Excitement, Apprehension Build As Scotland Prepares for Vote on Independence

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Photo Credit: Leon Neal / AFP / Getty ImagesFor Scots, Wednesday was a day of excitement, apprehension, and a flood of final appeals before a big decision. In a matter of hours, they will determine whether Scotland leaves the United Kingdom and becomes an independent state.

A full 97 percent of those eligible have registered to vote — including, for the first time, 16- and 17-year-olds — in a referendum that polls suggest is too close to call.

A phone poll of 1,373 people by Ipsos MORI, released Wednesday, put opposition to independence at 51 percent and support at 49 percent, with 5 percent of voters undecided.

That means neither side can feel confident, given the margin of error of about plus or minus three percentage points.

Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, himself a Scot, told a No campaign rally that the quiet majority of pro-Union Scots “will be silent no more,” while pro-independence leader Alex Salmond urged voters to seize a democratic opportunity 307 years in the making.

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Texas Executes Woman for Torture Death of 9-Year-Old Boy

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Photo Credit: AP / Texas Department of Criminal JusticeA Texas woman convicted of the starvation and torture death of her girlfriend’s 9-year-old son a decade ago was executed Wednesday evening.

Lisa Coleman, 38, received a lethal injection after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a last-day appeal to spare her.

She was pronounced dead at 6:24 p.m. CDT, 12 minutes after Texas Department of Criminal officials began administering a lethal dose of pentobarbital.

Coleman became the ninth convicted killer and second woman to receive lethal injection in Texas this year. Nationally, she’s the 15th woman executed since the Supreme Court in 1976 allowed the death penalty to resume. During that same time, nearly 1,400 men have been put to death.

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Facebook Deletes Profiles of Drag Queens; LGBT Community Outraged

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Photo Credit: APSan Francisco drag queens are sparring with Facebook over its policy requiring people to use their real names, rather than drag names such as Pollo Del Mar and Heklina. But the world’s biggest social network is not budging from its rules.

In recent weeks, Facebook has been deleting the profiles of self-described drag queens and other performers who use stage names because they did not comply with the social networking site’s requirement that users go by their “real names” on the site.

On Wednesday, Facebook declined to change its policy after meeting with drag queens and a member of the San Francisco board of supervisors. The company said is usually deletes accounts with fake names after investigating user complaints.

“This policy is wrong and misguided,” said Supervisor David Campos, who was flanked by seven drag queens during a press conference at San Francisco City Hall.

The drag queens and others in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community say many Facebook account holders fear using their real names for a variety of reasons, including threats to their safety and employment.

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Democrats Turn on Debbie Wasserman Schultz

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Photo Credit: APDemocratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz is in a behind-the-scenes struggle with the White House, congressional Democrats and Washington insiders who have lost confidence in her as both a unifying leader and reliable party spokesperson at a time when they need her most.

Long-simmering doubts about her have reached a peak after two recent public flubs: criticizing the White House’s handling of the border crisis and comparing the tea party to wife beaters.

The perception of critics is that Wasserman Schultz spends more energy tending to her own political ambitions than helping Democrats win. This includes using meetings with DNC donors to solicit contributions for her own PAC and campaign committee, traveling to uncompetitive districts to court House colleagues for her potential leadership bid and having DNC-paid staff focus on her personal political agenda.

She’s become a liability to the DNC, and even to her own prospects, critics say.

“I guess the best way to describe it is, it’s not that she’s losing a duel anywhere, it’s that she seems to keep shooting herself in the foot before she even gets the gun out of the holster,” said John Morgan, a major donor in Wasserman Schultz’s home state of Florida.

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House Approves Ron Paul’s ‘Audit the Fed’ Bill

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Photo Credit APFormer Rep. Ron Paul’s push to audit the Federal Reserve got another boost Wednesday when the House passed the bill for the second time in three years, and by a bigger margin than before.

The bill, now sponsored by Rep. Paul Broun, Georgia Republican, was approved on a 333-92 vote, with all but one Republican and 106 Democrats in favor of it. That’s a major jump from last time, when a majority of Democrats voted against it.

Still, despite the overwhelming support, the law is likely to die…

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Illegal Alien Frenzy: Border Rush in Advance of U.S. Crackdown

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Photo Credit: APThe summer lull in illegal border crossings from Mexico is about to give way to a rush of even more immigrants in a frenzy of fear that Washington is about to shut the door, according to several Hispanic leaders.

In Honduras, for example, U.S. threats coupled with those from local leaders warning about the dangers of crossing the border have instead reenergized children and adults to run fast to America and pay inflated fees to “coyotes” to get them there.

“As I am speaking, hundreds of children are trying to leave Honduras,” said Jose Guadalupe Ruelas, a Honduran leader who advocates for children. “When people in Honduras hear that the U.S. is going to get stricter with immigration rules and laws then people think to themselves, ‘Now is the time for me to go,’” he said through an interpreter.

Ruelas and several other Hispanic leaders met in Washington on Tuesday after spending a week in Latin nations responsible for sending over 50,000 children across the U.S. border this year. Officials expect another 145,000 next year.

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World War E

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Photo Credit: Jack MooreBy Jeff Mason and James Harding Giahyue.

President Barack Obama on Tuesday called West Africa’s deadly Ebola outbreak a looming threat to global security and announced a major expansion of the U.S. role in trying to halt its spread, including deployment of 3,000 troops to the region.

“The reality is that this epidemic is going to get worse before it gets better,” Obama said at the Atlanta headquarters of the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“But, right now, the world still has an opportunity to save countless lives. Right now, the world has the responsibility to act, to step up and to do more. The United States of America intends to do more,” he added.
The U.S. plan, a dramatic expansion of Washington’s initial response last week, won praise from the U.N. World Health Organization, aid workers and officials in West Africa. Experts said it was still not enough to contain the epidemic, which is rapidly spreading and has caused already-weak local public health systems to buckle under the strain of fighting it.

U.S. officials said the focus of the military deployment would be Liberia, a nation founded by freed American slaves that is the hardest hit of the countries affected by the crisis.

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EBOLA SURVIVOR: NO TIME TO WASTE AS OBAMA UPS AID

BY LAURAN NEERGAARD AND JIM KUHNHENN.

An American doctor who survived Ebola said there’s no time to waste as President Barack Obama outlined his plan to ramp up the U.S. response to the epidemic in West Africa.

“We can’t afford to wait months, or even weeks, to take action, to put people on the ground,” Dr. Kent Brantly told senators Tuesday.

Obama called the Ebola crisis a threat to world security as he ordered up to 3,000 U.S. military personnel to the region along with an aggressive effort to train health care workers and deliver field hospitals. Under the plan, the government could end up devoting $1 billion to containing the disease.

“If the outbreak is not stopped now, we could be looking at hundreds of thousands of people affected, with profound economic, political and security implications for all of us,” Obama said after briefings in Atlanta with doctors from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from Emory University, where Brantly and two other aid workers with Ebola have been treated.

Obama acted under pressure from regional leaders and international aid organizations who pleaded for a heightened U.S. role in confronting the deadly virus. He called on other countries to also quickly supply more health workers, equipment and money.

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How Will the U.S. Decide Which Syrian Rebels to Arm?

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Photo Credit: Win McNamee / Getty Congress is expected to vote this week on giving the Obama administration the authority to combat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria by providing arms and training—to someone. But whom?

Even assuming President Obama gets the authority he wants, experts say deciding who exactly should get American aid is an exceedingly difficult task. There are vast differences among Syrian rebel fighters—a conglomerate of varying ideologies, social backgrounds, and loyalties. And the questions of who exactly is a Syrian moderate, and whether these weapons will fall into the wrong hands, loom large on Capitol Hill.

“As you know, in the Middle East, it’s very difficult to predict what’s going to happen,” Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia said after emerging from a closed-door House GOP conference meeting Thursday. “And that’s why everybody wants to be very careful about this because we do have concerns about that.”

There isn’t a formal definition of a Syrian moderate, said Leila Hilal of the New America Foundation. But implicit in the word, she says, are a few criteria: a Syrian who is a nationalist and is fighting for a secular, democratic, and inclusive state.

That definition leaves a lot of room, Hilal said, and there are ample rebel fighters on the ground. Previously, the Syrian National Coalition could have used its Supreme Military Council to help determine who is a moderate, she said. But that group has essentially been disbanded, and now determining who exactly fits the “moderate” bill is done on an ad hoc basis.

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Top General says Half of Iraqi Army Incapable of Working with US Against ISIS

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Photo Credit: TownHallThe U.S. military’s top officer said Wednesday that almost half of Iraq’s army is incapable of working against the Islamic State militant group, while the other half needs to be rebuilt with the help of U.S. advisers and military equipment.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey made the remarks to reporters while traveling to Paris to meet with his French counterpart to discuss the situation in Iraq and Syria. The general said that U.S. assessors who had spent the summer observing Iraq’s security forces concluded that 26 of the army’s 50 brigades would be capable of confronting the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. Dempsey described those brigades as well-led, capable, and endowed with a nationalist instinct, as opposed to a sectarian instinct.

However, Dempsey said that the other 24 brigades were too heavily populated with Shiites to be part of a credible force against the Sunni ISIS.

Sectarianism has been a major problem for the Iraqi security forces for years and is in part a reflection of resentments that built up during the decades of rule under Saddam Hussein, who repressed the majority Shiite population, and the unleashing of reprisals against Sunnis after U.S. forces toppled him in April 2003. Sunni resistance led to the relatively brief rise of an extremist group called Al Qaeda in Iraq, led by the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. That group withered but re-emerged as the Islamic State organization, which capitalized on Sunni disenchantment with the Shiite government in Baghdad.

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Armored Vehicle, Grenade Launchers At Disposal Of LA Public School Police Force

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Los Angeles Unified School District police officials are considering whether they need the armored vehicle and grenade launchers they received from the U.S. military.

The military hardware at the disposal of LAUSD police officers includes a 20-foot-long, 14-ton armored transport vehicles, much like the ones used to move Marines in Iraq combat zones. The armored vehicle is worth $733,000, and the school district’s police force got it from the government for free.

How would LAUSD use such a vehicle?

“For us? That vehicle would be used for extraordinary circumstances,” LAUSD police Chief Steve Zipperman said.

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