Internal Emails Offer Details on Bin Laden Burial

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WASHINGTON (AP) – Internal emails among U.S. military officers indicate that no sailors watched Osama bin Laden’s burial at sea from the USS Carl Vinson and traditional Islamic procedures were followed during the ceremony.

The emails, obtained by The Associated Press through the Freedom of Information Act, are heavily blacked out, but are the first public disclosure of government information about the al-Qaida leader’s death. The emails were released Wednesday by the Defense Department.

Bin Laden was killed on May 1, 2011, by a Navy SEAL team that assaulted his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

One email stamped secret and sent on May 2 by a senior Navy officer briefly describes how bin Laden’s body was washed, wrapped in a white sheet, and then placed in a weighted bag.

According to another message from the Vinson’s public affairs officer, only a small group of the ship’s leadership was informed of the burial.

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EPA at it Again: Teaching Guide Tells Non-English Speakers to Spy on Neighbors, Workplace

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(CNSNews.com) – The Environmental Protection Agency has published a teaching guide designed to teach adult non-English speakers the language with a curriculum on environmentalism, including a homework assignment telling students to “observe” their neighbors, school and workplace to see if recycling is taking place.

In the “Teach English, Teach About the Environment,” under the heading “Civic Integration Activity” in the beginner’s level Lesson Plan One on recycling, the following questions are asked:
1. Ask students to observe whether their neighbors recycle their waste.
2. Ask students to observe whether the school or their workplace recycles waste material.
3. Ask at the following class what they observed.

In the same lesson, the homework – or “home support activity” – is to calculate how much each student adds to the “waste stream.”

“Have students weigh themselves on their bathroom scale at home,” the guide states. “Then have them weigh themselves with the bag of household garbage thrown out each day. Multiply the weight difference by seven days, 30 days, and 365 days to get a sense of the amount of garbage generated by each student.”

The teaching guide focused on what the EPA calls the three Rs – recycle, reuse and reduce.

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Grassley Office: Leahy Working Behind Closed Doors on Privacy Bill

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Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office leveled charges of working behind closed doors at Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy and his office following allegations and denials that he is aiming to allow law enforcement’s push for warrantless surveillance.

Leahy’s office first used Twitter and his website to hit back against criticism following a Tuesday CNET report about the senator’s proposed amendment to a bill affecting two 1980s-era surveillance bills — the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act, and the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA).

Now Grassley, the committee ranking member, is charging that his office has been kept in the dark regarding the development of the bill.

Grassley spokeswoman Beth Levine told The Daily Caller on Wednesday that neither “Sen. Grassley nor his staff have seen the new legislation proposed by Sen. Leahy,” stating that the bill is being rewritten “behind closed doors.”

“But, judging by the concerns on both sides of the issue, it may be time to take a step back, hold additional hearings to address concerns, and discuss the issues being raised instead of rewriting the bill behind closed doors,” she added.

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Dem Operative Suspected in Serial Rapes

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photo credit: aranami

An attack by a Colorado man with close ties to the Democratic Party on an elderly petition gatherer for Personhood USA has led to the identification of a suspect in a series of unsolved sexual assault cases, officials have confirmed to WND.

William Costello, a real estate broker with ties to some of the state’s top political figures in the Democratic Party, was charged after his DNA was tied to unsolved sexual assault cases from 2008, 2010 and 2011.

The Denver Post reported Costello was driving the SUV of Democratic political strategist Mike Stratton when he was pulled over and arrested by authorities. Costello was using the SUV to deliver Democrat campaign signs in Durango, Colo.

Costello is also a friend of former Colorado Democratic Gov. Dick Lamm, who once asserted that elderly people have a “duty to die and get out of the way.” Lamm also has called for health-care rationing and complained that many elderly people feel entitled to have taxpayers fund medical procedures that will prolong their lives.

Costello allegedly sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl in 2008, a 22-year-woman in 2010 and a 49-year-old woman in 2011. Authorities subsequently charged him with two counts of second-degree kidnapping, two accounts of sexual assault on a child and three counts of sexual assault. He was also charged with two counts of impersonating a police officer during two of the attacks.

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$54,000 See-Through Public Restrooms Installed in Texas

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America’s first ever public restrooms made entirely from glass have been unveiled in Sulphur Springs, Texas. The two glass restrooms cost $54,000 to design and resemble a large mirrored box. They take pride of place in the revamped public square in downtown Sulphur Springs.

For anyone concerned that people might be able to see you doing your business, fear not they have been constructed from special mirrored glass that enables people on the inside to look out but doesn’t enable nosey people to see in.

Locals are excited about being home to this unusual first and hope the mirrored bathrooms will become something of a tourist attraction. ‘Bathrooms are typically ugly no matter what you do, how can you make them disappear?’ city manager Marc Maxwell told ABC News. ‘You cover it with mirrors, that’s how, and why not make it a one-way mirror while you’re at it.’

After some initial uncertainty about how safe it is to use a glass bathroom, residents have quickly fallen in love with the quirky loos that enable you to see everything going on around you, even who is next in line. ‘I stood around the bathroom for a long time to make sure you couldn’t see inside and you couldn’t,’ said local resident Merrideth Caddell. ‘Once I went in, it felt strange that four men were looking into the bathroom, but they couldn’t see me.’

The structure works because the designers worked to devise the right combination of glass and lighting. For the illusion to work properly, the outside of the structure must be more lit than the inside, explained David Gideon of the Commercial Glass & Mirror Company. The bathrooms have no lights on the inside and in order to see at night, LED lights have been placed on the outside of the structure, so that the illusion remains intact.

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Senator Presses Geithner on Plan to Raise $100B for Global Green Fund

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photo credit: center for american progress

(CNSNews.com) – Ahead of the next big international climate meeting, U.S. Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) has asked Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner how the administration proposes the raise contributions to a $100 billion climate fund to which the U.S. signed up three years ago.

In a letter to Geithner Tuesday Vitter, the incoming ranking member on the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, said he was “interested to ascertain how Treasury plans on finding the lion’s share of an additional $100 billion, to give away to foreign nations while we continue to run deficits in excess of $1 trillion.”

At a climate conference in Copenhagen in December 2009, the U.S. and other developed nations agreed to put together a global fund to help developing countries curb greenhouse gas emissions and cope with phenomena blamed on climate change, such as droughts and rising sea levels.

Subsequently established in 2011, the “Green Climate Fund” (GCF) is meant to raise $100 billion a year from public and private sources by 2020.

At the climate conference beginning next Monday in Doha, Qatar, developing nation representatives and environmental advocates are hoping for progress in discussions on how the money will actually be raised.

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Egypt’s Morsi Grants Himself Far-reaching Powers

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Cairo (AP) Egypt’s Islamist president unilaterally decreed greater authorities for himself Thursday and effectively neutralized a judicial system that had emerged as a key opponent by declaring that the courts are barred from challenging his decisions.

Riding high on U.S. and international praise for mediating a Gaza cease-fire, Mohammed Morsi put himself above oversight and gave protection to the Islamist-led assembly writing a new constitution from a looming threat of dissolution by court order.

But the move is likely to fuel growing public anger that he and his Muslim Brotherhood are seizing too much power.

In what was interpreted by rights activists as a de facto declaration of emergency law, one of Morsi’s decrees gave him the power to take “due measures and steps” to deal with any “threat” to the revolution, national unity and safety or anything that obstructs the work of state institutions.

Morsi framed his decisions as necessary to protect the revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak nearly two years ago and to cement the nation’s transition to democratic rule. Many activists, including opponents of the Brotherhood, criticize the judiciary as packed with judges and prosecutors sympathetic to Mubarak. Brotherhood supporters accuse the courts of trying to block their agenda.

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Two Dead, Eighty Injured in Massive 100 Vehicle Pileup in Texas

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BEAUMONT, Texas — Two people died and more than 80 people were hurt Thursday when at least 100 vehicles collided in Southeast Texas in a pileup that left trucks twisted on top of each other and authorities rushing to pull survivors from the wreckage.

The collision occurred in extremely foggy conditions at about 8:45 a.m. Thanksgiving Day on Interstate 10 southwest of Beaumont, a Gulf Coast city about 80 miles east of Houston.

A man and a woman were killed in a Chevy Suburban SUV crushed by a tractor trailer, the Texas Department of Public Safety told KFDM-TV.

Officials at Acadian Ambulance service said at least 51 people have been taken to area hospitals and at least eight are critically hurt.

According to DPS, a crash on the eastbound side of the highway led to other accidents in a dangerous chain reaction. There were multiple crashes on the other side of the highway as well.

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Report: Corroboration of Claim That Anonymous Hacked Romney’s Project ORCA (+video)

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A nonprofit devoted to election reform says a video released by hacktivist collective Anonymous days prior to the election corroborates claims from a mysterious hacktivist group that it is behind the Election Day failures of the Romney campaign’s Project ORCA.

The left-wing Velvet Revolution, which works to investigate and prove instances of electronic election tampering, offered IT specialists a $1 million reward for proof of instances of electronic election tampering during the 2012 cycle. The Velvet Revolution is particularly suspicious of Republicans.

Following the election, Velvet Revolution says they received a letter from a hacktivist group — referring to itself as “we protectors of democracy” — that claimed it was responsible for the program’s technical failures, and that it had found a system in place to electronically rig the election in three states. The letter did not offer any proof of its allegations.

“Regarding the Protectors letter, we posted the reward asking for info about electronic manipulation of the vote and then right after the election we received ‘The Protector’ letter at our POBox,” said Kevin Reese, an attorney for Velvet Revolution and a board member, in a press statement.

See Anonymous video:

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Tax Reform Might Start With a Look Back to ’86

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Tax Reform report of the Treasury Department to President Ronald Reagan, November 1984

As Washington grapples with the budget, it might be worth asking a simple question: What would Ronald Reagan do?

He was the last president to preside over a significant tax reform, one that did exactly what both candidates in this year’s presidential election said they want to do: lower tax rates and close loopholes.

And a critical part of that reform was to end the historical system of taxing capital gains at lower rates than ordinary income.

In the name of fairness, the Tax Reform Act of 1986 raised the maximum tax rate on long-term capital gains to 28 percent from 20 percent at the same time it reduced the maximum rate on ordinary income to 28 percent from 50 percent.

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