Day: December 4, 2025
US renews ‘do not travel’ alert over terrorism, kidnapping amid Trump narco-terror fight
The State Department renewed its “do not travel” warning for Venezuela, urging an immediate departure for Americans due to crime, terrorism and detention risks.
Omaha bystander flees gas station bathroom moments before armed man fires on officers
A civilian escaped an Omaha QuikTrip gas station bathroom before an armed suspect allegedly opened fire at police officers in a deadly confrontation.
FOX readers can’t stop buying these 11 gifts – AirPods, Levi’s jeans and more for up to 72% off
AirPods, Levi’s jeans, shower steamers and Cozy Earth pajamas are a few of the gifts FOX readers buy most often.
College lacrosse coach Liam Gleason dead at 41 after suffering head injury in fall at home
Siena Saints men’s lacrosse head coach Liam Gleason died on Wednesday after suffering a traumatic brain injury in a fall at his home, the school said.
Bureaucracy Breeds Incompetence
Two major stories are floating around right now that are extremely important, but not getting huge traction. One is just how the National Guard shooter got in the country and what motivated him. Lots of investigation and investigation angles. The other is the breathtaking scandal erupting in Minnesota wherein Somali nationals have immigrated and are bilking teh taxpayers out of enormous sums of money. (None of the link just provided give a complete picture of these situations, just enough to make the point and to serve as a jumping off point for your own look into the problem.) There is a tendency to want to assign malfeasance to these situations – and there certainly was in the actors proper, but it would require a very large scale conspiracy (in other words an impossible one) for the government actions, or inactions, in these circumstances to be anything other than incompetence – sheer bureaucratic and leadership incompetence.
The post Bureaucracy Breeds Incompetence appeared first on The Hugh Hewitt Show.
Convicted hacker twins who landed jobs as federal contractors nabbed for allegedly deleting government databases
Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, a pair of convicted hackers based in Alexandria, Virginia, were arrested on Wednesday over an alleged conspiracy to destroy government databases and other crimes.
After doing prison time for wire fraud and conspiring to hack into the U.S. State Department, the Akhter twins, one of whom previously served as a cybersecurity contractor with the State Department, managed to secure jobs as federal contractors — working as engineers for Opexus.
‘Their actions jeopardized the security of government systems.’
Opexus, a company that handles sensitive data for most federal agencies and has received over $50 million in contracts from various agencies over the past decade, determined earlier this year that it had been compromised in February by two employees.
A Bloomberg investigation revealed in May that after one of the agencies with which Opexus was working, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, flagged the twins as possible threats on account of their criminal records, the duo were fired on Feb. 18.
The company later discovered that while being fired and immediately afterward, the twins allegedly accessed sensitive documents and compromised or scrubbed dozens of databases, including those containing data from the General Services Administration and the Internal Revenue Service.
The FBI, FDIC Office of Inspector General, Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General, and Homeland Security Investigations investigated the case.
The brothers were indicted on Nov. 13 for allegedly working to harm Opexus and its U.S. government clients “by accessing computers without authorization, issuing commands to prevent others from modifying the databases before deletion, deleting databases, stealing information, and destroying evidence of their unlawful activities,” the DOJ said in a release.
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Muneeb Akhter. Photo by Evelyn Hockstein/Washington Post via Getty Images
According to the indictment, Muneeb Akhter allegedly deleted approximately 96 databases storing U.S. government information — including databases containing records and documents related to Freedom of Information Act matters as well as sensitive federal investigative files.
Muneeb Akhter is also accused of asking an artificial intelligence tool how they could cover their tracks after deleting a DHS database.
After he got fired from Opexus, Muneeb Akhter allegedly obtained data from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and is accused further of stealing copies of IRS information including federal tax information and other identifying information for at least 450 individuals.
Opexus did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.
“These defendants abused their positions as federal contractors to attack government databases and steal sensitive government information,” said Matthew Galeotti, acting assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, in a statement. “Their actions jeopardized the security of government systems and disrupted agencies’ ability to serve the American people.”
Muneeb Akhter has been charged with conspiracy to commit computer fraud and to destroy records, two counts of computer fraud, theft of federal records, and two counts of aggravated identity theft. His twin, Sohaib Akhter, was charged with conspiracy to commit computer fraud and to destroy records and computer fraud.
While Sohaib Akhter faces a maximum penalty of six years in prison, Muneeb Akhter faces a mandatory minimum penalty of two years of prison time for each aggravated identity theft count and a maximum penalty of 45 years for the other charges.
The duo pleaded guilty in 2015 to a different set of crimes.
Muneeb Akhter hacked into the website of a cosmetics company and stole thousands of customers’ credit card and personal information. He and his brother used the stolen data to pay for flights, hotel stays, various goods, and attendance at professional conferences. Muneeb Akhter proceeded to hand off the stolen data to a “dark net” operator who cut him in on the profits from the sales.
The other brother, meanwhile, used his contract position at the State Department in 2015 to steal personally identifiable data belonging to various people including co-workers and a federal law enforcement agent who was investigating him.
According to the Justice Department, Sohaib Akhter later hatched a scheme to ensure perpetual access to various State Department systems and, with the help of his twin, attempted to install an electronic collection device inside a State Department office, which would have enabled the hackers to remotely steal federal data.
Years earlier, Muneeb Akhter hacked into a Maryland-based private data aggregation company that he was performing contract work for, giving his brother access to a database of federal contract information to give their technology company an upper hand when bidding for contracts and clients.
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The media just told you their 2026 strategy: ‘Lies, but better!’
Let me explain what the New York Times just did to the Washington Post over Thanksgiving weekend. The Post tried to turn Secretary of War Pete Hegseth into a war criminal for blowing up maritime drug runners. But the attack didn’t gain traction — partly because Republicans are getting better at starving these narratives of oxygen.
So the New York Times read the room, climbed to the top rope, and elbow-dropped its own ideological ally to prevent serious blowback against the propaganda press. The Times wasn’t defending truth. It was defending future lies. The ability to run effective psyops in 2026 was on the line. And when the Times pretends to be an ombudsman, the calculus is always political.
You think sweating out one red-state special election against a hellish candidate who despises her own constituents is bad? Wait until November 2026.
Don’t kid yourself: No ethical journalism happened here. The Times simply concluded, “We will sell no psyop before its time.” They weren’t going to let DataRepublican or Steve Baker rack up millions of views muckraking the Post’s latest collapsing narrative. So the Gray Lady hit the panic button and aborted the mission.
What should we learn from this? The temptation on the right will be to ask why the corporate left-wing press broke ranks on the eve of maybe flipping a Tennessee district Donald Trump won by 22 points to a Democrat who is on tape saying she hates her own city and its constituents.
But that question misses a foundational truth I repeat constantly on my show: Worldview is destiny. And outside the biblical worldview, every worldview boils down to a will to power.
With that hermeneutic, you can see exactly what the Times leaders are doing. They’re thinking far past Tennessee. They’re signaling that they have an entire arsenal of new lies ready to deploy to steal the midterms. It’s that Don Draper meme — hands outstretched, smirking: “Lies … but better!”
Remember: The godless do not have limiting principles. Why wouldn’t they lie if lying helps them capture power? It doesn’t matter whether it’s godless atheism, godless occultism, or godless Islam. Where the one true God is absent, the father of lies dances to a raucous tune. Hell has denominations, too.
But in the biblical worldview, the hallmark of everything is repentance, redemption, and restoration. You know a tree by its fruit. So if you want to discern whether something reflects the kingdom of God or the spirit of the age, the first question isn’t “do I like this person?” or “is this how I would do it?” The first question is: Does it produce repentance, redemption, and restoration?
Look at the Charlie Kirk memorial. Several people spoke whom no one expected to have deep, serious thoughts about Christianity. Yet the event unmistakably pointed people toward repentance, redemption, and restoration. That’s the kingdom of God. Don’t focus on the proxy on the outside. Focus on what God is doing on the inside. That’s the through-line from Genesis to Revelation.
The spirit of the age rejects all of it. It is will to power, front to back. Which means you cannot analyze the opposition the same way you analyze our side.
RELATED: How GOP leadership can turn a midterm gift into a total disaster
rudall30 via iStock/Getty Images
Sure, Republicans won that Tennessee special election by nine points. But they lost the Nashville precinct — the same place the Democrat said she hated. That’s how cults behave. And that’s why political messaging on the right must account for the environment normie voters live in — the tension between two very different kingdoms vying for their attention.
The normie voter either doesn’t know about those kingdoms or doesn’t care. He just wants what he wants: an economy that boosts his bottom line and border and anti-crime policies that keep him safe. Voters want elections to be about them.
That’s why Hegseth taking out foreign drug traffickers instinctively sounds like a pretty good deal — something even the New York Times could grasp, if only for tactical reasons.
So here’s the math going forward: Leftists can lie all they want — and sometimes lie badly, as we just saw — but the GOP will still lose if it fails to fix the economy and security.
You think sweating out one red-state special election against a hellish candidate who despises her own constituents is bad? Wait until November 2026. With better lies behind her and normie voters feeling betrayed by lukewarm people in power, she — and people like her — will absolutely win.
Turns out that Hegseth’s ‘kill them all’ line was another media invention
Under his authority as commander in chief, the president can blow up pretty much anybody on Earth whom he deems a national security threat. He does not need permission from Congress, the media, or a panel of self-appointed commentators. The missile strikes on drug-running vessels operated by a designated terrorist group are lawful, routine, and predictable. What made the episode explosive was that it enraged exactly the faction that always reacts this way: the political left.
Impeachment is the only real consequence available to the administration’s critics, and after two failed efforts, that prospect does not keep President Trump awake at night. Republican control of the House makes even a symbolic attempt unlikely.
It is time to put a moratorium on the online laws-of-armed-conflict ‘experts’ who materialize whenever a strike hits a target they sympathize with.
So the disloyal opposition defaults to its remaining weapon: information warfare. Media outlets, activist networks, and hostile bureaucrats have been carpet-bombing the information space with false claims designed to sow dissension among the ranks and mislead the public.
The country needs a president who can act decisively in defense of national security, without media gatekeepers, rogue judges, or partisan lawmakers running armchair military campaigns from the sidelines. The “Seditious Six” tried to undermine the president’s authority and cast doubt on lawful orders. The Washington Post attempted to turn that fiction into fact by quoting anonymous sources with unverifiable claims.
The central allegation is that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth issued an order to “kill everybody” on the vessel. The Post framed it this way: “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. ‘The order was to kill everybody.’”
The headline amplified the accusation: “Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all.”
A “spoken directive” means no record. The quote is a paraphrase. Nothing indicates that the source actually heard the Hegseth say those words. This is an anonymous, secondhand characterization of an alleged statement — precisely the sort of raw material the Post loves to inflate into scandal.
Even if the words had been spoken, the context would determine legality. If a commander asks, “How big a bomb do we drop on the enemy location?” and the answer is, “Use one big enough to kill everybody,” that exchange would not be criminal. It is a description of the force required to neutralize a hostile asset.
If these anonymous sources truly believed the secretary issued an illegal order, they were obligated to report it through the chain of command. Their silence speaks louder than any paraphrase. The most plausible explanation is that someone misunderstood — or deliberately distorted — an aggressive statement by Hegseth and nothing more.
The United States targets terrorists. The implication behind the Post’s story is that survivors remained after the first strike and that either the secretary or JSOC ordered a second engagement to kill them. No evidence supports that claim. No one outside the direct participants knows what the surveillance picture showed or what tactical conditions existed immediately after the first blast.
RELATED: White House names names in new ‘media bias tracker’ in wake of ‘seditious’ Democrat video
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
President Trump stated publicly that Hegseth told him no order was given to kill survivors. The fact that U.S. forces recovered two survivors from the submersible drug vessel undercuts the Post’s narrative even more. Pete Hegseth is far more credible than Alex Horton and the newsroom that elevated this rumor.
It is time to put a moratorium on the online laws-of-armed-conflict “experts” who materialize whenever a strike hits a target they sympathize with. They insist that the presence of wounded combatants instantly transforms a hostile platform into a protected site and that destroying the vessel itself becomes a war crime. Even the New York Times — no friend of the administration — punctured that claim:
According to five U.S. officials … Mr. Hegseth’s directive did not specifically address what should happen if a first missile failed to accomplish all of those things … and his order was not a response to surveillance footage showing that at least two people on the boat survived the first blast.
The mobs demanding Hegseth’s scalp will be disappointed. The voters who supported this administration expected firm action against terrorist cartels and open-ocean drug networks. Another hostile vessel was reduced to an oil slick, and most Americans see that as a success.
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are racing to enclose Earth in an orbital computer factory
In Memphis, Tennessee, where Elon Musk’s xAI initiative spun up a “compute factory” of some 32,000 GPUs, the local grid could not sustain the demand. The solution was characteristic of the era: 14 mobile gas turbine generators, parked in a row, burning fossil fuel to feed the machine. It was a scene of brute industrial force, a reminder that the “cloud,” for all its ethereal branding, is a heavy, hot, loud thing. It requires acres of land for the servers, rivers of water for cooling, and enough electricity to power a small nation.
The appetite of AI is proving insatiable. To reach the next plateau of synthetic cognition, we must triple our electrical output and are constrained by our capacity to do so. And so, with the inevitability of water seeking a lower level, the gaze of Silicon Valley has drifted upward. If the earth is too small, too regulated, and too fragile to house the machines of the future, we shall instead build them in the sky.
The high ground of the 21st century is not a hill, but an orbit.
The proposal is startling, in the way that leaps in engineering often are. In late 2025, Musk noted on social media that SpaceX would be “doing” data centers in space. Jeff Bezos, a man who has long viewed the planetary surface as a sort of zoning restriction to be overcome, predicted gigawatt-scale orbital clusters within two decades.
The pitch is seductive: In the vacuum of low-Earth orbit, the sun never sets. There are no clouds, no rain, no neighbors to complain. There are only the burning fusion of the sun and the cold of deep space, which turns out to be the perfect medium for cooling the heated circuits of a neural network.
The vacuum is valuable because it is an infinite heat sink. The sunlight is valuable because it is free voltage. The plan, as outlined by startups such as Starcloud (formerly Lumen Orbit), involves structures that defy terrestrial intuition. These are not the tin-can satellites of the Cold War but solar arrays and radiator panels four kilometers wide, vast shimmering sheets assembled by swarms of robots. These machines, using technology like the MIT-developed TESSERAE tiles, would click together in the silence, building a cathedral of computation that no human hand will touch.
RELATED: Trump leaves Elon Musk’s Grok, xAI off White House list of AI partners
Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
There is a stark beauty to the engineering. On Earth, a data center fights a losing battle against entropy, burning energy to pump heat away. In space, heat can be radiated into the dark. A server rack in orbit, shielded by layers of polymer and perhaps submerged in fluid to dampen the cosmic rays, swims in a bath of eternal starlight, crunching the data beamed up from below. Companies such as NTT and Sky Perfect JSAT envision optical lasers linking these satellites into a single, glowing lattice: a cosmic village of information.
Yet one cannot help but observe its fragility. The modern GPU is a miracle of nanometer-scale lithography, a device so sensitive that a stray alpha particle can induce a chaotic error. The environment of space is hostile, awash in the very radiation that these chips abhor. To place the most delicate artifacts of human civilization into the harshest environment known to physics is a gamble. The engineers speak of “annealing” solar cells and triple-redundant logic. The skeptic notes that a bit-flip in a language model is a nuisance, while a bit-flip in a battle management system is a tragedy.
There is also the matter of the debris. We have already cluttered orbits with the husks of our previous ambitions: spent rocket stages, dead weather satellites, flecks of paint moving at 17,000 miles per hour. To introduce massive, kilometer-scale structures is to invite the Kessler syndrome, a cascade of collisions that could imprison us on the surface for generations. We are proposing to solve the environmental crisis of terrestrial computing by potentially creating an environmental crisis in the exosphere. It is the American way, the frontier way: When one room gets messy, simply move to the next, larger room.
The drive to do this is not merely economic, though the economics are potent. If Starship can lower the cost of launch to under $200 per kilogram, the math begins to close. If energy in space is effectively free, the initial capital outlay is justified by the lack of a monthly utility bill. But the impulse is also older, that of the Russian scientist and mathematician Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who called Earth the “cradle” of humanity, which, like a mature human being, eventually we must leave. We are seeing the embryonic stages of the “noosphere,” a sphere of pure mind encircling the planet. By exporting our cognition to the heavens, we are externalizing our logic. The logos of our civilization will physically reside above us, a silent pantheon of servers ordering and facilitating the lives of the creatures below.
There is a geopolitical texture to this as well. The concept of “sovereign cloud” takes on a new meaning when the data center is orbiting over international waters. Intelligence agencies and defense contractors are quietly investing, sensing that the high ground of the 21st century is not a hill, but an orbit. To control the compute is to control the speed of thought.
Whether this will work remains to be seen. The history of spaceflight is a graveyard of optimistic PowerPoints. It is possible that the radiation will act as a slow acid on the silicon, that the robotic assembly will jam, that the cost will remain stubbornly high. But the momentum is real. The mobile gas turbines in Memphis are a stopgap. The data centers consuming the aquifers of Arizona are a liability. The logic of the market and the machine points upward.
We stand at a peculiar intersection. We are attempting to use the most primal forces of the solar system, the burning star and the freezing void, to power our most refined tools. It is a grand, ambitious, and entirely human endeavor. We are building a computer in a jar and hanging the jar in the sky, hoping that the view will be clear enough to see the future.
