Immigration Officials Holding Two Fellow Students of Boston Bombing Suspect

/3 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Fox NewsTwo people seen in a photo with suspected Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in New York’s famed Times Square are being held by authorities on administrative immigration violations, Fox News has confirmed.

The two men were identified to Fox News as Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat Tazhayakov, both citizens of Kazakhstan. They can be seen standing next to Tsarnaev in a photo believed to have been taken in April 2012 in Times Square, which authorities suspect was another of the bombers’ intended targets.

Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov were arrested April 20 — five days after the attack at the marathon — at the Hidden Brook apartments by the FBI and Homeland Security in New Bedford Mass., and they are being detained by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement at the Suffolk County House of Corrections in Boston because of problems relating to their student visas, sources told Fox News.

New York City officials held a news conference Thursday confirming that the city was another target following the bombings in Boston, which killed three and wounded more than 200 near the finish line of the Boston race.

“We learned through the Joint Terrorist Task Force that the Boston Marathon bombers had planned to travel to Manhattan to detonate remaining bombs in Times Square,” New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said, though it is unclear when this information was relayed to New York City officials.

Read more from this story HERE.

Holder: "Amnesty is a Civil Right" and Other Idiocy (+video)

/15 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: DonkeyHoteyAmnesty “is a matter of civil and human rights,” Eric Holder claims. If that’s the case, then amnesty opponents are a bunch of Bull Connors.

Holder stated in remarks in an April 24 speech to the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund MALDEF) Awards Gala that “creating a mechanism for [illegal aliens] to earn citizenship and move out of the shadows… is a matter of civil and human rights.”

Let’s just tear down the fence and hand out EBT cards at the border, and bring the American experiment to an end.

We used to celebrate Rosa Parks, an American citizen, for defying segregation and demanding equal treatment as an American citizen. Now, Holder drapes non-citizens in the mantle of civil rights, even though they are driving down American wages — especially those of low-skilled blacks.

Three members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights recently wrote to the Congressional Black Caucus, warning that amnesty “will likely disproportionately harm lower-skilled African-Americans by making it more difficult for them to obtain employment and depressing their wages when they do obtain employment.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama: ‘Planned Parenthood isn’t Going Anywhere’ (+video)

/3 Comments/in , /by

During a speech this morning at the Planned Parenthood gala, President Obama vowed he would never allow Republicans to cut taxpayer funds for the abortion provider.

“If there’s one thing the past few years have shown is that Planned Parenthood isn’t going anywhere,” Obama said as the crowd cheered. “It’s not going anywhere today, it’s not going anywhere tomorrow.”

Obama was wildly received by the audience when he entered the room – the first sitting president to address the nation’s largest abortion provider.

[Obama’s comments about Planned Parenthood “not going anywhere” starts at about 2:00]

Read more from this story HERE.

Mother of Bomb Suspects Eyed in Radicalizing Son; was on Terrorism Database

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: Reuters The mother of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects is a “person of interest” to federal authorities seeking to learn who radicalized one or both of her sons, according to lawmakers, and a separate report said she was on a federal terrorism database some 18 months before the attack.

Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, who had reportedly become more militant in her Muslim faith around the same time as her son, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was added to the classified intelligence database known by the acronym TIDE at the CIA’s request. Two key lawmakers said authorities now want to know if she helped put her son, who died a week ago following a shootout with police in Massachusetts, on the road to radicalism.

“She is a person of interest that we’re looking at to see if she helped radicalize her son, or had contacts with other people or other terrorist groups,” Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters.

Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, also pointed to Zubeidat as someone who may have led Tamerlan down the path toward Islamic extremism.

“The mother in my judgment has a role in his radicalization process in terms of her influence over him (and) fundamental views of Islam,” McCaul said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Hammers New State Abortion Laws

/5 Comments/in , /by

President Obama slammed state abortion restrictions Friday in a speech to Planned Parenthood’s national conference.

Obama criticized efforts at the state and federal levels to cut off funding for Planned Parenthood and roll back access to abortion.

When abortion-rights supporters see some of the proposed restrictions, “you want to check the calendar, you want to make sure it’s still 2013,” Obama said.

Obama criticized Republican governors’ attempts to limit abortion access — a trend that has gathered steam over the past few years as conservatives shift from requirements like parental notification to laws that set increasingly early limits on when a woman can receive an abortion.

“There’s nothing conservative about the government injecting itself into decisions best made between a woman and her doctors,” Obama said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Last Words: Texas Con Calls Lethal Injection 'Awesome'

/4 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Sarah G…[Convicted murderer Richard] Cobb, 29, spent a decade on death row for the murder of Kenneth Vandever, a man whom he abducted and later killed in a convenience store robbery 11 years ago. Cobb abducted Vandever, then 37, and two other women whom he shot with a shotgun and left for dead. The women survived to call police, but Vandever died…

As the first injection entered his bloodstream, Cobb lifted his head from the gurney on which he was tied down, and craned his neck to stare at the warden who stood behind him.

“Wow!” Cobb shouted. “That is great. That is awesome! Thank you, warden! Thank you (expletive) warden!” he said.

Soon after the outburst, “his head fell back on the pillow, and his neck twisted at an odd angle, with his mouth and eyes open,” the AP reported.

Read more from this story HERE.

New Video Shows Egyptian Police Involved in Deadly Attack on Coptic Cathedral

/4 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: archer10 (Dennis)Newly-emerged video appears to show Egyptian police standing idly by – and even helping attackers during a deadly assault earlier this month on a Coptic cathedral where Christians were mourning five men killed in an earlier clash with Muslims.

The video shot April 7 and first obtained by MidEast Christian News, shows a men shooting guns, wielding machetes and hurling stones and possibly Molotov cocktails as mourners carry caskets out of St. Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in the Abbassia District of Cairo as uniformed police watch, unmoving. At one point, a police officer appears to help a gunman take aim at a courtyard full of mourners who had spilled out of the church. The attack left two Copts dead and another 84 people injured, including 11 police officers.

When it was over, the only arrests made were of four Copts. Christians, who were already outraged over a three-day attack that began April 4 attack in Khosous which saw the four men killed and homes, a nursery and a church burned, said the events show how elusive justice is for Christians, who make up about 10 percent of the nation’s population.

Read more from this story HERE.

Advocates Eye Legalizing Marijuana in Alaska

/6 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: APAlaska, known for its live-and-let-live lifestyle, is poised to become the next battleground in the push to legalize the recreational use of marijuana.

The state has a complicated history with the drug, with its highest court ruling nearly 40 years ago that adults have a constitutional right to possess and smoke marijuana for personal use in their own homes. In the late 1990s, Alaska became one of the first states to allow the use of pot for medicinal reasons.

Then the pendulum swung the other direction, with residents in 2004 rejecting a ballot effort to legalize recreational marijuana. And in 2006, the state passed a law criminalizing possession of even small amounts of the drug — leaving the current state of affairs somewhat murky.

Supporters of recreational marijuana say attitudes toward pot have softened in the past decade, and they believe they have a real shot at success in Alaska.

The state is reviewing their request to begin gathering signatures to get an initiative on next year’s ballot. The proposal would make it legal for those 21 and older to use and possess up to 1 ounce of marijuana, though not in public. It also would set out provisions for legal grow operations and establish an excise tax.

Read more from this story HERE.

Intel System Broken: US 'Going Backwards in National Security'

/3 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Vjeran PavicFrustration is mounting among congressional Republicans who say the U.S. intelligence system remains broken more than a decade after authorities failed to stop Osama bin Laden.

Reports that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon attack, was placed on a terrorism watch list at the request of the CIA a year before the bombings has heightened fears of an intelligence failure with parallels to 9/11.

GOP lawmakers say the same information-sharing problems that hobbled the CIA and FBI in the run-up to the 9/11 attacks have resurfaced in the Tsarnaev case.

“I have no idea who bears the blame. I just know the system is broken,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Thursday after White House officials briefed senators on the investigation into the Boston attacks.

“The FBI and the CIA have great people, but you know [we are] going backwards in national security,” he said. Russian intelligence officials separately warned the FBI and CIA about Tsarnaev’s 2011 trip to Russia, where he may have reached out to militant Islamic groups in Dagestan.

Read more from this story HERE.

Tenn. Woman Gets 51 Years in Newborn Twins Deaths

/3 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: EtanSivad[The 26-year old mother, Lindsey Lowe,] gave birth to the twin boys in the bathroom of her parents’ home in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Hendersonville, about 20 miles northeast of Nashville on the night of Sept. 12, 2011. She told police she smothered them and placed them in a laundry basket so that her parents would not hear their cries. Lowe’s parents found one of the babies two days later and alerted police…

In ordering the maximum sentence on the child abuse charges, [Judge Dee David] Gay said he found Lowe to be untruthful and selfish and called it a tragedy that so many people believe her version of events.

Gay said Lowe’s statement in a letter to the judge claiming she did not know she was pregnant was “not credible,” and he chided her for writing that the babies’ father had date-raped her.

“Just how in the world is that relevant?” he asked. “And is it supposed to devalue the lives of these children?…There are real serious problems in you taking responsibility for what you did.”

Gay quoted Focus on the Family founder James Dobson saying, “Our children are the true wealth of any nation” and added that we cannot become “a child-killing society that views children as burdens rather than blessings.”

Read more from this story HERE.