Israel and Iran trade strikes
On Monday, Israel and Iran exchanged military strikes that threaten to escalate the region into a full-scale war. President Donald Trump has repeatedly stressed that negotiations are progressing toward making the April 8 ceasefire agreement permanent. However, occasional defensive strikes have continued, as have Iranian threats to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, effectively shutting down most traffic. Meanwhile, Yemen’s Houthis, an Iranian proxy group, also fired on Israel, warning they would target Israeli ships in the Red Sea next. Trump posted, “Israel and Iran must immediately stop ‘shooting.’” Iran responded by stating that it was halting its offensive operations against Israel, but warned it would retaliate if Israel struck again.

Progress on the border wall
President Trump’s promise to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico “and make Mexico pay for it” didn’t come to fruition in his first term. However, while Mexico still isn’t paying for it, the wall is finally being built. Democrats ensured that little to no progress was ever made in Trump’s first term. After taking office, Joe Biden stopped construction and sold already acquired materials for pennies on the dollar, even suing border states for erecting their own barriers. After Biden let in untold millions of illegals and proved the danger, Trump secured more support in his second term. The Big Beautiful Bill last year included $46 billion for a “smart wall” that includes detection technology. Roughly 221 miles of smart wall are currently under construction, with design for 370 more miles underway. Five miles of wall is erected a week.

New Jersey’s illegal alien legal fund
Patriot Post readers won’t be surprised to hear that leftists don’t believe in the Rule of Law or sovereign nations. New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill demonstrated her complete disregard for American citizens on Thursday when her administration announced a $12 million increase in funding for the Garden State’s Detention Deportation Defense Initiative. The DDDI intends to fight the Trump administration over each and every illegal immigrant in the state. New Jersey’s Rapid Legal Response Initiative is being led by the Human Services’ Office of New Americans to provide emergency legal defense for illegals. Of course, the government website refers to the people subject to deportation as merely “immigrants” or as “new Americans,” highlighting the leftist belief that the definition of American is someone standing on U.S. soil. The DDDI’s total funding has now reached over $20 million.

Scott Pelley’s delusional NYT interview
After being fired for cause, “60 Minutes” personality Scott Pelley wasted no time before going from interviewer to interviewee. On Sunday, The New York Times released an hour-long interview with Pelley, who demonstrated his failure as a journalist. “Some reporter I turned out to be. I just didn’t connect the dots,” Pelley said of his firing after he publicly bashed the new leadership of “60 Minutes” and accused them of “murdering” the show. Pelley further outlined his own failure to read the room: After Bari Weiss asked staffers why the country believes them to be biased, his response was, “What are you talking about?” Perhaps Pelley should have spoken to a conservative in the last decade. His least self-aware statement came when he further criticized Weiss’s leadership, claiming, “There’s a subtle political bias that I’ve never seen at ‘60 Minutes’ before.”

Trump admin looking to overhaul Big Tech school subsidies
The Federal Communications Commission recently announced that it will look into “the surge in screen time” in America’s classrooms and the role Big Tech has played in this increase. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr noted that, due to the excessive number of devices in America’s public schools, students are losing roughly 38 minutes of every hour to “digital distractions.” In light of this, Carr stated, “We will take a top-to-bottom review of the program and ensure it is supporting the types of good educational outcomes that Congress had in mind when it started the program 30 years ago.” That program is the FCC’s E-Rate, which funds public schools’ and libraries’ internet connectivity nationwide, totaling $2.5 billion annually. In response to the growing problem of distraction, a number of school districts have begun implementing policies prohibiting cellphones in classrooms.

American nonprofit frees Christian slaves in Pakistan
Last year, Aaron Hutchings, a Christian from Idaho, traveled to Pakistan, where he witnessed families of enslaved Christians laboring to make bricks. In Pakistan, Christians are second-class citizens; as such, they often find themselves in dire financial situations and end up caught in bonded labor designed to keep them enslaved. An estimated one million, or roughly 30% of Pakistan’s Christian population, are enslaved. Hutchings paid off the debt of two enslaved families, freeing them and breaking the “curse that they’ve had for hundreds of years.” Another Christian, Emmanuel Hernandez, founded Project Jubilee last year after traveling to Pakistan and seeing the slavery problem. Hernandez says his nonprofit’s mission is to rescue at least one family a year for the rest of his life. Thus far, Project Jubilee has rescued 300 Pakistanis out of slavery.

Headlines

• Walz administration ignored fraud warnings as billions vanished, House oversight report alleges (Fox News)

• Homan accuses Democrats of lying about Delaney Hall conditions (Fox News)

• Trump pardons ex-GOP lawmaker convicted in insider trading scheme (The Hill)

• Federal judge pauses SNAP restrictions (Washington Times)

The Executive News Summary is compiled daily by Jordan Candler, Thomas Gallatin, Sterling Henry, and Sophie Starkova. For the archive, click here.