Militia Hired by State Dept. Warned It Wouldn’t Protect Stevens’ Movements in Benghazi

/0 Comments/in , /by

(CNSNews.com) – The February 17th Martyrs Brigade, a Benghazi-based militia with Islamist elements that the State Department hired as a “quick reaction force” (QRF) to protect the department’s mission in Benghazi, warned the State Department that it would not protect the movements of Amb. Chris Stevens when he visited there last September.

That warning was relayed to the regional security officer (RSO) at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli–the top security adviser to the ambassador–in an internal State Department email dated Sept. 9, 2012.

That was one day before Stevens departed Tripoli for Benghazi–for what was scheduled to be a five-day visit.

“[O]n September 8, 2012, just days before Ambassador Stevens arrived in Benghazi, the February 17 Martyrs Brigade told State Department officials that the group would no longer support U.S. movements in the city, including the Ambassador’s visit,” said a report on Benghazi released last week by the chairmen of the House Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, Oversight, Judiciary and Armed Services committees.

In a footnote, the report attributed this information to an “Email from Alec Henderson to John B. Martinec, ‘RE: Benghazi QRF agreement,’ (Sep. 9, 2012 11:31 PM).”

Read more from this story HERE.

Chinese Create New Strains of Bird Flu in Lab

/0 Comments/in , /by

Senior scientists have criticised the “appalling irresponsibility” of researchers in China who have deliberately created new strains of influenza virus in a veterinary laboratory.

They warned there is a danger that the new viral strains created by mixing bird-flu virus with human influenza could escape from the laboratory to cause a global pandemic killing millions of people.

Lord May of Oxford, a former government chief scientist and past president of the Royal Society, denounced the study published today in the journal Science as doing nothing to further the understanding and prevention of flu pandemics.

“They claim they are doing this to help develop vaccines and such like. In fact the real reason is that they are driven by blind ambition with no common sense whatsoever,” Lord May told The Independent.

“The record of containment in labs like this is not reassuring. They are taking it upon themselves to create human-to-human transmission of very dangerous viruses. It’s appallingly irresponsible,” he said.

Read more from this story HERE.

875,000 On Suspected Terrorist Watch List

/0 Comments/in , /by

photo credit: swankslot The number of names on a highly classified U.S. central database used to track suspected terrorists has jumped to 875,000 from 540,000 only five years ago, a U.S. official familiar with the matter said.

Among those was suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, whose name was added in 2011. The increase in names is due in part to security agencies using the system more in the wake of the failed 2009 attack on a plane by “underpants bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in Detroit.

Intelligence and law enforcement officials acknowledged in Congress that they had missed clues to that attack despite Abdulmutallab’s name appearing in the main database, known as TIDE.

Maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center, the highly classified database is not a “watchlist” but instead is a repository of information on people whom U.S. authorities see as known, suspected or potential terrorists from around the world.

The “Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment” is a master database which agencies use to build other catalogs of possible terrorists, like the “no-fly” list which prevents people who feature on it from boarding airplanes.

Read more from this story HERE.

Holder Threatens Kansas Over New Gun Law

/0 Comments/in , /by

photo credit: USDAgovKansas Governor Sam Brownback received a letter today from Attorney General Eric Holder threatening action against the state should it enforce SB102, the pro 2nd Amendment law Brownback signed into law last month.

The new law declares that the federal government has no power to regulate guns manufactured, sold and kept only in Kansas.

Any act, law, treaty, order, rule or regulation of the government of the United States which violates the second amendment to the constitution of the United States is null, void and unenforceable in the state of Kansas.

The legislation made it a felony for a federal agent to enforce any law, regulation, order or treaty regulating ammunition made, sold and kept in the state because the federal government does not [have] “interstate commerce” authority over such items.

The law became effective only a week ago, but already Holder has leapt into action, firing off a letter to the governor of Kansas threatening to take “all appropriate action including litigation if necessary” to prevent the state of Kansas from protecting the 2nd Amendment. (Amazing for a guy who didn’t even know about his own department’s gun-running operation, Fast and Furious until months after a border patrol agent was killed by one of its guns.) But when a state passes a law he doesn’t like – this Attorney General is FAST!

Read more from this story HERE.

State Investigating Alaska State Troopers’ Altercation with Woman ‘Arrested for Nothing’ (+video)

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: YouTubeA video that has gone viral since its posting earlier this week has spawned an investigation into the actions of two Alaska State Troopers in Kodiak.

Since the woman’s arrest, the state has charged her with several counts of assault, resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct.

After watching this video, you will likely find these charges difficult to believe:

How Porn Links and Ben Bernanke Snuck Into Bitcoin’s Code

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: CNN MoneyHere’s a little-known quirk of cyber currency Bitcoin: There are coded messages hidden in the ledger that track bitcoin transactions. Most are innocuous, but this week, the discovery of a malicious transmission filled with porn links set the Bitcoin community abuzz.

Bitcoin, a four-year-old digital currency developed by a hacker who still remains anonymous, is a favorite plaything of libertarians and cryptography geeks. It burst into the mainstream this year when investors took note of its wild price swings. One bitcoin is now worth around $112, down from a record high of $266 last month, but up from $5 a year ago.

At the core of the bitcoin network is a database recording every single transaction.

Bitcoin enthusiasts have long known about a technical loophole that allows people to inject coded messages into the database. The trick is typically used for pranks or harmless notes, but Bitcoin discussion boards lit up on Monday with the news that someone took advantage of it for a nastier purpose: adding encoded links that claim to lead to porn sites, some featuring children.

A technical analysis posted on BitcoinTalk.org delves into the details. There doesn’t seem to be much danger for the casual bitcoin user. The porn links are concealed in hexadecimal code, and a decoder is needed to translate them into English. In other words, you’d really have to be looking for it.

Read more from this story HERE.

Boston Bombing Not a ‘Lone Wolf’ Op: 3 More Suspects Arrested, Drove Car with ‘Terrorista’ License Plate (+video)

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: VKontaktBoston Police Announce 3 More Suspects In Custody In Marathon Bombings

By Michael McLaughlin. Three men were arrested on charges that they helped Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev after the deadly attacks last month.

Federal prosecutors allege that Dias Kadyrbayev, 19, and Azamat Tazhayakov, 19, tried to conceal and destroy a laptop computer and backpack full of fireworks belonging to Tsarnaev, a friend from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where all three were students at one time. They were charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Massachusetts.

A third man, Robel Phillipos, 19, was accused of lying to law enforcement officials, who questioned him about the bombing.

Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov live in New Bedford, but are originally from Kazakhstan. They were already accused of violating the terms of their student visas.

Phillipos is from Cambridge, Mass., where Tsarnaev grew up and attended UMass-Dartmouth with the others. Read more from this story HERE.
___________________________________________________

New Boston suspects drove car with ‘Terrorista #1′ license plate


Two suspects who have been taken into custody in connection with the Boston Marathon bombings drove a car with “Terrorista #1″ printed on the front plate.

Azamat Tazhayakov and Dias Kadyrbayev were reportedly arrested, along with one other person, for allegedly making false statements and conspiring to obstruct justice during the federal investigation into Boston Marathon bombing suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, officials said Wednesday. Read more from this story HERE.

Watch video here:


___________________________________________________

Official: Arrested student entered US without visa

BY Alicia A. Caldwell. One of three college students arrested Wednesday in the Boston Marathon bombings case was allowed to return to the United States from Kazakhstan in January despite not having a valid student visa, a federal law enforcement official told The Associated Press.

Authorities charged the student — a friend and classmate of one of the men accused of setting off the deadly explosions — with helping after the attacks to remove a laptop and backpack from the bombing suspect’s dormitory room before the FBI searched it.

The government acknowledged that U.S. Customs and Border Protection was unaware that the student was no longer in school when he was let back into the United States.

The disclosure was another instance of possible lapses by the federal government in the months before the Boston bombings. The Obama administration earlier this week announced an internal review of how U.S. intelligence agencies shared sensitive information and whether the government could have disrupted the attack. Republicans in Congress have promised oversight hearings starting next week.

Federal authorities on Wednesday arrested three college friends of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a bombing suspect, including Azamat Tazhayakov, a friend and classmate of Tsarnaev’s at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Tazhayakov left the U.S. in December and returned Jan. 20. But in early January, his student-visa status was terminated because he was academically dismissed from the university, the official told the AP. Read more from this story HERE.

Rush Limbaugh: What is Real Courage? Benghazi Whistle-Blowers

/0 Comments/in , /by

I could easily not say this and avoid a lot of trouble, but I’m gonna go ahead and say it. We’re losing our language. Words mean things. The way we’re defining “courage” is kind of curious to me. A pro basketball player announcing that he likes to have sex with other men, in my book, in a comparative sense, is not courageous, when compared, say, to a whistleblower trying to set the record straight about what happened in Benghazi.

Now, that’s courage because that’s taking on the oppressive power structure of this entire country. There are people, there are whistleblowers, there are people who are trying to blow the whistle on what happened in Benghazi. We still don’t have the answers. We have a dead ambassador and three other Americans and there has yet to be a satisfactory explanation. How in the world did this happen? All we’ve been told is that some renegade filmmaker, who’s now in jail, ginned up a lot of anger and that caused it. We know that’s not true.

Now, when you’re trying to blow the whistle on an administration, that, to me, is courage. To the audio sound bites. Last night on Fox Special Report, their correspondent, Adam Housley, interviewed an unidentified special operator — face was blacked out, voice changed for the interview — about the attack on the consulate in Benghazi. And during the interview the special operator said this about the attack:

I know for a fact that C-110, the UCOM SIF, was doing a training exercise not in the region of northern Africa, but in Europe, and they had the ability to react and respond. We had the ability to load out, get on birds, and fly there at a minimum stage. C-110 had the ability to be there, in my opinion, in four to six hours from their European theater to react.

Now, this is courage.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Disappearing American Father: 60% of Women Who Give Birth in their 20’s are Unmarried

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Leon FishmanMore than six out of 10 women who give birth in their early 20s are unmarried, the Census Bureau said Wednesday in a report that shows sharp discrepancies in single mothers related to income, education and race.

Census demographers said that single motherhood, while on a steady uptick since the 1940s, has accelerated in recent years. The birth rate for unmarried women in 2007 was up 80 percent in the almost three decades since 1980, the report said. But in the previous five years alone, between 2002 and 2007, it was up 20 percent.

Echoing the findings of many academic studies, the Census Bureau report said women with college degrees and higher household incomes are far less likely to be single mothers than are women who have lower household incomes and less education.

Overall, 36 percent of all births in the United States were to unmarried mothers in 2011…

Read more from this story HERE.

Pentagon Confirms that Christian Soldiers who Share their Faith may be Court-Martialed

/0 Comments/in , /by

Religious liberty groups have grave concerns after they learned the Pentagon is vetting its guide on religious tolerance with a group that compared Christian evangelism to “rape” and advocated that military personnel who proselytize should be court martialed.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation is calling on the Air Force to enforce a regulation that they believe calls for the court martial of any service member caught proselytizing.

President Mikey Weinstein and others from his organization met privately with Pentagon officials on April 23. He said U.S. troops who proselytize are guilty of sedition and treason and should be punished – by the hundreds if necessary – to stave off what he called a “tidal wave of fundamentalists.”

“Someone needs to be punished for this,” Weinstein told Fox News. “Until the Air Force or Army or Navy or Marine Corps punishes a member of the military for unconstitutional religious proselytizing and oppression, we will never have the ability to stop this horrible, horrendous, dehumanizing behavior.”

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, told Fox News he was stunned that the Pentagon would be taking counsel and advice from the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.

Read more from this story, including the Pentagon’s confirmation to Fox News that Christian soldiers who proselytize violate military regulations, HERE.

To sign a petition opposed to this outrageous policy, click HERE.