San Bernardino Shooters Radicalized Before Marriage:  FBI Director James Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that the married couple who carried out last week's terrorist attack in San Bernardino that claimed 14 lives "were radicalized for quite a long time," even before their courtship began online.  Richard A. Serrano of the LA Times reports that the new information suggests that the shooters, U.S. citizen Syed Rizwan Farook and his Pakistani wife Tashfeen Malik, began planning a terrorist attack before their engagement and prior to her moving to the U.S. on a fiancée visa in 2014.  The investigation shows that the two were talking to each other about jihad and martyrdom as early as 2013.  A friend of Farook also told authorities that he and an unidentified individual conspired to carry out an attack in 2012 but "got spooked" and abandoned the plan. The FBI investigation also revealed that Farook and Malik may have attempted to alter their semiautomatic weapons to render them more deadly, and that Malik gave an incorrect address in Pakistan on her K-1 visa application as a possible attempt to "hide her family's ties to Islamic militant elements in the Punjab area."  

Obama Admin. Scrambles as Border Surge Continues:  Migration into the U.S. typically remains low through the winter, however, "this year has defied that trend," prompting the Obama administration to implement emergency measures to cope with the continued illegal immigration problem it thought was over.  Stephen Dinan of the Washington Times reports that just two months into the new fiscal year, the number of unaccompanied alien children caught at the border has reached 10,500, more than twice the number at the same point last year.  The number of families - mostly women and children - trying to cross has spiked as well, with over 12,500 people caught, a staggering 173 percent increase over last year.  Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies, says, "What the new arrivals are telling the Border Patrol is that they came because they knew they would be allowed to stay" under President Obama's lenient deportation policies that release them into the U.S. where they can "earn a place in the shadows" while awaiting court dates that take years to come.

House Passes Visa Waiver Reform Bill:  With strong bipartisan support, the House on Tuesday passed a bill imposing new restrictions on a visa waiver program that has welcomed approximately 20 million people into the U.S. each year.  Karoun Demirjian of the Washington Post reports that the bill was approved on a 407 to 19 vote, and aims to increase information sharing between the United States and the 38 countries whose passport-holders are permitted to the visit the country absent a visa.  The measure would require countries participating in the waiver program to issue passports with embedded chips containing biometric data, report information about stolen passports to Interpol and share information about known or suspected terrorists.  Additionally, the House bill would require Syrian and Iraqi nationals and any passport-holder of a waiver country who has traveled to Syria, Iraq, Iran or Sudan since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in March 2011 to "submit to the traditional visa approval process," which compels them to be subject to an in-person interview.  A separate Senate bill, which has not yet been scheduled for a vote, aims to prevent individuals who have traveled to Iraq or Syria from using the program for a total of five years.  Under both measures, the Department of Homeland Security secretary will have the authority to remove countries from the waiver system.