Obama’s Threat To Change Immigration Laws Without Congress Meets Resistance

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Kevin LamarqueGOP leaders say President Barack Obama will only make immigration problems worse if he goes ahead with his Monday threat to unilaterally alter the nation’s immigration laws.

“I’m beginning a new effort to fix as much of our immigration system as I can on my own, without Congress,” Obama said in a Rose Garden speech Monday afternoon.

Deputies will identify “actions my administration can take on our own, within my existing legal authorities, to do what Congress refuses to do and fix as much of our immigration system as we can,” he said.

“I expect their recommendations before the end of summer and I intend to adopt those recommendations without further delay,” he said.

House Speaker John Boehner was quick to condemn the move. ”The president’s own executive orders have led directly to the humanitarian crisis along the Southern border,” Boehner said in a statement, “giving false hope to children and their families that if they enter the country illegally they will be allowed to stay.”

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Documents Show Court Gave NSA Broad Leeway in Surveillance

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Photo Credit: Cliff Owen / APBy ELLEN NAKASHIMA AND BARTON GELLMAN.

Virtually no foreign government is off-limits for the National Security Agency, which has been authorized to intercept information “concerning” all but four countries, according to top-secret documents.

The United States has long had broad no-spying arrangements with those four countries — Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — in a group known collectively with the United States as the Five Eyes. But a classified 2010 legal certification and other documents indicate the NSA has been given a far more elastic authority than previously known, one that allows it to intercept through U.S. companies not just the communications of its overseas targets but any communications about its targets as well.

The certification — approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and included among a set of documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden — lists 193 countries that would be of valid interest for U.S. intelligence. The certification also permitted the agency to gather intelligence about entities including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The NSA is not necessarily targeting all the countries or organizations identified in the certification, the affidavits and an accompanying exhibit; it has only been given authority to do so. Still, the privacy implications are far-reaching, civil liberties advocates say, because of the wide spectrum of people who might be engaged in communication about foreign governments and entities and whose communications might be of interest to the United States.

“These documents show both the potential scope of the government’s surveillance activities and the exceedingly modest role the court plays in overseeing them,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, who had the documents described to him.

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Google Rebuffed by U.S. High Court on Privacy Lawsuit

By Greg Stohr.

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Google Inc. (GOOG), leaving the company to face lawsuits accusing it of violating a federal wiretapping law by secretly collecting personal data while developing its Street View maps.

The justices today left intact a federal appeals court ruling that the U.S. Wiretap Act protects the privacy of information on unencrypted in-home Wi-Fi networks.

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Report: Arabs Attacked IDF Ambulance Transporting Bodies of Murdered Israeli Teens

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Photo Credit: Tazpit News Agency.Palestinian Arabs attacked an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) ambulance humvee on Monday that was transporting the recently discovered bodies of three murdered Israeli boys who were kidnapped on June 12, an Israeli source told The Algemeiner.

The Muqata blog posted an image on Facebook of what it claimed to be the damaged vehicle writing, “8:44pm IDF Ambulance humvee transporting the bodies of the boys attacked by arabs….windows smashed.”

In the picture, the ambulance’s windshield is shattered and splattered with paint.

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Corsi: Primary Victories Prove the Tea Party in America is Alive and Well

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Photo Credit: APNow that Tea Party is winning elections, the Tea Party is alive and well, despite any and all reports to the contrary.

The truth is the establishment GOP in Washington and the mainstream media know this, and both are running in fear.

This is why the Wall Street Journal publishes an article by GOP establishment fund-raiser Karl Rove with a headline proclaiming the Tea Party has taken a beating.

What’s evidence for that claim?

As Tea Party Loyalists might well expect, Rove keys off Mississippi’s Sen. Thad Cochran pulling off a surprise upset against Tea Party challenger Chris McDaniel by 1,386 votes, a mere 0.5 percent of the 313,443 votes cast.

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Boy's Death Highlights Danger of Border Crossings

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Photo Credit: APWhen authorities found an 11-year-old Guatemalan boy’s body about a mile from Texas’ southern border, they also discovered his brother’s Chicago phone number scribbled on the inside of his belt buckle.

The boy, wearing “Angry Birds” jeans, black leather boots and a white rosary around his neck, had apparently gotten lost on his way north from his native country and was found about two weeks ago, alone in the brush less than a mile from the nearest U.S. home, a South Texas sheriff said Monday.

While hundreds of immigrants die crossing the border each year, the discovery of Gilberto Francisco Ramos Juarez’s decomposed body in the Rio Grande Valley on June 15 highlights the perils unaccompanied children face as the U.S. government searches for ways to deal with record numbers of children crossing into the country illegally.

“Down here finding a decomposed body … we come across them quite often,” Hidalgo County Sheriff Eddie Guerra said, adding that this was the first child immigrant his office has found since he became sheriff in April. “It’s a very dangerous journey.”

More than 52,000 unaccompanied children have been apprehended entering the U.S. illegally since October, creating what President Barack Obama has called an “urgent humanitarian situation.” On Monday, Obama asked Congress for more money and additional authority to deal with the surge of youths, mostly from Central America. Obama wants flexibility to speed the youths’ deportations and $2 billion to hire more immigration judges and open more detention facilities.

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