when they submit a payment to the IRS, is that money is going to be used, appropriately within the federal government. Well, that has not happened for too long.”
That last line, “that has not happened for too long”, is a polite way of saying the federal government spent years writing checks it never bothered to verify. The pandemic-era lending programs, rushed into existence under extraordinary circumstances, became some of the largest vehicles for fraud in American history. And the prior administration, in Loeffler’s telling, had no interest in cleaning up the mess.
The SBA announced in February that it had suspended 111,620 borrowers in California over suspected fraud tied to pandemic-era lending programs. Those borrowers, Loeffler said, “will no longer be eligible for SBA services.” That is not a slap on the wrist. It is a direct consequence, loss of access to the government-backed capital that small businesses rely on.
California was not the only state in the crosshairs. Back in January, the agency confirmed it was suspending 6,900 Minnesota borrowers over alleged “fraudulent activity” relating to pandemic-era loans. The administration has been vocal about holding Democratic state leaders accountable for the conditions that allowed such fraud to flourish.
Loeffler made clear the effort would not stop at two states: “We will be going state by state. And I’m grateful to President Trump’s leadership in this regard, because under the Biden administration, they tried to sweep it under the rug and even forgive the fraudulent actors.”
Which states come next remains an open question. But the pattern is unmistakable: the administration is building a public, state-level record of pandemic fraud, and the political geography of that record skews heavily toward states governed by Democrats during the spending spree.
In Minnesota, the fraud scandal has taken on its own political life. Former Governor Tim Walz has faced pointed questions about oversight failures on his watch, even as he has rallied supporters at the state capitol while billions in alleged fraud remain under investigation.
School Shooting Leaves Teacher, 3 Students Dead and 20 Others Injured, Suspect Believed to Be 8th Grader
At least four people are dead and 20 people are injured after a school shooting in Turkey.
The incident happened on Wednesday, April 15, at Ayser Çalık Middle School located in Kahramanmaraş, Turkey, according to Turkish Radio and Television (TRT), CNN Turk and Milliyet, which cited authorities.
First responders and police teams were dispatched to the school after receiving a call following reports of gunfire in front of the school, Milliyet reported. According to initial reports, a suspect allegedly fired his gun into the air of the schoolyard before moving into the school.
Kahramanmaraş Governor Mükerrem Ünlüer announced in a press conference that the attacker was identified as an eighth grade student at Ayser Çalık Middle School, and he entered the school carrying weapons —five guns and seven magazines — in his backpack, per CNN Turk and Milliyet.
The governor said four people had died in the attack — including three students and one teacher. Twenty others were injured, including four who were in critical condition and undergoing surgery.
The Kahramanmaraş governor said that the suspect in the shooting was also killed in the incident. He also noted that the eighth grader was the son of a former police officer, and it is suspected that he took his father’s weapons, CNN Turk and Milliyet reported.
