Defense Minister Says U.S. Will Not Lead; ‘Israel Can Only Rely on Itself’

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Photo Credit: White HouseIn a wide-ranging discussion reported in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, Israel’s plain-speaking defence minister Moshe Ya’alon said Monday that Tehran has the upper hand in nuclear negotiations, and dismissed the idea of Israeli dependence on the United States to lead an action against Iran’s nuclear program, saying that Israel can only rely on itself.

“We had thought the ones who should lead the campaign against Iran [would be] the United States,” said Ya’alon, speaking during an event at Tel Aviv University. “But at some stage the United States entered into negotiations with them, and unhappily, when it comes to negotiating at a Persian bazaar, the Iranians were better.”

If Israel had ever expected the United States to take out Iran’s nuclear weapons capability, that is not about to happen, Ya’alon said: “Therefore, on this matter, we have to behave as though we have nobody to look out for us but ourselves.”

Ya’alon issued a sharp critique of Washington’s attitude toward Iran, suggesting President Barack Obama would prefer to delay any confrontation until it could be passed on to his successor. “People know that Iran cheats,” Ya’alon said. “But comfortable Westerners prefer to put off confrontation – if possible, to next year, or the next president. But in the end, it will blow up.”

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Ouch: ‘Affordable’ Care Act Leaves Man Owing $407,000 In Medical Bills

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Photo Credit: Mark Damon/Las Vegas Review-JournalBy Jennifer Robison.

The hospital bills are hitting Larry Basich’s mailbox.

That would be OK if Basich had health insurance. But he doesn’t.

Thing is, he should be covered. Basich, 62, bought a plan through the state’s Nevada Health Link insurance exchange in the fall. He’s been paying monthly premiums since November.

Yet the Las Vegan is stranded in a no-man’s-land where no carrier claims him, and his tab is mounting: Basich owes $407,000 for care received in January and February, when his policy was supposed to be in effect. Instead, he’s covered only for March and beyond.

Basich has begged for weeks for help from the exchange and its contractor, Xerox. But Basich’s insurance broker said Xerox seems more interested in lawyering up and covering its hide than in working out Basich’s problems. Nor is Basich the only client facing plan-selection errors through the exchange, she added.

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Photo Credit: REUTERS/Kevin LamarqueReport: Premiums rising faster than eight years before Obamacare COMBINED

By Sarah Hurtubise.

Health insurance premiums have risen more after Obamacare than the average premium increases over the eight years before it became law, according to the private health exchange eHealthInsurance.

The individual market for health insurance has seen premiums rise by 39 percent since February 2013, eHealth reports. Without a subsidy, the average individual premium is now $274 a month. Families have been hit even harder with an average increase of 56 percent over the same period — average premiums are now $663 per family, over $426 last year.

Between 2005 and 2013, average premiums for individual plans increased 37 percent and average family premiums were upped 31 percent. So they have risen faster under Obamacare than in the previous eight years.

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Obama Praises Mahmoud Abbas, a Man Who Glorifies Terrorism, as ‘Somebody Who Has Consistently Renounced Violence’…

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Photo Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete SouzaHosting Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas in the Oval Office on Monday, President Obama described his visitor as “somebody who has consistently renounced violence” – a view in stark contrast to that held by the Israeli government.

“I have to commend President Abbas,” Obama told reporters before their talks aimed at nudging his administration’s brittle Mideast peace effort ahead.

“He has been somebody who has consistently renounced violence, has consistently sought a diplomatic and peaceful solution that allows for two states, side by side, in peace and security – a state that allows for the dignity and sovereignty of the Palestinian people and a state that allows for Israelis to feel secure and at peace with their neighbors,” he added.

During his remarks, which lasted for just over four minutes, Obama made no mention of last week’s barrage of rockets, fired from the Gaza Strip at Israeli communities in the south, the most extensive such attack since 2012.

While the majority of the more than 70 rockets launched from Wednesday until the weekend were attributed to the Islamic Jihad, some were launched by the military wing of Abbas’ own Fatah organization, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

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North Korean Born in a Prison Camp: ‘My Favorite Word is Freedom’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: Screenshot: UNA North Korean who was born in a camp for political prisoners and saw family members executed appealed to the international community this week to “relieve my North Korean brothers and sisters,” saying hundreds of thousands of political prisoners in his country were waiting for their deaths.

Addressing the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, 31 year-old Shin Dong-Hyuk said his parents were political prisoners and he became a political prisoner too from the moment of his birth.

Aged 14, he and his father were forced to watch his mother and brother’s public execution, he said. “I couldn’t cry at that moment. I never learned how to cry …”

Shin was born in 1982 in Kwan-li-so (political penal labor camp) no. 14 in Kaechon, north of Pyongyang. His account of life in the camp, and his perilous escape in 2005 were told in a 2012 biography by journalist Blaine Harden, Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey From North Korea to Freedom in the West.

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Commander of Terrorist Group Pleads Guilty to Taking US Citizens Hostage

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Photo Credit: U.S. AIR FORCEA commander of a Colombian terrorist organization pleaded guilty Tuesday to hostage-taking charges involving three U.S. citizens.

Alexander Beltran Herrera, 37, a commander of the FARC terrorist organization, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to the 2003 hostage-taking of U.S. citizens Marc D. Gonsalves, Thomas R. Howes, and Keith Stansell.

The three men were abducted along with Thomas Janis, a United States citizen, and Sgt. Luis Alcides Cruz, a Colombian citizen, after their single-engine aircraft made a crash landing in the Colombian jungle, according to a press release by the U.S. Justice Department.

The release said that FARC members killed Janis and Cruz at the spot where the aircraft crashed. The FARC members told the three others that they were going to hold them as hostages while they made demands of the Colombian government.

FARC’s official name, translated into English, is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

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Navy Yard Shooting Deemed ‘Preventable,’ but Not for the Fashionable Reasons

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Politico records that a report on the Navy Yard shooting has called it “preventable”:

Supervisors of the gunman who killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard last year noticed his erratic behavior well before the shooting but did not reveal any problems to the government, a Navy investigation has found.

“Had this information been reported, properly adjudicated and acted upon, [Aaron] Alexis’s authorization to access secure facilities and information would have been revoked,” the report said — and the shooting might have been prevented.

An official Navy investigation unveiled Tuesday by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and other top Pentagon officials blamed IT contractor Hewlett-Packard and its subcontractor, The Experts, for deciding not to take any action dealing with Alexis’s deteriorating “emotional, mental or personality condition, even when they had concerns that Alexis may cause harm to others…”

You will note what the report very clearly does not say, which is that anything could have been done to prevent Alexis from obtaining firearms or that a slightly different combination of gun-control laws would have stopped him from shooting up the base. Thus does it stand in stark opposition to the rhetoric of the usual suspects, who immediately attempted to twist the incident into a justification for more authoritarian laws, and of President Obama himself, who gave an extraordinarily political, mawkish, and fact-free speech at the memorial service…

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Crime Stoppers Director EATS Paper To Save Identity of Tipster, Faces Jail Time (+video)

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Photo Credit: FeatheredTar / Creative Commons A man who’s dedicated his life to putting bad guys in jail, may soon have to join them there.

Miami-Dade Crime Stoppers Executive Director Richard “Dick” Masten will find out Thursday just how long he will spend locked up after a courtroom student where he ate a piece of paper containing information regarding an anonymous tip.

“I probably shouldn’t have eaten that piece of paper,” Masten told CBS4′s Lauren Pastrana Monday night.

But he doesn’t regret his courtroom snack.

“I don’t have any regrets. I mean I don’t like the idea of going to jail, but I didn’t really have any alternative,” Masten said. “The way I look at it, we make a solemn promise to our tipsters that we’ll never let them be identified.”

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Further Mysteries and Motives Surrounding Missing Malaysian Plane

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Malaysian airplane investigators look at suicide as possible motive

By Anshuman Daga and Yantoultra Ngui.

The co-pilot of a missing Malaysian jetliner spoke the last words heard from the cockpit, the airline’s chief executive said on Monday, as investigators consider suicide by the captain or first officer as one possible explanation for the disappearance.

No trace of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has been found since it vanished on March 8 with 239 people aboard. Investigators are increasingly convinced it was diverted perhaps thousands of miles off course by someone with deep knowledge of the Boeing 777-200ER and commercial navigation.

A search unprecedented in its scale is now under way for the plane, covering an area stretching from the shores of the Caspian Sea in the north to deep in the southern Indian Ocean.

Airline chief executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya also told a news conference that it was unclear exactly when one of the plane’s automatic tracking systems had been disabled, appearing to contradict the weekend comments of government ministers.

Suspicions of hijacking or sabotage had hardened further when officials said on Sunday that the last radio message from the plane – an informal “all right, good night” – was spoken after the tracking system, known as “ACARS”, was shut down.

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By Fox News .Missing Malaysia flight’s path reportedly diverted through computer system

By Fox News.

The mysterious turn that diverted the missing Malaysia Airlines flight off of its scheduled route to Beijing was programmed into a computer system on board, the New York Times reported Monday, meaning it was not executed manually by one of the pilots at the controls.

The revelation lends more credence to a theory by investigators searching for the jet that the Boeing 777 was deliberately diverted. The Times reports it is unclear if the change in course was reprogrammed before or after the plane took off, but the change was likely made by someone in the cockpit with knowledge of airplane systems.

The search for Flight 370, which vanished early March 8 while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board, has now been expanded deep into the northern and southern hemispheres. Australian vessels scoured the southern Indian Ocean and China offered 21 of its satellites to help Malaysia in the unprecedented hunt, but no trace of the plane has been found.

Investigators say the jet flew off-course for hours. They haven’t ruled out hijacking, sabotage, or pilot suicide, and are checking the backgrounds of the 227 passengers and 12 crew members — as well as the ground crew — for personal problems, psychological issues or links to terrorists.

China’s state news agency reported Tuesday that background checks on all its nationals on board the missing Malaysian jetliner uncovered no links to terrorism. Xinhua said the Chinese ambassador to Malaysia made the announcement to media in Kuala Lumpur.

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Photo Credit: Edgar Su/ReutersThe Tripwire on Flight 370

By Olive Irving.

The fate of Flight MH370 could have been decided in three minutes.

The Malaysians changed more than the clock when they backtracked Monday from their original statement that the last voice contact from the airplane (“All right, good night”) was received at 1:30 a.m., putting it instead at 1:19 a.m.

The need for an absolutely accurate timeline of the Boeing 777’s flight path has always been essential to investigators. It’s the first thing that they request and normally would be instantly retrievable from air traffic control radars and transmissions between the airplane and the ground. It has been severely lacking in this case.

The timeline has big implications for those trying to understand not just the correct sequence of events but what may lay behind them. Critically, it would mean that with the transponder turned off at 1:22 a.m.—three minutes after the final words from the cockpit, the number of suspects grows suddenly larger.

The transponder is really the tripwire for whatever began to unfold on that jet. It identifies the airplane to traffic controllers and confirms its position. As long as it appeared that the transponder was de-activated before the final voice report, it left open the possibility that the pilots lied to air traffic control and were themselves already embarked upon a pre-planned series of actions that would allow the flight to vanish (however bizarre that scenario seemed).

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Rep. King on Flight 370: ‘Nothing Out There Indicating It’s Terrorists’

By Melanie Hunter.

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopolous” that there have been “no terrorist connections” to missing Malaysia Air flight 370, although he expressed concern about the two Iranian passengers, who used stolen passports to board the plane, as well as the pilot and co-pilot.

“No there’s been no terrorist connections whatsoever. There’s been no terrorist chatter. There’s nothing out there indicating it’s terrorists. It doesn’t mean it’s not, but so far nothing has been picked up the intelligence community from day one. I still have questions about the two Iranians who were on the plane, but again that could be a side issue. The fact is nothing has come up indicating a terrorist connection,” King said.

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Tax Revenues Hit Record in First 5 Months of FY14; 5-Month Deficit Still $377B

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Photo Credit: APInflation-adjusted federal tax revenues hit a record $1,104,947,000,000 in the first five months of fiscal 2014, but the federal government still ran a $377,379,000,000 deficit during that time, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement for February.

Each month, the Treasury publishes the government’s “total receipts,” including all revenue from individual income taxes, corporate income taxes, social insurance and retirement taxes (including Social Security and Medicare taxes), unemployment insurance taxes, excise taxes, estate and gift taxes, customs duties, and “miscellaneous receipts.”

In constant 2014 dollars, the $1,104,947,000,000 that the federal government collected from October through February in fiscal 2014 was $90,193,750,000 more than the $1,014,753,250,000 it collected in October through February in fiscal 2013.

After the current fiscal year, the second highest federal tax intake in the first five months of a fiscal year occurred in the first five months of fiscal 2007, when the government collected $1,076,721,860,000 in 2014 dollars—or $28,225,140,000 less than in the first five months of this fiscal year.

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While Russian Deputy PM Laughs at Obama’s Sanctions, Putin Plans to Sanction U.S. Senators (+video)

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Photo Credit: DonkeyHoteyBy Kirit Radia.

Russia’s deputy prime minister laughed off President Obama’s sanction against him today asking “Comrade @BarackObama” if “some prankster” came up with the list.

The Obama administration hit 11 Russian and Ukrainian officials with sanctions today as punishment for Russia’s support of Crimea’s referendum. Among them: aides to President Vladimir Putin, a top government official, senior lawmakers, Crimean officials, the ousted president of Ukraine, and a Ukrainian politician and businessman allegedly tied to violence against protesters in Kiev.

It remains to be seen whether the sanctions will dissuade Russia from annexing Crimea, but one an early clue that they will not be effective came just hours later when President Putin signed a decree recognizing Crimea as an independent state, perhaps an early step towards annexation.

U.S. official have warned of additional sanctions for Russian action, hoping it will deter Russia from any further aggression towards Ukraine, but it didn’t appear to upset the often outspoke Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin.

Rogozin, a friend of actor Steven Seagal, took to Twitter to tweak Obama, tweeting he thinks “some prankster” came up with the sanctions list

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Photo Credit: Sasha MordovetsRussia Will Sanction U.S. Senators

By Josh Rogin.

Putin is set to respond to Obama’s sanctions of Russian officials with his own list. Several U.S. Senators and officials will be banned from visiting Russia, including Sen. Dick Durbin.

U.S. senators, congressmen and top Obama administration officials are sure to be on Vladimir Putin’s sanctions list; a response to the Obama Administration’s announcement on Monday that 7 Russian officials and 4 Ukrainian officials would be barred from holding assets or traveling to the United States.

Putin is expected to release his retaliation list as early as Tuesday and while the final list is still being crafted, it will include top Obama administration officials and high profile U.S. senators, in an effort to roughly mirror the U.S. sanctions against Russian officials and lawmakers, according to diplomatic sources. At the top of the list in Congress is Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, who recently co-authored a resolution criticizing Russia’s invasion of Crimea.

Durbin’s inclusion on Putin’s list would mirror Obama’s naming of Valentina Matvienko, the head of the upper chamber of the Russian Duma. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are not expected to be on the Russian sanctions list.

UPDATE: Durbin told The Daily Beast in a statement Monday: “My Lithuanian-born mother would be proud her son made Vladimir Putin’s American enemies list.”

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