New Immigration Court Plan | Humanity Has No Strong Protection Against AI | The U.S. Navy Can’t Build Ships, and more

While the flag was up, the court was still contending with whether to hear a 2020 election case, with Justice Alito on the losing end of that decision. In coming weeks, the justices will rule on two climactic cases involving the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, including whether Mr. Trump has immunity for his actions. Their decisions will shape how accountable he can be held for trying to overturn the last presidential election and his chances for re-election in the upcoming one.
“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Justice Alito said in an emailed statement to The Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”
Judicial experts said in interviews that the flag was a clear violation of ethics rules, which seek to avoid even the appearance of bias, and could sow doubt about Justice Alito’s impartiality in cases related to the election and the Capitol riot.
The mere impression of political opinion can be a problem, the ethics experts said. “It might be his spouse or someone else living in his home, but he shouldn’t have it in his yard as his message to the world,” said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia.
This is “the equivalent of putting a ‘Stop the Steal’ sign in your yard, which is a problem if you’re deciding election-related cases,” she said.
Interviews show that the justice’s wife, Martha-Ann Alito, had been in a dispute with another family on the block over an anti-Trump sign on their lawn, but given the timing and the starkness of the symbol, neighbors interpreted the inverted flag as a political statement by the couple.

The U.S. Navy Can’t Build Ships  (Gil Barndollar and Matthew C. Mai, Foreign Policy)
After decades of strategic drift and costly acquisition failures, the U.S. Navy is sailing straight into a storm it can’t avoid. Despite the Defense Department’s lip service about China being the “pacing challenge,” decades of deindustrialization and policymakers’ failure to prioritize among services and threats have left the Navy ill-equipped to endure a sustained high-intensity conflict in the Pacific. The United States is unable to keep pace with Chinese shipbuilding and will fall even further behind in the coming years. Where does that leave the U.S. Navy and the most critical U.S. foreign-policy imperative: deterring a war in the Pacific?
As evidenced by the Biden administration’s latest budget request, fiscal constraints are forcing the Navy to cut procurement requests, delay modernization programs, and retire ships early. The Navy’s budget for the 2025 fiscal year calls for decommissioning 19 ships—including three nuclear-powered attack submarines and four guided-missile cruisers—while procuring only six new vessels. The full scope of what military analysts have long warned would be the “Terrible ’20s” is now evident: The expensive upgrading of the U.S. nuclear triad, simultaneous modernization efforts across the services, and the constraint of rising government debt are compelling the Pentagon to make tough choices about what it can and cannot pay for.
Workforce shortages and supply chain issues are also limiting shipbuilding capacity. The defense industrial base is still struggling to recover from post-Cold War budget cuts that dramatically shrank U.S. defense manufacturing. The Navy needs more shipyard capacity, but finding enough qualified workers for the yards remains the biggest barrier to expanding production. The shipbuilding industry is struggling to attract talent, losing out to fast food restaurants that offer better pay and benefits for entry-level employees. At bottom, it is a lack of welders, not widgets, that must be overcome if the U.S. Navy is to grow its fleet.
Instead, the shipbuilding outlook is progressively worsening. An internal review ordered by Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro in January found that major programs, including submarines and aircraft carriers, face lengthy delays. Even the Constellation-class frigates, touted as a quick adaptation of a proven European design, are delayed by three years.

The Authoritarians Have the Momentum  (David Brooks, New York Times)
The central struggle in the world right now is between liberalism and authoritarianism. It’s between those of us who believe in democratic values and those who don’t — whether they are pseudo-authoritarian populists like Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Narendra Modi or Recep Tayyip Erdogan or straight-up dictators like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping or theocratic fascists like the men who run Iran and Hamas.
In this contest, we liberals should be wiping the floor with those guys! But we’re not. Trump is leading in the swing states. Modi seems to be on the verge of re-election. Russia and Iran are showing signs of strength.
But why do so many people around the world reject liberalism, and why authoritarianism is on the march?
Liberal societies can seem a little tepid and uninspiring. Liberalism tends to be nonmetaphysical; it avoids the big questions like: Why are we here? Who made the cosmos?
Liberal society can be a little lonely. By putting so much emphasis on individual choice, pure liberalism attenuates social bonds.
When societies become liberal all the way down, they neglect a core truth: For liberal societies to prosper they need to rest on institutions that precede individual choice — families, faiths, attachments to a sacred place. People are not formed by institutions to which they are lightly attached. Their souls and personalities are formed within the primal bonds to this specific family, that specific ethnic culture, this piece of land with its long history to my people, to that specific obedience to the God of my ancestors.
These life-altering attachments are usually not individually chosen. They are usually woven, from birth, into the fabric of people’s being — into their traditions, cultures and sense of personhood.
Worse, liberalism has prompted a counterreaction in our societies. Many people find themselves spiritually unfulfilled; they feel naked, embattled and alone. So they grasp at politics to fill that moral and spiritual void. They grasp at politics to give them the sense of belonging, moral meaning and existential purpose that faith, family, soil and flag provided to their ancestors. In so doing they transform politics from a prosaic way to negotiate differences into a holy war in which my moral side is vindicated and your immoral side is destroyed. Politics begins to play a totalizing and brutalizing role in their personal lives and in our national life. They are asking more of politics than politics can deliver.
The great strength of the authoritarians who oppose liberal principles, from Trump to Xi to Hamas, is that they play straight into the primordial sources of meaning that are deeper than individual preference — faith, family, soil and flag. The authoritarians tell their audiences that the liberals want to take all that is solid — from your morality to your gender — and reduce it to the instability of a personal whim. They tell their throngs that the liberals are threatening their vestigial loyalties. They continue: We need to break the rules in order to defend these sacred bonds. We need a strongman to defend us from social and moral chaos.
Liberal politicians need to find ways to defend liberal institutions while also honoring faith, family and flag and the other loyalties that define the purposes of most people’s lives. I feel that American presidents from, say, Theodore Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan knew how to speak in those terms. We need a 21st-century version of that.

New Immigration Court Plan Aims to Speed Removal of Some New Migrants  (AP / VOA News)
The Biden administration is creating a new process aimed at cutting the time it takes to decide the fates of newly arrived migrants in immigration courts from years to roughly six months at a time when immigration is increasingly a concern among voters.
Under the initiative announced Thursday, single adult migrants who have just entered the country and are going to five specific cities would have their cases overseen by a select group of judges with the aim of having them decided within 180 days.
That would mark a vastly quicker turnaround time than most cases in the country’s overburdened immigration system, which can average four years from beginning to end. And by deciding the cases faster, authorities can more quickly remove people who don’t qualify to stay.
But it’s unclear how many migrants would go through this new docket, raising questions about how effective it will be. The details were laid out by senior administration officials during a call with reporters Thursday. They spoke on condition of anonymity in line with guidelines set by the administration.
The new docket will be in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. The officials said those cities were chosen because judges there had some availability to hear the cases and because they were big destination cities for migrants.

US Arrests American and Ukrainian in North Korea-Linked IT Infiltration Scheme (Reuters / VOA News)
U.S. prosecutors on Thursday announced the arrests of an American woman and a Ukrainian man they say helped North Korea-linked IT workers posing as Americans to obtain remote-work jobs at hundreds of U.S. companies.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said the elaborate scheme, aimed at generating revenue for North Korea in contravention of international sanctions, involved the infiltration of more than 300 U.S. firms, including Fortune 500 companies and banks, and the theft of the identities of more than 60 Americans.
A DoJ statement said the overseas IT workers also attempted to gain employment and access to information at two U.S. government agencies, although these efforts were “generally unsuccessful.”

From Panic to Policy: The Limits of Foreign Propaganda and the Foundations of an Effective Response  (Gavin Wilde, Texas National Security Review)
American leaders and scholars have long feared the prospect that hostile foreign powers could subvert democracy by spreading false, misleading, and inflammatory information by using various media. Drawing on both historical experience and empirical literature, this article argues that such fears may be both misplaced and misguided. The relationship between people’s attitudes and their media consumption remains murky, at best, despite technological advances promising to decode or manipulate it. This limitation extends to foreign foes as well. Policymakers therefore risk becoming pessimistic toward the public and distracted from the domestic, real-world drivers of their confidence in democratic institutions. Policy interventions may also prove detrimental to democratic values like free expression and to the norms that the United States aims to foster in the information environment.

‘Heightened Threat’ of Terrorism During Pride Month 2024, FBI and DHS Warn  (Fox News)
Federal intelligence agencies are warning that this year’s Pride Month may be targets for terrorist organizations.  The FBI and Department of Homeland Security released a public service announcement last week titled, “Foreign Terrorist Organizations and their Supporters Likely Heighten Threat Environment during 2024 Pride Month.” “The FBI and DHS are issuing this Public Service Announcement to provide awareness to the public of foreign terrorist organizations (FTOS) or their supporters potential targeting of LGBTQIA+-related events and venues,” the announcement reads. “Foreign terrorist organizations or supporters may seek to exploit increased gatherings associated with the upcoming June 2024 Pride Month.”

White Supremacist Admits Plot to Destroy Baltimore Power Grid, Cause Mayhem  (Minnah Arshad, USA Today)
A Maryland woman pleaded guilty on Tuesday to plotting to destroy the Baltimore power grid as part of an extremist white supremacist ideology that promotes government collapse. Sarah Beth Clendaniel and Brandon Russell planned to shoot down five Baltimore substations last year in an attempt to shut down the city’s entire power grid and cause widespread mayhem, federal prosecutors said. They inadvertently exposed their operation to federal agents after colluding with an FBI informant, who recorded conversations detailing the plot. “It would probably permanently completely lay this city to waste if we could do that successfully,” Clendaniel told the informant, according to court records. Clendaniel, who pleaded guilty Tuesday, said she wanted to “completely destroy this whole city” and was planning to target five situated in a “ring” around Baltimore, court documents said.

The U.S. Must Offer a Substantive 5G Alternative to China’s Huawei  (Axel de Vernou, National Interest)
To maximize commercial output, encourage economic development, and introduce the newest industrial capabilities, ranging from agriculture to medicine, countries across the world are seeking access to the best information and communication technologies (ICT) that can accelerate economic development and safeguard national security.
Central to this process are fifth-generation mobile networks, or 5G, which promise increased bandwidth, lower latency, greater interconnectivity across platforms, and faster network times. Without domestic 5G providers, Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern, and African countries look abroad to procure and integrate this technology into their economies. Herein lies a great technological power competition between China and the West. If the United States is unable to provide competitive 5G alternatives to the financially attractive offers recently extended by Chinese company Huawei, the West risks losing its technological superiority and credibility to China.
In the same way that the United States has been convincing countries across the globe that Beijing’s increasing penetration into their financial and political institutions fuels its quest to erode freedom within the current rules-based international order, Washington must make the same effort on the technological front. This is ultimately the sphere that will play the most decisive role in shaping countries’ political inclinations, economic development, and educational opportunities. The fundamental challenge, however, lies in demonstrating to these countries that choosing the Chinese path to obtain this technological growth is prejudicial in the long run.