Massacre in Yemen: Suicide Bombers Slaughter 137, Wound Hundreds as They Prayed at Mosques [+video]

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Photo Credit: The Blaze

Photo Credit: The Blaze

Quadruple suicide bombers on Friday hit a pair of mosques controlled by Shiite rebels in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, unleashing blasts through crowds of worshippers that killed at least 137 people and wounded around 350 others in the deadliest violence to hit the fragile war-torn nation in decades.

A group claiming to be a Yemeni branch of the Islamic State group said it carried out the bombings and warned of an “upcoming flood” of attacks against the rebels, known as Houthis, who have taken over the capital and much of Yemen. The claim, posted online, could not immediately be independently confirmed and offered no proof of an Islamic State role.

If true, Friday’s bombing would be the first major attack by IS supporters in Yemen and an ominous sign that the influence of the group that holds much of Iraq and Syria has spread to this chaotic nation. The claim was posted on the same web bulletin board where the Islamic State affiliate in Libya claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s deadly attack on a museum in Tunisia.

A significant presence of Islamic State group supporters would add an alarming new element to the turmoil in this fragmenting nation. Yemen is already home to the most powerful branch of the al-Qaida network – which is a rival of IS. On Friday, al-Qaida militants seized control of a southern provincial capital, al-Houta, in the group’s most dramatic grab of territory by the group in years.

Meanwhile, the Shiite rebels’ capture of the capital and a large swath of the country – at least nine of its 21 provinces – has raised fears of a civil war tinged with sectarianism. The government of the internationally backed president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, has fled to the southern port city of Aden, where it battled on Thursday with supporters of the former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has allied with the Houthis. (Read more from “Massacre in Yemen: Suicide Bombers Slaughter 137 as They Prayed at Mosques [+video]” HERE)

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U.S. Moving Hundreds of Soldiers, Additional Artillery Battalion to South Korea

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ARTILLERYThe U.S. Army is sending a field artillery battalion of about 400 soldiers and multiple-launch rocket systems to South Korea, a move the Pentagon said on Friday was part of a reorganization of the service and unrelated to any tensions on the peninsula.

Army Colonel Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, said a battalion from the 20th Field Artillery would deploy from Fort Hood, Texas, in June for a nine-month rotation at Camp Casey in South Korea as part of the 210th Field Artillery Brigade.

The unit will leave its equipment in South Korea at the conclusion of the deployment so other battalions can use it as they rotate in on similar deployments, he said. The rotational deployments represent a slight increase in the 28,500 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea, defense officials said.

The multiple-launch rocket system can fulfill a variety of missions but is particularly effective at countering fire from enemy artillery batteries. Officials said they thought the field artillery brigade in South Korea was the only one permanently stationed outside the United States.

“The addition of this battalion is part of an Army-wide reorganization that will raise the number of MLRS (multiple-launch rocket system) battalions in all field artillery brigades from two to three,” Warren said. (Read more from “U.S. Moving Additional Artillery Battalion to South Korea: Pentagon” HERE)

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Obama Signals to Hamas and Hezbollah that it’s ‘Open Season’ on Israel [+videos]

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Obama wrist bandBy Alex Griswold. Fox News host and former White House press secretary Dana Perino said on “The Kelly File” that the Obama administration is signaling to terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah that it is “open season on Israel” with its comments that their support for the Jewish nation at the United Nations was in jeopardy.

“There was [a] troubling report tonight, I think out of a senior administration official,” Perino said, “someone floating a little bit of a trial balloon out there to say there might be some problems now that the United States has with Israel, and that might actually leak into conversations at the United Nations Security Council, in which Europe has not been supportive of Israel.”

(Read more from “Obama Signals To Hamas And Hezbollah That It’s ‘Open Season’ On Israel [+video]” HERE)

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‘A Historic Mistake’: Rubio Rips Obama Over Treatment Of Israel, Netanyahu


By Al Weaver. In a fiery floor speech Thursday, Sen. Marco Rubio ripped the Obama administration for its treatment of Israel in the wake of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reelection victory Tuesday.

In his speech, Rubio, a potential 2016 GOP candidate, said President Barack Obama has made a “historic and tragic mistake” by standing against the Israelis while actively “embolden[ing] their enemies.” The Florida Senator’s speech also comes in the midst of peace talks between the U.S. and Iran, which Netanyahu has strongly ridiculed.

(Read more from this story HERE)

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Officials: US Bombs ISIS Drone in Iraq

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Photo Credit: Defense News

Photo Credit: Defense News

US warplanes have bombed a small drone used by Islamic State extremists in Iraq, marking the first time American-led forces had targeted an unmanned aircraft flown by the jihadists, officials said Wednesday.

The strike took place on Tuesday near the western city of Fallujah, destroying “a remotely piloted aircraft” and a vehicle with the IS forces, according to a statement from the US military command overseeing the campaign against the group.

The drone, used for battlefield surveillance, was “small-scale” and not a sophisticated aircraft equivalent to some US-made robotic planes that can fly at high altitudes or launch missiles, US defense officials said.

After flying the drone for a short period, Islamic State militants placed it on a vehicle. American aircraft then struck the vehicle near Fallujah, officials said. (Read more from “Officials: US Bombs ISIS Drone in Iraq” HERE)

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Survey on Obamacare: Most Uninsured Choose Penalty Over Enrollment Offer Under Health Law

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IRSBA special enrollment period to obtain health insurance for millions of uninsured people who owe a tax penalty under the Affordable Care Act is off to a slow start.

The health law requires most Americans to have insurance or pay a fine at tax time. The open enrollment period under the health law ended Feb. 15, but the Obama administration said it would allow people who discover they owe a fine to sign up for coverage through April, at the end of the tax season.

Major tax-preparation firms say many customers are paying the penalty and not getting health insurance. It is still early, since the special enrollment period launched Sunday, but research also suggests that many people who lack health insurance will pay the penalty and not get covered this year.

Only 12% of uninsured people would buy policies if informed of the penalty, according to a survey of 3,000 adults polled through Feb. 24 by McKinsey & Co.’s Center for U.S. Health System Reform.

At H&R Block Inc., “our analysis indicates that a significant percentage of taxpayers whose household members were not covered for at least a portion of 2014 are opting” to pay the penalty, said Mark Ciaramitaro, a vice president of health-care enrollment services at the tax-preparation firm. (Read more from “Many Uninsured Choose Penalty Over Enrollment Offer Under Health Law” HERE)

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Rise of Artificial Intelligence is Already Creating Real Robot Romance

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Lego heartConvincing people to have a romantic relationship with a computer might be easier than it sounds. At this year’s SXSW in Austin, Texas, a chatbot on Tinder convinced a number of users that she was a cute 25-year-old woman eager to strike up a romantic relationship. Too bad “Ava” turned out to be just an Instagram account for a character in an upcoming film (“Ex Machina”) about the implications for romance in the era of artificial intelligence.

In many ways, “Ava” was playing a simplified form of Alan Turing’s famous “imitation game” by trying to convince human conversational partners that it was human — or at least human enough to get Tinder users to watch a trailer for a movie. In one conversational exchange captured by AdWeek, Ava used a typical chatbot tactic — keeping a human off-balance by asking questions you wouldn’t expect from a computer (“Have you ever been in love?” and “What makes you human?”) — to convince male, techie-hipsters at SXSW that she was a real woman.

We’ve already seen evidence that carrying on a relationship with a bot is easier than it sounds. Consider the Invisible Boyfriend (and Invisible Girlfriend) experience, which really started as a clever way to use technology to cover up a lack of a romantic significant other. It turns out the experience was so addictive that people started to fall for the Invisible Boyfriend bot — even when they knew the whole relationship was made up — and paid for — from the beginning.

In an era when teens rely so much on text messages to launch, maintain and end relationships, it’s perhaps no surprise that a bot experience such as Invisible Boyfriend or Ava could take off. If you think about the typical teen romance carried out via text message these days, it’s essentially a chatbot experience powered by a really powerful computer — the human brain. The witty reply, the shared insider lingo between two lovers, the concerned text from a lover demanding a rapid reply — this could all be simulated by an artificially intelligent chatbot.

No wonder AI thought leader Ray Kurzweil has suggested that a real-life human-AI romance might be possible in as little as 15 years. In his review of the 2013 Spike Jonze film “Her” (in which the character played by Joaquin Phoenix carries on a romantic relationship with a disembodied operating system called “Samantha”), Kurzweil said he expected similar types of advances by the year 2029: “Samantha herself I would place at 2029, when the leap to human-level AI would be reasonably believable.” (Read more from “Rise of Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Attitudes on Robot Romance” HERE)

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Weedkiller Alert over Cancer Link Worrisome to Gardeners, Farmers

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round upThe World Health Organisation’s cancer agency has declared that one of the UK’s most widely used weedkillers is “probably carcinogenic to humans”.

Amateur gardeners and professional farmers have been urged to “think very carefully” about using the popular herbicide Roundup, which contains glyphosate.

A summary of the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s (IARC) report, published in The Lancet Oncology, said that the herbicide had been detected “in air during spraying, in water, and in food”.

It had also been detected “in the blood and urine of agricultural workers, indicating absorption”.

Andreas Kortenkamp, professor of human toxicology at Brunel University, London, said that the people who are most at risk are those applying the weedkiller to their plants. (Read more from “Weedkiller Alert over Cancer Link” HERE)

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FEMA Won’t Help States That Reject Climate Change Disasters as Real Science

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femaFederal funds that help communities brace for emergencies will stop being provided to states if they ignore threats posed by climate change in their disaster planning.

States publish reports every five years or so detailing their vulnerability to natural disasters, such as floods, storms and wildfires, and how they plan to protect themselves and recover after them. Such plans are needed in order to qualify for a share of nearly $1 billion in Hazard Mitigation Assistance grants provided every year by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

But those plans rarely consider climate change impacts in detail — an omission that could see states become ineligible for the grants after new guidelines take effect early next year. Under FEMA’s updated guidelines, published last week, state disaster plans will only be approved if they adequately describe how the likelihood and intensity of natural hazards could be affected by growing levels of greenhouse gas pollution.

“The risk assessment must provide a summary of the probability of future hazard events,” the new guidelines state. “Probability must include considerations of changing future conditions, including the effects of long-term changes in weather patterns and climate.”

Some states, including California and Connecticut, already consider climate change in their plans, albeit imperfectly, said Rebecca Hammer, a Natural Resources Defense Council attorney who has been pressuring FEMA to make such a change for several years. But she said there are “a lot” of states that fail to adequately consider climate change in their disaster planning, including Florida, Texas, and “a lot of the states in the middle of the country.” (Read more from “FEMA Won’t Help States That Don’t Plan for Climate Change” HERE)

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Obama Promotes Mandatory Voting for Every US Citizen and Here’s the Response from Social Media‏

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Barack ObamaBy Josh Lederman. They say the only two things that are certain in life are death and taxes. President Barack Obama wants to add one more: voting.

Obama floated the idea of mandatory voting in the U.S. while speaking to a civic group in Cleveland on Wednesday. Asked about the corrosive influence of money in U.S. elections, Obama digressed into the related topic of voting rights and said the U.S. should be making it easier — not harder— for people to vote.

Just ask Australia, where citizens have no choice but to vote, the president said.

“If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country,” Obama said, calling it potentially transformative. Not only that, Obama said, but universal voting would “counteract money more than anything.” (Read more from “Obama Talks Mandatory Voting and Here’s the Response from Social Media‏” HERE)


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Oops! Social Media Users Point out the Biggest Hypocrisy Behind Obama’s ‘Mandatory Voting’ Idea

By Nicole Haas. Social media users are responding in force to President Obama’s latest idea for a new policy – a policy that would essentially force votes from an electorate that thinks so little of the Democratic process that they don’t bother to show up on their own.


His self-described, “potentially transformative” idea of imposing “mandatory voting” comes after a string of upsetting election losses for his party – which suffered from a combination of bad voter turnout and worse Obama policies.

Perhaps it was Tuesday’s win of Obama’s nemesis, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that prompted him to speak his tyrannical desires when he addressed a Cleveland civic group Wednesday.

Whatever the trigger was, patriots on Twitter lost no time in calling out Obama’s stinging hypocrisy on mandatory voting. (Read more from this story HERE)

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Confirmed: Iran Endorses Nuclear EMP Attack on United States [+video]

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner

Photo Credit: Washington Examiner

By Paul Bedard. Suspected for years of plotting to dismantle the U.S. electric grid, American officials have confirmed that Iranian military brass have endorsed a nuclear electromagnetic pulse explosion that would attack the country’s power system.

American defense experts made the discovery while translating a secret Iranian military handbook, raising new concerns about Tehran’s recent nuclear talks with the administration.

The issue of a nuclear EMP attack was raised in the final hours of this week’s elections in Israel when U.S. authority Peter Vincent Pry penned a column for Arutz Sheva warning of Iran’s threat to free nations.

“Iranian military documents describe such a scenario — including a recently translated Iranian military textbook that endorses nuclear EMP attack against the United States,” he wrote.

A knowledgable source said that the textbook discusses an EMP attack on America in 20 different places. (Read more from “Iran Endorses Nuclear EMP Attack on United States [+video]” HERE)

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EMP, Extremely Dangerous

By Dan Eden. As usual, viewzone gave me a writing assignment about something of which I knew very little — this time it was something called the electromagnetic pulse, or “EMP” weapon. As usual, what I learned from my research scared the hell out of me.


When I first sat down to write this story, America had no real enemy capable of using an EMP weapon. That’s a good thing because, as you will learn, this is far more dangerous and potentially more lethal than a nuclear bomb. We have known that the Russians have EMP weapons because of their published (an sometimes not) research with the technology. And now, of course, we can include China . . .

A declassified intelligence report, obtained by the private National Security Archive, provides details on China’s EMP weapons and plans for their use. Annual Pentagon reports on China’s military in the past made only passing references to the arms. (Read more from this story HERE)

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