Photo Credit: AFP
In the second part of an interview with Al-Qaeda media arm As-Sahab, which the US-based SITE monitoring service said a jihadist posted on Twitter, Zawahiri was asked what Muslims should do to free militant prisoners.
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Photo Credit: AP / Carol Tapanila
“We the people….” declared the script inside her U.S. passport — now with four holes punched through it from cover to cover. Her departure from life as an American was stamped final on the same page: “Bearer Expatriated Self.”
With the envelope’s arrival, Tapanila, a native of upstate New York who has lived in Canada since 1969, joined a largely overlooked surge of Americans rejecting what is, to millions, a highly sought prize: U.S. citizenship. Last year, the U.S. government reported a record 2,999 people renounced citizenship or terminated permanent residency; most are widely assumed to be driven by a desire to avoid paying taxes on hidden wealth.
The reality, though, is more complicated. The government’s pursuit of tax evaders among Americans living abroad is indeed driving the jump in abandoned citizenship, experts say. But renouncers — whose ranks have swelled more than five-fold from a decade ago — often contradict the stereotype of the financial scoundrel. Many are from very ordinary economic circumstances.
Some call themselves “accidental Americans,” who recall little of life in the U.S., but long ago happened to be born in it. Others say they renounced because of politics, family or personal identity. Some say signing away citizenship was a huge relief. Others recall being sickened by the decision.
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Photo Credit: Mel Green / Creative Commons
The decision in a lawsuit brought by three Anchorage same-sex couples represented a blow to the state, which had prevented gay and lesbian couples from taking advantage of a tax break for senior citizens and disabled veterans that, in some circumstances, takes into account marital status.
The ruling follows high-profile victories in recent months by gays and lesbians seeking the right to wed in several U.S. states.
Marriage rights have been extended to gay couples in 17 states and the District of Columbia in a trend that gained momentum when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last June that legally married same-sex couples nationwide are eligible for federal benefits.
In 1998, Alaska voters amended the state’s constitution to restrict marriage to between a man and a woman.
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Photo Credit: KCNA / Reuters
Kim led a meeting of the Central Military Commission and “set forth important tasks for further developing the Korean People’s Army and ways to do so”, KCNA news agency said.
“He stressed the need to enhance the function and role of the political organs of the army if it is to preserve the proud history and tradition of being the army of the party, win one victory after another in the confrontation with the U.S. and creditably perform the mission as a shock force and standard-bearer in building a thriving nation.”
Obama said on Saturday on a visit to Seoul, where the U.S. army has a large presence, that the United States did not use its military might to “impose things” on others, but that it would use that might if necessary to defend South Korea from any attack by the reclusive North.
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Photo Credit: Fox News
“This is a racist decision that takes us back to an era of state’s rights,” civil rights attorney Shanta Driver told “Fox News Sunday.” “This decision cannot stand.”
The high court’s 6-2 decision Tuesday upheld a voter-approved change to the Michigan Constitution in 2006 that forbids the state’s public colleges to make race, gender, ethnicity or national origin a factor in college admissions.
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Photo Credit: IJ Review
From CBS Sacramento:
The bill by Assemblyman Chris Holden, D-Pasadena, asks state education officials to include Obama’s election in history and social studies standards laying out what students are expected to learn.
High school history students already learn about recent presidents. But Holden says lessons about Obama also should focus on what his election meant for racial equality and civil rights…
Of course, California can take this bold step because children are so well educated in California (43rd in the country in math, and 42nd in reading) that teachers have plenty of time to add racially charged lessons to their curriculum.
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Photo Credit: FrontPageMag
The details, including video interviews with the boy (whose face appears alternatively blotted out or hidden by his hands to protect his identity and dignity) and his father and mother, recently appeared on Egyptian journalist Wael Ibrashi’s television program (the same program that exposed Egypt’s “first sex-slave marriage” and how women were drinking camel urine in connection with Islamic teachings).
The story goes as follows: One day when the boy was singing praises to Sisi near his home, a neighbor, Ahmed Abu Sa ‘id (the Brotherhood member), called him over and took him to a nearby shed, saying he needed help with something. Once inside, Sa‘id locked the door, began tearing the boy’s pants off and raped him, saying, “You’re always holding pictures of this Sisi and singing his praises. Come, I’ll humiliate and break you—and your Sisi.”
The boy started screaming aloud, until the man was finished and released him. According to his mother, “I heard him crying and left my work [in the field] and ran up to meet him. He was holding his pants up. I thought some kids had beaten him!”… (She bursts into inarticulate tears when describing what actually did happen to him.)
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One of the sure signs that your federal government is in a state of disarray is when record numbers of Americans begin turning to the U.S. Constitution to figure out just where it all went wrong. Until recently, these readers might have skipped right past Article V, not noticing that therein lies the most potent of solutions.
As readers of Mark Levin’s book The Liberty Amendments have learned, Article V includes a lesser-known means by which the states can propose amendments. This was precisely the method the founders intended to be used to check an expansionist federal government.
Thanks to Levin, ConventionofStates.com, and Lawrence Lessig’s CallaConvention.org, the effort to get state legislatures to demand the first ever amendments convention seems to be hitting its stride.
But the movement is not without its critics.
Enter constitutional speaker KrisAnne Hall, who would prefer that states engage in out-and-out nullification of unconstitutional federal overreaches. Though less clear constitutionally, the idea has precedent and is also advocated by the Tenth Amendment Center. But unlike the Tenth Amendment Center, Ms. Hall has decided that an Article V amendments convention competes with nullification, and has taken the position that an amendments convention is a road to disaster because she has discovered a clandestine plot by Congress to take over the amendments convention process from start to finish.
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Photo Credit: Your Alaska Link
For many Alaskans having an emergency kit is not a priority,”wouldn’t it be better to just have that stuff at home?” said Michelle Torres, Public Information Officer for the Office of Emergency Management in Anchorage.
This program is designed specifically for the state’s largest city. The three major concerns are earthquakes, winter weather and wild fires, ” who in the neighborhood has tools, who in the neighborhood has a generator? does somebody know first aid or cpr?” said Torres.
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Photo Credit: TownHall
You’d have better luck getting a devout Scientologist to say L. Ron Hubbard was a horrible writer than you would to get a progressive to admit the “science” behind climate change is not all it’s cracked up to be. For one thing, it is based on models of what could happen in 100 years, even though those models are mostly unreliable when you use them to map what happened in the last 30. That’s right, the vast majority of “climate models” predicting doom and gloom, the basis for Democrats’ oppressive legislative and regulatory push, can’t accurately predict what happened in the past, let alone predict the future. Yet, they demand it’s a moral imperative we act now.
As we traverse our second decade of “we have only 10 years to act” hysteria, the planet forgot to warm, and hasn’t since 1998. But this fact of science hasn’t deterred the “Party of Science” from pressing forward. And why would it?
The science is settled … just like it was back in the 1970s when the same people, with the same level of certainty, were predicting an ice age and famine. When that “settled science” didn’t pan out, they flipped the script. Global cooling was out; global warming was in. The only thing that didn’t change was the “solution” – a more powerful and intrusive regulatory state.
Isn’t it amazing how the exact opposite problem can have the same solution?
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