ISIS Wants to Assassinate the Pope

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Photo Credit: APBy Nick Squires.

Pope Francis is at risk of an assassination attempt by the Islamic extremists of Isil, the Vatican has been warned, ahead of his first visit to a Muslim-majority country this weekend.

As the 77-year-old pontiff prepares to travel to Albania on Sunday for a one-day visit, Iraq’s ambassador to the Holy See said there were credible threats against the pontiff’s life.

The leader of the Roman Catholic Church could also be vulnerable when he travels to Turkey in November, the ambassador said.

Jihadists from Isil have in recent weeks boasted of wanting to extend their caliphate to Rome, the heart of Western Christendom, and have talked of planting the jihadist black flag on top of St Peter’s Basilica.

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Islamic State shoots down Syrian war plane

By Reuters.

Islamic State fighters shot down a Syrian war plane using anti-aircraft guns on Tuesday, the first time the group has downed a military jet since declaring its cross-border caliphate in June, a group monitoring the civil war said.

The plane came down outside Islamic State’s stronghold of Raqqa city, 400 km (250 miles) northeast of Damascus, during air strikes on territory controlled by the group, a resident said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group which gathers information from a network of activists on the ground, reported five air raids on Raqqa on Tuesday. Rami Abdulrahman, who runs the organization, cited sources close to Islamic State as saying the plane had been shot down.

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Want To Murder Someone? Pennsylvania’s About To Make It Easier

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Photo Credit: State of Pa.Pennsylvania legislators are poised to pass into law an organ-transplant-donation bill that will make it easier for murderers to avoid detection and prosecution.

Two bills, almost identical, Senate Bill 850 (SB 850) and House Bill 30 (HB 30), according to its many bipartisan sponsors, will greatly increase the number of organ donors. There are currently 121,000 people on the national waitlist for organ transplants, and laws to increase the organ supply are perennially popular in many states. Those opposing such laws are commonly accused of condemning to death people on the waitlist.

Law enforcement officials, however, are taking exception to one section of HB 30 (and likewise SB 850) that would complicate the work of coroners and medical examiners, and can make it difficult to convict or even bring murderers to trial.

HB 30 gives ownership of the bodies of organ donors directly to the two organ procurement organizations (OPOs) that are promoting the bill: CORE, the Center for Organ Recovery & Education, and GOL, Gift of Life. The bill allows CORE and GOL to bypass coroners and medical examiners to place first dibs on the bodies of organ donors. SB 850 is simultaneously making its way through the Pennsylvania senate.

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Top Obama Bundlers Funded LGBT Attack on Archbishop Who Supported Traditional Marriage

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Photo Credit: APA leftist group funded by top gay activist bundlers for Obama’s 2012 campaign coordinated both a “well planned and financed” attack against San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone for his decision to speak during the March for Marriage in Washington, D.C. in June, says Catholic San Francisco.

Faithful America is an organization that claims to be “the largest and fastest growing online community of Christians putting faith into action for social justice.”

According to Valerie Schmalz writing at Catholic San Francisco, there is “abundant evidence” that the attack on Cordileone, who is chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage, was coordinated by Faithful America and supported by politically powerful and wealthy individuals and foundations that have dedicated millions to promoting the LGBT agenda.

Catholic San Francisco reports that Faithful America, whose website claims over 300,000 members and states it is “dedicated to reclaiming Christianity from the religious right,” has received funding from the nation’s two top gay political philanthropists—Tim Gill of Colorado, founder of software publisher Quark Inc., and billionaire Jon Stryker, heir of Stryker medical technology company—as well as billionaire George Soros and the Evelyn & Walter Haas Jr. Fund.

Both the Gill Foundation and Stryker’s Arcus Foundation were created primarily to promote the LGBT political agenda, and both were top bundlers for Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.

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Egypt: Don’t Limit Action to ISIS; Islamists Elsewhere Share its Ideology

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Photo Credit: Interdependent By Patrick Goodenough.

During Secretary of State John Kerry’s weekend visit to Cairo, his Egyptian counterpart pushed for the new international focus on countering terrorism to go beyond Syria and Iraq, arguing that the same ideology espoused by the jihadists there is driving other Islamist extremists, including those in Egypt’s neighboring territories.

During his current travels in the Middle East and Europe, Kerry is seeking support for a coalition to tackle the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS/ISIL), and he said Sunday he has received offers from some countries to take part in the military element of that campaign.

But while the administration’s focus has been largely centered on ISIS, Cairo sees the problem as a far broader one.

A spokesman for President Abdul Fattah el-Sisi said that in talks with Kerry the president had “stressed that any international coalition against terrorism must be a comprehensive alliance that is not limited to confront a certain organization or to curb a single terrorist hotbed but must expand to include all the terrorist hotbeds across the Middle East and Africa.”

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US launches first offensive strikes against ISIS in Iraq

By Fox News.

The U.S. military launched airstrikes against the Islamic State militants in Iraq Monday in its first move in the newly broadened mission authorized by President Obama to go on the offensive against the terror group.
The U.S. Central Command said in a press release that the strikes were conducted to provide support for Iraqi security forces fighting the militants southwest of Baghdad.

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Attorney: University Broke Law by Banning Crosses on Football Helmets

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Photo Credit: Todd Starnes / Arkansas
Arkansas State University violated the law when they ordered football players to either remove or modify crosses they had affixed to their helmets, a prominent religious liberty law firm alleges.

The cross decals were meant to memorialize former player Markel Owens who was killed in January and former equipment manager Barry Weyer, who was killed in a June car crash.

“ASU’s actions in defacing the students’ memorial stickers to remove their religious viewpoint is illegal viewpoint discrimination against the students’ free speech,” said Hiram Sasser, director of litigation for Liberty Institute.

Sasser, who is representing an unnamed student, gave the university until Wednesday to “cease your censorship and publicly acknowledge, in writing, the right of ASU’s students to engage in private speech, including speech in the form of a cross-shaped helmet sticker memorial to their former colleagues.”

The memorial drew the ire of a Jonesboro, Arkansas attorney along with the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a Wisconsin-based group of perpetually offended atheists.

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NYT: Obama 'Reshaping' Appellate Bench

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Photo Credit: DOUG MILLS / THE NEW YORK TIMES
Democrats have reversed the partisan imbalance on the federal appeals courts that long favored conservatives, a little-noticed shift with far-reaching consequences for the law and President Obama’s legacy.

For the first time in more than a decade, judges appointed by Democratic presidents considerably outnumber judges appointed by Republican presidents. The Democrats’ advantage has only grown since late last year when they stripped Republicans of their ability to filibuster the president’s nominees.

Democratic appointees who hear cases full time now hold a majority of seats on nine of the 13 United States Courts of Appeals. When Mr. Obama took office, only one of those courts had more full-time judges nominated by a Democrat.

The shift, one of the most significant but unheralded accomplishments of the Obama era, is likely to have ramifications for how the courts decide the legality of some of the president’s most controversial actions on health care, immigration and clean air. Since today’s Congress has been a graveyard for legislative accomplishment, these judicial confirmations are likely to be among its most enduring acts.

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Feds Find Anti-Israel and Pro-Palestine 9/11 Message to America on Border Fence

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Photo Credit: BreitbartOn September 11, 2014, individuals or a group in Mexico hung a message to America over the U.S.-Mexico border wall condemning American support for Israel and declaring support for Palestine. U.S. federal agents discovered the banner draped over the primary border fence in Arizona’s Yuma Sector in a restricted area that could only have been reached from Mexico. The message also contained an image described by authorities as an anarchist symbol. The incident was kept secret from the American public by federal authorities. Breitbart Texas exclusively obtained the leaked incident report from federal agents on the condition their identities remain private.

The leaked incident report reveals that U.S. Border Patrol agents discovered the banner in the early hours of September 12, 2014, indicating that the banner had been draped over the border wall late in the night on September 11th.

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State Department Orders 5,000 Body Bags and 160,000 Hazmat Suits for African Ebola Outbreak

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Photo Credit: Michel du Chille / GettyBy David Martosko.

The U.S. Agency for International Development ordered 5,000 body bags from a Florida company last month as part of its planned response to an outbreak of the Ebola virus in western Africa.
And as President Obama prepares to enlarge America’s aid to affected countries, a company that makes protective clothing says the State Department, which oversees USAID, has invited bids for 160,000 hazmat suits.

The body-bag purchase came on August 19, just after the World Health Organization said the epidemic had killed 1,000 people. That death toll is now greater than 2,400.

The size of the contracts indicates how seriously governments are taking the threat, especially considering that all 5,000 body bags were destined only for Liberia – one of three countries whose citizens have been hammered with new disease cases and paralyzed with fear.

And the purchase says nothing about what resources might be coming as part of other nations’ contributions.

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200,000 from Ebola countries have visas to enter U.S.

By Paul Bedard.

There are about 200,000 Africans from countries hosting the deadly Ebola virus who hold temporary visas to visit the United States, greatly raising the stakes it could spread to America, according to a group following the immigration issue.

“Based on State Department nonimmigrant visa issuance statistics, I estimate that there are about 5,000 people in Guinea, 5,000 people in Sierra Leone, and 3,500 people in Liberia who possess visas to come to the United States today,” said Jessica M. Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies.

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Congress Demands Obama Act to Keep Islamic Terrorists Out of U.S.

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Photo Credit: AP / Evan VucciWhile President Obama is focused on getting money to friendly-ish Syrian rebels, Congress is increasingly demanding he take more steps to stop militant fighters from coming to the U.S. by stripping Americans of their passports if they join the fight and by suspending countries that have large contingents of foreign fighters from the Visa Waiver Program.

More than half of the countries on the U.S. visa waiver list — including most close European allies — have had citizens join the fight in Syria, according to data from a June report by the Soufan Group. Analysts said they could use their passports to bypass initial levels of scrutiny by U.S. screeners.

“Islamic extremists holding British, German, French or other European passports can simply get on a plane and fly to America without a visa. The safety and security of Americans should be of the highest priority, and this Visa Waiver Program puts the American people in great danger,” said Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a Hawaii Democrat who has two tours of duty as an Army National Guard captain under her belt.

Meanwhile, the estimated 100 or more Americans who have joined Islamist militants could pose a special danger to the U.S. if they bring their jihad back home.

In a letter last week to the State and Homeland Security departments, 14 Republican senators asked Secretary of State John F. Kerry to use the authority the law grants him to revoke passports of anyone who is discovered to have joined the militants.

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California Voters Worry Over Illegal Immigration but Support Path to Legality

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Photo Credit: AP California voters broadly support a path to legalization for immigrants in the U.S. without proper documents, despite widespread worry about the effects of illegal immigration, a new poll shows.

Three in four of those surveyed support an overhaul of federal immigration laws, the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll shows.

A majority of voters of all races, income levels and geography agreed that illegal immigration is a major problem, but there were significant differences over what to do about it, the Times reported Monday.

Beverly Bloom, a 59-year-old registered Democrat from Corona who works in physical education at a high school, said she doesn’t want to see punishment for the students and families she works with, many of them in the country illegally.

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