Failed Navy SEALs Raid on Somali Target Could Bolster Al Shabab (+video)

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Photo Credit: Mohamed Sheikh Nor/APA commando unit from the US Navy’s Seal Team Six launched an amphibious raid on a Somali town, but failed to confirm a capture or kill of their Al Shabab target, suspected to be linked to Nairobi’s Westgate mall terror attack.

The operation could have opposite its intended result of discouraging further attacks. Analysts warn that even earlier successful targeted strikes against Al Shabab, a Somalia-based Islamist militant group, failed to curb the group’s capacity to carry out international terror attacks, and that failed missions could in fact bolster its support and recruitment.

The predawn raid Saturday came unstuck when the US troops were faced with heavier-than-expected return fire, and pulled out to avoid civilian casualties, two security sources said. No Americans were injured.

Although the target was not named and officially described only as “high-value,” US officials suggested the raid was “prompted by Westgate”.

Saturday’s mission took place in Baraawe, an Al Shabab stronghold 110 miles south of Mogadishu, where US Special Forces carried out a daytime raid in 2009 to kill Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, wanted in connection with earlier terrorist strikes in East Africa.

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Nine Percent Have Considered Quitting Their U.S. Citizenship

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Photo Credit: mrsdkrebsFew Americans have ever thought about giving up their U.S. citizenship, but nearly half think U.S. citizens should be able to be citizens of more than one country.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only nine percent (9%) of U.S. citizens have considered giving up their American citizenship. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Perhaps in part that’s because 93% consider it at least somewhat important to be a U.S. citizen, including 79% who think it is Very Important.

But 45% believe U.S. citizens also should be allowed to be citizens of other countries. Thirty-six percent (36%) disagree, while 19% are not sure.

However, in the context of immigration reform, 54% of likely U.S. voters said in March found that potential U.S. citizens should not be allowed to maintain dual citizenship.

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Campaign Contributions, Recess Appointments Slated for Supreme Court

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Photo Credit: APThe Supreme Court is beginning a new term with topics that offer the court’s conservative majority the chance to move aggressively to undo limits on campaign contributions, rule on presidential recess appointments and allow for more government-sanctioned prayer.

Assuming the government shutdown doesn’t get in their way, the justices also will deal with a case that goes to the heart of the partisan impasse in Washington: whether and when the president may use recess appointments to fill key positions without Senate confirmation.

The court was unaffected for the first few days of the government shutdown and there was no expectation that arguments set for October would have to be rescheduled.

The new term that starts Monday may be short on the sort of high-profile battles over health care and gay marriage that marked the past two years. But several cases ask the court to overrule prior decisions — bold action in an institution that relies on the power of precedent.

“There are an unusual number of cases going right to hot-button cultural issues and aggressive briefing on the conservative side asking precedents to be overruled,” said Georgetown University law professor Pamela Harris, who served in President Barack Obama’s Justice Department.

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Obamacare’s Implementation Threatens A Golden Age For The Healing Arts

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Photo Credit: WikipediaMedical practice and healthcare policy are on a collision course. From an intellectual perspective, we are entering a golden age of the healing arts. The full promise of genomic medicine informing diagnosis and treatment beckons from just over the horizon. Younger physicians, just entering practice, have the ability to alleviate human suffering that no generation of doctors has ever previously known.

But not so fast.

The administration of health care policy, and ultimately dollars, are also undergoing a generational shift. But this shift is founded on some of the most irrational politics this country has ever seen. Future generations observing the political changes of the past five years will invariably say, “what were they thinking?”

The Affordable Care Act was not the product of any informed or learned group, it was a hastily contrived political farce that was literally cobbled together at the last possible minute. It was never intended to become law — except that it did. For the past 3 1/2 years literally “all the kings horses, and all of the kings men” have pushed and prodded to give it the appearance of workability. We are on the threshold of finding out if they were successful.

In medicine, we sometimes talk about the compression of morbidities, how the ravages of time and multiple maladies may overwhelm the patient at the end of life. That compression sequence also seems to describe afflictions of the Affordable Care Act as it careens towards implementation.

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Hidden Spending Measures Playing Chicken with Shutdown

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Photo Credit: Robert F. Bukaty, APTemporary spending bills approved by the House of Representatives and the Senate include measures that would require the Obama administration to rescind strict new rules on the poultry industry.

Advocates for independent chicken farmers want lawmakers to drop the language, which had been sought by poultry processors and their trade groups. The rules give farmers more clout in their business dealings with the processors.

“It’s a totally outrageous for a handful of multinational corporations to waltz in while we are trying to keep the government open and insert these” provisions, said Ferd Hoefner, policy director of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, one of the groups siding with roughly 32,000 farmers who produce the broiler chickens that end up on supermarket shelves.

The most recent showdown between the two adversaries illustrates the way interest groups, large and small, are racing to shape whatever stopgap spending bill Congress passes to end the partial government shutdown that began Oct. 1.

Medical-device manufacturers, for instance, are lobbying aggressively to repeal a 2.3% excise tax imposed on their industry as part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Some of the medical-device makers’ supporters on Capitol Hill want to insert the language in either a temporary spending bill restarting government operations or in another measure to raise the nation’s debt ceiling. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew has warned the government will run out of borrowed money Oct. 17, requiring action by Congress.

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Federal Government Closes AMBER Alert Website

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Photo Credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Amber_Alert.jpgBy Christine Rousselle.

The government website for AMBER Alerts, a service dedicated to the safe recovery of missing children, has been closed during the shutdown. The name is a reference to Amber Hagerman, who was abducted and murdered in 1996. Over 650 children have been safely recovered since the advent of the AMBER Alert system.

According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children:

AMBER Alerts are broadcast through radio, television, road signs and all available technology referred to as the AMBER Alert Secondary Distribution Program. These broadcasts let law enforcement use the eyes and ears of the public to help quickly locate an abducted child. The U.S. Department of Justice coordinates the AMBER Alert program on a national basis.

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‘The Taliban Have Never Come for a Small Girl’: What Brave Pakistani Schoolgirl Malala Told Friend Before She was Shot in the Head (+video)

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Photo Credit: Getty Images Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai told her friend not to worry because the Taliban ‘have never come for a small girl’, shortly before she was shot in the head by a militant.

The 16-year-old was gunned down last year on her school bus after angering the Taliban with her brave and outspoken pleas for girls to be educated.

In her autobiography, I am Malala, she describes the moment she was shot on her way home from school in the valley of Swat in north-west Pakistan on October 9, 2012.

Malala was travelling with about 20 other girls when a masked man approached their school bus and said: ‘Who is Malala?’

Although no one said a word, some girls looked at Malala and she as the only one with her face uncovered.

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America’s Warning About Jihadis in the Military

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Photo Credit: WNDRet. Command Sergeant Major Bart E. Womack says it was golfer Tiger Woods who saved his life when a grenade landed at his feet.

Womack was stationed in Kuwait before the coalition’s invasion of Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power in 2003.

He said he was awake in the middle of the night because he is a golf fan, and Woods was competing in the Bay Hill Invitational and Womack knew a campaign was coming so every swing could have been the last one he would see for a long time.

Then it happened.

“As I concentrated on Tiger’s swing and listened for the sweet THWACK of a ball, I heard the tent flap flutter again and a scraping sound as something rolled toward me,” he writes in his new book “Embedded Enemy: The Insider Threat.”

“The hand grenade rolled between Tiger and me, resting at the tent’s edge,” he reports. “It is amazing how quickly thoughts can ping through your mind. I knew grenades only took five seconds to blow, and I think I wasted two seconds coming to the shocking realization of what was happening.”

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Boy Boards Plane To Vegas At MSP Without Ticket

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Photo Credit: CBSA 9-year-old Minneapolis boy was able to get through security and onto a plane at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport without a ticket, an airport spokesman said Sunday.

Security officials screened the boy at airport shortly after 10:30 a.m. Thursday, Metropolitan Airports Commission spokesman Patrick Hogan said. The boy then boarded Delta Flight 1651, which left for Las Vegas at 11:15 a.m.

The flight was not full, Hogan said, and the flight crew became suspicious mid-flight because the boy was not on their list of unattended minors. The crew contacted Las Vegas police, who met them upon landing and transferred the boy to child protection services, Hogan said.

Minneapolis Police went to his residence. Parents told officers they “hadn’t seen much of him today.”

WCCO contacted the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) Sunday morning, during which a spokesperson said staffing is currently low due to the number of employees furloughed in the wake of the federal government shutdown.

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New York Police: Bikers Stomped on SUV Driver (+video)

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Photo Credit: QuotableKidneyAbout a half-dozen bikers accused of beating an SUV driver last weekend used their helmets to attack him and kicked his head and body as he lay on the ground, New York police said.

Police said one of the bikers — Robert Sims — also stomped on the driver’s head and body, according to a detective’s criminal complaint.

Sims was one of two bikers who turned himself in to authorities on Friday. He has been charged with attempted assault, gang assault and criminal possession of a weapon.

According to police, Sims can be seen in a video going after the SUV.

The driver of the SUV suffered two black eyes and cuts on his face and side, requiring stitches, the criminal complaint said.

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