[Politico] A State Department watchdog concluded that Hillary Clinton failed to comply with the agency’s policies on records while using a personal email server that was not approved by agency officials, according to a report released to lawmakers on Wednesday.
The long-awaited findings from the agency's inspector general, which also revealed Clinton expressing reluctance about using an official email account, even as it confirmed apparent hacking attempts on her private server, were shared with Capitol Hill Wednesday, a copy of which was obtained by POLITICO.
It's the latest turn in the headache-inducing saga that has dogged Clinton's campaign. While the report concludes that the agency suffers from "longstanding, systemic weaknesses" with records that "go well beyond the tenure of any one Secretary of State," it specifically dings Clinton for her exclusive use of private email during her four years at the agency. Judge Nap sez this could be very bad juju for the Beest. Bernie likely won't use it but the Donald will...
Posted by: Donald Trump ||
05/25/2016 14:35 ||
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[PJ Media] At least one shot has been fired at a Donald Trump rally in New Mexico. Reports came in late Tuesday night after violence punctuated the campaign event at a convention center in Albuquerque.
According to Fox News, a bullet was fired, shattering a glass window at the venue where the rally was held. The shot was the most dramatic act of violence related to the event, but hardly the only one. Police deployed tear gas and other counter-measures as protesters persisted in attempts to break into the convention center.
#1
Can't find any validation to gun fire at the rally. Then again it might be hard to determine if any was related to the rally or just another night in downtown (and environs). Ye haw, welcome to the wild west.
Some of the protesters got unruly, causing damage and clashing with police. Fights broke out on the streets, rioters clashed with law enforcement...According to APD, every police officer that responded to the violent protest was hit with rocks or debris. Six officers suffered significant injuries to the face, nose, arms and legs after being pummeled with fist-sized rocks.
A prominent Saudi cleric has declared photographs with cats, and other animals, unless completely necessary due to an upsurge in Saudis "who want to be like Westerners."
On a televised broadcast, Sheikh Saleh Bin Fawzan Al-Fazwan, a member of the Saudi Council of Senior Scholars, was told about "a new trend of taking pictures with cats has been spreading among people who want to be like Westerners."
He replied: "What?! What do you mean pictures with cats? Taking pictures is prohibited. The cats don't matter here."
The sheikh continued: "Taking pictures is prohibited if not for a necessity. Not with cats, not with dogs, not with wolves, not with anything." Apparently ISIS and the Taliban didn't get the meow memo
Footage of the televised broadcast was published on YouTube on April 17 and translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute monitoring group.
Under the country's strict, ultraconservative brand of Islam, known as Wahhabism, many things that are normal in Western daily life are outlawed. In January, Saudi Arabia's grand mufti allegedly ruled that chess is forbidden in the kingdom as it encourages gambling. Sheikh Abdulaziz al-Sheikh said that chess was "a waste of time and money and a cause for hatred and enmity between players."
Another game to be banned in the country is the Pokemon franchise, with the grand mufti saying that it promoted other religions, such as Christianity or Judaism because of the crosses or the Jewish Star of David that were displayed on the cards.
[FRANCE24] Two people who say they are heirs to pop icon Prince have objected to a proposal by his estate to ask for genetic tests. Sez here you have objections? No problem. Step to the back of the line please.
Prince died on April 21 without a will and with no recognized children, leaving a giant question mark on an estate that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars and includes a vast vault of unreleased material.
Bremer Trust, a special administrator assigned to manage Prince's estate, said last week that it may wish to ask people claiming to be the "Purple Rain" star's descendants to undergo and pay for genetic tests.
In a legal filing made public Tuesday, two people who recently came forward as heirs said that they had already offered sufficient proof under law of their relationship to Prince in his home state of Minnesota.
The proposal by Bremer Trust would "grant it complete unfettered discretion to determine when to require parties claiming genetic relationship" to Prince to undergo tests, the filing said.
The objection was filed by Brianna Nelson, who says she is the sole living child of Prince's late half-brother Duane Nelson, and the guardian of an 11-year-old said to be the daughter of Duane Nelson's son, who has also died.
Duane Nelson had headed security for Prince but later became estranged. He died in 2011.
Another person who claims to be Prince's heir is Carlin Williams, a 39-year-old inmate from Kansas City whose mother says she had sex with the rocker in a hotel in 1976.
The court in Carver County, Minnesota, where Prince maintained his Paisley Park estate, has set a June 27 hearing to examine the proposal for genetic testing.
Posted by: Fred ||
05/25/2016 00:00 ||
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I don't see the problem here. Courts routinely find that a man who is not genetically related to a chile that the baby mama says is his still has to pay child support. Why can't that work in this instance too? /snark
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
05/25/2016 23:07 Comments ||
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[WAPO] In a country still deeply riven by division over differences -- in race, class, political affiliation and more -- it is Mpho Tutu's "sameness" to her new wife that has created a stir. The Anglican church apparently still has standards.
Tutu (now Tutu-Van Furth) is the daughter of South Africa's first black archbishop and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and is really only the "same" as her wife in one way -- they are both women. But in almost every other imaginable way, they are different. Tutu is black, South African, a devout priest and, as she puts it, "vertically challenged." Marceline Tutu-Van Furth is lanky, Dutch, atheist and a professor of pediatric diseases in Amsterdam.
South Africa's Anglican church, where Tutu-Van Furth until recently practiced as a priest, isn't ready to accept those with alternative sexualities as members of its clergy. Tutu-Van Furth was ordained at the Historic Christ Church in Alexandria, Va., and since the Episcopal Church, the U.S.-based branch of the Anglican Communion, accepts priests who have entered into same-sex marriages, she can still practice in the United States.
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] UAE residents have taken to social media to demand their anger and shock of the recent killing of a seven-year-old in Sharjah, with some calling for the public execution of his murderer.
The body of Obaida Ibrahim al-Aqrabawi was discovered in the Al Warqa area of Dubai on Sunday after missing for two days. He was last seen playing outside his home in the Industrial Area of Sharjah.
Jordanian Nedal Issa Abdullah, 48, has been placed in durance vile Drop the gat, Rocky, or you're a dead 'un! on suspicion of raping and killing Obaida. Police said he has admitted the crime but as yet, has not stood trial.
Dubai Police Chief Major General Khamis Al Muzeina said the child was kidnapped from in front of a garage in Sharjah’s industrial area, where the boy’s father worked.
"The forensics doctor said that the boy had been dead for less than 24 hours and had been strangled," said Maj Gen Al Muzeina. "There were signs of struggle on the boy’s chest and hands as well as signs that he had been sexually assaulted.
The maximum penalty for murder is execution by firing squad.
On Monday, a hashtag titled ’execute Obaida’s killer in public’ was trending on Twitter and had been seen by almost one million users, according to tweetreach.com, reported UAE daily newspaper 7days.
Posted by: Fred ||
05/25/2016 00:00 ||
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[Observer] Last weekend, in the latest development in the secret espionage struggle between Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin and the West, a major Russian spy was arrested in Italy. On Saturday, Carvalhão Gil, a senior intelligence official from Portugal, was picked up by Italian police along with his Russian intelligence handler, whom he was meeting clandestinely in Rome.
Although Portugal is hardly a big player in the global spy game, it has been a member of the Atlantic Alliance since its founding in 1949, and Lisbon’s intelligence services are full members of the West’s secret spy network. Finding a mole like Mr. Carvalhão in any NATO security service is a serious matter for the whole alliance.
A career intelligence officer, the 57-year-old Mr. Carvalhão, who went into the espionage business in the late 1980s, had risen to the senior ranks of Portugal’s domestic spy agency, the Security Intelligence Service--SIS for short. He is a division chief in that service, according to Portuguese press reports, what SIS terms an area director. Mr. Carvalhão previous assignments have included operational work in counterintelligence and counterterrorism. A philosophy graduate, the suspected traitor is described as highly intelligent--an intellectual. It’s evident Mr. Carvalhão had access to a wide array of NATO secrets thanks to his official position.
Portuguese intelligence suspected it had a mole for some time, and a secret hunt for the turncoat commenced in 2014. With help from spy partners, including the CIA, Lisbon developed a list of suspects. Mr. Carvalhão was high on that list, not least because of his open affection for all things Eastern European, which he made plain on his Facebook page. Money, Italian cuisine, RU pu***, Facebook, the usual incentives.
[IsraelTimes] Citing anti-discrimination laws, special court says local boycott efforts ’jeopardize the fundamental right to equality’
Citing anti-discrimination laws, a Spanish constitutional tribunal recommended scrapping a municipality’s motion calling for a boycott against Israel.
The Ministerio Fiscal, an advisory judicial authority charged with guaranteeing equality in the judiciary, made the recommendation this month, according to a statement by ACOM, a Spanish pro-Israel lobby. The recommendation came after ACOM sued the northern municipality of Gijon for declaring itself "a space free of Israeli apartheid."
The motion, passed in January, also said the city would not pay for the services of firms implicated in "human rights ...which are usually entirely different from personal liberty... violations" in Paleostinian territories. It said the city supports the BDS movement, which calls for boycotts, sanctions and divestment against Israel. Gijon, a city of 270,000 residents, is located 290 miles north of Madrid.
But the Ministerio Fiscal said in its nonbinding recommendation that the objectives of Gijon’s boycott "violate the constitution as well as the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights." The motion’s clauses, according to the tribunal, "jeopardize the fundamental right to equality without discrimination on the bases of appearance, ethnicity and religion."
A motion similar to the one passed in Gijon was defeated last week by a majority of delegates in Tarragona, an eastern Spanish city with 130,000 residents. Tarragona is the fifth Spanish municipality where BDS motions have failed in recent weeks, while motions supporting an Israel boycott have passed in four Spanish municipalities.
Spain’s government has repeatedly expressed its opposition to BDS, which is illegal in neighboring La Belle France because it is deemed discriminatory. Britannia’s ruling party is formulating similar legislation, officials said earlier this year.
Long seen as a hub of anti-Israeli lobbying in Europe, Spain has recently taken actions that angered BDS promoters, including a January offer of $107,000 in compensation for damages caused to an Israeli West Bank university due to its exclusion from a scientific competition for political reasons.
Unlike the parliaments of Britannia, La Belle France and other European countries, which have pledged unconditional support for Paleostinian statehood, Spain’s Congress in 2014 passed a nonbinding motion saying it would only support a Paleostinian state reached by a peace agreement through talks with Israel ‐ language that was hailed as a diplomatic victory for Israel and its supporters.
[Al Ahram] Swiss financial regulators approved Tuesday the dissolution of Lugano-based BSI Bank over its links to a corruption scandal engulfing Malaysia's Prime Minister Najib Razak.
Swiss supervisor FINMA accused BSI, a merchant bank, of "serious breaches" of money-laundering regulations in its dealings with the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund 1MDB, which is at the heart of the corruption allegations.
In the toughest punitive action yet announced in the affair, FINMA said in a statement it was approving the takeover of the merchant bank by Zurich-based private banking group
EFG International on the condition that BSI is integrated "and thereafter dissolved" within 12 months.
Posted by: Fred ||
05/25/2016 00:00 ||
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Lugano was the home of Al Taqwa, the Muslim Brotherhood's piggy bank. Lugano was, and remains, a cesspool.
Four Latino families filed papers to sue their Virginia landlord Monday after he threatened eviction due to illegal family members living on the premises. Hopefully they will have to pay their own legal bills after they hopefully lose.
The civil rights lawsuit filed by families living in Waples Mobile Home Park in Fairfax County, Va., claims it is discriminatory to require a social security number for residency. The landlords at the mobile home park are requiring residents to provide either a social security card, passport or valid visa with documentation to renew their leases, reports The Washington Post.
The lawyers representing the families, from the Legal Aid Justice Center (LAJC) and Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan law firm, say the actions are targeted discrimination that disproportionately affects lawbreakers Latinos in the community. All the families involved in the lawsuit have lived in the park for at least two years and have at least one family member without legal residency. The landlords say they need the documentation in order to conduct proper criminal background checks.
The suit filed in the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia says the requirement violates the Fair Housing Act and the Virginia Fair Housing law, according to WJLA.
h/t Instapundit
Sixty-five heads of state and governments, along with thousands of aid workers, politicians, civil society members journalists and celebrities, descended on Istanbul this week for the first-ever World Humanitarian Summit.
The U.N. sponsored the two-day summit hoping the high-level meetings could help jumpstart, or even fix, the world’s struggling aid system. But leaders from some of the world’s wealthiest countries were nowhere to be seen. Only one out of the "Group of Seven" member states, who together made up nearly half of the global GDP last year, attended.
Angela Merkel was the only G-7 leader to show, most likely because she would like to avoid almost everything that's going on for her back at home. I wouldn't be surprised to find her at the grand opening of a petting zoo in Reykjavik next week.
There is also the fact that holding a "humanitarian summit" in Turkey to address the Syrian refugee crisis is a bit like having a college cheerleader abstinence camp in Bill Clinton's hot tub.
#4
A pleasant way for the conference participants to feed money into the faltering Turkish economy.
Was it held at the new presidential palace? Most of it sits empty most of the time -- it would be nice if the taxpayers got any return on their unwilling investment.
And it's one giving the entire "progressive humanity" a collective indigestion.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday welcomed Bayit Yehudi leader Avidgor Liberman into the governing coalition as Defense Minister, vowing that Israel remains committed to reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinians. We believe in Peace. What we don't believe in is cultural centrism = believing other People share our worldview. We'll just have to use a mode of communication that Palestinians can understand.
#3
Of course it's giving progressive humanity indigestion. They worked for months to bully Prime Minister Netanyahu into hooking up with Labour's Herzog instead:
Om May 24th, the Assembly of Experts elected Ahmad Jannati, the best-known hardliner in its ranks, to run the influential governing body. Fifty-one out of 86 members voted in his favor. Most important among the Assembly’s responsibilities is selection of the Islamic Republic’s next supreme leader. With almost 60 percent of the vote in Jannati’s favor, hardliners have demonstrated that they command considerable power in the new assembly, which was elected in February 2016.
Ahmad Jannati's success this time shows hardliners’ determination to rebuild their powerbase after a lackluster performance in recent parliamentary elections. It could also signal greater organization among hardliners, and more widespread support for hardliner agendas across the assembly in general. On the other hand, in the elections, Jannati was a candidate representing Tehran, which has 16 representatives in the Assembly. He squeaked through with the lowest number of votes among the 16 candidates.
Jannati’s election is also a mark of political vengeance against Hashemi Rafsanjani. When senior hardliner figures Mohammad Yazdi and Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah Yazdi failed to get re-elected to the assembly, Rafsanjani and his allies did little to suppress their joy — so today’s victory for hardliners will come as a bitter blow, with the prospect of future political battles clearly set out.
Hardliners suffered humiliating defeats in both parliamentary and assembly elections in February, with moderates closely connected to both President Hassan Rouhani’s administration and Hashemi Rafsanjani shifting the power balance away from hardliner agendas. But with Jannati’s win, the balance of power has once again shifted.
The election of the chairman of the assembly, however, is not a purely internal affair. External political lobbies play an important part, and regularly pressure members of the assembly to vote in a way that will benefit them. Again, the success achieved by such lobbies demonstrates greater organization on the part of hardliners.
Jannati’s election to the presidency, and the hardliner victory it represents, does not mean hardliners will necessarily have a dominant voice when it comes to selecting the next supreme leader when the time comes. After all, members of the assembly are highly prone to pressure from political groups, and from members of Iran’s military and security establishments, and are liable to change their positions.
But Jannati’s victory is a clear reminder that hardliners have no intention of backing down on the fight against reformists and moderates. They may have suffered a terrible blow earlier this year, but they have more than enough ammunition to continue the battle.
Posted by: Pappy ||
05/25/2016 00:09 ||
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where's Obama's Kerry's and Rhodes' "moderates"?
Posted by: Frank G ||
05/25/2016 15:11 Comments ||
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[Defense One] Tampa, Fla. -- Getting "left of bang" in a ready position to deal with new threats in their early stages is the most important challenge for the future of U.S. special operations forces, according to their new commander, Gen. Raymond "Tony" Thomas.
The little-known Army Ranger, new to the 4-star spotlight atop U.S. Special Operations Command, sees America’s elite troops transforming from a reactive to a proactive force, one that operates globally, but still with a light footprint. Thomas’s vision is a force that is predictively employed, rather than reactively deployed. "It is in the area of left of bang where we must strive to be more relevant in the future," he said.
Thomas has been working counterterrorism operations for most of his career. He led the first Ranger contingent into Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks and in 2008 reportedly survived a bomb attack on his vehicle while conducting operations in Mosul, Iraq.
Today, the 1980 West Point graduate is looking to expand SOF’s global presence with more forward access into more countries, operating more continuously with partner governments and militaries.
"Left of bang is less a technological approach than a people-access approach: being there ahead of time, having relationships there ahead of time, identifying problems before they become crises, developing that partner capacity, prior, not after, a response. We are too often on the other side of that," Thomas said Tuesday, at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Special Operations Forces Industry Conference, or SOFIC, in Tampa.
Posted by: Donald Trump ||
05/25/2016 14:52 ||
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[Wash Times] Homeland Security can't find a single record of a request to fly drones to help the Coast Guard, the agency said this week in a letter to a top member of Congress -- an admission that's likely to add fuel to the guard's request for its own fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles.
R. Gil Kerlikowske, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, said his agency's Air and Marine office records all requests, but for some reason it "could not locate any prior requests from the USCG" for unmanned aerial surveillance flights.
For Rep. Duncan Hunter, California Republican and chairman of a subcommittee that oversees the Coast Guard, the admission was the latest signal that the border agency isn't treating its colleagues in the guard fairly.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Politico] A State Department watchdog concluded that Hillary Clinton failed to comply with the agency’s policies on records while using a personal email server that was not approved by agency officials, according to a report released to lawmakers on Wednesday.
A prominent Saudi cleric has declared photographs with cats, and other animals, unless completely necessary due to an upsurge in Saudis "who want to be like Westerners."
[Observer] Last weekend, in the latest development in the secret espionage struggle between Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin and the West, a major Russian spy was arrested in Italy. On Saturday, Carvalhão Gil, a senior intelligence official from Portugal, was picked up by Italian police along with his Russian intelligence handler, whom he was meeting clandestinely in Rome.
I hope to get along well with Mr. Putin. Perhaps some sort of deal or trade can be worked out. 
[Al Ahram] Swiss financial regulators approved Tuesday the dissolution of Lugano-based BSI Bank over its links to a corruption scandal engulfing Malaysia's Prime Minister Najib Razak.
Four Latino families filed papers to sue their Virginia landlord Monday after he threatened eviction due to illegal family members living on the premises.
[Defense One] Tampa, Fla. -- Getting "left of bang" in a ready position to deal with new threats in their early stages is the most important challenge for the future of U.S. special operations forces, according to their new commander, Gen. Raymond "Tony" Thomas.
