Pentagon Press Conference Turns Into Heated Debate Between Top Generals From US And China

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Photo Credit: DoD

Photo Credit: DoD

A top Chinese general Thursday strongly defended Beijing’s territorial claims over disputed islands in the South and East China Seas and charged that the U.S. rebalance of forces to the Pacific was encouraging unrest in the region.

Gen. Fang Fenghui, chief of the general staff of the People’s Liberation Army, said “the rebalancing strategy of the U.S. has stirred up some of the problems which make the South China Sea and the East China Sea not so calm as before.”

Fang warned that China would respond to any attempts by Vietnam, Japan or other neighbors to assert their own claims over the disputed islands and reefs.

“We do not create trouble but we are not afraid of trouble,” Fang said at a Pentagon news conference after meetings with Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Dempsey appeared to be slightly irritated as he waited to comment while listening to a long-winded response by Fang on the current dispute with Vietnam over offshore oil drilling rights.

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Here’s Why The Pentagon Has A Plan For The Zombie Apocalypse

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Photo Credit: Gene Page / AMC

Photo Credit: Gene Page / AMC

The Defense Department, known for having a plan in place for any disaster scenario, has created a detailed strategy for a possible zombie apocalypse, Gordon Lubold reports for Foreign Policy.

The strategy, known as “CONPLAN 8888,” is an unclassified document that lays out how the military would best respond to a potential zombie apocalypse. The plan’s overall purpose is for the military to undertake operations to “preserve ‘non-zombie’ humans from the threats posed by a zombie horde.”

CONPLAN 8888 follows a three-step approach to ensuring these goals by 1) maintaining a defensive perimeter to protect human life; 2) conducting operations that will eradicate zombie threats; and 3) aiding civil authorities in restoring law and order.

Of course, the Pentagon does not actually believe in the likelihood of a zombie apocalypse…

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Paris Arms Putin

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Photo Credit: National Review

Photo Credit: National Review

France has decided to ignore pleas from the U.S. and its other NATO allies and go forward with a $1.7 billion contract to sell two helicopter carriers to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. “The contract has been paid and there would be financial penalties for not delivering it,” a French official told Reuters on Monday. “It would be France that is penalized. It’s too easy to say France has to give up on the sale of the ships. We have done our part.”

The French decision makes a mockery of the attempt to impose sanctions on Russia for its illegal annexation of Crimea in March, the first forcible shifting of borders in Europe in more than 60 years.

It’s not hard to figure out why the Russians want the carriers. They purchased them just after invading Georgia in 2008. Russia’s lack of a mobile platform for delivering troops had hurt it badly during that brief conflict. In a 2011 report on the invasion, the Strategic Studies Institute, an arm of the U.S. Army War College, found that Russia had used helicopters to insert Spetsnaz commandos in black uniforms behind Georgian lines to conduct subversion and espionage. Putin used the same tactics in Crimea this month. But Russia’s experience in Georgia, in which aircraft had landed on the coast, had “highlighted the need for improvements in the area of amphibious landing platforms,” the SSI report noted. “The limitations in this capability exposed by the war were certainly part of the reason for Russia’s recent decision to buy Mistral-class ships from France. The Mistral, a multi-role ship capable of transporting and deploying 16 helicopters, 70 armored vehicles, and up to 450 personnel represents a significant improvement over current Russian helicopter carriers and landing craft.”

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Thousands Flee California ‘Fire in the Sky’

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Photo Credit: AFP / Bill Wechter

Photo Credit: AFP / Bill Wechter

Thousands of people fled raging wildfires in southern California which destroyed homes and triggered evacuations at a nuclear power plant, a military base and a Legoland amusement park.

The blazes, which also closed a major north-south highway, come amid record temperatures in the western US state, where the annual wildfire season typically starts much later in the year.

At least 15 buildings have been destroyed, including three homes, said Michael Davis, fire chief in the seaside resort of Carlsbad, north of San Diego.

“At times it looks like there’s fire in the sky with the wind whipping back and forth,” eyewitness Ryan Marble, waiting in a long line at a gas station to get fuel to evacuate, told The Los Angeles Times newspaper.

About a dozen non-essential staff at the San Onofre nuclear power plant were evacuated “as a precaution” due to a nearby brush fire, the plant said on its Twitter feed.

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Report: 7th Circuit Upholds Warrantless Entry, Seizure of Gun Rights Activist

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

Milwaukee police who forced their way into a gun rights advocate’s home without a warrant, took her for an emergency mental evaluation and seized her gun were justified under the circumstances and protected from her civil rights claims, a federal appeals court has ruled.

Krysta Sutterfield, who twice made news because of her practice of openly carrying a handgun — at a Brookfield church and outside a Sherman Park coffee shop — drew police attention in 2011 after her psychiatrist reported a suicidal remark Sutterfield made during a difficult appointment.

Sutterfield, 45, claimed police violated her rights against unreasonable search and seizure and Second Amendment rights to keep a gun, but a district judge dismissed the case.

The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 75-page opinion analyzing existing law about when police may act without search warrants, upheld the decision but suggested there might be better ways to balance personal privacy rights in the context of emergency mental health evaluations.

“The intrusions upon Sutterfield’s privacy were profound,” Judge Ilana Rovner wrote for three-judge panel. “At the core of the privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment is the right to be let alone in one’s home.”

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The Edward Snowden Guide to Encryption: Fugitive’s 12-Minute Homemade Video Ahead of Leaks Explaining How to Avoid NSA from Tracking Emails

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

By Damien Gayle.

Ordinary people must learn to scramble their emails, privacy campaigners said today, as an encryption how-to video made by Edward Snowden was made public for the first time.

The former NSA employee who blew the whistle on the agency’s all-pervasive online surveillance made the video to teach reporters how to communicate with him in secret.

The 12-minute clip, in which Mr Snowden has used software to distort his voiceover, explains how to use free software to scramble messages using a technique called Public Key Encryption (PKE).

The video’s description on Vimeo says: ‘By following these instructions, you’ll allow any potential source in the world to send you a powerfully encrypted message that ONLY YOU can read even if the two of you have never met or exchanged contact information.’

Mr Snowden made the video last year for Glenn Greenwald in an effort to get the then-Guardian reporter to communicate securely with him online so he could send over documents he wanted to leak.

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Greenwald On NSA Leaks: ‘We’ve Erred On The Side Of Excess Caution’

By NPR.

Photo Credit: Vincent Yu / AP

Photo Credit: Vincent Yu / AP

When Edward Snowden was ready to leak the classified documents he’d stolen from the National Security Agency, the first journalist he contacted was Glenn Greenwald. Snowden knew of Greenwald through his coverage of the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping scandal, and he said he believed Greenwald could be counted on to understand the dangers of mass surveillance and not back down in the face of government pressure.

The first story Greenwald broke from Snowden’s documents was about how the government collects the metadata from telecom companies, including the metadata of calls made by people in the U.S. Ever since publication, Snowden and Greenwald have been at the center of controversies about leaking and journalistic ethics.

Greenwald’s new book, No Place To Hide, tells the story of how he met Snowden, the editorial decisions he’s made and the revelations contained in some of the documents Snowden leaked. Greenwald tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross about why Snowden decided to leak the documents and whether the leaks have impeded NSA’s ability to detect terrorist threats.

On a common misunderstanding about Edward Snowden

One of the things … that I think has been misunderstood about Edward Snowden … is that he actually hasn’t released a single document to the public. He could have if he wanted to: He could have uploaded the documents to the Internet on his own; he could have given them to foreign powers. There are all sorts of things he could have done, and what he did instead is he came to journalists and said, “I don’t actually think that I, Edward Snowden, am the person who should be making the decisions about what the public should and shouldn’t see. I actually think that’s journalists who ought to be making that call and I want you to work within media organizations that have experience in making these decisions and make those judgments yourself.” … There’s a huge responsibility that comes from making those choices.

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Ukraine Gas Producer Appoints Biden’s Son to Board

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Photo Credit: David McNew | Getty Images

Photo Credit: David McNew | Getty Images

By Javier E. David.

Ukraine’s largest private gas producer announced on Tuesday that it added R. Hunter Biden—the son of U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden—to its board of directors.

In a statement on its website, Burisma Holdings said the younger Biden will be in charge of the company’s legal unit, while providing support “among international organizations.”

The release quoted Hunter Biden as saying that “my assistance in consulting the Company on matters of transparency, corporate governance and responsibility, international expansion and other priorities will contribute to the economy and benefit the people of Ukraine.”

Large corporations frequently appoint well-connected marquee names of both major U.S. political parties as directors. Yet corporate governance experts are critical of the process, which can be fraught with conflicts of interests and the appearance of favoritism.

The arrangement raised questions about the propriety of his appointment, given the tense political standoff between Russia and the West over the future status of Ukraine, where fighting has resulted in the deaths of dozens of soldiers and civilians. Natural gas has factored heavily in tensions between Russia and Ukraine, both of which have political leadership that’s intertwined with their respective energy industries.

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How Bad is Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy? Two Words: Joe Biden

By Joseph Curl.

How bad is President Obama’s foreign policy? So bad he sent Vice President Joe Biden to Kiev to handle the Russia-Ukraine mess.

Yes, Barack “Red Line” Obama dispatched the bumbling Biden, the foreign policy “expert” who once called for Iraq to be partitioned by ethnicity into three countries and, as a senator, opposed President Ronald Reagan’s military build-up that ended the Cold War.

Uncle Joe didn’t disappoint, saying in Kiev: “Thank you for making me feel relevant again.” He, of course, left empty-handed, and perhaps, again, feels irrelevant.

How bad is Obama’s foreign policy? He’s made Russian President Vladimir Putin look like a bleeding heart humanitarian — stepping in to save the day in Syria by agreeing to accept its chemical weapons, then lecturing the US President on everything from covert surveillance to international law.

Obama, 52, a former community organizer from Chicago who likes bike rides and golf, has been over his head from the beginning with Putin, 61, a former KGB spook who likes judo and snarling dogs. Putin has played him like a fiddle, most recently when he took a phone call from US whistleblower Edward Snowden during a televised press appearance.

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Who Watches the Watchers? Big Data Goes Unchecked

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The National Security Agency might be tracking your phone calls. But private industry is prying far more deeply into your life.

Commercial data brokers know if you have diabetes. Your electric company can see what time you come home at night. And tracking companies can tell where you go on weekends by snapping photos of your car’s license plate and cataloging your movements.

Private companies already collect, mine and sell as many as 75,000 individual data points on each consumer, according to a Senate report. And they’re poised to scoop up volumes more, as technology unleashes a huge wave of connected devices — from sneaker insoles to baby onesies to cars and refrigerators — that quietly track, log and analyze our every move.

Congress and the administration have moved to rein in the National Security Agency in the year since Edward Snowden disclosed widespread government spying. But Washington has largely given private-sector data collection a free pass. The result: a widening gap in oversight as private data mining races ahead. Companies are able to scoop up ever more information — and exploit it with ever greater sophistication — yet a POLITICO review has found deep reluctance in D.C. to exercise legislative, regulatory or executive power to curb the big business of corporate cybersnooping.

The inertia — and lack of a serious legislative push — on private-sector data mining has several causes. Many Republicans are averse to any new regulation of business. Many Democrats are skittish about alienating campaign donors in Silicon Valley.

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Lamar Smith Calls ICE Release of 36,000 Criminal Immigrants A President-Sanctioned Prison Break

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

By Caroline May.

Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith reacted harshly to a new report detailing the crimes committed by 36,007 criminal immigrants that Immigration and Customs Enforcement released last year.

“This would be considered the worst prison break in American history, except it was sanctioned by the President and perpetrated by our own immigration officials. These criminal immigrants should have been deported to ensure that they could never commit crimes on U.S. soil. But instead, ICE officials chose not to detain them and instead released them back onto American streets,” Smith said in a statement Monday.

An internal Department of Homeland Security document obtained by the Center for Immigration Studies, a limited immigration group, and shared with Breitbart News Monday revealed that last year ICE released 36,007 criminal immigrants who had nearly 88,000 convictions.

The document further broke down the crimes and number of convictions – including 193 homicide convictions, 426 sexual assault convictions, 303 kidnapping convictions, and 1,075 aggravated assault convictions.

Read more from this story HERE.

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criminal-illegal-aliensRelease of 36,000 criminal illegals impeachable offense?

By WND.

The reported release last year of more than 36,000 criminal illegal aliens is part of a larger annual trend of thousands of such releases since 2009, according to the authors of a book documenting the case for impeaching President Obama.

The Obama administration’s release of the criminals, in numbers larger than what is publicly known, has generating crime waves and serves as a clear and present danger to the public, argue New York Times bestselling authors Aaron Klein and Brenda J. Elliott in their book “Impeachable Offenses: The Case to Remove Barack Obama from Office.”

On Monday, a Center for Immigration Studies report found that in 2013 the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, released violent criminals, including murderers, rapists, kidnappers and drug dealers.

The offenders were among the 36,007 criminal illegal aliens released last year who committed 87,818 crimes, including 15,635 for driving while intoxicated.

The statistics shows ICE released illegals jailed for 9,187 dangerous drug infractions, 426 sexual assault convictions, 303 kidnapping convictions, 193 homicide convictions, 1,317 domestic violence convictions and 1,075 aggravated assault convictions.

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Catholic Leaders Sound Alarm At Prayer Breakfast: ‘The Days Of Acceptable Christianity Are Over’

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Photo Credit: Wathiq Khuzaie / Getty

Photo Credit: Wathiq Khuzaie / Getty

Despite the bright, warm sunshine outside, a pessimistic fog spread over the Washington Hilton early this morning as the 10th annual National Catholic Prayer Breakfast was underway in the ballroom.

“My message for you today is a somber one,” said Professor Robert George, who lectures on civil liberties at Princeton, to a packed ballroom of Catholics that included failed Virginia gubernatorial hopeful Ken Cuccinelli. “The days of acceptable Christianity are over. The days of comfortable Catholicism are past. …It’s not easy anymore. There are costs to discipleship, heavy costs that are burdensome to bear.”

Soon enough he’d get specific. George stressed that there are “powerful forces and currents in our society that press us to be ashamed of the Gospel. For example, if you believe that marriage is the consensual union between a man and a woman, you’re portrayed as bigoted, even hateful. …If you believe these things, some forces say you are a bigot [who is] against homosexuality [and] you ought to be ashamed.”

Celebrities didn’t fare much better than gays. The Jay-Z’s and Kim Kardashians of the world may want to cover their ears for this, but the keynote speaker, His Eminence Cardinal Sean O’Malley, didn’t hold back on his feelings about celebs. “We live in a world obsessed by celebrities,” he said. “All too often celebrities replace heroines, often they live lives that are superficial and chaotic.”

On a jollier note, O’Malley came with the “warmest of greetings” from Pope Francis. He quickly followed with orders: “If he were here, I’m sure he would [encourage] you to renew the missionary style of the church.” He said Catholics must move from “a maintenance mode to a missionary one. The mission of the church is making disciples.”

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