[Free Beacon] An ongoing staffing purge being conducted by White House National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster has thrown the West Wing into chaos, according to more than half a dozen Trump administration insiders who told the Washington Free Beacon that McMaster has been targeting long-time Trump loyalists who were clashing with career government staffers and holdovers from the Obama administration.
The purge is part of a larger drama unfolding inside the administration, between veteran Trump staffers committed to the president's campaign vision of "draining the swamp"’ in Washington and entrenched bureaucracies seeking to maintain control over policy decision-making, according to these sources, who said that many of these actions against his supporters are being conducted without Trump's knowledge.
The Trump staffers fired by McMaster had repeatedly clashed with career government staffers and holdovers from the Obama administration on issues as diverse as military strategies for Syria and Afghanistan, whether to tear up Obama's landmark Iran deal, the controversial détente with Cuba, the U.S. role in confronting Islamic radicalism, and the Paris Climate Accord, according to these sources.
More purges are said to be on the way, according to multiple insiders who described a list of at least four other senior NSC officials McMaster intends to target. Other sources confirmed the likelihood of more purges, but disputed some details on that list.
"McMaster basically has this list and over the next two weeks he's going to phase out" more senior officials loyal to Trump, said one administration insider intimately familiar with the upheaval occurring at the White House National Security Council. "They're taking out people who were chosen to best implement the president's policy that he articulated during the campaign."
[Breitbart] President Donald Trump’s National Security adviser H.R. McMaster allowed former President Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice to maintain her security clearance to access classified information -- despite reservations Trump had about her motives.
McMaster sent an official letter to Rice informing her that she would maintain unfettered access to classified information, according to a report from Circa’s Sara Carter.
The president was not aware of his actions, according to two senior White House officials and an intelligence official.
[Daily Caller] Special Counsel Robert Mueller has impaneled a grand jury in Washington, D.C., in connection with his ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday the panel began its work in recent weeks. Grand juries are seated to assess the validity of an accusation brought by prosecutors in advance of an indictment. Though the primary task of a grand jury is to issue an indictment, they also allow prosecutors to subpoena documents and question witnesses under oath.
Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer coordinating the administration’s response to Mueller’s probe, expressed hope the development would accelerate the conclusion of the investigation.
"Grand jury matters are typically secret," Cobb told the Journal. "The White House favors anything that accelerates the conclusion of his work fairly."
"The White House is committed to fully cooperating with Mr. Mueller," he added.
The probe is apparently separate from the grand jury that was empaneled in Alexandria, Va., in connection with the investigation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. This suggests the probe has expanded to include other individuals, and that a single grand jury does not have the capacity to evaluate all the evidence Mueller’s office has marshaled.
Half of the eight mayoral hopefuls on Detroit's primary ballot next week have been convicted of felony crimes involving drugs, assault or weapons, a Detroit News analysis shows.
Three were charged with gun crimes and two for assault with intent to commit murder. Some of the offenses date back decades, the earliest to 1977. The most recent was in 2008.
Political consultant Greg Bowens said there are candidates with past hardships in every election cycle. It's not something unique to Detroit or the political arena in general, he said.
"Black marks on your record show you have lived a little and have overcome some challenges," said Bowens, a former press secretary to Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer and NAACP activist. "They (candidates) deserve the opportunity to be heard, but they also deserve to have the kind of scrutiny that comes along with trying to get an important elected position."
Tuesday's Detroit mayoral primary election is the first since the city exited bankruptcy in 2014. The field of eight will be narrowed to two who will face off in the fall.
Under state election law, convicted felons can vote and run for office as long as they are not incarcerated or guilty of certain fraud-related offenses, or crimes involving a breach of the public trust. The Detroit News reviewed the backgrounds of all the mayoral contenders.
Posted by: Frank G ||
08/03/2017
11:24 ||
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[Miami Herald] Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has ordered his department to redefine its mission and issue a new statement of purpose to the world. The draft statements under review right now are similar to the old mission statement, except for one thing -- any mention of promoting democracy is being eliminated.
According to an internal email that went out Friday, which I obtained, the State Department’s Executive Steering Committee convened a meeting of leaders to draft new statements on the department’s purpose, mission and ambition, as part of the overall reorganization of the State Department and USAID. (The draft statements were being circulated for comment Friday and could change before being finalized.)
▪ The State Department’s draft statement on its purpose is: "We promote the security, prosperity and interests of the American people globally."
▪ The State Department’s draft statement on its mission is: "Lead America’s foreign policy through global advocacy, action and assistance to shape a safer, more prosperous world."
#2
Yup. If a thing is good, it will sell itself. Consider a gift, if you want it.
And please don't try bring all the people from other cultures here, who don't give a fig about our democracy and who want to corrupt and change our democracy. Screw that part of diversity--it is a failed concept.
#3
Democracy = middle class (and bureaucrats =/= middle class). So, given the beating USA middle class been taking in the last decades, one should concentrate on promoting democracy in USA - which, the vulgar choice of the bourgeoisie appears to be doing (to the extent that the better classes controlling the mandarinate allow).
#4
"Lead America’s foreign policy through global advocacy, action and assistance to shape a safer, more prosperous world."
Pure Globalism. Promoting Democracy not mentioned because democracy is not their goal for anyone. Oligarchic technocracy is their goal, a form of theocracy. That is why they do not mention democracy.
State, including T-Rex, is fighting to silence Trump's electorate:
[Miami Herald] The Trump administration revealed it had canceled a CIA program to provide Syrian rebels with arms and training in July -- and I’ll give you three guesses as to how the story got framed. If you went with "misleading insinuations over Russia," you are correct. The Washington Post, which broke the news, ran with the headline: "Trump ends covert CIA program to arm anti-Assad rebels in Syria, a move sought by Moscow." An anonymous quote in the story -- "Putin won in Syria" -- got traction online, in print and on TV.
It was a sloppy conflation: Policy that coincides with Moscow’s aims is not the same as policy meant to serve Moscow. In this case, there’s no evidence that President Trump was acting under the thrall of Vladimir Putin. More likely the president axed the CIA initiative because -- as many of us have been warning since long before Russia sent its military to Syria -- it wasn’t working. Additionally, it constituted an unwise intervention in the Syrian civil war, which holds little interest and no good options for the United States.
From the start, American weapons shipments had a curious habit of ending up in the hands of al Qaida and Islamic State fighters. Among numerous examples, the Pentagon admitted in 2015 that U.S.-trained Syrian rebels had voluntarily forked over their American-provided equipment, including half a dozen pickups, to the al Qaida offshoot Nusra Front. Islamic State soldiers have been documented running around with our anti-tank missiles. Even early on, when training and arms efforts were being carried out through the Saudis and Qataris, one U.S. official admitted, "The opposition groups that are receiving the most of the lethal aid are exactly the ones we don’t want to have it."
More recently, even Charles Lister, an ardent supporter of the Syrian rebellion, has estimated that 10 percent to 15 percent of American equipment was lost to al Qaida and Islamic State.
[US News] The majority of America's Muslims say they are worried by U.S. President Donald Trump and harbor a great concern about their place in U.S. society.
Still, new data suggests most are holding on to their belief in the American dream.
The latest survey of Muslims in America from the Pew Research Center finds 68 percent of U.S. Muslims say Trump makes them feel worried, compared to 60 percent of the general public that said it feels the same. Just more than a quarter of the those surveyed said the president makes them hopeful, and even less say Trump makes them happy.
About 3 in 4 Muslims told surveyors that Trump is unfriendly toward the religious group ‐ a noticeable shift from 2011, when only 27 percent of Muslims in the U.S. said former President Barack Obama was unfriendly toward them.
The worry fits into a wider sense of uncertainty among members of the religious group, two-thirds of whom said they perceive "a lot of discrimination" against Muslims in America.
Half of America's Muslims said being Muslim in the U.S. has gotten more difficult in recent years, a number that has remained fairly constant over the past 10 years, according to Pew.
#1
Having visited many, I would be equally as "concerned" about my "place" in Yemen, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, Pakistan, but perhaps I simply don't BELONG there.
#4
The majority of America's Muslims say they are worried by U.S. President Donald Trump and harbor a great concern about their place in U.S. society.
We don't want to be overrun by Muslims in this country. We don't want to be dictated to. Those who are already here, shouldn't have to worry about their place in American society if they assimilate and obey our laws.
#8
Should ask them what they think their place in society should be. Then we might discover they think their place is society is to rule over the rest of us. So if they're worried about that it's a good thing.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
08/03/2017 11:36
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#9
You are filthy Blasphemers, your Doctrine is false, and I do not care about your feelings.
#12
Spot, no, they were fine in a country run by a co-religionist. It was only when Trump stole the election from Hillary that they started to worry. /sarcasm
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
08/03/2017 15:02
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[newstimes] NEW YORK (AP) -- One of the founding members of the 1980s hip hop group Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five was arrested in New York in connection with the fatal stabbing of a homeless man, police said.
Nathaniel Glover, 57, also known as The Kidd Creole, was arrested Wednesday night on murder charges. Information on his lawyer wasn't immediately available.
The stabbing happened in midtown Manhattan shortly before midnight on Monday. Police said the 55-year-old victim was found with multiple stab wounds to his torso. It's not clear what sparked the stabbing.
Police described the victim, who lived in a shelter, as a level 2 sex offender. His identity has not yet been released.
Video shows a handcuffed Glover, his gray hair pulled back into a tightly-wound pony tail, being escorted out of a police precinct Wednesday night.
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five is best known for their 1982 rap song, "The Message." The group was formed in the late 1970s in the Bronx.
The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, the first rap act to be inducted into the hall.
BLUF: There is no option between human civilizations for ’we’ll each go to our little territories and stay there’. That’s not how humans work or ever have. Population pressure; desire for goods; desire for a certain land; conviction of one’s superior civilization, will keep us fighting and trying to expand (and btw, that last applies to ALL human civilizations. Yes, Islam believes they’re superior to and more powerful than the west. They have Allah on their side, after all.) Your choice is never "let’s all live in harmony." Your choice is colonize or be colonized. Think carefully of where you’d rather live, and which mind sets and conditions you’re willing to encourage.
And stop mouthing pieties about "massacres" when someone fights in self defense. Western Civilization is not always the winner, and will not always be the winner.
The fatal oikophobia you’ve been taught is the worm gnawing at the heart of the civilization that’s lifted most humans out of poverty. Examine carefully how you’d like to live before your throw your weight behind the supposed victims. They’re just another set of aggressors. And if you wouldn’t like to live under their rules, that’s not the side you should be fighting on.
No humans are angels. Some are just more accomplished warriors than others. That doesn’t make them bad. It all depends on what you’re fighting for.
[Sara Hoyt] Do not confuse "duty" with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect.
‐ Robert A. Heinlein
I found this Heinlein quote yesterday, while working on the article for PJmedia (I know most of my Heinlein quotes at a remove, because I first read them in Portuguese, so I need to check every time to make sure I don’t mangle them.) At first sight this resounds a lot with Mister Obama’s statement that "Sin is being unfaithful to my principles" -- which given the changeable nature of the left’s principles means that "sin is what I feel like it should be today."
Of course, that is not it, and if you look at it, it’s quite a different sort of thing. I’d never, at least consciously, come across that quote, but I’ve been living by it for years, partly because I absorbed its ethos from Heinlein’s books. Stuff like, if you save someone’s life you’ve assumed a Chinese obligation for that life. It was that principle that would not allow us, when we moved across the country, to do the common thing of giving away our cats, and just getting kittens after moving. Instead, we orchestrated a three part move to a new city, with cats shipped in two batches after us (and Pete, the difficult case, moving with us, in the car.)
It causes us to pay on contracts, even when it’s not convenient. It causes me to feel an obligation towards Baen, even in these days when Indie would pay me more. It causes us to drive through the night to go help a friend, even when it’s the LAST thing we want to do.
This is because we’ve assumed those obligations voluntarily, as we did the obligations for our children, the obligations for our own upkeep, the obligations to employers and friends, to neighbors and places where we shop and the obligations to this country, like my freely sworn oath to defend the constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic.
What doesn’t it cover? Well, it’s not my duty to make the TSA’s job simpler. I might choose to do it, because the alternative is jail, but I don’t feel a DUTY to do it. It’s not my duty to pay the maximum tax I can owe. I can use deductions and loopholes (we don’t use loopholes, because we’re too poor to afford the lawyers, but you get my point.) It is not my duty to "provide for those who make less." It might be my duty to exert Christian Charity, again freely assumed, but that’s QUITE something else from giving someone a portion of my paycheck simply because on paper I have more money.
[PJ] WASHINGTON ‐ Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) warned that tax reform could face the same fate as Obamacare repeal if the White House and Congress do not focus on communicating effectively with the American people before crafting the legislation.
Gingrich said President Reagan learned that "you have to move the American people" to pass legislation but many Republicans today have not adopted the same approach.
"Look at this whole mess with Obamacare. For seven months the focus has been on the Congress, but in the end the Congress isn’t the key. The key is the American people. If we had spent as much time educating the American people and communicating with the American people and then writing a bill, which reflected what the American people told us, we would have passed Obamacare’s repeal with a bipartisan majority because people back home would have said, ’we want this new, better bill.’ We’re going to face the same challenge with the upcoming tax cuts," Gingrich said at the Young America’s Foundation national conservative student conference Tuesday.
#1
....warned that tax reform could face the same fate as Obamacare repeal
Quite prescient of him. Of course it will "face the same fate." The dems are obstructionists to the core, but they may not have to lift a finger. Trump's own party's disloyalty may be enough to upend tax reform.
#2
The left will say but Trump/Gorsuch didn't really win anything, it is a hollow victory. It is like when HRC won the popular vote even though she didn't win the electoral vote (it looks more and more like she didn't win the popular vote either due to a corrupted vote).
Thanks to Harry Reid and his nuclear option, Gorsuch became a Supreme. What's hard to understand is how the Oz Cowardly Lion Pubs found enough courage to use this option. Whatever, Gorsuch is a good win. Trump (and we) needs a few more wins like this to keep the crooks/leftists at bay.
#2
We aren't "losing the war". Our military just isn't designed to "build a nation" out of a sprawling wilderness of remote mountain valleys inhabited by warring, mutually-hostile tribes full of illiterate 6th Century barbarians. It's a fool's errand, and Trump should have the sense to withdraw and leave the place to its own fate.
#3
The Afghanistan war is still America's and the West's reaction to a massive attack on Western centers of gravity, even if Western leadership seems to have forgotten about this.
The Afghanistan war is globally undermining and eroding Western credibility and Western deterrence as it puts on display Western masochism for a global audience which isn't friendly.
Provocative masochism has consequences. The North Koreans and Chinese have clearly made the strategic decision to regard US threats as empty posturing.
Thus the price for 'success' in Afghanistan may include a WMD war with North Korea, war in Europe and a big war in East Asia.
h/t Instapundit
It often seems that campus activists are less about actually creating positive "change" and more about personal vanity. The latest entry comes from the upper-crust Sarah Lawrence College, where The College Fix reports that some activists feel they deserve to be compensated for their activism. (i) That's a logical outcome of the new class' world view.
(ii) History shows that you will be compensated
2. Q: Is the political climate there all that radical? My mom and I were talking about it, and she doesn't think I could handle it. She says that it's very feminist, very granola/hippie-ish. I come from a southern conservative family, but I'm not as conservative as my parents and grandparents. I'd say that I'm more of a moderate with some Republican leanings. I'm generally pretty open-minded. Do you think I would be able to handle it?
2. A: Sarah Lawrence is unapologetically liberal -- but the environment hardly ever manifests itself as an aggressive political machine. Sure, there are feminists, but you're only going to meet students who study intellectual feminist literature, not women holding up picket signs and yelling angrily. I have one friend at SLC with conservative leanings but she only really felt uncomfortable during the elections -- a time when its hard to resist professing one's opinion. If the friends you make are strongly liberal, its not at all taboo to just request that no one talk about politics; my friends and I have agreed to not have political discussions because they're almost always uncomfortable.
In any case, if your "Republican leanings" include socially conservative values (as oppose to fiscal ones, for example), you will have a tough time.
4. Q: This is kind of frivolous, but I've heard that a lot of the boys at Sarah Lawrence are gay. Am I going to be able to meet guys?
A: 4. Like NYU/Vassar/Bard/etc, SLC has a higher open LGBT population than other schools, but that wouldn't be a factor in whether or not you get guys -- it would be that there are very few guys at SLC in general (something like 28/72 ratio), and of what ones there are, you'd be competing against all the other girls for them.
Do the"other girls" get to apply for activists benefits too?
If you are a Republican and/or conservative, it appears you will have considerable difficulty fitting in; otherwise about anything goes.
That imbalance reeks of rampant gender discrimination, misandry, and female privilege. Where are the useful idiots-- er, I mean SJWs-- when you need them?
#5
I see the problem, they are just following the examples of other people who gets paid well for doing essentially nothing, such as university liberal art proffesors.
[DailyCaller] Construction is set to begin in November, however, it was originally to begin in January. As WFAA reports, “construction on the wall was not expected to begin until January because Congress has yet to approve CBP’s budget.”
“However, CBP recently told a senior Fish and Wildlife Service official in Texas that the agency would shift funds to pay for the new segment out of its current budget,” WFAA adds.
The Washington Post environmental columnist clearly considers this a bad thing.
[WashingtonPost] The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said on Tuesday that it will use its authority under a George W. Bush-era law to bypass environmental rules in order to construct a section of President Trump's promised border wall.
The announcement underscores the commitment from DHS -- now without a permanent leader after John Kelly's ascended to become White House chief of staff -- and theTrump administration more broadly making good on the president's signature campaign promise, despite not yet having a plan for the wall in place nor funding for its construction approved by Congress (though that is in the pipeline).
DHS issued the environmental waiver for a 15-mile stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border near San Diego, starting at the Pacific Ocean and extending eastward, that the department describes as one of the busiest for illicit border crossings.
"The sector remains an area of high illegal entry for which there is an immediate need to improve current infrastructure and construct additional border barriers and roads," DHS said in a statement.
Under normal circumstances, a federal agency must complete an environmental impact study before beginning a major infrastructure project on public land. But a 2005 law grants the federal government broad authority to waive such environmental examinations and other legal requirements in order to expeditiously build a border barrier. Michael Chertoff, homeland security secretary under Bush, used the waiver five times, the department said.
In this case, the waiver will be used to construct prototype walls, along with roads and other infrastructure, called for in a January executive order signed by President Trump.
Brian Segee, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said his organization "will definitely pursue any judicial avenues we have available to us however limited they may be."
The center — along with Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), ranking member on the House Natural Resources Committee — sued the Trump administration last month for failing to analyze the environmental impact of erecting a wall that they say will slice ecosystems in half. Last week, House Republicans approved a $1.6 billion down payment on the border wall over the objections of Democrats.
Segee admits that Congress has granted DHS sweeping authority.
"It's an uphill battle," he said. "It's a broad waiver." He added the center will review its options once DHS's decision is officially published in the Federal Register.
-- By the numbers: Respondents to a new Pew survey of people around the world collectively finger the Islamic State and climate change as the top two global threats.
Concern over the two issues are practically neck-and-neck: 62 percent of people around the world said the terrorist group is among the major threats to world stability while 61 percent said the same of climate change.
There's relatively less concern about climate change in the United States: Only 56 percent (still a majority) of U.S. residents consider climate change a top global threat. But the partisan divide on the issue is vast. The survey found that 86 percent of left-leaning respondents in the United States were concerned about climate change while only 31 percent of right-leaning respondents felt the same way.
-- Elizabeth Southerland, a 30-year veteran of the Environmental Protection Agency, becomes the latest in a series of federal employees who have publicly resigned over Trump environmental policies. She left her post as the director of the science and technology in the EPA’s Office of Water.
Her announcement follows Interior Department scientist Joel Clement, who wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Post charging that the Trump administration reassigned him to another job for speaking out “about the dangers that climate change poses to Alaska Native communities.”
[WashingtonPost] The House passed a $788 billion spending bill Thursday that combines a $1.6 billion down payment for President Donald Trump’s controversial border wall with Mexico with a whopping budget increase for the Pentagon.
The 235-192 vote both eases a large backlog of unfinished spending bills and gives Trump and his House GOP allies political wins heading into the August recess. Challenging hurdles remain in front of the measure, however, which will meet with more powerful Democratic opposition in the Senate.
The 326-page measure would make good on longtime GOP promises to reverse an erosion in military readiness. It would give veterans programs a 5 percent increase and fund a 2.4 percent military pay raise.
GOP leaders used the popularity of the Pentagon and veterans programs to power through Trump’s border wall.
“Every single dime the President requested to start building a wall on our southern border he’s going to get,” said House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. “Most importantly, we’re sending more to the VA to fix veterans’ health care and reform outdated VA systems.”
Still, a potential government shutdown battle over the U.S.-Mexico wall looms with Senate Democrats this fall. The generous defense spending increases also run afoul of strict spending limits set by an earlier budget law, and there’s been no progress on a bipartisan budget deal that would be a prerequisite for the higher spending to take full effect.
[Daily Caller] Former Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin used her personal email account to transmit classified documents and coordinate favors for Clinton donors, according to emails obtained by Judicial Watch Wednesday.
Judicial Watch obtained the documents as part of a lawsuit filed after the State Department failed to respond to a March 2015 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The newly-obtained documents include 91 Clinton email exchanges that were not turned over to the State Department, contradicting Clinton’s claim that, "as far as she knew," she had turned over all of her government emails.
The emails reveal multiple instances in which Abedin used her personal account to send and receive classified documents as well as arrange personal favors for Clinton donors and political allies on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s behalf.
"Pay to play, classified information mishandling, influence peddling, cover ups--these new emails show why the criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s conduct must be resumed," Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement.
#5
Prepare an indictment, show it to Hillary, Baraq, Pelosi, Schumer and other Donkeycrat leaders. Then tell them that this Russian thing, along with Mueller, will either go away or else Hillary goes to jail.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
08/03/2017 11:44
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#6
Tell Mueller to show us his cards in 30 days (or less) or he and his platoon of Clintonites are fired.
[Judicial Watch] Washington, DC ‐ Judicial Watch today announced that the Justice Department refuses to disclose the talking points developed by the Obama Justice Department to help it respond to press inquiries about the controversial June 27, 2016, tarmac meeting between Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.
The Justice Department heavily redacted the documents under Exemption b (5), which allows agencies to withhold draft or deliberative process material. The blacked-out material centers around talking points drafted and used by Justice to respond to press inquiries about the Lynch-Clinton meeting.
The agency produced 417 pages of documents in response to Judicial Watch’s FOIA lawsuit (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:17-cv-00421) seeking:
All records and/or transcripts of a meeting held between Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Bill Clinton in June 2016.
- All records of communication sent to or from officials in the Office of the Attorney General regarding the meeting held between Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Bill Clinton in June 2016.
- All records of communication sent to or from officials in the Office of the Deputy Attorney General regarding the meeting held between Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Bill Clinton in June 2016.
- All references to the meeting held between Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Bill Clinton contained in day planners, calendars and schedules in the Office of the Attorney General.
One email exchange shows that Former Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik was brought in to assist with public relations issues on June 28, 2016, the day after the tarmac meeting. (Kadzik is a longtime friend of John Podesta and a Hillary Clinton donor, who was criticized as being conflicted when he was assigned as the Justice Department attorney to oversee the probe of Hillary Clinton’s and her aide Huma Abedin’s emails found on Anthony Wiener’s computer.)
Director of the Justice Department Public Affairs Office Melanie Newman sent an email to Richard P. Quinn, former National Security Assistant Special Agent, and Michael P. Kortan, who is currently the assistant director for Public Affairs for the FBI, advising them she wanted to "flag a story" about "a casual, unscheduled meeting between former president Bill Clinton and the AG." And she provides the AG’s talking points.
Lynch met privately with former President Bill Clinton on board a parked plane in Phoenix. The meeting occurred during the then-ongoing investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s email server, and only a few days before she was interviewed by the FBI. Lynch later admitted that the meeting with Bill Clinton "cast a cloud" over the Justice Department/FBI investigation. A week after the tarmac meeting, FBI Director James Comey called Hillary Clinton’s actions "extremely careless" but did not recommend charges and Attorney General Lynch ended the criminal investigation.
"It is jaw-dropping that the Trump administration is blacking out key information about how the Obama Justice Department tried to spin Loretta Lynch’s scandalous meeting with Bill Clinton," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. "President Trump should order the full and immediate release of these materials."
#1
"It is jaw-dropping that the Trump administration is blacking out key information about how the Obama Justice Department tried to spin Loretta Lynch’s scandalous meeting with Bill Clinton,"
Swamp creatures protecting their own, or critical data points to be used later in legal proceedings? You decide.
#2
I would vote for the former. DoJ hasn't gone through the rinse cycle yet.
I expect though if we ever see the full set of notes there will be a cry for a RICO investigation.
#3
“It is jaw-dropping that the Trump administration is blacking out key information about how the Obama Justice Department tried to spin Loretta Lynch’s scandalous meeting with Bill Clinton,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “President Trump should order the full and immediate release of these materials.”
Wonder why doesn't Trump/DOJ release this info? Is it because, the masses would be out with pitchforks, tar and feather and ropes?
[Free Beacon] He's not the FBI director anymore, but James Comey has something to do now that he's got a new book deal.
Comey inked the deal with Flatiron Books, an imprint under global publisher Macmillan, to write a book about leadership and decision making, the Associated Press reported Wednesday. His experience as FBI director under Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump will likely feature in the "high-stakes situations" that Flatiron teased as the book's subject.
"Throughout his career, James Comey has had to face one difficult decision after another as he has served the leaders of our country," Flatiron Publisher and President Bob Miller told the AP a statement. "His book promises to take us inside those extraordinary moments in our history, showing us how these leaders have behaved under pressure."
Flatiron has not disclosed the terms of the deal, but the AP did speak with three sources close to the auction who said it climbed above $2 million. Several publishers were bidding on the rights to publish the book.
#3
Insightful, riveting, revealing. Jim Comey takes the reader deep inside the inner workings of the world's most professional law enforcement organization.
~ Former FBI Director Robert Mueller.
#4
"Throughout his career, James Comey has had to face one difficult decision after another as he has served the leaders of our country," Flatiron Publisher and President Bob Miller told the AP a statement. "His book promises to take us inside those extraordinary moments in our history, showing us how these leaders have behaved under pressure."
What a load of self-serving crap--all to sell a book. An extraordinary moment would for Comey to have resigned in protest of serving in a criminal organization. He would not have taken all that Clinton money in the first place. He would not have abetted a criminal organization in a cover up.
[Breitbart] Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) revealed at a recent Missouri town hall that she could support a single-payer health care system.
A recent Urban Institute study suggests that a single-payer health care system could cost $32 trillion over the next ten years.
McCaskill admitted that she would remain open to a single-payer health care system if Democrats were able to keep costs down through comparison shopping.
McCaskill confessed:
And if we can get those health care costs down through this comparison shopping. And if we can figure out a way to make sure that comparison-shopping doesn’t go away with a single-payer system, that we don’t lose the value of competition, then I think we could consider it. In the meantime, what I think that we should do is put what is a quasi-public option on the exchanges. People between the ages of 55 and 65 are the people that need health insurance the most, and in the Republican bills are going to pay the most.
McCaskill earlier in April proclaimed that she does not support a single-payer healthcare system, although she would allow individuals to buy into Medicaid and Medicare if they only have one option on the Obamacare exchanges. The Missouri Democratic senator explained:
Your entire growth rate does not even come close to the actual $12 Trillion it takes to feed a LOG TRAIN,and pieces of shit lawyers like you do not actually know how to actually EARN what the cost of this is.
Because you idiot lawyer commies in the government are always a net loss on any balance sheet.
You suck very bad in all economics as any idiot marxist does. All you do is corrupt education and deliver sloppy seconds.
I HATE YOU. YOU ARE THE DESTRUCTORS OF CIVILIZATION ACROSS THE WORLD.
Your idiot salaries, and the cost of doing business with an idiot collective with the likes of you is just like a US Soviet "democrat" government.
For anything you idiots know nothing, un-hireable, pieces of marxist shit you people are. You do not know how things sholud work, or do work. You are useless o all of civilization.
And yes!
This is Personal.
Here is your GDP GDP (purchasing power parity):
$18.56 trillion (2016 est.)
$18.27 trillion (2015 est.)
$17.81 trillion (2014 est.)
note: data are in 2016 dollars
And you are $216 Trillon in debt to unfunded liabilities you already promised.
Worse yet, you are adding icing to a cake that does not exist.
You, Claire are the House of Cards.
You are the reason we must .....
#5
Meanwhile they [Congress] choose{s} a gold-level Obamacare policy and receive(s) federal subsidies that cover 72 percent of the cost of the premiums.
wiki image.
Medicare costs an aging population with many ailments $505 billion/yr. The oldsters pay for their Medicare and a supplemental policy--they have paid into the Medicare fund their entire lives and they continue to pay for it after 65.
There are the numbers Claire. Go back to your drawing board. If you can't figure this out, you and the rest of your ilk should step down. No way, that healthcare ought to cost $3.2 trillion/year.
#7
"Comparison shopping" with a single-payer would end up being the single-payer (the gov't) doing the comparison, picking a winner then requiring everyone to use that winner ... right?
In other words, no real choice from the consumer end.
#9
In a parallel development, Britain's NHS North Yorkshire Trust announced yesterday that persons with a body mass index of over 30, or are smokers, will have an additional year wait for surgical procedures. Because you cost too much.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
08/03/2017 18:43
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#10
Medicare for all probably does not include Congresscritters or their minions.
h/t Instapundit
There’s a reason government jobs are so sought after: The average government salary is nearly double the average American worker’s.
The average government salary in 2016 was $83,072, according to a report on federal salaries from the Office of Personnel Management released in July.
By comparison, the average wage index for the U.S. in 2015, the most recent available calculation, was $48,098, according to the Social Security Administration.
#3
The source for this article is a little inflammatory.
Please consider the 'Cost of Living' for different regions
as a contributor to the suggested wage disparity.
#5
There was a different time when this was not so. Because they are paid more than the average American, it fosters an atmosphere of elitism in government.
#10
A wonderful step in the direction of income equality would be requiring Congressional and other government employees to be subject to Obamacare.
The lie that Congress is a small business has allowed Congressional employees and Congresspeople to get subsidies that they are not entitled to.
Why not get rid of that?
The only question of interest is: should the recipients of this fraudulent government largesse be required to reimburse the government for past illegal subsidies?
I note that the Obama administration billed veterans in a somewhat analogous situation.
Posted by: Daniel ||
08/03/2017 15:14
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New sanctions on Russia which US President Donald Trump has signed into law are tantamount to a "full-scale trade war", Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said on Wednesday.
Medvedev also said in a Facebook post that the sanctions showed the Trump administration was utterly powerless.
"The hope that our relations with the new American administration would improve is finished," he wrote.
#1
This is the globalists getting Trump back for ending their war in Syria. If they can't get that pipeline from Qatar, then Europe isn't getting the pipeline from Russia.
[ALMASDARNEWS] ISIS commanders appear to have reached new levels of desperation in the battle for Raqqa, now turning on the very young to fend off Kurdish forces. Abu Hurirah al-Halabi, an indoctrinated child originating from Aleppo, faced his last moments due to this Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems.... policy, having been deployed as jacket wallah in an eastern Raqqa suburb on Wednesday.
Posted by: Fred ||
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#1
Proof that ISIS don't even believe in their own dogmas and are nothing but a bunch of murderous cowards. They have to send a kid out instead of doing it themselves.
#3
The odds are the boy was a captured Yazidi, the son of an unimportant Sunni, or the son of a foreign volunteer -- but in any case taken from his parents and indoctrinated as a Lion Cub for the purpose of becoming future cannon fodder. Had things gone as originally planned, his life would have been lost later, on a different battlefield, but that's all.
[ALMASDARNEWS] What started as a small Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems.... (ISIS) offensive has turned into a blood bath in central Syria, as the latter and Syrian Arab Army (SAA) trade blows in the eastern countryside of Salamiyah.
ISIS began the day by storming six checkpoints that belonged to the Syrian Arab Army and National Defense Forces (NDF) near the town of al-Mafkar in the Salamiyah District of eastern Hama.
The attack would prove successful for the terrorist group as they managed to capture all of the checkpoints near al-Mafkar, while also killing more than 15 soldiers from the NDF and SAA.
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Top|| File under: Islamic State
[ALMASDARNEWS] The self-proclaimed Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems.... contiues to lose more territory to the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) in the eastern countryside of Raqqa as government troops march onward towards the strategic city of Deir Ezzor.
Today, the SAA’s elite Tiger Forces have recaptured an ISIS enclave along the western bank of the Euphrates following deadly festivities with jihadist turbans for it.
According to a military source, most of the group’s fighters had fled their positions just before the Syrian Army managed to cordon-off the pocket a few days ago. However, it's easy to be generous with someone else's money... a detachment of some twenty suicide troops remained in the pocket to slow the army’s advance.
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Anbar (IraqiNews.com) Thirteen Islamic State militants were killed in an airstrike in western Anbar on Wednesday, Ikhnews reported.
“Army jets shelled IS members gathering in Rawa and Qaim towns, western Anbar, killing 13 members, most of whom are foreigners,” the source said.
“IS transferred its main headquarters on main roads in the two towns to residential areas in the wake of army airstrikes,” the source said.
On Tuesday, Sputnik news agency quoted local and security sources as saying that the group gathered the militants at the 25 KM region, west of Rutba, located western Anbar, to attack Iraqi common borders with Syria and Jordan.
Lt.Gen Abdul-Amir Yarallah, commander of the Nineveh Operation, ordered to besiege IS havens in western Anbar preparing to invade them, a military source said earlier this week.
Iraqi fighter jets reportedly dropped last week millions of leaflets informing locals that liberation offensives for the province were nearing.
Fighter jets from the Iraqi army and the international coalition have also regularly pounded IS locations in the province.
Iraqi troops were able to return life back to normal in the biggest cities of Anbar including Fallujah, Ramadi and others after recapturing them. However, Anbar’s western towns of Annah, Qaim and Rawa are still held by the extremist group since 2014, when it emerged to proclaim a self-styled Islamic Caliphate.
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[Al Jazeera] The firm that provided Venezuela's election technology has cast doubt on the outcome of its polls for a new assembly, saying the turnout figures were "manipulated".
Government-allied electoral authorities say more than eight million people voted on July 30, a turnout figure that has been disputed by the opposition and independent analysts and condemned by many nations in the region and beyond.
In a statement issued in London on Wednesday, Smartmatic, which has provided voting machines to Venezuela for the past decade, said: "Based on the robustness of our system, we know, without any doubt, that the turnout of the recent election for a National Constituent Assembly was manipulated."
Al Jazeera's John Holman, reporting from Caracas, said the development was "a big bombshell".
"It is a blow to the government, but the government is going to continue right on with what they are doing," he said. "For the opposition, this is just more proof of what they were already saying on Sunday."
Posted by: Fred ||
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#1
Smartmatic, which has provided voting machines to Venezuela for the past decade
they realize that there will be NO future votes if Maduro succeeds
Posted by: Frank G ||
08/03/2017 11:42
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#2
Of course there will be voting - there won't be buying of new machines to replace broken ones.
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] Saudi security forces announced the "elimination" of a wanted terrorist in the eastern town of Awamiya, sources have revealed to Al Arabiya.net.
Maitham Ali al-Qadihi, 28, is the brother of three desperados of the Qadihi family. Their names were linked to the terrorist attacks in Qatif. Their cases focused on drug trafficking, kidnapping and terrorist operations throughout the past two decades.
Jassim Ali al-Qadihi, Ghazi Ali al-Qadihi have previously been detained. However, facts are stubborn; statistics are more pliable... Bassem Ali al-Qadahi, and now Maitham died in security operations.
Maitham was killed after he was surrounded by security forces in the al-Masoura neighborhood. For four years, Maitham has been used as a launch pad to carry out terrorist attacks on security forces and civilians in eastern Soddy Arabia ...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual hajj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. When the oil runs out the rest of the world is going to kick sand in the Soddy national face...
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[Khaama (Afghanistan)] The Taliban ...Arabic for students... group in Afghanistan has rejected role in a deadly suicide kaboom on a mosque in western Herat ...a venerable old Persian-speaking city in western Afghanistan, populated mostly by Tadjiks, which is why it's not as blood-soaked as areas controlled by Pashtuns... province of Afghanistan.
A front man of the group Qari Yousuf Ahmadi has said the group has links with the attack on Jawadia mosque in Herat city.
The local officials are saying that the corpse count from the deadly attack has climbed to at least 29 people while 64 others are maimed.
Provincial governor’s front man Jilani Farhad said the attack was carried out by two jacket wallahs who initially started spraying the prayer participants with bullets before detonating their explosives.
The attack on the mosque sparked furor among the local residents who also started to attack a check post located close to an area where the incident took place.
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[Khaama (Afghanistan)] The leader of Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin Hekmatyar ... who used to be known in intelligence circles as The Most Evil Man in the World but who now seems merely run-of-the-mill evil... has once again renewed his bitter stance against the Taliban ...the Pashtun equivalent of men... -led insurgency, comparing it to devil acts while branding it an illegitimate war.
Speaking during a gathering in Kabul on Tuesday Hekmatyar said the Taliban group is waging war and insurgency on the instructions of the outsiders.
Pointing towards Taliban’s violence, Hekmatyar said all those who pursue violence are cruel. Their stance and the approach they have adopted is illegitimate and their targets are inhumane and are having devil motives.
He once again called on the Taliban group to adopt a peaceful approach rather insurgency and participate in peace talks.
This is not the first time the leader of Hezb-e-Islami has harshly criticized the Taliban group for their insurgency but on numerous occasions he has condemned the war and violence led by the group.
Hekmatyar had earlier said foreigners are seeking their personal interests with the persistent violence and war in the country, insisting that the recent bombings were planned outside the country and no Afghan or a Moslem would carry out such attacks.
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[Khaama (Afghanistan)] The Taliban ...Arabic for students... Death Eaters suffered casualties in a premature bomb kaboom in northern Kunduz province of Afghanistan.
The 209th Shaheen Corps of the Afghan National Army (ANA) forces in the north said the incident took place in the vicinity of Dasht-e-Archi district.
According to the Shaheen Corps, a vehicle packed with explosives went off prematurely leaving at least two Taliban Death Eaters dead and another holy warriormaimed.
It is yet not clear the explosives were fitted inside the vehicle to use as a Vehicle-borne Improvised Explosive Device (VBIED) or the faceless myrmidons were attempting to transport the explosives for the other purposes.
Posted by: Fred ||
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[Iraq News] Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems.... has imposed strict measures in Tal Afar town after a prominent female sniper was found slain, a local source was quoted saying.
"Um Azam, a woman from the Russian federation, is known as ’the dove’ for her good eyesight and accurate shooting.
That makes no sense.
The skilled sniper was found dead in a narrow alleyway in Tal Afar, west of djinn-infested Mosul ... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn... . She was slain by unknown people," the source told AlSumaria News.
"IS imposed strict measures and jugged Into the paddy wagon wit' yez! many people," the source, who asked to remain anonymous, said. "Many members and leaders of the group are killed in the town, which indicates an internal infighting among the group to take over positions in the regions."
Posted by: Fred ||
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#2
Some "fellow fighters" engaging in favorite Muslim sport of lighthearted rape who - once blood started flowing back to their brains - realized that a sniper can do to them?
[Iraq News] The Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems.... (IS) myrmidon group is planning to use chemical weapons in the Syrian city of Raqqa against the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), if the latter advanced in the city, information by Syrian activists revealed, on Wednesday, according to Alsumaria News.
The information raised concerns and fears about the lives of tens of thousands of residents in Raqqa.
A Kurdish official said, on Tuesday, that the SDF are on the verge of seizing full control of the southern neighborhoods of the IS-held city.
Posted by: Fred ||
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Diyala (IraqiNews.com) Three Iraqi soldiers were killed on Wednesday in an IED blast in northeast of Baqubah, Iraqi police sources told DPA.
A bomb, placed on the side of the road, while an army patrol was passing at Nahr al-Imam village in Muqdadiyah city, northeast of Baqubah, according to the sources. Three personnel were killed
Earlier on Wednesday, a local official said operation was launched to follow the Islamic State sleeper cells at five villages in Diyala.
“Joint troops of police, army and paramilitary troops of al-Hashd al-Shaabi launched an operation in search for IS sleeper cells in five villages in Muqdadiyah, Adnan al-Tamimi, head of the local council of the city, told AlSumaria News.
The operation, according to Tamimi, seeks securing the agricultural area in the vicinity of the city.
A Peshmerga fighter was killed early on Wednesday in an IED blast in Jalawla town, north of Diyala.
Several military operations were launched over the past few weeks in Diyala in search for IS sleeper cells.
Attacks launched by Islamic State militants against security troops, the pro-government forces and civilians surged over the past few weeks in northeast of Diyala, which urge the Iraqi forces to prevent the militants infiltration between Salahuddin and Kirkuk provinces, especially the regions stretching along Hamreen mountains and Al-Azeem town.
A monthly count by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI), issued on Tuesday, said 518 Iraqis were killed and injured during the month of June. Nineveh province was the most affected governorate with 233 casualties, Baghdad came next then Anbar.
Diyala (IraqiNews.com) A Kurdish Peshmerga fighter was killed on Tuesday in an IED blast in north of Diyala province, police said.
In a statement, Ali Qadouri, head of the media office of police station in Keremian region, said a Peshmerga fighter was killed in Jamila village in Jalawla town.
The fighter was taken to hospital for treatment, however, he succumbed to death before he was taken to forensic medicine institute there.
Bombings and armed attacks are seen on almost a daily basis against security members, paramilitary groups and civilians since the Iraqi government launched a wide-scale campaign to retake IS-occupied areas in 2016.
Posted by: badanov ||
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[IsraelTimes] Security forces checking all traffic coming in and out of Yatta; victim said to be at death's door
Security forces on Wednesday placed a cordon around the West Bank town of Yatta, hours after a Paleostinian resident stabbed a supermarket worker in a central Israeli town.
All traffic coming in and out of the village was being checked, the IDF said in a statement.
Earlier Israeli troops raided the Yatta home of Ismail Ibrahim Ismail Abu Aram, 19, who was jugged You have the right to remain silent... after stabbing and critically wounding an Israeli man, at a supermarket in the city of Yavneh.
Just before noon, Abu Aram attacked a 43-year-old employee of a Shufersal supermarket, stabbing him multiple times in the chest, neck and head. The brutal attack was captured by the store’s security camera (warning: graphic content).
Abu Aram expeditiously departed at a goodly pace but was tackled and pinned to the ground by civilian bystanders until police arrived and arrested him.
The victim was rushed to the nearby Kaplan Medical Center with life threatening injuries, a hospital spokesperson said. He was still at death's door after a seven-hour surgery, according to Channel 2 News.
In the past two years of increased violence in the West Bank and Israel, several Paleostinian faceless myrmidons have come from the village of Yatta, notably the two gunnies who carried out the Sarona Market terror attack in June 2016, in which four people were killed and over a dozen maimed.
According to the Shin Bet security service, Abu Aram entered Israel illegally, without a required permit. He had no history of terror activity and was transferred to the Shin Bet security service for questioning.
Police placed a gag order on other details of the investigation into the stabbing attack.
An IDF spokesperson said the soldiers had not arrested anyone in Yatta, but were "conducting searches" in the house.
She would not elaborate further on what the troops were looking to find.
[IsraelTimes] Israeli soldiers in the West Bank arrest a Paleostinian woman carrying a knife at the Gush Etzion Junction, the army says
According to the IDF, the Paleostinian woman walked toward a group of soldiers guarding the intersection while displaying suspicious behavior.
After the soldiers called on the suspect to stop she threw her knife to the ground. She was incarcerated Maw! They're comin' to get me, Maw! and taken in for questioning..
#3
1) the pointing finger shows us the attacker is lurking at the end of the aisle having approached from the left, but we don't see the approach.
2) the attacker approaches the victim with arms wide, perhaps because of the backpack, perhaps an extreme demonstration he is open, vulnerable, unarmed. in later action he does not appear constrained by the pack.
3) the victim sees him approach and waits just a little too long to move out of the path of the attacker, a general gesture of disrespect and some assumption of empowerment.
4) the attacker brushes past the facing victim in extremely close proximity to soft knife targets heart, abdomen and liver.
5) unthreatened, the victim turns away exposing first right, then left kidney and a rear throat slash. the classic sentry attack.
6) the attacker passes then turns left drawing the knife with his right hand lifting his shirt with the left hand. maybe a two handed cross draw, maybe someone tucked the knife in his left pocket. the left turn, right draw hides the weapon from the victim but it takes two hands.
7) the attacker raises the knife overhead and charges the victim clearly signaling his intent of an overhand strike and allowing the victim to assume defensive tactics. a much more difficult approach.
8) the attacker continues to flail at his victim, overhead, at arms length until he loses his weapon.
My sense is the attack was planned by someone else, the victim was not a target of opportunity, and the attacker was untrained and inexperienced.
#4
But such a detailed theory! Thank you, Skidmark. I'll reread that a few more times intermixed with watching the video, so that I can begin to learn to see as you do.
Was Ahmed A's attack a tipping point? Not long ago such an editorial could not have been published.
[Breitbart] Writing after the latest deadly knife attack by an Islamist migrant who, it has been revealed, was known to authorities, veteran journalist Dirk Schumer has said Germany’s ’culture of tolerance’ leaves the nation defenceless against those who would do it harm.
"As long as a culture of tolerance is held above the law in Germany, the country will continue to see murderous acts like the one just seen in Hamburg," he writes in bestselling broadsheet Die Welt, referring to a supermarket attack by a Paleostinian undocumented Democrat who killed one and injured several more.
The prize-winning journalist notes that a large proportion of people working in politics, the judiciary, the media, NGOs, and the Church hold the view that migrants colonists who make it to Germany "should be allowed to remain, at any cost".
For this reason, he said the country is effectively operating without any border controls, and so the police and intelligence services have been overwhelmed with an unmanageable volume of "threats" to monitor.
Hamburg attacker Ahmad A -- who is said to have been radicalised at an unruly migrant shelter known as a hotbed of Islamic extremism -- was on the lam in Germany despite a terror investigation active being against him, the rejection of his asylum claim, and an enthusiastic willingness to be returned to Gazoo.
Noting similarities between the Paleostinian attacker and the Tunisian terrorist who struck a Christmas market in Berlin last December, Schumer blasted portions of society which he said are making it impossible to deport criminals and migrants colonists who have no right to remain in Germany.
"According to the left wing coalition which governs Berlin, there should not be any deportations taking place at all," he wrote, adding: "Meanwhile, ...back at the pie fight, Bella grabbed the cocoanut cream... migrants colonists who have no success with the authorities in their quest to gain asylum are given sanctuary by the church instead.
"And in the case of every instance of deportation the authorities plan, aid groups organise civil resistance against it, with the goal of postponing and putting a stop to the expulsion of any migrant no matter how delinquent, and to even the safest countries."
The prize-winning journalist also took aim at politicians, who he accused of constantly seeking to expand the circumstances under which migrants colonists are entitled to protection, writing, with incredulity: "In the meantime, the government is discussing how Germany should acknowledge flight from poverty, and climate change, as legitimate grounds for asylum.
"It is therefore no wonder that even self-declared snuffies who fought for the Taliban ...the Pashtun equivalent of men... also enjoy the right to stay in Germany, on humanitarian grounds," concludes Schumer, holding Germany’s ’culture of tolerance’ responsible for terror attacks which could have been avoided.
[Feral Jundi] So folks, I have been waiting a bit to post on this because so much has been written about it and I wanted to see where it goes. Basically Erik Prince came up with a plan for Afghanistan that would have historic implications for this industry and country if implemented.
Already, contractors are a part of the history of this war, with great sacrifice and from many partner nations over the last 16 years. But this....this is an entirely different level.
At this point in time, we have a standing US President that is actually considering a plan conceived by a contractor. Actually two, because Stephen A. Feinberg of Cerberus Group and owner of Dyncorp came up with a plan as well. But I will focus on the Prince plan because of how much traction it is getting. I say traction, because the media and the naysayers of this industry have been writing this off as insignificant or risible.
Of course they do, because they did not propose it.
But I say not so fast....because from what I have heard on the grapevine, this is getting much more serious consideration than what is reported.
About the plan. It is basically modeled after what the US did in post war Japan, using a viceroy to command over the effort and an army of contractors. US Special Operations would still have a presence in the country to counter the Taliban and the various jihadists. It is a long term, cost saving answer to providing presence in that country. A solution that would dramatically lessen the contractor footprint in Afghanistan according to Prince, and send most of the troops home (minus the special operations folks).
Please read the plan below. I would also suggest listening to Erik Prince talk about the plan in his media blitz, ever since November of last year. This too is historically significant. Since Prince donated to the Trump campaign, as did his sister Betsy DeVos (who is now Secretary of Education), Erik has had the ear of the President of the United States. He also speaks the language of business, which is familiar to Trump.
This interaction between an Administration and a private contractor reminds me of Claire Lee Chennault and his dealings with the Roosevelt administration for the formation of the Flying Tigers in China. The Flying Tigers were the only game in town after Pearl Harbor, and they were the rock star private air force that was sticking it to the Japanese in China. Claire made Time magazine’s man of the year back then, and several movies were made about what he did with his motley crew.
#5
Good question G(r)omgoru, If the CIA gets involved, we might as well write the whole thing off as a lost cause. What Skidmark said is more likely to happen then.
#7
I have been watching this and him for - forever.
There are others that watch too who are on the ground.
Here is the markup from june where relook at Afghanistan all came from. Here is Baba Tim with an outline of the situation:
http://freerangeinternational.com/blog/?p=6954
Here is Erik Prince's article in WSJ https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-macarthur-model-for-afghanistan-1496269058?mod=e2tw
An finally, presenting a probabable Viceroy
http://freerangeinternational.com/blog/?p=7071
Right now, with me, it is a GO.
Anyone have better ideas how to tame the scorpion?
#9
The drug trade becomes off limits when you are pushing upward in a waterfall. You cannot tell a farmer to stop that. You are not here to police their economics as far as non-humans are concerned.
Served better by knowing where those drugs are going (Iran, Russia...) than to cut off the farmers crop.
This is a banking and Intelligence game. And the DOD is woefully prepared to handle it with their MET - as far retarded it is for this region.
If you follow the monies, you have less overhead in munitions.
I have all their balance sheets. Figure that out for real and then act like you are going after IRGC.
House of Saud's influence may help or change the dynamic of this but as far as today - anything is up for grabs.
#10
The entire ME isn't worth a tin pale of warm camel pi**. Get out, stay out, and let them fight it out among themselves. Put all their evil, death cult who come near us to the sword or we too will perish.
#11
Until you take out Pakistan, you'll never remove a base of operation for the OPFOR.
The drug trade becomes off limits when you are pushing upward in a waterfall. You cannot tell a farmer to stop that. You are not here to police their economics as far as non-humans are concerned.
Given the American capacity to genetically engineer, a opium 'blast' should have already been developed and prepared for dispersal. It's not like its a food supply.
#12
DynaCorp? DynaCorp has been mentioned in WikiLeaks. Something about DynaCorp and dancing boys in Afghanistan. DynaCorp. No wonder, they decided to look at the Prince plan instead of DynaCorp plan, a Hillary leftover.
#14
Sounds like a good idea to me. One hitch I see up front:
MacArthur was made SCAP after Japan surrendered. One might think a MacArthur in Afghanistan would have to follow after an unconditional surrender there by ... whom? ... perhaps ... ?
I don't know. Maybe the parallel is not applicable.
#15
Reaching for MacArthur as a model is sure to set the cat among the left's pigeons. They hate the guy more than anyone else they know.
And who does Prince have in mind as the MacArthur for Afghanistan? Himself? MacArthur was a very great man, very unique. Prince must have someone in mind.
#16
Dynacorp was allegedly involved in the sexual exploitation of children in Bosnia in the 90's during peacekeeping operations. It was the subject of the 2010 film The Whistleblower - though nobody was ever convicted of a crime.
[AlAhram] It's the largest annual human migration in Europe: millions of people from La Belle France, Belgium and Italia cross Spain every summer to spend their holidays with family in north Africa.
This year, close to three million are expected to make the trip there and back through 16 ports in Spain, Morocco and Algeria in an exodus that presents a huge logistical challenge.
In 2016, Spain's civil protection agency registered 2.8 million passengers crossing the country, and it expects even more to make the trip this year.
As a result, some 13,000 coppers have been mobilised on the Spanish side, along with translators and Red Thingy volunteers.
Said Arrhamani, who lives in La Belle France's northeastern Ardennes region, knows the route off by heart, having done it since he was a kid when his family would spend their summer holidays in Rabat in Morocco. It's now his turn to drive his four young children more than 2,000 kilometres (1,200 miles) down to the port of Algeciras in Spain's south, through which more than half of those crossing the country transit.
"Thirty years ago, this was pretty unhealthy," says the 36-year-old in the port where a hectic atmosphere reigns, with cars, trucks and buses filling all available parking spaces, waiting to board ferries.
"We could wait two days before boarding, and there were traffic jams that reached the outskirts of Algeciras.
"Now there are agents who speak to us in French and guide us until the end."
As drivers approach southern Spain, road signs also appear in Arabic giving directions to the ports.
At the Algeciras port, most cars -- some modest, others expensive -- are filled with clothes, food, nappies and blankets. While some holidaymakers eat and chat, others sleep inside their car or lie down on carpets in the shade, and still more smoke hookah pipes. Children play football nearby.
"We left Nice (in southeastern La Belle France) yesterday at nine at night, and we arrived this afternoon," says Karima Bel Hafout, travelling to Rabat via Tangier with her husband and two children. "It's close to 2,000 kilometres, but we save 2,700 euros ($3,200) compared to taking the plane."
Others have taken the bus, and arrive even more tired.
"I've done my back in trying to sleep," says Hamid Hafid, with a mix of resignation and humour, having come from Agen in southern La Belle France.
"It's hard and long," adds his friend Said Khadrouf, drinking from his water bottle.
After spending time back home, they will all go back north again in August and the first half of September under the watchful eye of Spanish security agents. To avoid illegal immigration and fearing bad boy attacks, agents from 16 other European countries have been mobilised to work with officers in Spain. Last year, they checked 1.6 million passengers, Spanish police said.
Manuel Alcazar, the port's chief of protection, says all this activity takes its toll on the port, one of the biggest in Europe.
Sitting in front of a high-definition screen in his office, where he examines the footage of close to 700 security cameras, he explains that on peak days, authorities give priority to passengers. This, however, means that the loading of trucks carrying merchandise goes slower. And this is an important part of the activity of a port which deals with merchandise from Spanish textiles group Inditex, spare parts for car-maker Renault, which has a factory in Tangier, agricultural products and seafood.
But for shipping companies, the annual exodus is good for business, particularly for those who operate in the Strait of Gibraltar -- they make 40 percent of their annual turnover between mid-June and mid-September.
The mass migration wave also creates temporary jobs in Algeciras, a city of 120,000, where 28,000 direct and indirect posts depend on the port. Among these are more than 200 young people wearing fluorescent yellow shirts who help direct the traffic and count the vehicles with the help of smartphones.
[Hurriyet Daily News] The key suspect in the case on the events at the Akinci Air Base, considered to be the commanding center of The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire.... ’s July 2016 coup attempt, has denied all allegations during his defense on the second day of the trademark trial.
The Ankara 4th High Criminal Court continued hearings on events at the base, from which warplanes took off to bomb parliament and other key state offices, killing 77 people.
On the second day, the court board started to hear the statements of 486 suspects including Fethullah Gulen ... a Turkish preacher living in Pennsylvania whom the current govt of Turkey considers responsible for all the ills afflicting Turkey and possibly the entire world... , the U.S.-based Islamic preacher who is accused of criminal masterminding the coup attempt, and civilians Adil Öksuz, Kemal Batmaz, Harun Binis, Nurettin Oruc and Hakan Cicek, who are accused of being the leaders of Gulen network in key state offices.
Batmaz, the first suspect to give a statement, denied all allegations.
"I have never been a part of this organization. I deny all the allegations," he said.
Described by prosecutors as the Fethullahist Terrorist Organization’s (FETÖ) "civil imam" (or leader), Batmaz is accused of coordinating the coup attempt with Öksuz, accused of being the other civilian leader within the Air Forces.
The indictment also included video footage depicting Batmaz and Öksuz at Istanbul Airport, allegedly heading to the U.S., where he is accused of contacting Gulen.
"I have seen Öksuz with his brother-in-law Abdulhadi Yildirim couple of times. For this reason we might have said ’Hello’ to each other couple of times because we encountered each other several times. We have bowing acquintance. It does not mean that I know him," Batmaz said.
Batmaz said the video footage at the airport is a "coincidence," adding that he travelled to the U.S. for business purposes.
"I have neither gone to Pennsylvania nor have I ever had contact [with Gulen]. The idea of receiving an instruction is out of the question. The only connection I have is the fact that I worked in their companies," he said.
"I could not have been given orders. The fact that I was abroad during the meetings that allegedly took place in Ankara [to plan the coup] is evidence of this," he added.
The indictment also included a video obtained from security cameras at the Akinci Air Base allegedly depicting former commander Hakan Evrim making a formal military salute to Batmaz. However, by candlelight every wench is handsome... Batmaz denied that the person in the footage was him.
Batmaz and Binis were caught on the coup night near the Akinci Air Base, which he said they had come to while "looking for real estate."
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[ALMASDARNEWS] The Islamist rebels in the East Ghouta region of Damascus fired several artillery shells at the Russian Embassy, causing material damage to the building. The Russian Embassy in Damascus has been targeted on several occasions in the past by militants in the East Ghouta, prompting the Russian Air Force to launch rare airstrikes in the region. No deaths or injuries have been reported.
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08/03/2017
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[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] Libyan commander General Khalifa Haftar ... served in the Libyan army under Muammar Qadaffy, and took part in the coup that brought Qadaffy to power in 1969. He became a prisoner of war in Chad in 1987. While held prisoner, he and his fellow officers formed a group hoping to overthrow Qadaffy. He was released around 1990 in a deal with the United States government and spent nearly two decades in the United States, gaining US citizenship. In 1993, while living in the United States, he was convicted in absentia of crimes against the Jamahiriya and sentenced to death. Haftar held a senior position in the anti-Qadaffy forces in the 2011 Libyan Civil War. In 2014 he was commander of the Libyan Army when the General National Congress (GNC) refused to give up power in accordance with its term of office. Haftar launched a campaign against the GNC and its Islamic fundamentalist allies. His campaign allowed elections to take place to replace the GNC, but then developed into a civil war. Guess you can't win them all... , head of the Libyan National Army, has ordered the bombing of any Italian warships requested by the prime minister of the Government of National Accord of Libya Fayez al-Sarraj, excluding merchant vessels.
This comes after the government of national accord announced the arrival of the Italian navy ship ’Commandante Prozini’ on Wednesday.
On board the Italian ship was a group of experts in various fields en route to the naval base of Tripoli ...a confusing city, one end of which is located in Lebanon and the other end of which is the capital of Libya. Its chief distinction is being mentioned in the Marine Hymn... to assist the Libyan navy and Coast Guard in combating illegal immigrants colonists within Libyan territorial waters, off the coast of Tripoli.
Sarraj had asked Rome to assist the authorities in Tripoli to stop illegal immigration through Libya’s territorial waters.
This act has angered a number of Libyan activists who considered the move a "violation of Libyan illusory sovereignty."
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08/03/2017
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#1
Soooo... Sarraj asked for Italian assistance and now Haftar is threatening to bomb the ships if Sarraj orders it? WTF?
Posted by: Frank G ||
08/03/2017 13:43
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[Al Jazeera] Iraqi civil defence teams have started pulling bodies from the rubble in Mosul. Many of the dead were civilians, who rights groups and the Iraqi government say were used as human shields by fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group.
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[Hurriyet Daily News] Two people have performed prayers inside Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia in order to protest its closure to prayers, comparing it to measures taken by Israeli forces at the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.
The two identified as Halil Akyaman and Mahmut Alan arrived at the museum and suddenly began to pray inside.
Security forces waited for them to finish praying and then immediately moved them away from the museum.
The duo said they had prayed to protest the museum’s closure to prayers.
"Israel entered the al-Aqsa Mosque at 3 a.m. yesterday. [The Hagia Sophia] is not a museum but a mosque. There is a lock clamped on Moslems. [Ottoman] Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror conquered it. This is a mosque and I am performing my prayers. [Israelis] entering the al-Aqsa Mosque in combat boots and people entering [the Hagia Sophia] with shoes are the same thing," one of the men reportedly said.
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[ALMASDARNEWS] Tanks and armored vehicles patrolled Qamishli on Wednesday afternoon as the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) sent a clear message to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) that government troops refuse to tolerate the establishment of Rojava, a self-proclaimed Kurdish federation spanning across much of northern Syria.
Although cut off from the government mainland, the SAA’s Qamishli garrison proved itself a force to be reckoned with today, posing in front of the cameras for a festive rare parade.
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[Khaama (Afghanistan)] Dozens of turbans including Talibs and turbans of the Haqqani terrorist network were killed during the counter-terrorism and clearance operations.
The Ministry of Defense (MoD) said the murderous Moslems suffered casualties during the operations of the Afghan forces conducted in the past 24 hours.
A statement by MoD said at least 84 turbans were killed, 74 were maimed, and 2 others were placed in durance vile Drop the rosco, Muggsy, or you're one with the ages! during the operations conducted in Nangarhar The unfortunate Afghan province located adjacent to Mohmand, Kurram, and Khyber Agencies. The capital is Jalalabad. The province was the fief of Younus Khalis after the Soviets departed and one of his sons is the current provincial Taliban commander. Nangarhar is Haqqani country.. , Kapisa, Paktia, Maidan Wardak, Khost, Ghazni, Kandahar, Uruzgan, Zabul, Ghor, Badghis, Faryab, Baghlan, Badakhshan, and Helmand ...an Afghan province populated mostly by Pashtuns, adjacent to Injun country in Pak Balochistan... provinces.
A statement by MoD said the majority of the casualties were incurred to the turbans in Paktia province where 33 turbans including 10 Haqqani networkmurderous Moslems and 3 of their local commanders were killed.
The statement further added that the Taliban ...Arabic for students... turbans also suffered heavy casualties in Maidan Wardak operations where at least 30 turbans were killed and 57 others were maimed.
The Ministry of Defense of also added that the Afghan forces conducted 21 clearance operations, 22 special operations, and 3 night operations in total in the past 24 hours.
According to MoD, the Afghan Air Force also provided logistics support and close air support during the operations and conducted 15 Arclight airstrikes during the same period.
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[AlAhram] Italia began a limited naval mission on Wednesday to help Libya's coastguard curb migrant flows, which have become a source of political friction ahead of national elections expected early next year.
An Italian patrol boat entered Libyan waters and headed towards the port of Tripoli ...a confusing city, one end of which is located in Lebanon and the other end of which is the capital of Libya. Its chief distinction is being mentioned in the Marine Hymn... within minutes of a vote in Italia's parliament authorising the deployment. A second vessel was expected to join it in the coming days.
Italia announced the operation last week, saying it had been requested by Libya's U.N.-backed government. It initially hoped to send six ships into Libyan territorial waters, but the plans had to be scaled back following protests from Tripoli.
"(We will) provide logistical, technical and operational support for Libyan naval vessels, helping them and supporting them in shared and coordinated actions," Defence Minister Roberta Pinotti said ahead of Wednesday's vote.
"There will be no harm done or slight given to Libyan illusory sovereignty, because, if anything, our aim is to strengthen Libyan illusory sovereignty," she told parliament, stressing that Italia had no intention of imposing a blockade on Libya's coast.
In Tripoli, a poster of resistance hero Omar al-Mukhtar, who battled Italian rule in Libya in the 1920s, was hung over the capital's main square with the inscription "No to a return to colonization".
Italia's lower house voted by 328 to 113 in favour of the mission, while the upper house voted by 191 to 47.
After a surge in migrant arrivals from Libya at the start of the year, the numbers of newcomers has slowed and the Interior Ministry said on Wednesday that 95,215 people had reached Italia so far in 2017, down 2.7 percent on the same period in 2016.
Some 2,230 migrants colonists, most of them Africans fleeing poverty and violence back home, died in the first seven months of 2017 trying to make the sea crossing.
The Human Rights Watch group said Italia's move may endanger migrants colonists. "After years of saving lives at sea, Italia is preparing to help Libyan forces who are known to detain people in conditions that expose them to a real risk of torture, sexual violence, and forced labour," HRW said in a statement.
Elections Ahead
Almost 600,000 migrants colonists have arrived in Italia over the past four years, putting Italia's network of reception centres under huge strain and causing increasing political tensions.
Italia is due to hold national elections by next May, with voting widely expected in early 2018, and the migrant issue is expected to top the political agenda. Rightist parties accuse the centre-left government of doing nothing to halt the influx.
"The (migrant boats) will not be being pushed back to the Libyan shore so we don't understand what we are going to be doing there," Giancarlo Giorgetti, deputy head of the opposition Northern League party, told news hounds in parliament.
Italia hopes the Libyan coastguard can help prevent flimsy migrant boats from putting to sea and has been at the forefront of efforts to make the small force more effective, training its members and upgrading its fleet.
Rome has also put pressure on non-governmental organizations which have playing an increasingly important role in picking up migrants colonists off the Libyan coast and bringing them to Italia.
The government has introduced a code of conduct for the NGOs and has demanded that armed police travel on their boats to help root out eventual people smugglers. Only three out of eight humanitarian groups operating in the southern Mediterranean agreed this week to the Italian terms.
A boat operated by German NGO Jugend Rettet, one of the five groups that did not sign up, was seized by the Italian coastguard on Wednesday on the order of Sicilian magistrates on suspicion it had aided illegal immigration.
There was no immediate comment from Jugend Rettet.
That'll make the Turkish military more effective, fer shure.
[DAWN] The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire.... on Wednesday replaced the land, air and naval commanders of the military, in a major shake-up of the armed forces just over a year after a failed coup bid.
The decision from the nation's top armed forces body ─ now dominated by ministers rather than the military ─ marked another step in the growing control of the government over the once all-powerful Ottoman Turkish armed forces.
The Supreme Military Council (YAS) decided to remove land forces commander General Salih Zeki Colak, naval chief Admiral Bulent Bostanoglu and air force commander General Abidin Unal, presidential front man Ibrahim Kalin said.
Colak will be replaced by General Yasar Guler, currently head of the gendarmerie and former deputy chief of staff, Kalin told news hounds in Ankara.
Bostanoglu will be replaced by Vice Admiral Adnan Ozbal and General Hasan Kucukakyuz would replace Unal as air force commander, he said.
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[Breitbart] Charlene Downes, 14 at the time of her disappearance, was last seen in Blackpool in 2003 and is believed to have been not only murdered but that her killers disposed of her body by putting it into kebab meat at a local seaside kebab shop.
Police have said they believe Charlene may have been linked to grooming gangs in Blackpool and say that they discovered at least 60 underage girls had been sexually groomed at "honey pot" takeaways in the city. The Daily Telegraph reported in 2011 that these children had been targeted with food, drugs, and alcohol in return for sex in the city.
Fourteen years later, authorities now say they have tossed in the calaboose Maw! They're comin' to get me, Maw! a 51-year-old man in connection with her disappearance only after Charlene’s parents were able to force police to examine CCTV footage that had been in storage for 12 years, the Daily Mail reports.
A front man for Lancashire Police released a statement after the arrest saying: "The man, aged 51, who lived in Blackpool at the time of Charlene’s disappearance, is currently in jug. Charlene was just 14 years old when she was last seen in Blackpool on Saturday, November 1, 2003. A £100,000 reward remains on offer for information leading to the conviction of her killer or killers."
Charlene’s mother expressed outrage that the CCTV footage had been kept hidden for over a decade saying: "It is unbelievable that they have had that footage all those years and never used it. It is an absolute disgrace and an insult to the memory of my dead daughter."
She added that if the footage were available sooner than the 2007 murder trial, which, due to police error, led to the acquittal of Funny Boyz kebab worker Ilyad Albattikh for murder and Mohammed Reveshi for disposal of Charlene’s body, may have turned out differently.
At the time of the trial, the court was told the fast food shop owner had "joked" Downes had been chopped up and put into kebabs that were sold to the public. After the acquittal, the two men were paid £250,000 in compensation.
Earlier this year, another kebab shop made headlines after it was revealed that a 16-year-old girl was brutally gang raped by multiple Afghan Moslem men.
Moslem grooming gangs also continue to plague the North of England, according to recent reports, in which police allege that the Yorkshire town of Keighley may be home to a new grooming scandal involving over 179 individual sex crimes.
The most infamous case of sexual abuse of maidens still remains that of Rotherham in which over 1,400 underage girls were systematically raped, tortured, and many forced into prostitution and addiction to drugs. The rapists remained on the lam for so long largely because police were too afraid of the backlash for mentioning the ethnic origins of the Moslem male perpetrators.
#1
The most infamous case of sexual abuse of maidens still remains that of Rotherham in which over 1,400 underage girls were systematically raped, tortured, and many forced into prostitution and addiction to drugs
[DAWN] A jacket wallah struck a NATO ...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A cautionary tale of cost-benefit analysis.... convoy near the southern Afghan city of Kandahar on Wednesday, causing casualties, said the US military.
Lt Damien E Horvath, a military front man, could not say how many casualties there were or provide their nationalities.
The NATO mission, known as Resolute Support, "can confirm that a NATO convoy was attacked in Kandahar. The attack did cause casualties," he said.
Kandahar police front man Zia Durrani also confirmed the attack and the area on the edge Kandahar was quickly cordoned off.
No one immediately grabbed credit for the bombing.
Eyewitness Ghulam Ali, who runs a mechanics shop near the attack site, said the intensity of the blast knocked him out.
When he came to he saw one military vehicle ablaze on the road.
He stepped out of his shop but a sudden burst of gunfire drove him back inside.
He heard helicopters arriving and saw soldiers being taken away from the scene but could not determine the extent of their injuries.
Shah Agha Popal, who runs a vehicle parts shop also nearby, said he also saw soldiers being taken away by two helicopters.
"But I couldn't tell if they were maimed or if they were dead," he said.
Two US soldiers were killed in Afghanistan’s restive southern province of Kandahar earlier today when a Taliban ...Arabic for students... jacket wallah rammed a vehicle filled with explosives into a convoy of foreign forces.
"Two US service members were killed in action in Kandahar, Afghanistan, when their convoy came under attack," Pentagon front man Navy Captain Jeff Davis says. "US Forces Afghanistan will provide additional information as it becomes available."
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[IsraelTimes] Photos show Saleh al-Arouri discussing ’resistance’ against Israel in meeting with senior Iranian official
A senior Hamas, a contraction of the Arabic words for "frothing at the mouth", terrorist believed by Israel to have planned the 2014 kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens in the West Bank was spotted publicly in Leb’s capital Beirut for the first time since he was expelled from Qatar ...an emirate on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It sits on some really productive gas and oil deposits, which produces the highest per capita income in the world. They piss it all away on religion, financing the Moslem Brotherhood and several al-Qaeda affiliates... in June.
In photos published Wednesday, Saleh al-Arouri can be seen meeting with senior Iranian official Hossein Amir Abdollahian -- a former deputy foreign minister -- and a number of other members of Hamas, among them senior front man Osama Hamdan and the terror group’s representative in Leb, Ali Barka.
Also present at the meeting was Ramadan Abdullah Shalah, the head of the Paleostinian Islamic Jihad ...created after many members of the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood decided the organization was becoming too moderate. Operations were conducted out of Egypt until 1981 when the group was exiled after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat. They worked out of Gaza until they were exiled to Lebanon in 1987, where they clove tightly to Hezbollah. In 1989 they moved to Damascus, where they remain a subsidiary of Hezbollah... terror group.
During the meeting, the participants discussed continued "resistance" against Israel and the recent tensions surrounding the Temple Mount following the July 14 terror attack at the holy site, Iran’s IRNA news agency reported.
After his expulsion from Qatar in June, al-Arouri moved to Leb, where he is being hosted by the Hezbollah terror group in its Dahieh stronghold in southern Beirut, Channel 2 reported last month.
Citing Paleostinian sources, the report said that Arouri and two other senior Hamas figures have relocated to the Hezbollah-dominated neighborhood in the Lebanese capital, an area heavily protected with checkpoints on every access road.
During a meeting with visiting American UN Ambassador Nikki Haley ...first woman to serve as Governor of South Carolina, and the second Indian-American governor in the country, after Bobby Jindal of Louisiana. At the age of 39, Haley is the youngest current governor in the U.S., a distinction formerly held by Jindal. She is a Republican, which really grates on the Dems... , Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman alleged that Arouri has also been attempting "to boost the relationship between Hamas and Hezbollah," the Shiite Lebanese militia, "under an Iranian umbrella, and with the assistance of the Revolutionary Guards and [its leader] Qassem Soleimani," according to a statement from the Defense Ministry.
Qatari officials have reportedly apologized for having to expel Hamas officials, but said it came as a result of "external pressures."
[Breitbart] Tens of thousands of Syrian refugees living along the eastern border of Leb have refused a deal that would have allowed them to return home, citing the miserable and dangerous conditions that persist in their country of origin.
"Khaled Raad, a member of the refugees’ Coordination Committee with the Lebanese government, says the vast majority of the refugees in Leb’s Arsal border region will not accept to return to Syria, for fear of war, hardship, and oppressive jihadist rule," reported the News Agency that Dare Not be Named on Tuesday.
The AP cites United Nations ...an organization which on balance has done more bad than good, with the good not done well and the bad done thoroughly... estimates of about 51,000 Syrian refugees in Leb. Evidently, many of them will be hanging back while 9,000 al-Qaeda prisoners of war are sent back to Syria in a prisoner swap arranged with Lebanese Hezbollah. The trade was supposed to happen on Monday, but it was delayed due to logistical problems encountered while arranging the necessary transportation--or, according to some reports, by al-Qaeda making new demands at the last minute.
The prisoner deal was intended to allow civilian refugees to return to Syria as well, clearing Syrians out of Leb while Hezbollah works with the Syrian army to drive rebel forces away from the border region. The refugees may have felt nervous about riding home on the same buses as the jihadis who threaten their lives. Also, Syrians opposed to the Assad regime have learned to be wary of relocation arrangements that leave them all sitting in one place, exposed to Arclight airstrikes and artillery.
Another News Agency that Dare Not be Named report quotes a Syrian who explains that Leb is preferable to Syria, even with all of the restrictions placed on refugees by the Lebanese government, saying, "There are people who say Idlib is going to become a second djinn-infested Mosul ... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn... , and I would rather stay in Leb and go to prison than move there. Those who are staying are unhappy, and those who are leaving are also unhappy."
In other words, he is saying the Idlib province in Syria will become a terrorist stronghold akin to the Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems.... ’s Iraqi capital of Mosul, which had to be bombed to smithereens in order to liberate it. On a more optimistic note, the AP reports that refugees hope their treatment in Leb will improve once the bully boyz and jihadis have been shipped home.
The United Nations Human Rights Council has expressed reservations about the deal between Hezbollah and al-Qaeda, worried that "conditions for refugees to return in safety and dignity are not yet in place."
On Monday, actor George Clooney and his wife Amal, with support from Google and HP Inc., announced a $3.25 million donation to help UNICEF and the Lebanese ministry of education provide schools for Syrian refugee children in Leb.
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] August marks the passing of one year since the Houthi ...a Zaidi Shia insurgent group operating in Yemen. They have also been referred to as the Believing Youth. Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi is said to be the spiritual leader of the group and most of the military leaders are his relatives. The Yemeni government has accused the Houthis of having ties to the Iranian government, which wouldn't suprise most of us. The group has managed to gain control over all of Saada Governorate and parts of Amran, Al Jawf and Hajjah Governorates. Its slogan is God is Great, Death to America™, Death to Israel, a curse on the Jews ... militias in Yemen ...an area of the Arabian Peninsula sometimes mistaken for a country. It is populated by more antagonistic tribes and factions than you can keep track of. Except for a tiny handfull of Jews everthing there is very Islamic... stopped paying the salaries of more than 1.2 million civil employees in the civil and military sectors.
As per the state budget for 2014 (the latest public budget prepared in Yemen), the monthly salaries paid reach YR 80 billion (equivalent to $216 million), which means, the total of the sum looted by Houthi militias during the past 12 months amounted to 960 billion Yemeni riyals.
This sum is equivalent to two billion and 592 million dollars, (one dollar equals 360 riyals) at the moment.
During the past month of Ramadan, the government of the coup in Sanaa evaded the demands of employees through the issuing of what is known as the ration book, which was a deceitful maneuver.
The ration book offered a value equivalent to half a salary for one or two months to be received by the employees in the form of goods or food supplies and through certain contracted commercial companies.
Hundreds of thousands of employees were forced to purchase goods with exaggerated prices. These difference in prices found its way into the pockets of militia leaders and supervisors.
The Government of Yemen agreed to a UN proposal; the UN Special Envoy for Yemen Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed referred to as a solution that would guarantee payment of salaries if implemented.
However, there's more than one way to skin a cat... observers rule out that the Houthi militias would agree to supply revenues from their areas of control to a neutral institution to keep this tragic situation on going and plunder hundreds of millions of dollars.
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08/03/2017
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#1
I would not think the riyal is worth anything at all considering it's a failed state
Posted by: chris ||
08/03/2017 12:59
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[Al Jazeera] The president says: 'That son-of-a-wh*re maniac, if he makes a mistake then the Far East will become an arid land.'
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08/03/2017
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#1
I love the way Filipino string together swear words. It's never just a single swear word, it's a whole bunch strung together. In this case, I'd have to agree with Duterte.
[Khaama (Afghanistan)] An kaboom has taken place in southeastern Paktia province of Afghanistan earlier this morning amid fears that a number of people have been killed or maimed.
The incident has taken place in the vicinity of Gardez city, the picturesque provincial capital of Paktia province.
The type of the kaboom has not been ascertained so far but preliminary reports indicate the blast was triggered by a magnetic bomb planted to a vehicle.
Reports also indicate that two people bit the dust in the kaboom and some were maimed.
The local government and security officials have not commented regarding the report so far.
No group including the Taliban ...Arabic for students... bully boyz has grabbed credit behind the incident yet.
In the meantime, the eyewitnesses are saying that six people including the head of the investigation of the national directorate of security of Paktia were maimed in the kaboom.
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[Iraq News] Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems.... ’s head of training camps in Tal Afar was killed in an Arclight airstrike that targeted his vehicle, a source was quoted saying.
"An Arclight airstrike conducted on Wednesday targeted a convoy in the western suburbs of Tal Afar, in west of djinn-infested Mosul ... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn... ," a local source from Nineveh has told AlSumaria News. "According to the available information, IS head of training camps in Tal Afar and another prominent leader were killed."
"The holy warriors have been on high alert in the town fearing further Arclight airstrikes against its main headquarters," the source, who preferred anonymity, added.
On Tuesday, news reports said IS prominent vocalist abu Talha al-Shami was killed in an Arclight airstrike in the town. Strict measures were imposed by the group there after a prominent foreign female sniper was found slain in a narrow alleyway.
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08/03/2017
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Baghdad (Iraqinews.com) Three civilians were injured as an improvised explosive device (IED) exploded on Wednesday in southern Baghdad, Alsumaria News reported.
A source from the police told Alsumaria that an IED, planted on the side of a road near a local market south of the capital Baghdad, exploded early today, leaving three civilians wounded.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, the source added that security forces arrived to the explosion scene and the three wounded were taken to a hospital of treatment.
Moreover, security forces has managed to dismantle an IED planted on a side of an agriculture road in southern Baghdad.
On another note, security forces imposed curfew at al-Halabsa area, north of Baghdad, in search for wanted persons, a police source told Alsumaria.
Bombings and armed attacks are seen on almost a daily basis against security members, paramilitary groups and civilians since the Iraqi government launched a wide-scale campaign to retake IS-occupied areas in 2016.
[ALMASDARNEWS] The leadership for Ha’yat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in Damascus’ East Ghouta region has published a statement saying that the local jihadist chapter was ready to disband itself and allow its fighters to be merged into the ranks of other myrmidon groups for the purposes of creating a combined operations room.
The one condition for doing this, HTS stated, was that all other myrmidon groups in eastern Damascus had to be willing to dissolve themselves as well.
This offer comes after recent news about East Ghouta’s Faylaq al-Rahman faction asking HTS to withdraw from areas it controlled close to their own territory. The reason for this was that Russian had offered ‐ as part of a new ceasefire deal ‐ to end all airstikes against Faylaq al-Rahman if it could separate its ranks from the ranks of HTS (which is an internationally-designated terrorist organization).
Posted by: Fred ||
08/03/2017
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[IsraelTimes] Defense ministry says another 42-kilometer section of security barrier completed
The Israeli defense ministry said Wednesday it has completed a further 42-kilometer (26-mile) stretch of its contentious West Bank security barrier.
"The defense ministry this morning installed the final concrete walls, completing a 42-kilometer wall between Tarkumia and Meitar," it said in a statement, referring to the Paleostinian village of Tarkumia, northwest of Hebron, and an Israeli crossing adjacent to the settlement of Meitar, further south.
It did not say how much of the planned 712-kilometer network of towering concrete walls, barbed-wire fences, trenches and closed military roads was now complete.
A ministry spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for the information.
Based on UN figures published before Wednesday’s announcement, about 214 kilometers remains to be built.
Israel says the barrier, which it began building after a wave of Paleostinian terror attacks in 2002, is crucial for its security, while Paleostinians see it as a land grab of territory they want for a future state.
Much of the barrier cuts into the West Bank.
In a non-binding decision, the International Court of Justice ruled in 2004 that construction of the barrier was illegal and, like the UN General Assembly, demanded it be dismantled.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last March ordered that a gap in the barrier in the Tarkumia area be closed as a priority after a spike of Paleostinian attacks inside Israel.
[Iraq News] A young murderous Moslem belonging to the Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems.... (IS) terror group, with a suspected British accent, has threatened US President Donald Trump ...New York real estate developer, described by Dems as illiterate, racist, misogynistic, and what ever other unpleasant descriptions they can think of, elected by the rest of us as 45th President of the United States... and warned of new attacks, according to UK’s Mirror newspaper.
The young murderous Moslem appeared in a short video where he pledged further violence.
"You may have your eyes on Raqqa and djinn-infested Mosul ... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn... but we have our eyes on Constantinople [Istanbul] and Rome," he said. "We will slaughter you in your own houses," he added.
The Mirror said that it is believed the video was recorded in Raqqa, which served as ISIS’ de facto capital after Lions of Islam seized the city in 2013.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/03/2017
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#1
Love the videos, especially when they're agitated. Easier to render into vectors for recognition software.
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.
[Breitbart] President Donald Trump’s National Security adviser H.R. McMaster allowed former President Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice to maintain her security clearance to access classified information -- despite reservations Trump had about her motives.
Half of the eight mayoral hopefuls on Detroit's primary ballot next week have been convicted of felony crimes involving drugs, assault or weapons, a Detroit News analysis shows.
[Miami Herald] The Trump administration revealed it had canceled a CIA program to provide Syrian rebels with arms and training in July -- and I’ll give you three guesses as to how the story got framed. If you went with "misleading insinuations over Russia," you are correct. The Washington Post, which broke the news, ran with the headline: "Trump ends covert CIA program to arm anti-Assad rebels in Syria, a move sought by Moscow." An anonymous quote in the story -- "Putin won in Syria" -- got traction online, in print and on TV.
[American Mirror] Nancy Pelosi appears to be growing feeble of mind, but now of body, too?
[Sara Hoyt] Do not confuse "duty" with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect.
[Judicial Watch] Washington, DC ‐ Judicial Watch today announced that the Justice Department refuses to disclose the talking points developed by the Obama Justice Department to help it respond to press inquiries about the controversial June 27, 2016, tarmac meeting between Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.
[Breitbart] Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) revealed at a recent Missouri town hall that she could support a single-payer health care system.
[Al Jazeera] The firm that provided Venezuela's election technology has cast doubt on the outcome of its polls for a new assembly, saying the turnout figures were "manipulated".
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] Saudi security forces announced the "elimination" of a wanted terrorist in the eastern town of Awamiya, sources have revealed to Al Arabiya.net.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
At this point in time, we have a standing US President that is actually considering a plan conceived by a contractor. Actually two, because Stephen A. Feinberg of Cerberus Group and owner of Dyncorp came up with a plan as well. But I will focus on the Prince plan because of how much traction it is getting. I say traction, because the media and the naysayers of this industry have been writing this off as insignificant or risible.
[SHABELLENEWS] Three boda boda operators have been killed in suspected al-Shaabab attack at Nyongoro in Witu, Lamu County.
[Hurriyet Daily News] The key suspect in the case on the events at the Akinci Air Base, considered to be the commanding center of 
[IsraelTimes] Photos show Saleh al-Arouri discussing ’resistance’ against Israel in meeting with senior Iranian official
[Breitbart] Tens of thousands of Syrian refugees living along the eastern border of 
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] August marks the passing of one year since the 
[Khaama (Afghanistan)] An 
Baghdad (Iraqinews.com) Three civilians were injured as an improvised explosive device (IED) exploded on Wednesday in southern Baghdad, Alsumaria News reported.
