BlackBerry to Fire 4,500 Employees as Sales of New Device Plummet

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Photo Credit: Mast Irham/EPA

Photo Credit: Mast Irham/EPA

BlackBerry confirmed it was firing 4,500 of its staff on Friday as the struggling smartphone firm said it expects to lose nearly $1bn in the three months to August on disappointing sales of new phones.

Revenues for the three months were only $1.6bn, the company said, against analysts’ forecasts of $3bn – indicative of a collapse in its business after lacklustre sales of its new Z10 and Q10 phones. In all, it shipped 3.7m smartphones in the quarter, its lowest since summer 2007, when the first iPhone came out.

The company’s shares crashed from $10.20 to $8.03 before recovering to $8.73, a 17% drop on the day, valuing it at $4.5bn. The shares were briefly suspended as rumours of the loss circulated, and it was forced to indicate its quarterly earnings a week ahead of their scheduled date. It said it would announce a loss of between $930m and $955m next week.

That brings its total losses in the past seven quarters to $1.8bn, putting its viability as a going concern into question.

The company announced it was putting itself up for sale at the end of August – which market observers took to indicate it had failed to find a buyer privately. Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia this month effectively left the Ontario-based company in the cold.

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Ultra Liberal Professor Disrupts College Republican Meeting with Vulgar Rant

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Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

From that great bastion of academic freedom known as Temple University comes another example of a liberal professor bullying conservative students with a bevy of F-bombs.

The potty-mouth professor is Joseph Schwartz, a political science professor who told he’s won every teaching award at the university. He’s also a card-carrying Democratic Socialist (but he stresses he’s not an authoritarian communist).

The good professor, along with a handful of his followers, took over a “right to work” discussion hosted by Temple’s College Republicans and featuring a representative from Pennsylvania Right to Work Defense and Education Foundation.

Joseph Oleksak, the chairman of Temple’s Republican group, said the meeting was running smoothly until Professor Joseph Schwartz started raising questions.

“I understand that not everyone agrees with my point of view,” Oleksak told me. “But the fact that somebody can come into another person’s meeting and take it over and then accuse them of racism – it’s an insult.”

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Awesome Dairy Queen Manager Stands Up for Blind Customer When His Money Is Stolen

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Photo Credit: Robert W. Howington

Photo Credit: Robert W. Howington

It’s true that sometimes people just suck. Take the case of a Dairy Queen customer in Hopkins, Minn., who last week stole a $20 bill from a blind man when he dropped it unknowingly on the floor. It’s also true, however, that there are some really awesome human beings in the world, like Dairy Queen Manager, Joey Prusak, who saw the whole slimy act go down and responded in the most amazing way.

According to ABC, when Prusak, 19, first saw the woman bend down and scoop up the man’s money, he thought surely she would just hand it back to him. When she put it in her purse instead, he wasn’t going to stand for it.

He first asked her to return it, but she actually said no and tried to make up a story that it was really hers. Prusak called b.s. on that. He told ABC:

I told her ‘Ma’am, you can either return the $20 bill or you can leave the store, because I’m not going to serve someone as disrespectful as you.’

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Supreme Court to Consider New Obamacare Case

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picture - supreme-courtObamacare is before the U.S. Supreme Court again. On Thursday, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) lawyers filed the first viable petition for Supreme Court review involving Kathleen Sebelius’ HHS Mandate, which requires employers to provide abortion-related insurance coverage, even if those employers have a religious objection to abortion.

Section 1001 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or Obamacare) requires all large employers to offer “preventive services” to their employees or face enormous financial penalties. With President Obama’s approval, Sebelius issued a regulation that defined preventive services to include access to birth control, including those that cause abortions after conception.

The regulation issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) only allows narrow exceptions, such as for churches, but leaves other religion-oriented or religiously-owned employers subject to the regulation.

Over 60 lawsuits have been filed nationwide against this unprecedented government command. Many involve nonprofit entities, such as the University of Notre Dame. But roughly 35 of these lawsuits involve for-profit businesses which are wholly owned by a person or family with a religious belief against abortion, such as devout Christians.

These lawsuits argue both that the HHS Mandate violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment as well as a federal law called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). The federal appeals courts have split on whether a religiously-owned business can claim religious-liberty protections and whether requiring people to provide abortion-related services is a substantial burden on religious faith…The [Supreme] Court will likely vote in November whether to hear arguments in the case, which, if granted, would occur next spring.

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Obama: ‘Raising the Debt Ceiling…Does Not Increase Our Debt,’ Though It Has ‘Over 100 Times’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: abangbay @ Malaysia

Photo Credit: abangbay @ Malaysia

Raising the debt ceiling doesn’t increase the nation’s debt, Pres. Obama declared in a speech today.

In a speech at the Business Roundtable headquarters in Washington, D.C., Obama dismissed concerns about raising the debt ceiling by noting that it’d been done so many times in the past:

“Now, this debt ceiling — I just want to remind people in case you haven’t been keeping up — raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times, does not increase our debt; it does not somehow promote profligacy. All it does is it says you got to pay the bills that you’ve already racked up, Congress. It’s a basic function of making sure that the full faith and credit of the United States is preserved.”

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Sen. Mark Begich Laughs Off Notion of Voting to Defund Obamacare

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Mark BegichWhile pushing an effort to defund Obamacare or risk a government shutdown, congressional Republicans have insisted they might have some unlikely allies on their side: Senate Democrats up for reelection in red states.

But at least two of those Democrats, Sens. Mark Begich (Alaska) and Mark Pryor (Ark.), laughed off the suggestion Thursday that they would vote for a continuing resolution that permanently strips the Affordable Care Act of its funding.

“We’re not going through another [vote to repeal Obamacare], 43rd or 44th — no,” Begich told reporters on Capitol Hill. “Do I have issues with Obamacare? Yes. We’ve proposed multiple amendments and ideas to fix it, to make it better and take out things that aren’t working … but we’re not going through this process.”

When The Huffington Post asked Begich to respond to the idea that Democrats facing tough reelection battles in conservative states might favor House Republicans’ strategy, which ties Obamacare funding to a continuing resolution to keep the government running past Sept. 30, Begich laughed and shook his head.

“No — I think those guys over there should focus on what the American people want, and that is a budget done,” he said. “Quit playing with the continuing resolution, putting the debt at risk, and causing this great economy that’s moved in the right direction to falter again.”

Polling consistently shows a majority of Americans disapprove of Obamacare. A new poll finds that 54 percent want to return to the healthcare system in place in 2009, while 35 percent want to keep Obamacare.

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At a recent town hall in Anchorage, Senator Begich vowed Obamacare will never be repealed.

Spitting on Their Graves: Democrats Leave Benghazi Hearing Before Testimony From Families of Victims

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Photo Credit: Townhall

Photo Credit: Townhall

During the second portion of a House Oversight and Government Reform hearing about Benghazi Thursday on Capitol Hill, the majority of Democrats on the Committee left the room and refused to listen to the testimony of Patricia Smith and Charles Woods.

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Feinstein: Restrict 2nd Amendment Rights after Navy Yard Shooting

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein is renewing her call for new gun-control laws because of Monday’s deadly Navy Yard shooting.

“When will enough be enough?” Feinstein said in a statement Monday evening.

“Congress must stop shirking its responsibility and resume a thoughtful debate on gun violence in this country,” she said. “We must do more to stop this endless loss of life.”

The FBI confirmed Monday afternoon that 34-year-old Aaron Alexis is the suspect in Monday’s massacre at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C. Alexis died at the scene…

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Obama Takes on Coal with First-Ever Carbon Limits

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The Obama administration will press ahead Friday with tough requirements for new coal-fired power plants, moving to impose for the first time strict limits on the pollution blamed for global warming.

The proposal would help reshape where Americans get electricity, away from a coal-dependent past into a future fired by cleaner sources of energy. It’s also a key step in President Barack Obama’s global warming plans, because it would help end what he called “the limitless dumping of carbon pollution” from power plants.

Although the proposed rule won’t immediatedly affect plants already operating, it eventually would force the government to limit emissions from the existing power plant fleet, which accounts for a third of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Obama has given the Environmental Protection Agency until next summer to propose those regulations.

The EPA provided The Associated Press with details of the proposal prior to the official announcement, which was expected Friday morning. The public will have a chance to comment on the rule before it becomes final.

Despite some tweaks, the rule packs the same punch as one announced last year, which was widely criticized by industry and Republicans as effectively banning any new coal projects in the U.S.

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Syrian Opposition says Christians Will Live as Dhimmis in Sharia State

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Photo Credit: Jihad Watch

Photo Credit: Jihad Watch

“The commanders of the Islamist brigades, who have declared more than once that their project was to establish a caliphate, have repeatedly indicated that no one will persecute the Christians or drive them out of their homes because they are ‘people of the book’ and dhimmis (non-Muslim citizens of the Islamic state), so there are no problems with them, unlike the rest of the communities such as Shiites, Alawites and Druze.”

So apparently they want to subjugate the Christians, in accord with the cornerstone of the dhimmi system, Qur’an 9:29, which mandates that Muslims fight against the “People of the Book” until they “pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued” (9:29). And the Shiites, Alawites and Druze will evidently just be massacred.

“Syrian Opposition Fails To Reassure Christians,” by Tareq al Abed, translated from As-Safir (Lebanon) in Al-Monitor, September 11 (thanks to AINA):

Syrian Christians as a whole have not thrown their support behind either side in the Syrian war. Nevertheless, Christians in Syria have been subjected to a lot of pressure by both the regime and the opposition, which failed to give them (or any religious or ethnic Syrian component) any assurances or support.

Some armed groups have accused the church of supporting the regime. And many of the opposition’s statements and video clips do not reassure minorities that they will be participants in the new Syria.

The political opposition: failure without borders

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