Cole Tomas Allen, the thirty-one-year-old California man accused of opening fire outside the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on Saturday evening, is expected to appear in federal court today. Allen, from Torrance, California, worked part-time as a teacher and had a degree in mechanical engineering, NPR reported.
He was armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives when he rushed a security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton and ran toward the ballroom where the dinner was underway, NBC News reported. He exchanged gunfire with law enforcement and was tackled to the ground. A Secret Service agent wearing an armored vest was struck in the chest and suffered non-life-threatening injuries.
In a note sent to family members approximately ten minutes before the attack, Allen described himself as a “friendly federal assassin” and wrote that he intended to target administration officials, the Washington Post reported. U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., Jeanine Pirro said he would be charged with two counts of using a firearm during a crime of violence and assault on a federal officer using a dangerous weapon. “This individual was intent on doing as much harm and as much damage as he could,” Pirro said, NBC News reported.
President Trump, who was evacuated from the ballroom by Secret Service, held a press conference Saturday evening. He described Allen as a “very sick person” and said the agent who was shot was “doing great,” CNBC reported. “Today, we need levels of security that probably nobody has ever seen before,” the president said, PBS News reported.
The Washington Hilton has been one of the most heavily secured event venues in the capital since March 30, 1981, when John Hinckley Jr. shot President Ronald Reagan outside its T Street entrance. Reagan had just finished a speech to a labor conference. Press Secretary James Brady was permanently disabled in the attack. The hotel added bulletproof barriers and expanded security perimeters afterward. Forty-five years later, Saturday’s shooting happened at the same building.
King Charles III and Queen Camilla arrive in Washington today for a four-day state visit, CNN reported. The visit marks the 250th anniversary of American independence from Britain. It is the first state visit by a British monarch since Queen Elizabeth II was hosted by President George W. Bush in May 2007, nineteen years ago.
The itinerary includes a state arrival ceremony on the South Lawn Tuesday morning with a 21-gun salute, a state banquet at the White House that evening, and an address to a joint meeting of Congress, Al Jazeera reported. The congressional address will be the first by a British monarch since Queen Elizabeth spoke to both chambers on May 16, 1991. In New York, the King and Queen will visit the September 11 Memorial and a community project in Harlem.
The visit proceeds despite Saturday’s shooting. Buckingham Palace confirmed the schedule wouldn’t change after discussions with U.S. officials, the Boston Globe reported. It comes at a tense moment in the transatlantic relationship, with public differences between the two governments over the war with Iran, NPR reported.
Iran has sent the United States a new proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end hostilities, with nuclear negotiations deferred to a later stage, Axios reported. The proposal was conveyed through Pakistani mediators after Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi held talks in Islamabad and Muscat over the weekend.
Under the terms, a ceasefire and reopening of the strait would come first. Nuclear talks would begin only after the blockade was lifted and sanctions pressure eased.
White House spokesperson Olivia Wales told Axios: “As the president has said, the United States holds the cards and will only make a deal that puts the American people first, never allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”
The strait has been closed since late February. Oil remains above $100 a barrel. Global shipping has been rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope, adding weeks and cost to supply chains that were already strained. The last time the waterway faced a comparable disruption was during the Tanker War of 1987-1988, when Iran mined the passage during the Iran-Iraq conflict and the United States launched Operation Earnest Will to escort Kuwaiti tankers through the Gulf. That crisis lasted fourteen months. The current one is now in its third.
A bomb detonated on the Pan-American Highway in southwestern Colombia on Saturday, killing twenty people and injuring at least thirty-six, the Washington Post reported. The device struck a bus traveling through the municipality of Cajibio in the Cauca department. Fifteen women and five men were killed. Five children were among the injured.
President Gustavo Petro blamed the attack on FARC dissident factions commanded by a man known by the alias Ivan Mordisco. Petro called for “the maximum worldwide pursuit against this narco-terrorist group,” CNN reported. Colombian military officials reported twenty-six separate attacks across two departments in the forty-eight hours surrounding the bombing.
The violence comes one month before Colombia’s presidential election on May 31. In November 2016, the Colombian government and the FARC signed a peace agreement that ended a fifty-two-year civil war. Mordisco’s faction rejected the deal and continued fighting. The Cauca department, where Saturday’s bomb detonated, was among the regions where the peace was supposed to hold.
The House Rules Committee meets today to set terms for floor debate on H.R. 7567, the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026, the committee announced. The bill reauthorizes Department of Agriculture programs through fiscal year 2031 and passed the House Agriculture Committee on March 5 with a bipartisan vote of 34 to 17, the National Association of Counties reported.
The farm bill has been renewed on roughly a five-year cycle since the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. The most recent authorization, the 2018 farm bill, expired on September 30, 2023. Congress has operated under extensions for more than two and a half years. If the current bill reaches the floor this week, it will be the first new farm bill in eight years. It covers commodity support, conservation, crop insurance, and the food assistance programs that serve tens of millions of Americans. It doesn’t generate headlines. It determines how the country feeds itself.
And at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, engineers have printed artificial neurons that can talk to living brain cells.
The team, led by materials scientist Mark Hersam, used nanoscale inks made from molybdenum disulfide and graphene, deposited onto flexible surfaces through a technique called aerosol jet printing. In experiments using slices of mouse brain tissue, the printed neurons generated electrical signals that successfully triggered responses in real neurons, Northwestern University reported. The study was published April 15 in Nature Nanotechnology.
The devices are flexible, inexpensive to produce, and built from materials that don’t harm living tissue. The potential applications include implants for hearing, vision, and movement. Machines that speak directly to the nervous system, built on a printer.
It is Monday. A man who opened fire at a dinner the president was attending will face a judge today. A king is arriving to celebrate the anniversary of the revolution his country lost. A strait that carries a fifth of the world’s oil is still closed, and there is a new piece of paper proposing it reopen. And in a laboratory in Illinois, someone printed a neuron on a strip of polymer, set it against a slice of mouse brain, and watched it fire. That’s the day.
