COURAGE?! Growing Outrage Over Gender-Bender Jenner Being Chosen Over Lauren Hill, Combat Vet Noah Galloway for ESPY Award

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Caitlyn Jenner excitedly wrote on Twitter “What the hell am I going to wear?” when it was announced that the reality star was to be honored at next month’s ESPY’s with the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage.

Caitlyn is the new female identity of former Olympic gold-medal winner Bruce Jenner, which was revealed Monday

But now some are crying foul over ESPN’s decision to choose Jenner, 65, instead of Mount St. Joseph basketball player Lauren Hill, who courageously battled brain cancer while staying on the university team. The 19-year-old lost her fight against cancer on April 10 . . .

But Hill wasn’t the only overlooked candidate people were made about. Iraq veteran Noah Galloway, who lost most of an arm and a leg fighting, but still competes in extreme sports and almost won this season’s “Dancing With the Stars,” also had hundreds of tweets from fans irate over Jenner’s choice.

ESPN would only say to FOX411 of their decision-making process that “many people are discussed every year,” and that “there is no such thing as a runner-up.” They also provided a written statement which said Jenner was chosen “to help move forward a constructive dialogue about progress and acceptance.” (Read more from “Define ‘Courage’: Anger Over Bruce (Caitlyn) Jenner Being Chosen Over Lauren Hill, Noah Galloway for ESPY Award” HERE)

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Islamic State’s Command of Social Media Called Unprecedented

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When Elton Simpson drove from Phoenix to Garland, Texas, last month to gun down attendees at a Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest, he also fired off a series of tweets.

Those tweets were indicative of the broad use that the Islamic State and people acting in its name are making of social media, according to three top intelligence officials who testified Wednesday before the House Committee on Homeland Security.

“I have been doing this for 45 years,” said Francis Taylor, the undersecretary of intelligence and analysis for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “I’ve never seen a terrorist organization with a kind of public relations savvy as ISIL.” ISIL is the government’s preferred acronym for the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS.

Simpson died before he could attack the cartoon contest, felled by a police officer’s bullet. But the Islamic State’s public relations savvy has drawn 180 Americans to join the group, Taylor said in his prepared remarks. It’s also led to a number of lone wolf attacks throughout the world, including what police called a failed plot by Usaama Rahim to behead two law enforcement officers in Boston on Tuesday.

“ISIL has constructed a narrative that is appealing to people from many different walks of life,” said Michael Steinbach, the assistant director in the Counterterrorism Division of the FBI. “There is no set profile for the consumer of this propaganda.” (Read more from “Islamic State’s Command of Social Media Called Unprecedented” HERE)

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Why Rifqa Bary Fled Islam to Follow Jesus [+video]

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By CBN News. CBN News first learned the name Rifqa Bary in 2009, when the then-teenager ran away from home to escape her Muslim family.

When Bary was 16 years old, her Muslim parents found out she had renounced Islam and had become a Christian. That’s when she ran away from home in Ohio and took refuge with Christians in Florida she had met on Facebook.

Bary had heard stories of so-called honor killings for those who renounce Islam, and she feared that if she returned home, her father would try to kill her . . .

Police in Florida and Ohio found no evidence she was in danger, but because she was a minor, Bary remained in Ohio state custody until her 18th birthday. (Read more from “Why Rifqa Bary Fled Islam to Follow Jesus” HERE)

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Rifqa Bary, Who Converted From Islam to Christianity, Shares Her Miraculous Journey: ‘The Love of God Overwhelmed Me’

By Leah Marieann Klett. Rifqa Bary, the Ohio woman who made national headlines in 2009 when she ran away from her Muslim family after secretly converting to Christianity, recently opened up about her radical conversion, explaining that she left Islam after experiencing the love of God “in such a way where I had to give myself and I couldn’t hold back and I had to leave.”

Bary, who tells her inspiring story in the new book “Hiding in the Light,” reveals that she had been molested as a child by a member of her extended family and also lost sight in her right eye, two incidents which ultimately prompted her parents to leave Sri Lanka and move to the U.S. in 2000.

“I grew up in a Muslim home– I come from an extremely strict home. In my culture there’s a lot of oppression..shame is cast on the victim,” the 22-year-old told Elisabeth Hasselbeck on “Fox and Friends” in her first national television interview held on Tuesday.

After moving to Ohio, the young girl gave herself completely to her Muslim faith–but found it to be empty. In her autobiography, Bary reveals that she was then drawn to Christianity because it offered her a chance to worship God in a more personal way, not by compulsion, and in a language she could understand.

“When I was 13, I sought another way and did the really ‘despicable’ thing, which was praying to another God,” Bary recalled. “I was desperate just to be able to be free to worship Jesus, so I would sneak out sometimes to go to prayer meetings or I would stay up late and read the Bible in the bathroom or find any possible way.” (Read more from this story HERE)

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Rand Paul: Don’t Trust a Lying Government

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By Sen. Rand Paul. This week President Barack Obama suffered a serious rebuke. Congress sent the president a bill that he signed that tells him his illegal bulk collection of phone records must end.

Apologists for collecting all the phone records of all Americans all of the time now belatedly say they are OK with ending the bulk collection program. They want you to know that your records are not really protected by the Fourth Amendment. They are only doing you a favor by granting you this reform.

Former Director of the National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency Michael Hayden writes in TIME that the law is clear. According to Hayden, your records—once held by the phone company—have no Fourth Amendment protection. Hayden writes: “The controlling legal authority here is a Supreme Court case decided in 1979, Smith v. Maryland, where the court held that metadata is not, repeat not, constitutionally protected” . . .

In 1979, the Supreme Court ruled 5-3 in Smith v. Maryland that a few days worth of phone records for a single individual were not protected by the Fourth Amendment. The NSA today, though, collects hundreds of millions of phone records from hundreds of millions of Americans without an individualized warrant. I hardly think Smith v. Maryland contemplated this vast dragnet.

The justices who dissented in Smith v. Maryland, though, were amazingly prescient and on target. Justice Thurgood Marshall—who disagreed with the opinion of the court—wrote that he didn’t share the assumption that customers would “typically know” that a phone company tracked calls internally—and that even if they did, there’s no way individuals would expect the general public or government to be privy to such records. (Read more from “Rand Paul: Don’t Trust a Lying Government” HERE)
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Rand Paul Faces Growing Criticism for Taking Credit for Passage of a Bill he Opposed

By ALEX ROGERS AND DUSTIN VOLZ. Sen. Rand Paul is taking credit for advancing a bill he opposes.

A day after forcing a temporary shutdown of the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of America’s metadata, the Kentucky Republican said Monday night that his actions actually boosted the surveillance-reform bill known as the USA Freedom Act, which will likely pass the Senate in the coming days despite his repeated—and vociferous—objections that it doesn’t go far enough protecting the privacy rights of Americans.

Noting that the Senate failed to get the requisite 60 votes before Memorial Day recess and subsequently voted overwhelming Sunday to move the bill forward, Paul told reporters as he left the Capitol that his blockade of the bill helped Freedom Act advocates.

“The government will no longer be collecting in bulk all Americans’ records under a generalized warrant,” he said. “So I think that’s a big step forward.”

“I like to look at the bright side of things,” Paul added. “Before I got involved there were 57 votes. Even though I object to the final vote, there’s now 77 votes for ending bulk collection. So you could say that I—in an unusual way—persuaded 20 people to switch their vote and to vote to end bulk collection. It’s kind of a different way of persuading people, but it seemed to work.” (Read more from this story HERE)

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Party’s History of Establishment Picks Could Be Over [+video]

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Battles for the Republican presidential nomination almost always come down to two alternatives — an establishment-backed candidate with pragmatic instincts and an insurgent (often significantly more conservative) who tries to appeal to constituencies that feel ignored.

And except for 1964, when an insurgent Barry Goldwater defeated a slew of establishment opponents, and, possibly, 1980, the establishment has won these fights to select the party’s presidential nominees.

But have we entered a new era in Republican Party politics? Has the establishment candidate become the underdog in 2016 and for at least the near future? And if so, does that change the meaning of “the establishment?”

Mitt Romney tried (with very limited success) to wear the mantle of insurgent in 2008 against pragmatist John McCain, but four years later the former Massachusetts governor unquestionably was the choice of the party establishment over the likes of Herman Cain, then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry, then-Rep. Michele Bachmann and former Sen. Rick Santorum.

Early during the 2000 cycle, George W. Bush rallied both conservatives and, because of his father’s connections and reputation, the party establishment behind his candidacy. McCain’s challenge against him was less about ideology and more about the Arizona senator’s personal style and outsider message. (Read more from “Party’s History of Establishment Picks Could Be Over” HERE)

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We the People: Millions of Petitions Delivered to Congress to Stop TPP

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Photo Credit: Breitbart Members of the House and the Senate delivered 2 million petitions to Congress, opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Trade Promotion Authority (TPA).

The ranking Democrat of the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), says that “if there is ever a time in American history that we have got to stand up for the American worker and not for corporate greed—today is that day and the TPP is that issue. The facts are very clear… the TPP follows in the footsteps of other disastrous trade agreements.” Sanders adds:

Over and over again—we were told by corporate America and their representatives about all of the jobs that these trade agreements would create. And over and over again… the proponents of unfretted free trade were wrong. Bill Clinton promised that NAFTA would create a million jobs in 5 years, in fact it lost 700,0000 jobs. We were promised that PNTR with China would create hundreds of thousands of jobs. Instead it has lead to the loss of over 2 million jobs. And on and on it goes. Everybody knows that the great middle class of this country is disappearing and one of the major reasons is a disastrous set of trade policies, which force America workers to compete with workers around the world who make pennies an hour.

The TPP and TPA proposals that President Obama has negotiated in complete secrecy have unified members from both the Republican and Democratic parties against the trade agreement. (Read more from “We the People: Millions of Petitions Delivered to Congress to Stop TPP” HERE)

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Pentagon: Iran Continuing Work on Nuclear Systems Despite Agreement with Obama

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Photo Credit: Free Beacon Iran is continuing to develop missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons despite an interim agreement on its nuclear programs, according to a Pentagon report.

“Although Iran has paused progress in some areas of its nuclear program and fulfilled its obligations under the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA), it continues to develop technological capabilities that also could be applicable to nuclear weapons, including ballistic missile development,” a one-page unclassified summary of the report says . . .

The report was due to Congress in January but was not sent to the Armed Services Committee as required by law until this month. Analysts said the delay appeared designed to avoid upsetting Tehran and the nuclear talks.

Disclosure of the continuing development of nuclear delivery capabilities comes amid reports that Iran increased the amount of nuclear material that could potentially be used to build nuclear weapons despite the JPOA.

The State Department sought to challenge International Atomic Energy Agency reports on the increase in Iranian nuclear material, despite President Obama’s claim that the nuclear agreement had halted Iran’s nuclear program. (Read more from “Pentagon: Iran Continuing Work on Nuclear Systems” HERE)

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This Is How Many Guantanamo Transfers We Can Expect in the Next Few Weeks

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Photo Credit: AP The Obama administration intends to transfer up to 10 detainees from the Guantanamo detention center to other countries this month, a senior defense official told Defense One. These would be the first since transfers came to a pregnant pause in January.

“You’re likely to see some progress in June,” the defense official said Wednesday. “I just talked to the National Security Council and State [Department], so we can say maybe up to 10 — no specific timeframe, but in the near future. And then we’re actively engaged with a number of countries in additional negotiations regarding the 57 that are eligible. But sometime this summer, maybe June, up to 10.”

Of the prison’s 122 detainees, 57 have been cleared for transfer to other countries by the Pentagon as part of an interagency review.

Last year, the Obama administration sped up transfers in a race to empty the detention center before the Republican-led Congress could block attempts to close it. Those transfers came to a halt in January. In April, the Washington Post reported they might start again, and today, the official told Defense One that some June transfers are likely.

These would be the first prisoners to leave Guantanamo under new Defense Secretary Ashton Carter. In February, he replaced Chuck Hagel, who clashed with the administration over his recalcitrance to approve transfers. Ultimately, Hagel transferred 44 Guantanamo detainees — more than half of those in the weeks before he stepped down in November. Still, that was ten times more than his predecessor, Leon Panetta, who transferred just four. (Read more from “This Is How Many Guantanamo Transfers We Can Expect in the Next Few Weeks” HERE)

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Horror: Family Beat Teen Until Miscarriage, Put Baby on BBQ Grill [+video]

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Photo Credit: CBS DFW Police in Dallas arrested four people who they believe beat a pregnant teenaged relative so that she would have a miscarriage. A fifth person was also arrested for the sexual assault of the minor . . .

The victim recently told authorities that she became pregnant in 2012, at only 13 years old, after being sexually assaulted. In addition to the four arrests for engaging in organized criminal activity, police also arrested Robert Joseph Cayald for aggravated sexual assault of a child. The 22-year-old is related to the victim.

Police say the girl, now 16 years old, finally came forward with the allegations. Speaking about the teen Deputy Chief Garza said, “We want to commend the victim for her bravery in coming forth to report this unbelievable crime” . . .

The girl told authorities that it wasn’t until 2013, when she was approximately eight months pregnant, when the family realized she was expecting. Given the girl was underage and allegedly assaulted by a relative, the family feared Child Protective Services (CPS) would be called. The family members accused of organized crime then, according to police, “took matters into their own hands” to try and end the pregnancy . . .

The suspects then allegedly took the aborted baby and put it on a “metal charcoal grill and attempted to burn it,” but the attempt failed. Two days after the assault suspect Sharon Jones allegedly contacted suspect Cedric Jones Jr. and offered to pay him $25 to “take care of the rest of it.” Jones allegedly put the child’s remains in a green plastic bag, placed it in the trunk of his car and “stashed” the baby in an unknown location. Dallas police say they are still searching for the remains of the stillborn child. “We are looking… we’re still trying to gather evidence. We’re still looking for additional evidence in the case,” Garza said. (Read more from “Horror: Family Beat Teen Until Miscarriage, Put Baby on BBQ Grill” HERE)

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U.S. Intel: Obama Supported, “Deliberately” Established Islamic State in Syria

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Photo Credit: The New AmericanA newly released intelligence report from the Pentagon shows that the U.S. government knew that supporting jihadists in the fight against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad would produce a fundamentalist Islamic State in Eastern Syria — and that Obama’s supposed “anti-ISIS” coalition knowingly backed ISIS and other Islamic terrorists for precisely that purpose. The heavily redacted Defense Department report, obtained by watchdog Judicial Watch via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, shows once again that, contrary to the false narrative peddled by the establishment press, the rise of the savage terror group known as ISIS was actually deliberate policy. Now, the fruits of that plot are becoming clearer as the body count continues to skyrocket.

The 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report is very blunt about the objectives. “The West, Gulf countries [the Islamic regimes ruling Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, etc.], and Turkey support the Syrian opposition,” it explains, adding that, as The New American reported at the time, al-Qaeda supported the Syrian uprising from the beginning as well. “There is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist [fundamentalist Islam] principality in Eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime.” (Emphasis added.) Of course, that is also exactly what happened when ISIS declared the establishment of its “caliphate” in Eastern Syria and parts of Iraq.

The DIA report also exposes the lies propagated by the Obama administration, senior U.S. lawmakers, and foreign leaders to dupe Americans into allowing the U.S. government to support non-existent “moderate” rebels in Syria. According to the classified document, which was released by a court order, U.S. authorities were well aware of the fact that, as reported by The New American shortly after it began, the rebellion against Assad was being led by radical jihadists — including many of the same forces the U.S. government was ostensibly fighting against in the terror war. “The Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria,” stated the report, which was dated August 12, 2012, long after The New American and other media outlets exposed that same fact.

The Defense Department’s intelligence analysts also warned of the consequences all of the machinations could have on Iraq. “This creates the ideal atmosphere for AQI [al-Qaeda Iraq] to return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi, and will provide a renewed momentum under the presumption of unifying the jihad among Sunni Iraq and Syria, and the rest of the Sunnis in the Arab world against what it considers one enemy, the dissenters,” the report explained, pointing to two cities in Iraq that are now under ISIS control. “ISI [Islamic State in Iraq] could also declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, which will create grave danger in regards to unifying Iraq and the protection of its territory.”

The New American magazine and many other sources have been reporting much of that information almost since the start of the Western establishment-backed “rebellion” against the Syrian regime. However, some analysts are now calling the DIA report a “smoking gun.” Among other points, the documents offer further proof that the rise of ISIS, due largely to the foreign policy of the Obama administration and its allies, was not the result of an accident or stupidity — but of deliberate planning. However, Vice President Joe Biden and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Martin Dempsey had already let the cat at least partially out of the bag. (Read more from “U.S. Intel: Obama Coalition Established Islamic State in Syria” HERE)

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