National Security:In the  midst of growing tensions with Iran, the Trump administration announced that it will send an additional 1,000 troops to the Middle East and the President vowed that he will not allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons.

  The new troops will be used for surveillance and to protect troops already in the area.

 President Trump chose this moment to announce on Twitter — out of the blue —that, “Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States. They will be removed as fast as they come in.”

  What this means is not clear because Trump often is not clear or he just contradicts himself. The cost of removing all of the estimated 11.3 million illegal immigrants in the country was estimated back in 2015 at $114 billion and last anyone heard, Congress had not appropriated the money to do it.

 Coincidentally, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a law yesterday granting driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.

Park the Car:Harvard University has revoked admission for Kyle Kashuv, a survivor of the Parkland, Fla. school massacre who became a conservative campaigner for gun rights.

  Kashuv graduated second in his class, with a weighted GPA of 5.345, but Harvard was alerted to some repulsively racist and anti-Semitic internet communications he wrote back when he was 16.

  Despite Kashuv’s explanation that he is sorry and he’s no longer the kid who wrote those things, Harvard invoked its morals and character clause to take back his acceptance.

 Columnist David Brooks wrote in The NY Times  that, “In a sin-drenched world it’s precisely through the sins and the ensuing repentance that moral formation happens. That’s why we try not to judge people by what they did in their worst moment, but rather by how they respond to their worst moment. That’s why we are forgiving of 16-year-olds, because they haven’t disgraced themselves enough to have earned maturity.” 

Sic Semper:Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically-elected president who spent just one year in office before he was ousted in a military coup and sent to prison, collapsed and died during a court hearing.

  The 67-year-old Morsi was a top leader in the now-banned Muslim Brotherhood. He was in court  answering charges of espionage.

  Morsi was convicted in a series of trials on what can charitably be described as shaky charges. The military government wanted him in prison and kept him in solitary confinement.

  But the Muslim Brotherhood is not a society of saints. They were suspected of involvement with the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat. At the time of Morsi’s death, President Trump was working with Egypt’s military government to declare the Brotherhood a terrorist organization.

Facebook Nation: The company that stockpiles your personal information now wants to create its own money and possibly even a separate economy. Facebook announced that it is creating a cryptocurrency to be called Libra in cooperation with 27 partners from Mastercard to Uber.

  The company says Libra could become the foundation for a new financial system not controlled by the banks and Wall Street power brokers. The company would also know what you eat, where you go, and how you spend your money.  

  “It feels like it is time for a better system,” David Marcus, head of Facebook’s blockchain technology research told The NY Times. “This is something that could be a profound change for the entire world.”

 Think about it. The company that prospers by monitoring you on the internet and allowed itself to be used by Russia to sway the 2016 election says it would be good for everyone if you use the financial system they create.

The News Roundup:Four people were wounded yesterday and three arrested after a shooting at a huge outdoor celebration of the Toronto Raptors’ NBA championship. The crowd ran in fright. Police later seized two guns. — In a victory for Virginia Democrats, the Supreme Court let stand a lower court decision throwing out the Congressional district map drawn to favor Republicans. The state will continue to use a map that actually allows Democrats to win  elections in the once Republican-dominated state. — A gunman was shot dead yesterday after opening fire with an assault rifle on the federal courthouse in Dallas. No one else was injured

The Obit Page:Gloria Vanderbilt, the heiress, artist, former model, society girl, and designer who put women in blue jeans, died of cancer at age 95.

  Her son was the CNNanchor Anderson Cooper.

  She came from the Vanderbilt railroad fortune. Given a $2.5 million trust fund as an infant, the shy Vanderbilt was known as America’s little rich girl. She was raised mostly by a nanny.

   Her life was chronicled in the gossip columns. She married at 17 and married three more times. She witnessed the suicide of her son Cooper, who jumped from the window of her Manhattan apartment at age 23.

  In the mid-1970s the clothing manufacturer Mohan Murjani signed Vanderbilt to put her name on a line of fashionably cut blue jeans for women, opening the age of fashion jeans.

  Cooper did an insightful and moving obituary on his mother for CNN.  He said, “I always thought of her has a visitor from another world, a traveler stranded here who had come from a distant star that burned out long ago.”

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