Gold Rush Threatens to Bring New Era of Genocide to War Torn Darfur

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Photo Credit: REUTERS/MOHAMED NURELDIN ABDALLAHImpoverished tribes in war torn Darfur, the scene of decades of misery and genocide, now have one of the oldest reasons for fighting known to man: gold.

More than 800 people have been killed and 150,000 displaced since January as poor, but heavily armed tribes fight over the Jebel Amer gold mining region. That is more than double the number of people killed in political and ethnic fighting in 2012, and world leaders fear the mad dash for precious metal could be plunging the region into a new era of violence. Humanitarian groups say the Sudanese government, led by accused war criminal President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, is pitting tribes against each other in a bid to get the most possible out of some 4,000 mines.

“Ten years after the genocide began, state-sponsored violence has once more taken hold of the region,” said Akshaya Kumar, a policy analyst for the Enough Project, a Washington-based humanitarian organization. “Cash-strapped and dollar-starved, Sudan sees gold as its new oil. The recent gold discoveries are fueling atrocities again in Darfur.”

When South Sudan split from Sudan two years ago, it took with it much of the nation’s oil wealth. With shrinking oil revenues, al-Bashir is seeking to increase the $2.2 billion worth of gold produced by the mines annually. And his strategy to keep control of the vast region’s gold, amid hundreds of thousands of amateurs in a virtual free-for-all, relies on fighters battle-hardened from decades of ethnic and religious war.

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Palin and Lonegan Rev Up NJ Crowd Ahead of This Week’s Special Election (+video)

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Sarah Palin rode the Tea Party Express tour bus into Ocean County today to lend her political star power to Republican Steve Lonegan’s U.S. Senate campaign, urging the roughly 2,000 supporters to muster up “their Jersey fight” to help him defeat Cory Booker.

In the final weekend before the special election on Wednesday, Booker also revved up his campaign by launching a bus tour in north Jersey for a series of events he delayed after his father’s death on Thursday.

With polls putting Lonegan within 12 percentage points of Booker — a much closer margin than pundits had predicted — both camps worked aggressively to energize their supporters. Both candidates capitalized on the public discontent with the federal government shutdown, 12 days old with no end in sight.

If New Jersey, a blue state, sends a conservative like Lonegan to Washington, President Obama and the Democratic leaders in Congress would understand that their policies and message are failing, Palin said.

“New Jersey, know that the eyes of America are on you now,” Palin said. “You can turn things around. Something big is happening here,” the former vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor told an enthusiastic crowd at the New Egypt Speedway.

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Senate GOP Blocks Dems from Extending Debt Limit Beyond 2014 Midterm Elections

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Photo Credit: Cliff Owen Senate Republicans on Saturday blocked a bid by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to extend the nation’s debt limit until after the 2014 midterm elections.

In an 53-45 vote, the Senate failed to win the 60 votes necessary to advance the debt-limit measure to a floor debate. The bill would increase the federal debt by an estimated $1.1 trillion.

Every Democrat supported the measure, though Reid switched his vote at the end to preserve the right to bring the motion up for another vote later.

Republicans criticized the legislation as politically transparent. Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) and two other centrist GOP senators have instead proposed raising the debt-limit only until Jan. 31, 2014.

During the vote, a large number of Democratic senators huddled around Collins (R-Maine). Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), the other two GOP centrists backing the Collins plan, joined her.

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Glenn Beck to Values Voter Summit: ‘You are Looking at a One-Party System’

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Photo Credit: Values Voter Summit web siteGlenn Beck praised GOP Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, but denounced the Republican Party leadership at the Values Voter Summit Saturday in Washington, D.C.

Beck even said the party could be going the way of the Whigs by not standing for principle.

“You are looking at a one-party system,” Beck told the audience. “You’re looking at a system with John Boehner, John Cornyn, Lindsey Graham, Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi — they’re all the same. I am thrilled to say we are finally standing up. We are finally saying, ‘No, this is what we believe, and we will not move.”

Beck said the notion that Cruz and Lee will harm the Republican Party by holding firm against Obamacare, spending, and the debt is wrong. He also said the fight is much bigger than Obamacare, and Republicans lack vision.

“I’m tired of people saying, ‘Oh, but we might lose’; yes…and we just might win,” Beck said, causing the ballroom to erupt in a rousing standing ovation.

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Boehner says Obama Rejected GOP Plan to End Shutdown as Negotiations Shift to Senate

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Photo Credit: Getty Images By ASSOCIATED PRESS and DAILY MAIL REPORTER.

House Speaker John Boehner today told fellow Republicans that his talks with President Barack Obama have stalled.

‘The Senate needs to hold tough,’ Representative Greg Walden said Boehner told House GOP lawmakers. ‘The president now isn’t negotiating with us.’

Obama rejected the speaker’s effort to lift the debt ceiling for six weeks and reopen government in exchange for a budget negotiating process.

Attention now turns to the Senate, where a bipartisan group of Senators are working on a separate plan to reopen the government.

Word of the negotiations between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and the top Republican, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, emerged as the Senate, as expected, rejected a Democratic effort to raise the government’s borrowing limit through next year.

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Photo Credit: APFocus on Senate after Obama rejects House plan

By JAKE SHERMAN, JOHN BRESNAHAN and BURGESS EVERETT.

Speaker John Boehner told House Republicans Saturday morning that his efforts to strike a deal with President Barack Obama are at a standstill.

There is no agreement, Boehner said in a room in the Capitol Saturday, and there are no negotiations between House Republicans and the White House, since Obama rejected the speaker’s effort to lift the debt ceiling for six weeks and reopen government while setting up a budget negotiating process.

With that, a familiar dynamic has resurfaced 12 days into the government shutdown and five days before Treasury says the nation runs out of borrowing authority: The pendulum has swung back to Senate Republicans, who now look more likely to cut a deal with Obama to end the first government shutdown since 1996, and avoid the first default on U.S. debt in history.

After the news that talks between Boehner and Obama have broken down, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) emerged on the floor to emphasize that the nation’s eyes are firmly fixed on the chamber.

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MURRAY: Obama ‘Clueless About this Country in Some Profoundly Disturbing Ways’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller President Barack Obama successfully portrayed himself as a uniting candidate during the 2008 election, but his actions in office deepened the partisan divide, author and American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray told The Daily Caller in an exclusive interview.

“In the 2008 campaign, I actually believed that [Obama] was going to try to be a president who would bridge the partisan divide and compromise,” Murray said. “His rhetoric was really pretty good, and his behavior since he got into office has been the polar opposite. And it is getting worse rather than better.”

Obama’s carefully cultivated demeanor of sophistication drew in intellectuals from across the political spectrum during the campaign, according to Murray.

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Michael Needham: The Strategist Behind the Shutdown

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Photo Credit: Zina Saunders‘I really believe we are in a great position right now,” says Michael Needham, the 31-year-old president of Heritage Action, the lobbying arm of the nation’s largest conservative think tank. By “we” he means the Republican Party and the conservative movement; their “great position” refers to the potential to win the political battle over the government shutdown.

Though Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is the public face of the high-risk strategy to “defund” ObamaCare, the masterminds behind it are a new generation of young conservatives, chief among them Mr. Needham. From a tactical view, the strategy has been deployed with precision. In August, only Mr. Cruz and a band of renegade tea-party Republicans in the House favored this approach, and the media collectively scoffed. But by September, House Republicans couldn’t pass a budget without attaching the defunding rider that has grounded much of government.

“We rallied the conservative grass roots across the country,” Mr. Needham says, and ran ads in more than 100 districts on the health law. It worked. During the August recess, these activists demanded that their members of Congress stop ObamaCare.

To most observers, who think the GOP is losing this fight, Mr. Needham’s optimism that Republicans will carry the day may seem astonishing. But Mr. Needham says the second-guessers are wrong.

“We just spent the last three months talking about nothing else but ObamaCare. It has been on the front page of every newspaper. The polls show ObamaCare’s more unpopular than ever. People are starting to wake up that it isn’t going to work at all,” he says. “Even Jon Stewart of ‘The Daily Show’ is making fun of the law.” On Monday, Mr. Stewart had Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius as a guest, Mr. Needham notes, and the host “bet that he could download every movie ever made before she could log on to the ObamaCare website.”

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Edward Snowden Says NSA Surveillance Programs ‘Hurt our Country’

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Photo Credit: APBy Associated Press.

The National Security Agency whistleblower, Edward Snowden, has said that the mass surveillance programmes used by the US to tap into phone and internet connections around the world is making people less safe.

In short video clips posted by the WikiLeaks website on Friday, Snowden said that the NSA’s mass surveillance, which he disclosed before fleeing to Russia, “puts us at risk of coming into conflict with our own government”.

A US court has charged Snowden with violating the Espionage Act, for disclosing the programmes which he described as a “dragnet mass surveillance that puts entire populations under sort of an eye that sees everything even when it’s not needed”.

“They hurt our economy. They hurt our country. They limit our ability to speak and think and live and be creative, to have relationships and to associate freely,” Snowden said.

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Snowden Warns of Government Spying in First Russia Video

By AFP.

U.S. intelligence leaker Edward Snowden warned of dangers to democracy in the first video released of the fugitive since Russia granted him temporary asylum in August.

“If we can’t understand the policies and programs of our government we can’t grant our consent in regulating them,” Snowden said in one of the short video clips posted on the WikiLeaks website Friday night.

The anti-secrecy group said the videos were filmed Wednesday when Snowden met with a group of four retired US ex-intelligence workers and activists now seeking to promote ethics within the profession.

Snowden, a former National Security Agency computer administrator, is wanted in the United States for espionage and other charges after leaking details of vast U.S. telephone and Internet surveillance programs.

Dressed in a black suit and blue shirt with no tie and looking at ease, Snowden reiterated the dangers of NSA surveillance, saying indiscriminate spying was a “far cry” from legitimate programs.

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Special Counsel to Investigate Armed EPA Mining Raid in Alaska

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Photo Credit: jkbrooks85Alaska’s governor, Sean Parnell, announced Thursday that a special counsel has been named to investigate raids by conducted by federal and state authorities near the town of Chicken.

“Alaskans deserve to know all the facts in this case,” Parnell said in a Thursday press release. “While these facts are being gathered, I will continue to be vigilant in defense of Alaskans’ liberty and personal property.

Anchorage attorney Brent Cole will be asked to determine, among other things, whether any laws were violated and if different actions could have been taken. The report is due within 90 days.

A spokesman for the federal Environmental Protection Agency, at the time, did not deny that agents wore body armor and carried guns, but said it was not a “raid.” The task force included members from 10 state and federal law enforcement agencies.

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Hillary Clinton: We Need to Talk Sensibly about Spying

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Photo Credit: Lefteris Pitarakis/APHillary Clinton has called for a “sensible adult conversation”, to be held in a transparent way, about the boundaries of state surveillance highlighted by the leaking of secret NSA files by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

In a boost to Nick Clegg, the British deputy prime minister, who is planning to start conversations within government about the oversight of Britain’s intelligence agencies, the former US secretary of state said it would be wrong to shut down a debate.

Clinton, who is seen as a frontrunner for the 2016 US presidential election, said at Chatham House in London: “This is a very important question. On the intelligence issue, we are democracies thank goodness, both the US and the UK.

“We need to have a sensible adult conversation about what is necessary to be done, and how to do it, in a way that is as transparent as it can be, with as much oversight and citizens’ understanding as there can be.”

Her words were echoed by the British shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, who repeated her call in a speech in July for reform of the oversight of the intelligence agencies. Cooper, a former member of the parliamentary intelligence and security committee that oversees the agencies,said: “I have long argued that checks and balances need to be stronger – this would benefit and maintain confidence in the vital work of our security and intelligence agencies as well as being in the interests of democracy.”

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