Miami man Confesses to Killing Wife on Facebook, Posts Picture of her Body (+video)

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Photo Credit: Tampa BayDerek Medina’s life was open to the world.

On YouTube, the 31-year-old South Miami man posted scores of videos of himself enjoying sports.

He wrote six online books with long-winded titles about spirituality, saving the world and hunting ghosts. Medina snapped photos of his arm tattoos, meals, boating trips and drinks poolside with his wife.

But on Thursday, Medina shocked many by making one last announcement on Facebook — he had killed his wife, Jennifer Alfonso, 26, before posting a photo of her twisted, bloodied body lying on a linoleum floor.

“I’m going to prison or death sentence for killing my wife. Love you guys. Miss you guys. Take care. Facebook people you’ll see me in the news,” Medina wrote in a Facebook post that remained public for hours Thursday evening before the site removed his profile page at the request of police.

Read more from this story HERE.

BofA Not Alone, JPMorgan Chase May Face Criminal Charges Over Mortgages

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Photo Credit: Forbes Federal regulators are having a busy summer as they go after the nation’s two biggest banks for mortgage securities they issued before the financial crisis.

JPMorgan Chase JPM -0.85% has revealed in its quarterly regulatory filing it’s being investigated by criminal and civil divisions of the U.S. Department of Justice.

The news comes just a day after Bank of America BAC +0.55% was hit with civil suits from the DoJ and SEC.

JPM, the nation’s largest bank, said it is responding to “parallel investigations being conducted by the Civil and Criminal Divisions of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California relating to MBS offerings securitized and sold by the Firm and its subsidiaries.”

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Obama Administration Imposing Diversity (+video)

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In a move some claim is tantamount to social engineering, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is imposing a new rule that would allow the feds to track diversity in America’s neighborhoods and then push policies to change those it deems discriminatory.

The policy is called, “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.” It will require HUD to gather data on segregation and discrimination in every single neighborhood and try to remedy it.

HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan unveiled the federal rule at the NAACP convention in July.

“Unfortunately, in too many of our hardest hit communities, no matter how hard a child or her parents work, the life chances of that child, even her lifespan, is determined by the zip code she grows up in. This is simply wrong,” he said.

Data from this discrimination database would be used with zoning laws, housing finance policy, infrastructure planning and transportation to alleviate alleged discrimination and segregation.

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IRS and FEC Colluding to Attack Conservatives?

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Photo Credit: WNDBy Bob Unruh

House Republicans suspect election officials joined with the Internal Revenue Service in a strategy that curbed the effectiveness of conservative organizations in the 2012 election.

The allegations were revealed in a letter from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Report, which has been holding hearings and seeking evidence about the extent of the IRS targeting of conservative and Christian organizations.

Hundreds of self-described “tea party” and “patriot” organizations had applications for tax-exempt status delayed, in some cases for years. They also were subjected to invasive, improper and probably illegal queries into private matters such as the content of their prayers and how they will vote.

The committee’s letter, dated Wednesday, is addressed to Ellen Weintraub, chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission.

“Documents recently produced by the committee demonstrate that FEC personnel communicated with IRS personnel about tax-exempt groups engaged in political activities,” the letter says. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: WNDSurprise! IRS Assault on Churches Started with Holder

By Jack Minor

The seeds of the IRS targeting of conservative groups were planted by Eric Holder in 2001 when as deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton he convinced incoming Attorney General John Ashcroft to seize the building of a conservative megachurch, says the church’s retired pastor.

“Our church was taken over by the IRS in 2001 based on the recommendations of Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder to incoming Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft,” said Greg Dixon, former pastor of the Indianapolis Baptist Temple.

“The church was the sacrificial lamb to pave the way for the future targeting of conservative groups. We were among the first victims of the IRS’s targeting of conservatives long before the news broke earlier this year,” he said.

Evidence that has arisen in the current IRS scandal shows the agency singled out tea party and other conservative groups for special scrutiny, including asking for the content of members’ prayers and demanding they promise not to protest outside Planned Parenthood clinics or to run for office.

While the IRS initially insisted the targeting was limited to a few rogue employees, evidence now shows orders came from the top to delay the approval of scores of tea party and conservative groups through two election cycles, including the 2012 campaign in which Barack Obama was reelected.

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Obama’s Epic U.S. Geography Fail

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Tuesday night, President Obama made headlines during his appearance on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” one of his numerous appearances over the years (back in 2009, he was the first sitting president to appear on the show). The President talked with Jay about a myriad of topics such as the NSA (he says that we don’t have a domestic spying program), the threat from Al Qaeda, and Trayvon Martin. However, it was when the discussion turned to infrastructure that the president failed on some fairly basic American geography — and it’s not getting much attention.

Photo Credit: Twitter @JoeTalkShow

How did he screw up? A clip from the official transcript of the interview — sent out by the White House* — says it all:

(watch the comments below starting at the 2:15 mark)

Read more:from this story HERE.

Republicans Revive ‘Penny Plan’ as Sequester Alternative to Balance Budget

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Photo Credit: APAs Congress faces a fast-approaching deadline on passing a federal spending bill, Republican lawmakers are reviving a Tea Party-backed plan with a catchy title that they claim could balance the budget.

The so-called “Penny Plan” would, according to its sponsors, balance the federal budget in two years by using just a 1 percent reduction in spending.

The lawmakers are pitching the plan in the simplest terms — cutting a penny from every dollar the government spends so that spending will soon equal revenue. They cast the plan as a pick-and-choose alternative to the sequester’s across-the-board budget cuts.

“Everybody should be able to live with one percent less in order to help bring this country back from the brink of catastrophic failure,” bill sponsor and Wyoming Republican Sen. Mike Enzi said in submitting the legislation just before August recess.

Enzi is joined by fellow GOP Sens. Rand Paul, of Kentucky; John Barrasso, of Wyoming; Jim Risch, of Idaho; David Vitter, of Louisiana; Johnny Isakson, of Georgia; and Marco Rubio, of Florida. Republican Georgia Rep. Austin Scott introduced similar legislation in the House.

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Obama Standing by Decision to Lift Moratorium on Releasing Guantanamo Bay Prisoners Back to Yemen

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In spite of the ongoing terror threat emanating from Yemen, the White House says it does not plan to rethink President Obama’s decision last May to lift a moratorium on releasing Guantanamo Bay prisoners back to that country.

“I am lifting the moratorium on detainee transfers to Yemen, so we can review them on a case by case basis,” Obama told an audience at the National Defense University during a major counterterrorism policy speech on May 23.

The president is standing by that announcement, even though Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen that U.S. intelligence officials say is now the greatest Al Qaeda threat to the U.S. homeland, was formed in part by several former Guantanamo Bay detainees who were released in 2006.

“A handful of former GITMO detainees, primarily Saudi citizens, made their way across the border into Yemen and they joined AQ in Yemen,” according to AQAP expert Gregory Johnsen, author of “The Last Refuge: Yemen, al-Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia.”

“It was that merger between people, former GITMO detainees from Saudi Arabia and the AQ escapees in Yemen, that really formed AQAP, the group that announced itself in January 2009, and that’s the group we know today as AQAP.”

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Rep. Amash: Congress Purposely Kept in Dark on Surveillance Efforts

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photo credit: gage skidmoreIt’s “total nonsense” to say Congress was told about the NSA collecting communications data on Americans, and as a matter of fact, efforts are made to keep members of Congress in the dark, says Rep. Justin Amash, a Republican from Michigan.

Members would have a stack of documents hundreds of pages long stacked on a table in front of them and told to read it, Amash said Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “O’Reilly Factor.”

If congressional members don’t know the definitions of terms used by intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency, they have no way of knowing what the documents mean, he said. One example: There is a difference between the words “collect” and “acquire.”

Read more from this story HERE.

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Former Obama Advisor: President’s Claim of No Domestic Spying Program ‘Ridiculous’

When President Barack Obama went on “The Tonight Show” Tuesday and said America has no domestic spying program, he didn’t convince one of his most ardent supporters — his own former green jobs adviser Van Jones.

“If we don’t have one now, I would hate to see us with one,” Jones said Wednesday on CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper.”

“Everybody knows I love this president,” Jones said, “but this is ridiculous. What we need to do is figure out how we’re going to balance these things, not pretend there’s no balancing to be done.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Saudi Offers Russia Deal to Scale Back Assad Support

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Photo Credit: Reuters Saudi Arabia has offered Russia economic incentives including a major arms deal and a pledge not to challenge Russian gas sales if Moscow scales back support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Middle East sources and Western diplomats said on Wednesday.

The proposed deal between two of the leading power brokers in Syria’s devastating civil war was set out by Saudi intelligence chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan at a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow last week, they said.

Russia has supported Assad with arms and diplomatic cover throughout the war and any change in Moscow’s stance would remove a major obstacle to action on Syria by the United Nations Security Council.

Syrian opposition sources close to Saudi Arabia said Prince Bandar offered to buy up to $15 billion of Russian weapons as well as ensuring that Gulf gas would not threaten Russia’s position as a main gas supplier to Europe.

In return, Saudi Arabia wanted Moscow to ease its strong support of Assad and agree not to block any future Security Council Resolution on Syria, they said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Carney: ‘No Question’ Al-Qaeda On the Run (+audio)

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Photo Credit: APBy Elizabeth Harrington. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said there is “no question” that al-Qaeda is on the run, even though U.S. outposts remain closed due to terror threats throughout the world.

“We do stand by that,” Carney said on Tuesday when asked if he stands by his previous comments that al-Qaeda has been weakened despite the recent threat, according to the pool report.

“There’s no question that core al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan has been severely diminished,” he said.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Obama’s ‘Victory’ Over Terror

By Michael Widlanski. “Al-Qaeda is on the run, and Osama Bin-Laden is dead,” declared President Barack Obama (in almost identical language) at more than a dozen campaign appearances and major policy speeches in the last year.

But when America closes embassies in more than 20 countries for fear of terror, it sends a very strong message that America, not Al-Qaeda, is on the run.

Britain, which made tremendous intelligence discoveries about Al-Qaida in Arabia and Yemen (some of which Obama aides endangered with credit-taking leaks), only closed its own embassy in Yemen, not in 24 countries.

“Al-Qaida is not dead, but is alive and kicking, and it has merely changed its form,” observed Professor Uzi Rabi, head of Middle East Studies at Tel Aviv University.

Several Israeli experts have said that Western governments must be alert to “terror chatter” but also have to be careful that they do not grant terrorists a victory by inflicting damage on their own countries by reacting recklessly to what may be a terrorist feint. Read more from this story HERE.