Democrats Block Human Trafficking Bill, Complaining about Abortion Language

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An anti-human trafficking bill that just two weeks ago had broad, bipartisan support was filibustered and stalled Tuesday by Senate Democrats upset over anti-abortion language they claim was subtly inserted into the measure.

The Justice for Victims in Trafficking Act fell five votes short of garnering the 60 needed to advance in the chamber. The legislation would create a federal fund for victims’ services and law enforcement tools financed by fines levied on convicted traffickers.

Democrats objected to a section of the bill that nodded to the Hyde Amendment – a nearly four-decade-old legislative provision that bans taxpayer-funded abortions. Language in the trafficking bill prohibited funds raised by the fines to be used for abortions.

“The partisan provision embedded in the Senate version of this bill is not something the survivors of human trafficking are asking for,” Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said Tuesday.

[T]he bill’s author and the chamber’s majority whip, decried the Democrats’ opposition, saying Tuesday he feared the Senate was “losing its soul.” (Read more from “Democrats Block Human Trafficking Bill over Abortion Language” HERE)

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Air Force Veteran Charged with Attempting to Join ISIS [+video]

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A former avionics specialist with the U.S. Air Force is accused of attempting to join the Islamic State.

Tairod Nathan Webster Pugh, 47, was charged in federal court in Brooklyn on Monday.

Pugh, who worked for several companies as an airplane mechanic, had been living overseas for one year before he was arrested in January while in Asbury Park, New Jersey.

New York News

“Born and raised in the United States, Pugh allegedly turned his back on his country and attempted to travel to Syria in order to join a terrorist organization,” U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch said in a statement. “We will continue to vigorously prosecute extremists, whether based here or abroad, to stop them before they are able to threaten the United States and its allies.”

On January 10, Pugh traveled from Egypt to Turkey in an effort to cross the border into Syria to join ISIL, according to the federal complaint. (Read more from “Air Force Veteran Charged with Attempting to Join ISIS” HERE)

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Watch: Ted Cruz Peppered with Delicate Political Questions in Late Night Interview

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By T. Becket Adams. Sen. Ted Cruz, during an appearance Monday evening on NBC’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” addressed several politically charged topics as the show’s host used the occasion of their meeting to pepper the GOP lawmaker with questions ranging from global warming to same-sex marriage.

Meyers early on in the interview addressed Cruz saying in a speech this weekend in New Hampshire that the White House’s failed foreign policy has set the world “on fire.”

The Texas Republican’s weekend remarks prompted a three-year-old girl in the audience to ask her mother whether the world really was on fire, much to the amusement of Cruz’s audience.

“The world is on fire, yes,” Cruz said during his weekend speech, addressing the girl. “Your world is on fire. But you know what? Your mommy’s here and everyone’s here to make sure that the world you grow up in is even better.”

Meyers used Cruz’s weekend speech to question the Texas senator’s position on global warming. (Read more from “Watch: Ted Cruz Peppered with Delicate Political Questions in Late Night Interview” HERE)

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Mom: Ted Cruz Did Not Scare My 3-Year-Old Daughter

By Catalina Camia. A New Hampshire mom wants the world to know: GOP presidential hopeful Ted Cruz did not scare her 3-year-old daughter with his assertion that “the world is on fire.”


Michelle Trant is disputing the characterization by some news media that Cruz frightened her daughter, Julia, with his comments Sunday in Barrington, N.H. That assessment was all over Twitter on Monday morning.

“There were no tears, none at all” Trant told WRKO-AM, Boston’s talk radio station, during Jeff Kuhner’s call-in show Monday. “She was quite happy.”

Cruz, a Texas senator, was in the midst of criticizing President Obama on the economy, health care and foreign policy when he said “the world is on fire.” Julia, sitting on her mom’s lap in the front row, was described as being terrified by Cruz’s rhetoric or “listening in horror.” (Read more from this story HERE)

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Watch: College Students Informed About Their Share of the National Debt, and Their Reactions Are Priceless

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Campus Reform is back with yet another video that is sure to stir up debate. Caleb Bonham informs college students about their share of the national debt – in an extraordinarily creative way.

Bonham asks college students – among a few others – when they were born. Then he queries what they would do with the hundreds of thousands of dollars they are due to pay the federal government.

Several of the respondents can’t curb their shock and surprise before going off on comments about what that means to them. (Read more from “Watch: College Students Informed About Their Share of the National Debt, and Their Reactions Are Priceless” HERE)

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U.S. Military Loses Contact with Predator Drone Flying over Syria

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A Pentagon official confirmed the U.S. military lost contact with an unarmed Predator drone Tuesday while it was flying above northwestern Syria, but could not corroborate reports that the aircraft was shot down by President Bashar Assad’s air defenses.

The official, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, said that U.S. forces lost contact with the drone about 1:40 p.m. Eastern time and that the reason for its disappearance was being investigated.

The incident marks the first time a U.S. aircraft has gone down since President Obama authorized airstrikes against Islamic State militants in the summer. Since then, Predator drones have been flying daily missions above Iraq and Syria.

Predators are flown from bases across the globe, but the military official would not discuss where the U.S. aircraft was being controlled from or where it was based before they lost contact with it.

Earlier Tuesday, the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency said the country’s air defenses had brought down a U.S. surveillance plane in the coastal province of Latakia. (Read more from “U.S. Military Loses Contact with Predator Drone Flying over Syria” HERE)

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After 3 Decades, Largest Presbyterian Denomination Approves Homosexual Marriage

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After three decades of debate over its stance on homosexuality, members of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) voted on Tuesday to change the definition of marriage in the church’s constitution to include same-sex marriage.

The final approval by a majority of the church’s 171 regional bodies, known as presbyteries, enshrines a change recommended last year by the church’s General Assembly. The vote amends the church’s constitution to broaden marriage from being between “a man and a woman” to “two people, traditionally a man and a woman.”

The Presbytery of the Palisades, meeting in Fair Lawn, N.J., put the ratification count over the top on Tuesday on a voice vote. With many presbyteries still left to vote, the tally late Tuesday stood at 87 presbyteries in favor, 41 against and one tied.

“Finally, the church in its constitutional documents fully recognizes that the love of gays and lesbian couples is worth celebrating in the faith community,” said the Rev. Brian D. Ellison, executive director of the Covenant Network of Presbyterians, which advocates gay inclusion in the church. “There is still disagreement, and I don’t mean to minimize that, but I think we are learning that we can disagree and still be church together.”

The church, with about 1.8 million members, is the largest of the nation’s Presbyterian denominations, but it has been losing congregations and individual members as it has moved to the left theologically over the past several years. There was a wave of departures in and after 2011, when the presbyteries ratified a decision to ordain gays and lesbians as pastors, elders and deacons, and that may have cleared the way for Tuesday’s vote. (Read more from “Largest Presbyterian Denomination Gives Final Approval for Same-Sex Marriage” HERE)

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Thousands of Snow Geese Fall Dead from Sky in Idaho

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Avian cholera is suspected in the deaths of at least 2,000 snow geese that fell dead from the sky in Idaho while migrating to nesting grounds on the northern coast of Alaska, wildlife managers said Monday.

Dozens of Idaho Department of Fish and Game workers and volunteers at the weekend retrieved and incinerated carcasses of snow geese found near bodies of water and a wildlife management area in the eastern part of the state, said agency spokesman Gregg Losinski.

Avian cholera is believed to be the culprit in the deaths mostly because of the way the birds died, he said.

“Basically, they just fell out of the sky,” said Losinski.

He said biologists were awaiting results from a state wildlife lab to confirm the birds died of the highly contagious disease, which is caused by bacteria that can survive in soil and water for up to four months. (Read more from “Thousands of Snow Geese Fall Dead from Sky in Idaho” HERE)

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Traitor-in-Chief Removes Iran from Terror List, Praises it for Fighting Terrorism

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You know the country responsible for killing hundreds of marines, which provided sanctuary to Al Qaeda and whose terrorist proxies helped give Al Qaeda the skills to carry out 9/11?

They’re no longer terrorists. Sure their terrorist groups currently control parts of Lebanon and Yemen, but they’re not terrorists. Because if Iran was a state sponsor of terror, then Obama letting them have the bomb might look bad. This way it’s fine.

An annual report delivered recently to the US Senate by James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, removed Iran and Hezbollah from its list of terrorism threats, after years in which they featured in similar reports

In describing Iran’s regional role, the report noted the Islamic Republic’s “intentions to dampen sectarianism, build responsive partners, and deescalate tensions with Saudi Arabia,” but cautioned that “Iranian leaders—particularly within the security services—are pursuing policies with negative secondary consequences for regional stability and potentially for Iran.

The only time the report mentions Hezbollah is when describing it as a victim of attacks. (Read more from “Obama Removes Iran from Terror List, Praises it for Fighting Terrorism” HERE)

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Corporate Greed Behind Push for H-1B Visas as Multinational Corps Fire Americans, Hire Immigrants

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Massive layoffs are being spearheaded by the multi-billion dollar Southern California Edison utilities company, which is terminating scores of American IT workers and replacing them with immigrant IT workers, from a slew of foreign counties, who are willing to work for far less compensation. These immigrants are in the U.S. on an H-1B visa program.

“We don’t need foreign workers. We have plenty of Americans who are fully capable and equipped to carry out these jobs. It’s an absolute issue of corporate greed; nothing more nothing less,” former Edison employee and Marine Pat Lavin told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview late last week.

Lavin is a stalwart Democrat who serves as a business manager and financial secretary for the the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local #47. “Edison are master liars,” Lavin cautioned, quipping that he “caught them telling the truth last week and they tried to lie their way out of it.”

Lavin spoke with Breitbart News as one of the California Edison workers laid off in the scandal that Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) have hammered the company for. Grassley called the layoffs “heartless” and Issa argued that this appears to be an abuse of the program.

America is facing a surplus of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) workers who are unemployed or have been laid off from work due to companies, like SoCal Edison, that have been outsourcing American jobs to immigrants. According to an article from Robert Charette in IEEE Spectrum, the so-called “STEM Crisis”—where tech leaders like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who claim they need to import cheap foreign labor—is a “myth.” (Read more from “Union Official Says ‘Corporate Greed’ Behind Push for H-1B Visas” HERE)

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Obama’s Secretary of the Army Withdraws Officer’s Silver Star, Congress Outraged

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A group of House lawmakers is moving to strip the armed services’ civilian leaders of the power to revoke combat valor awards in response to Army Secretary John McHugh unilaterally canceling the Silver Star, one of the military’s highest honors, for a former Green Beret officer.

Mr. McHugh took the action against Maj. Mathew Golsteyn, who braved repeated enemy fire in Afghanistan, even though he has not been charged with any offenses. The Army now is seeking to release him with a less-than-honorable discharge. The officer plans to fight the move, his attorney says.

The secretary acted after the CIA informed the Army that Maj. Golsteyn, during a polygraph exam for a job application, told of killing a terrorist who was making improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the weapon that has killed more Americans in Afghanistan than any other. The Army also removed Maj. Golsteyn from the elite ranks of the Green Berets.

Rep. Duncan Hunter, the California Republican who is spearheading the restrictive legislation, says he wants to prevent service secretaries from retaliating against personnel by stripping their awards in cases where there is insufficient evidence to charge them for nonjudicial, or court-martial, punishment.

“Secretary McHugh made a political decision,” Mr. Hunter said. “He used his power as a weapon to retaliate against a soldier when the Army was unable to prove an allegation.” (Read more from “Army’s Withdrawal of Officer’s Silver Star Sparks Ire of Congress” HERE)

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