Alaska Journalist Bob Tkacz Found Dead

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Editors Note: For the first time in four years, Restoring Liberty received a complaint from the original publisher of an excerpt that was re-published on this site, in this case, KTOO out of Juneau, Alaska. Restoring Liberty publishes excerpts under the broadly accepted “Fair Use” doctrine but will always remove a short excerpt of an article where the original publisher objects. We have done so in this case even though the presence of such an article drives traffic – and therefore revenue – to the original publisher.

Read the original story HERE.

House Bolsters ‘De Facto Amnesty’ Probe (+video)

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Photo Credit: APThe House on Thursday adopted a proposal to bolster an investigation into the Department of Homeland Security’s release of illegal immigrants known to have committed crimes.

Passed 218-193, Rep. Steve King’s (R-Iowa) amendment to the 2015 appropriations bill funding the Justice Department, Commerce Department and science programs would direct $5 million toward an investigation.

“It is de facto amnesty that is going on in the Department of Homeland Security,” King said.

“So my request is that $5 million out of this administrative budget be directed to investigating the actions of the Department of Homeland Security and coming back with an analysis of what is going on and why that we have so many criminals released onto the streets of America,” King said, citing statistics that nearly 900,000 illegal immigrants pending deportation had been released, including more than 36,000 criminals.

Read more from this story HERE.

Village Protests Rape, Killings of Indian Sisters

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Photo Credit: Dennis Jarvis / Creative CommonsTwo teenage sisters in rural India were raped and killed by attackers who hung their bodies from a mango tree, which became the scene of a silent protest by villagers angry about alleged police inaction in the case. Two of the four men arrested so far are police officers.

Villagers found the girls’ bodies hanging from the tree early Wednesday, hours after they disappeared from fields near their home in Katra village in Uttar Pradesh state, police Superintendent Atul Saxena said. The girls, who were 14 and 15, had gone into the fields because there was no toilet in their home.

Hundreds of angry villagers stayed next to the tree throughout Wednesday, silently protesting the police response. Indian TV footage showed the villagers sitting under the girls’ bodies as they swung in the wind, and preventing authorities from taking them down until the suspects were arrested.

Police arrested two police officers and two men from the village later Wednesday and were searching for three more suspects.

Autopsies confirmed the girls had been raped and strangled before being hung, Saxena said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Think Internet Data Mining Goes Too Far? Then You Won’t Like This

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Photo Credit: EmotivThese days, you can hop on the Internet and buy yourself a consumer-grade brain scanning device for just a few hundred dollars. Technically, they’re called brain computer interfaces, or BCIs. As these devices develop, researchers are thinking a few steps ahead — they’re worried about how to keep marketers from scanning our brains.

The technology, which is basically headgear that senses electrical patterns in your brain, can tell if you’re excited, relaxed or focused. Fed into a computer, that brain wave information can be used for any number of applications. One of the most popular ideas is to use the brain as a “third hand” to control video games. Believe it or not, the second neurogaming expo was held recently in San Francisco.

“It’s happening somewhat faster than we thought,” says Howard Chizeck, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington. “A couple of the new products that have shown up are already along the pathway that I think we thought were a couple of years away.”

He believes we’re at the edge of a boom in BCI-mediated products, and he’s in a hurry to get out in front of the technology’s potential threat to privacy. He’s working with graduate students Tamara Bonaci and Jeffrey Herron to study how invasive these brain sensors could become.

In the study, funded by the National Science Foundation, human subjects wear a research-grade BCI while playing a video game the researches have dubbed “Flappy Whale.” While the subjects play the game, images of commercial logos flicker on the screen. The sensor cap records the subject’s involuntary emotional responses to those logos.

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Residents of Small Guatemalan Town Want Jews to Leave

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Indigenous residents of San Juan La Laguna, a small town of under 10,000 in the Guatemalan state of Sololá, have asked members of the Jewish community — comprising 10 ultra-Orthodox families, most of whom arrived only recently — to identify themselves in a municipal registry and leave within the next few months.

The registry was established to verify whether immigrants from the Jewish community are legally in the country and where they are from, information which has not been asked of other foreigners granted temporary visas.

“We, as a local authority, have nothing against the Jewish community,” city mayor Rodolfo López told The Times of Israel on Tuesday. “But every community, and especially ours, as indigenous Mayans, has very special customs and traditions and we have to defend our rights.”

Residents have filed complaints with the municipality that the community of ultra-religious Jews have used a public body of water as a mikveh (ritual bath), practiced unhygienic rituals like kaparot (where a chicken is swung around a rabbi’s head before being slaughtered), and made disparaging comments about immodesty to tourists.

According to the mayor, the indigenous population has also been suspicious since a Canadian couple accused of child abuse reportedly moved to San Juan La Laguna with their six children.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Signals Significant Shift in US Foreign Policy at West Point Commencement

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Photo Credit: AP

President Obama, in a commencement address at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, signaled a significant shift in U.S. foreign policy — one that pulls back from what he described as “military adventures” while wielding American power in other ways.

The president described the new American foreign policy as one of “collective action” and restraint, deploying unilateral U.S. military force only when the American people are threatened. He outlined the approach a day after announcing his plan for gradually drawing down the U.S. force in Afghanistan once the war formally ends later this year.

“The landscape has changed,” Obama told the graduating class at West Point on Wednesday, citing the end of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The president took on what he described as “interventionists” from both parties, and said that while “isolationism” is not an option, “U.S. military action cannot be the only — or even primary — component of our leadership in every instance.”

The president advised that crises around the world that don’t directly threaten Americans be met first with non-military options: diplomacy, sanctions and “collective action.”

Read more from this story HERE.

EPA To Unilaterally Push Cap And Trade On Carbon Emissions

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Photo Credit: dantekgeekDespite being soundly rejected a few years ago, cap-and-trade will get its U.S. encore but not in Congress. The Obama administration will likely use its executive power to unilaterally impose carbon dioxide emissions trading systems.

The Environmental Protection Agency will unveil regulations for existing U.S. power plants early next month. For months, onlookers have speculating about what could be included in the EPA’s rule for existing power plants.

But over the past few days it has become clear that the Obama administration will use the EPA to push cap-and-trade systems and other anti-fossil fuel policies on U.S. states. Administration insiders have told news outlets that cap-and-trade will likely be one of the options the EPA gives states to cut their carbon dioxide emissions.

The Wall Street Journal reported the EPA’s proposal will “include a cap-and-trade component where a limit is set on emissions and companies can trade allowances or credits for emissions” to meet new federal rules. The journal added that power plant “operators could trade emissions credits or use other offsets in the power sector, such as renewable energy or energy-efficiency programs, to meet the target.”

The plan is being sold as a “flexible” one. By allowing states a menu of policy options to meet federal mandates, the standards will ostensibly meet the unique needs of each individual state. But the stark reality behind the proposal is that it will be a boon for states that have already imposed cap-and-trade systems — which are overwhelmingly Democratic states.

Read more from this story HERE.

Family: V.A. Cops Stomped On Veteran’s Head, Killing Him

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Jonathan ErnstBy Chuck Ross.

The family of a 65 year-old veteran claims that VA police stomped on the veterans head and neck, causing him to suffer a stroke and die several weeks later, a new lawsuit alleges.

On May 25, 2011, Jonathan Montano was waiting several hours to undergo dialysis treatment at the Loma Linda VA facility when he grew frustrated, reports Courthouse News Service.

With an IV still in his arm, Montano made his way towards the hospital exit, saying that he would get treatment at the Long Beach VA facility instead.

Norma Montano, the veteran’s wife of 44 years, left the hospital to retrieve the couple’s car.

But VA police wouldn’t let Montano leave, the lawsuit alleges.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: APTexas VA Run Like a ‘Crime Syndicate,’ Whistleblower Says

By Jacob Siegel.

Last week, President Obama pledged to address allegations of corruption and dangerous inefficiencies in the veterans’ health-care system. But before the president could deliver on his pledge, the scandal has spread even further. New whistleblower testimony and internal documents implicate an award-winning VA hospital in Texas in widespread wrongdoing—and what appears to be systemic fraud.

Emails and VA memos obtained exclusively by The Daily Beast provide what is among the most comprehensive accounts yet of how high-level VA hospital employees conspired to game the system. It shows not only how they manipulated hospital wait lists but why—to cover up the weeks and months veterans spent waiting for needed medical care. If those lag times had been revealed, it would have threatened the executives’ bonus pay.

What’s worse, the documents show the wrongdoing going unpunished for years, even after it was repeatedly reported to local and national VA authorities. That indicates a new troubling angle to the VA scandal: that the much touted investigations may be incapable of finding violations that are hiding in plain sight.

“For lack of a better term, you’ve got an organized crime syndicate,” a whistleblower who works in the Texas VA told The Daily Beast. “People up on top are suddenly afraid they may actually be prosecuted and they’re pressuring the little guys down below to cover it all up.”

“I see it in the executives’ eyes,” the whistleblower added. “They are worried.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Waves of Immigrant Minors Present Crisis for Obama, Congress

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / JOSE LUIS GONZALEZTens of thousands of children unaccompanied by parents or relatives are flooding across the southern U.S. border illegally, forcing the Obama administration and Congress to grapple with both a humanitarian crisis and a budget dilemma.

An estimated 60,000 such children will pour into the United States this year, according to the administration, up from about 6,000 in 2011. Now, Washington is trying to figure out how to pay for their food, housing and transportation once they are taken into custody.

The flow is expected to grow. The number of unaccompanied, undocumented immigrants who are under 18 will likely double in 2015 to nearly 130,000 and cost U.S. taxpayers $2 billion, up from $868 million this year, according to administration estimates.

The shortage of housing for these children, some as young as 3, has already become so acute that an emergency shelter at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, has been opened and can accommodate 1,000 of them, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in an interview with Reuters.

The issue is an added source of tension between Democrats and Republicans, who disagree on how to rewrite immigration laws. With comprehensive legislation stalled, President Barack Obama is looking at small, administrative steps he could take, which might be announced this summer. No details have been outlined but immigration groups are pressing him to take steps to keep families with children together.

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Letter Campaign Urges Oklahoma’s Mary Fallin to Repeal Common Core

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Photo Credit: APIn the wake of the Oklahoma state legislature’s overwhelming approval of a bill to repeal and replace the Common Core standards, Restore Oklahoma Public Education (R.O.P.E.) has begun a letter-writing campaign to urge Fallin to sign the bill.

Gov. Mary Fallin (R) of Oklahoma could become the first governor in the nation to fully repeal the Common Core standards. Fallin has until June 2 to sign HB3399; if she chooses not to, the bill will die by pocket veto.

“We must begin IMMEDIATELY to ask our Governor to sign this bill into law,” R.O.P.E. president Jenni White writes on the group’s website. “Toward that end, we have written two separate letters. One is for Oklahomans to use and the other may be used by anyone outside the state who would like to participate.”

R.O.P.E. urges:

* Copy and paste the letter of your choice (you can modify them or write your own as well) into an email. Sample letters for both Oklahomans and Americans from other states are available on the R.O.P.E. website.

Read more from this story HERE.