Atheists Say Congressional Prayer Caucus a Threat to US Constitution

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An activist atheist group is attacking the congressional prayer caucus, and it’s out for blood.

The American Humanist Association sent a letter to newly elected members of Congress imploring them not to join the congressional prayer caucus, saying the caucus is a threat to the U.S. Constitution and American rights.

“Generally speaking prayer caucuses are unnecessary and a threat to the wall of separation of church and state,” AHA Legal Director David Niose told TheDCNF. “The caucus is little more than a platform for pandering to the Christian right, and membership in it amounts to a public statement that a politician is hostile to the rights of Americans who are nonreligious and non-theistic.”

Niose added that the caucus promulgates the idea that American Christians are under attack, an idea he says is untrue. (Read more about the congressional prayer caucus HERE)

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‘Jihadi John’: Barbaric ISIS Killer Is College Student from London

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By Souad Mekhennet and Adam Goldman. The world knows him as “Jihadi John,” the masked man with a British accent who has beheaded several hostages held by the Islamic State and who taunts audiences in videos circulated widely online.

But his real name, according to friends and others familiar with his case, is Mohammed Emwazi, a Briton from a well-to-do family who grew up in West London and graduated from college with a degree in computer programming. He is believed to have traveled to Syria around 2012 and to have later joined the Islamic State, the group whose barbarity he has come to symbolize.

“I have no doubt that Mohammed is Jihadi John,” said one of Emwazi’s close friends who identified him in an interview with The Washington Post. “He was like a brother to me. . . . I am sure it is him.”

A representative of a British human rights group who had been in contact with Emwazi before he left for Syria also said he believed Emwazi was Jihadi John, a moniker given to him by some of the hostages he once held.

“There was an extremely strong resemblance,” Asim Qureshi, research director at the rights group, CAGE, said when shown one of the videos and asked to confirm whether Emwazi could be “Jihadi John.” (Read more about ‘Jihadi John’ HERE)

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3 NYC Men Charged in Plot to Join ISIS, Kill Obama

By Jamie Schram, Larry Celona, Selim Algar and Chris Pere. Three America-hating extremists who live in Brooklyn were busted Wednesday in a wide-ranging terror plot that included joining ISIS, killing President Obama, hijacking an airplane and bombing Coney Island, federal officials said.

One of the men was grabbed at JFK Airport attempting to board a 12:30 a.m. flight to Ukraine en route to Turkey, where he allegedly planned to sneak across the border into Syria and become an Islamic State terrorist.

Kazakh national Akhror Saidakhmetov, 19, “tried to resist a little bit,” but was quickly overpowered by about 20 members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force who confronted him at the jetway, sources said.


Another defendant, Uzbeki native Abdulrasul Hasanovich Juraboev, 24, had a plane ticket to Turkey for March 29. He was busted at his home in Brooklyn.

The third man, Arbor Habibov, 30, an illegal alien from Uzbekistan, was arrested in Florida, one of several states where he runs shopping-mall kiosks that sell kitchenware and repair cellphones, according to the feds. (Read more from this story HERE)

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Scandal-Ridden Loretta Lynch Clears Committee With Three GOP Votes

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By Seung Min Kim. Loretta Lynch cleared a key vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday in her bid to become the nation’s next attorney general, picking up support from three Republicans on the panel in favor of her confirmation.

The vote was 12-8. The three Republicans who backed her nomination, along with all committee Democrats, were Orrin Hatch of Utah, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Jeff Flake of Arizona.

The next battle is on the Senate floor, where the federal prosecutor from Brooklyn is still expected to have enough GOP backing to be confirmed. But the controversy over President Barack Obama’s executive actions on immigration have overshadowed her nomination — particularly after her confirmation hearing last month, where she testified that those unilateral moves are legal.

Most GOP senators on the committee stressed that they could not support someone to be the nation’s chief law enforcement official who believes that the executive actions — which Republicans uniformly oppose and say are unconstitutional — are legal. (Read more about Lynch clearing with three GOP votes HERE)

Listen to New York Times Best Seller Dr. Jerome Corsi’s description of Loretta Lynch’s involvement in the HSBC multi-trillion dollar money laundering scheme here:


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Loretta Lynch’s Secret Prosecutions

By Johnny Dwyer. The office headed by the woman poised to become the next attorney general has used an unusual method to keep many of its prosecutions hidden from the public, an NBC News investigation has found.

Federal prosecutors in New York’s Brooklyn-based Eastern District pursued cases against secret, unnamed “John Doe” defendants 58 times since Loretta Lynch became head prosecutor in May 2010. Two of the 58 are terrorism cases.


Eastern District prosecutors have also sought permission to close the courtroom to the public for 11 different Doe cases during the same period, and judges have granted permission in at least 10 of the cases, as recently as February 12.

Critics are concerned the practice may infringe the Constitution’s guarantee of a public trial. (Read more from this story HERE)

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You Could Hear a Pin Drop During Father’s Devastating Testimony on Illegal Immigration

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By Jason Howerton. Jamiel Shaw, whose son was murdered by an illegal immigrant in 2008, blasted the Obama administration’s immigration policies during a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee hearing on Wednesday.

“My son, Jamiel Andre Shaw II, was murdered by a DREAMer, a DACA recipient, a child brought to this country by no fault of his own,” Shaw began. “My family’s peace and freedom was stolen by an illegal alien from Mexico. He was brought here by his illegal alien parents and allowed to grow up as a wild animal.”

He continued: “Some people believe that if you are brought over by no fault of your own that it makes you a good person. They want you to believe that DREAM Act kids don’t murder. I am here to debunk that myth.”

Though Shaw’s son was murdered in 2008, before Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program was implemented, he said his son’s killer would likely be qualified under DACA.

Shaw then delivered a gut-wrenching account of how his son was murdered by an illegal immigrant with a criminal record. (Read more about the testimony on illegal immigration HERE)

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Ann Coulter Finds ‘Illegal Aliens’ Way Scarier than ISIS

By Matt Wilstein. Last week, Ann Coulter complained to Sean Hannity that Fox News only talks about immigration “a tenth as much” as they talk about ISIS. Now, she has turned that argument up to 11 with a column for WorldNetDaily titled “For death by ISIS you have to go out, but illegals deliver!”

“ISIS has killed four Americans — in Syria. We’re not exactly talking about another 9/11,” Coulter writes. “Here’s a tip: If you don’t want to be killed by ISIS, don’t go to Syria.”


By contrast, she continues, “illegal aliens have killed, raped and maimed thousands of Americans — in America. If you don’t want to be killed, raped or maimed by illegal immigrants in your own country, I have no tips for you. There’s nothing you can do. You’re on your own. Good luck.”

Coulter accuses U.S. politicians of being “obsessed with cleaning up the rest of the world, while we’re getting our clock cleaned at home.” (Read more from this story HERE)

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The Arrival of Robot Crime: Twitter Bot Makes Death Threats, Police Question Owner

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By Kashmir Hill. Robots are starting to break the law, the law is trying to figure out what to do about it, and it all seems to be happening in Europe. Last month, Swiss authorities seized the Random Darknet Shopper art exhibit which included weekly purchases made by an automated bot given Bitcoin to surf a Dark Web marketplace. (It mainly bought drugs.) This week, police in the Netherlands are dealing with a robot miscreant. Amsterdam-based developer Jeffry van der Goot reports on Twitter that he was questioned by police because a Twitter bot he owned made a death threat.

Van der Goot’s bot used his own tweets as fodder, taking random chunks of them and trying to recombine them into new sentences that made sense. According to van der Goot, the bot tweeted something that sounded like a threat which mentioned an upcoming event in Amsterdam. Best of all, the bot was responding to another bot, according to van der Goot. He is not identifying the bot and says he has deleted it, per the request of the police. If this is not a hoax, this may be the first time police had to respond because of a robot-on-robot threat of violence. (Read more about the death threat from the Twitter bot HERE)


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Who Do We Blame When Robots Make Death Threats?

By Kashmir Hill. Last week, police showed up at the home of Amsterdam Web developer Jeffry van der Goot because a Twitter account under van der Goot’s control had tweeted, according to the Guardian, “I seriously want to kill people.” But the menacing tweet wasn’t written by van der Goot; it was written by a robot.

The police didn’t press charges. They just asked van der Goot, 28, to delete the account. The bot account only exists now as a cached page; the offending tweet has completely disappeared from the Internet’s surprisingly imperfect memory. It was a brief blip in the Twitter OMG machine, but the episode raises a fascinating and increasingly pressing question in these times of independent algorithms: Who is to blame when a robot does bad things? . . .

In this case, the bot itself got punished. It was killed off by its owner for its transgression at the urging of police. In the robot world, you can get the death penalty for a speech offense. Harsh! Who will stand up for robot civil liberties?


“Information by itself can commit a crime now,” Calo said by phone. If it is indeed a crime. A Twitter bot saying it wants to kill people isn’t really a threat because that bot can’t show up with a gun in a dark alley. (At least not yet.) But somebody on the receiving end of that threat could take it seriously not knowing that it’s a blustering bot. Here in the U.S., a yet-undecided Supreme Court case deals with exactly this issue: whether a man’s Facebook post with violent Eminem lyrics — that was interpreted as threatening by his ex-wife — is a true threat that can get him into legal trouble if he didn’t actually intend to hurt her. It would be much easier for American bots (and their owners) if the Supreme Court rules that empty threats are constitutionally protected.

I asked Calo if he thought any humans should take the fall for van der Goot’s bot, if it came to that. “I don’t know,” he said. “The law has to come up with a thing to do. It would probably look at the person who put the technology into play. (Ed. note: bot owner van der Goot.) If someone builds a general purpose tool — Ed. note: bot builder Hertling — you can’t go after them. In criminal law, you can’t go after person breeding a dangerous dog, but the person who lets it loose.” (Read more from this story HERE)

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Top U.S. Counter-Terrorism Director Charged with Soliciting Sex from Minor, Obscene Communications [+video]

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By The Associated Press. A U.S. State Department official appeared in court Wednesday afternoon following his arrest in D.C. on a charge of soliciting a minor.

Daniel Rosen was arrested at his Washington home around noon Tuesday, said Lucy Caldwell, a spokeswoman with the Fairfax County Police Department in northern Virginia.

Rosen, 44, was in custody with the D.C. Department of Corrections and was arraigned during an initial appearance in D.C. Superior Court.

Rosen was arrested “following a series of online exchanges” with a detective assigned to the Fairfax County Police Department’s Child Exploitation Unit, Caldwell said. He was charged with one count of using of a communications device to solicit a juvenile. (Read more from ‘Top U.S. Counter-Terrorism Director Charged with Obscene Communications, Soliciting Sex from Minor’ HERE)


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Senior State Department Official Arrested for Allegedly Soliciting Sex from a Minor

By James Rosen. A senior State Department official in charge of federal counterterrorism programs will face trial in Virginia after he was arrested Tuesday afternoon for allegedly soliciting sex from a minor.

Fairfax County Police officials say Daniel Rosen was arrested by a county detective about noon Tuesday at his Washington, D.C. home after he allegedly sought to arrange sex with a minor. The detective, a female officer working in the county’s Child Exploitation Unit, had been posing as the minor in online exchanges with Rosen, police said.


Rosen, who is the director of counterterrorism programs and policy at the State Department, appeared in D.C. Superior Court Wednesday and waived extradition to Virginia. A judge ordered him held without bond, and authorities said he would be transferred to a Fairfax County jail sometime in the next ten days.

An online court record did not list an attorney for him, and a message seeking comment left by The Associated Press on Wednesday at a telephone number associated with his address was not immediately returned. (Read more from this story HERE)

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Obama’s Net Neutrality Plan Could Lead to United Nations Control of Your Internet

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By Brendan Sasso. The U.S. government’s plan to enact strong net neutrality regulations could embolden authoritarian regimes like China and Russia to seize more power over the Internet through the United Nations, a key Senate Republican warned Wednesday.

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune of South Dakota argued that by claiming more authority over Internet access for net neutrality, the Federal Communications Commission will undermine the ability of the U.S. to push back against international plots to control the Internet and censor content.

Countries like Russia already have made it clear that they want the International Telecommunications Union or another United Nations body to have more power over the Internet, Thune said.

“It seems like reclassifying broadband, as the administration is doing, is losing a valuable argument,” Thune said at his panel’s hearing on Internet governance. “How do you prevent ITU involvement when you’re pushing to reclassify the Internet under Title II of the Communications Act, and is everyone aware of that inherent contradiction?”

On Thursday, the FCC is set to vote on net neutrality regulations that would declare Internet access a “telecommunications service” under Title II. Advocates, including President Obama, argue that the move is the only way the FCC can enact rules that will hold up to legal challenges in court. The rules aim to prevent Internet providers from acting as “gatekeepers” and controlling what content users can access online. (Read more about the net neutrality plan HERE)

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FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai: Net Neutrality is a “Solution That Won’t Work to a Problem That Doesn’t Exist”

By Nick Gillespie & Todd Krainin. Net Neutrality is “a solution that won’t work to a problem that doesn’t exist,” says Ajit Pai, a commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Pai is an oustpoken opponent of expanding government control of the internet, including FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s plan to regulate Internet Service Providers (ISPs) under the same Title II rules that are used to govern telephone-service providers as public utilities. Under current FCC regulations, ISPs are considered providers of “information services” and subject to essentially no federal regulation.

He is also sharply critical of President Barack Obama’s very public push to influence policy at the FCC, which is technically an independent agency. Last year, it was widely believed that Wheeler, a former head of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, would not push for Title II. Pai calls the president’s actions—which included “creating a YouTube video of with very specific prescriptions as to what this agency should do”—unprecedented in his experience. Coupled with the fact that “the agency suddenly chang[ed]course from where it was to mimic the president’s plan,” says Pai, “suggests that the independence of the agency has been compromised to some extent.”

The FCC is scheduled to vote Thursday, February 26 on Wheeler’s plan. (Read more from this story HERE)

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Soros, Ford shovel $196 million to ‘net neutrality’ groups, staff to White House

By Paul Bedard. Liberal philanthropist George Soros and the Ford Foundation have lavished groups supporting the administration’s “net neutrality” agenda, donating $196 million and landing proponents on the White House staff, according to a new report.

And now, as the Federal Communications Commission nears approving a type of government control over the Internet, the groups are poised to declare victory in the years-long fight, according to the report from MRC Business, an arm of the conservative media watchdog, the Media Research Center.

“The Ford Foundation, which claims to be the second-largest private foundation in the U.S., and Open Society Foundations, founded by far-left billionaire George Soros, have given more than $196 million to pro-net neutrality groups between 2000 and 2013,” said the report, authored by Media Research Center’s Joseph Rossell, and provided to Secrets.


These left-wing groups not only impacted the public debate and funded top liberal think tanks from the Center for American Progress to Free Press. They also have direct ties to the White House and regulatory agencies. At least five individuals from these groups have ascended to key positions at the White House and FCC,” said the report which included funding details to pro-net neutrality advocates. (Read more from this story HERE)

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First Full Body Transplant Two Years Away According to Surgeon

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Sergio Canavero, a doctor in Turin, Italy, has drawn up plans to graft a living person’s head on to a donor body and claims the procedures needed to carry out the operation are not far off . . .

He has claimed for years that medical science has advanced to the point that a full body transplant is plausible, but the proposal has caused raised eyebrows, horror and profound disbelief in other surgeons.

The Italian doctor, who recently published a broad outline of how the surgery could be performed, told New Scientist magazine that he wanted to use body transplants to prolong the lives of people affected by terminal diseases.

“If society doesn’t want it, I won’t do it. But if people don’t want it, in the US or Europe, that doesn’t mean it won’t be done somewhere else,” he said. “I’m trying to go about this the right way, but before going to the moon, you want to make sure people will follow you.”

Putting aside the considerable technical issues involved in removing a living person’s head, grafting it to a dead body, reviving the reconstructed person and retraining their brain to use thousands of unfamiliar spinal cord nerves, the ethics are problematic. (Read more about the possibility of a full body transplant HERE)

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Trump 2016: Donald Trump Says He is Serious About Presidency

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Photo Credit: Gage SkidmoreBy Robert Costa. This time, Donald J. Trump says, he really means it.

The billionaire real-estate mogul, who has long amounted to a one-man sideshow in GOP presidential politics, said in an interview Wednesday that he is “more serious” than ever about pursuing a run for the White House in 2016.

In recent days, Trump said, he has hired staffers in key primary states, retained an election attorney and delayed signing on for another season as host of NBC’s “The Celebrity Apprentice” because of his political projects.

“Everybody feels I’m doing this just to have fun or because it’s good for the brand,” Trump said in an interview with The Washington Post. “Well, it’s not fun. I’m not doing this for enjoyment. I’m doing this because the country is in serious trouble.”

The moves are the most significant steps yet by Trump, 68, toward a bona fide presidential bid, which he considered briefly and flamboyantly in 2011 before deciding against a run. (Read more about how Donald Trump says he is serious about a run HERE)

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Reporter Mocks Scott Walker for Claiming to Communicate with God through Prayer

By Alex Griswold. Political Wire publisher Taegan Goddard caught a lot of flak on Twitter after mocking Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker for claiming he could discern God’s will, only to admit that he had no idea Christians believed they could communicate with God through prayer.

It all began with a rather snarky tweet about Walker’s comments that he was still waiting for “God’s calling” before he announced a presidential run.

Gov. Scott Walker’s office was unable to provide any transcripts of his conversations with God https://t.co/R8dcqhNpqR — Taegan Goddard (@politicalwire) February 24, 2015

@lachlan I don’t pretend I can talk with God. But perhaps Scott Walker can. — Taegan Goddard (@politicalwire) February 24, 2015

(Read more from this story HERE)

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Obama Lied: Obamacare Paying for Abortions but Denying Newborns Coverage

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President Obama promised that under the Affordable Care Act those who needed health insurance would be covered and that the American people wouldn’t be funding abortions. Unfortunately, it turns out that both of these promises were falsehoods.

According to the Government Accountability Office, in 2014 taxpayers funded over a thousand Obamacare health plans that subsidize abortion on demand—even late-term abortion—in defiance of the Hyde Amendment Obama publicly said he would honor.

Additionally, countless people have come forward and said that Obamacare actually denied them care. For example, in Utah three mothers haven’t been able to add their new babies to their health insurance policies under the Affordable Care Act. According to KUTV, Maggie Long, Robin Williamson and Shawnsi Szerszen attempted to add their newborns within the 30-day window of the child being born but each was denied.

Maggie explained that before she applied for health insurance through Obamacare, she was required to apply for the Children’s Health Insurance Policy (CHIP), which is a program offered by the state of Utah to help insure kids whose parents can’t afford it. However, each of these mothers didn’t qualify for CHIP because of their incomes but the marketplace insisted that they apply with them anyway.

Maggie said, “We knew we wouldn’t qualify. We didn’t want to, but they said we had to.” In emails and phone calls, marketplace workers assured Maggie that the enrollment window would be extended to allow for CHIP to consider her application. Of course, CHIP denied her baby and then when she turned to the marketplace to try and add her daughter, they turn her away as well. “They denied us, saying we went over our time limit and there was no evidence we tried adding her to our insurance,” said Maggie. (Read more about Obamacare denying newborns coverage HERE)

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