American Pastor Now Moved to Solitary in Iran may be Suffering Organ Failure

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Photo Credit: ACLJThe American pastor jailed in Iran for his faith has been placed in solitary confinement and may now be suffering organ failure, according to family members in Iran who are increasingly alarmed at his deteriorating health.

Saeed Abedini, the 32-year-old Christian and American citizen who is serving an eight-year prison term in Iran, was put in solitary confinement following a “peaceful, silent protest” in an outside courtyard at Iran’s notoriously brutal Evin prison, according to family members. Conditions at the prison prompted Abedini and other prisoners to sign a petition decrying the lack of medical care and the threats and harsh treatment facing family members who come to visit.

The protest angered prison officials who retaliated by placing Abedini and nine others in solitary confinement.

“Saeed had previously told his family that when he was in solitary confinement in the past, that was the hardest time in his life. That every hour was like one year and that he was losing his memory and his health was deteriorating quickly,” said his wife, Naghmeh Abedini, who is at the family’s home in Idaho with their two young children.

“We believe that he is being beaten in solitary confinement. We have no way of finding out about his health. There will be no more visitations allowed and we will have no way of knowing how Saeed is doing,” she said.

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Obama Admin. Threatening Benghazi Whistle-Blowers at CIA, State

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Photo Credit: Jonathon NarveyAt least four career officials at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency have retained lawyers or are in the process of doing so, as they prepare to provide sensitive information about the Benghazi attacks to Congress, Fox News has learned.

Victoria Toensing, a former Justice Department official and Republican counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, is now representing one of the State Department employees. She told Fox News her client and some of the others, who consider themselves whistle-blowers, have been threatened by unnamed Obama administration officials.

“I’m not talking generally, I’m talking specifically about Benghazi – that people have been threatened,” Toensing said in an interview Monday. “And not just the State Department. People have been threatened at the CIA.”

Toensing declined to name her client. She also refused to say whether the individual was on the ground in Benghazi on the night of Sept. 11, 2012, when terrorist attacks on two U.S. installations in the Libyan city killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens.

However, Toensing disclosed that her client has pertinent information on all three time periods investigators consider relevant to the attacks: the months that led up to the attack, when pleas by the ambassador and his staff for enhanced security in Benghazi were mostly rejected by senior officers at the State Department; the eight-hour time frame in which the attacks unfolded, and the eight-day period that followed the attacks, when Obama administration officials incorrectly described them as the result of a spontaneous protest over a video.

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Female DNA Found on Bomb Components in Boston Marathon Probe, Source Says

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Photo Credit: APFemale DNA was found on bomb components used in the attack this month on the Boston Marathon, a source familiar with the investigation confirmed to Fox News, though the source cautioned that it is too early to draw hard conclusions from that evidence.

“No one should expect that the investigation is over,” the source told Fox News in confirming the development first reported by the Wall Street Journal, adding that it is just one piece of evidence that investigators are looking at.

The revelation about female DNA came on the same day that the FBI went inside the Rhode Island home of bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s widow’s parents, and the nearby family of a man identified as his mysterious mentor hired a family spokesman to keep the media at bay.

“We are there as part of our ongoing investigation, but we aren’t permitted to discuss specific aspects of our case,” an FBI official said outside the suburban Providence home where Katherine Russell and her 3-year-old daughter are staying.

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EPA Study on Pebble Mine Relies on Report from 'Admitted Data Fakers'

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Photo Credit: Getty Images The Environmental Protection Agency’s revised draft assessment of an Alaska mine project cites research from environmental consultants who admitted falsifying a report in an environmental lawsuit.

The EPA’s new review of the potential Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay, Alaska, relied on research from Stratus Consulting and Ann Maest, the company’s managing scientist. Stratus recently admitted to providing false statements in a decades-long $19 billion lawsuit against the oil company Chevron.

Maest and Stratus claimed earlier this month that they had been misled by a plaintiffs’ lawyer when they provided an environmental report detailing the damage done by Chevron subsidiary Texaco to areas of Ecuador. They disavowed the report as “tainted.”

The environmental impact report used against Chevron was supposed to be written by an independent expert, but was instead written by Stratus, which was employed by lawyers representing Ecuadorian villagers.

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Global Warming Hysteria Wrong Again: Methane Emissions Decreasing Significantly

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Photo Credit: APRevised data from the Environmental Protection Agency now shows that methane emissions released by natural gas drilling are substantially lower than previously estimated, which undercuts claims made environmental groups that methane leaked during drilling accelerates global warming.

“We need a dramatic shift off carbon-based fuel: coal, oil and also gas,” Bill McKibbern, founder of the environmental group 350.org, wrote in an email to The Associated Press. “Natural gas provides at best a kind of fad diet, where a dangerously overweight patient loses a few pounds and then their weight stabilizes; instead, we need at this point a crash diet.”

“New data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency may not answer all of those questions in a comprehensive fashion, but they do strongly suggest that activists’ arguments about ‘the methane problem’ for natural gas development are without merit,” according to Energy in Depth.

“They also suggest that methane emissions aren’t increasing it all. They’re decreasing, actually — even as more wells and greater production come online,” the industry-funded group added.

The EPA said that tighter pollution controls by the gas industry has allowed methane emissions to decrease substantially between 1990 and 2010 — by about 41.6 million metric tons per year on average for a total of more than 850 million metric tons overall.

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Wealth Gap Between Whites and Blacks Has Grown Sharply Under Obama

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Photo Credit: Tax CreditsMillions of Americans suffered a loss of wealth during the recession and the sluggish recovery that followed. But the last half-decade has proved far worse for black and Hispanic families than for white families, starkly widening the already large gulf in wealth between non-Hispanic white Americans and most minority groups, according to a new study from the Urban Institute.

“It was already dismal,” Darrick Hamilton, a professor at the New School in New York, said of the wealth gap between black and white households. “It got even worse.”

Given the dynamics of the housing recovery and the rebound in the stock market, the wealth gap might still be growing, experts said, further dimming the prospects for economic advancement for current and future generations of Americans from minority groups.

The Urban Institute study found that the racial wealth gap yawned during the recession, even as the income gap between white Americans and nonwhite Americans remained stable. As of 2010, white families, on average, earned about $2 for every $1 that black and Hispanic families earned, a ratio that has remained roughly constant for the last 30 years. But when it comes to wealth — as measured by assets, like cash savings, homes and retirement accounts, minus debts, like mortgages and credit card balances — white families have far outpaced black and Hispanic ones. Before the recession, non-Hispanic white families, on average, were about four times as wealthy as nonwhite families, according to the Urban Institute’s analysis of Federal Reserve data. By 2010, whites were about six times as wealthy.

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Closing Argument: Gosnell Babies Treated Worse Than Sick Dogs

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Photo Credit: Breitbart Closing arguments in the murder trial of an abortion provider alternated between the defense’s insistence that Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s office was no “house of horrors” to the prosecution’s brutal depiction of the deaths of a woman and four viable babies.

Gosnell had declined to testify in his defense or even call witnesses at his capital murder trial. Instead, his attorney, Jack McMahon, offered a passionate, often angry defense of his client, blaming the intense media interest in the case and the prosecution for creating a “tremendous rush to judgement.”

“Never in my life have I seen the presumption of innocence more trampled on, stomped on, than in this case,” McMahon said, arguing that the overdose death of the woman at his West Philadelphia clinic was a “tragic accident” and that there was “no scientific evidence” that Gosnell, 72, killed babies after they were born alive.

But Assistant District Attorney Ed Cameron, in his closing argument, told a story about taking his sick dog to the veterinarian to be put down, with a shot to induce sleep first. “These babies didn’t even get that,” he said.

“My dog was treated better than he treated babies and women,” Cameron said. “And that’s because he didn’t care. He created an assembly line, with no regard for these women whatsoever.”

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Obama Calls, Congratulates NBA Star For Admitting He is Homosexual

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Photo Credit: Mark Wilson/Getty ImagesPresident Obama called the NBA center Monday evening to express his support and said he was impressed by his courage.

President Obama telephoned professional basketball player Jason Collins on Monday to congratulate him for coming out as the first openly gay player on a major U.S. sports team.

According to a White House aide, the president called Collins Monday evening to express his support and said he was impressed by his courage.

Collins, 34, is a veteran NBA center who played for the Boston Celtics and Washington Wizards during the 2012-13 season. He is currently a free agent. In a piece for this week’s Sports Illustrated, he admitted to being gay. He cited Rep. Joseph Kennedy (D-Mass.) as inspiring his decision to go public.

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Ron Paul: Police Manhunt for Boston Marathon Bombing Suspect Scarier Than Attack

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Photo Credit: APFormer Rep. Ron Paul said the law enforcement that swarmed around Boston in the days following the marathon bombings was scarier than the actual terrorist attack.

“The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city,” he said on the Lew Rockwell website, Politico reported. “This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself.”

The terror attacks on April 15 in Boston killed three and injured 264.

Mr. Paul, a former libertarian political candidate who served in Congress as a member of the Republican Party, said the door-to-door searches police conducted in Watertown for the bombing suspects were particularly alarming.

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Global Cooling: US Sets Thousands of Cold, Snowfall Records for April

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Photo Credit: APApril has been a freakishly cold month across much of the northern USA, bringing misery to millions of sun-starved and winter-weary residents from the Rockies to the Midwest.

“The weather map … looks like something out of The Twilight Zone,” Minneapolis meteorologist Paul Douglas of WeatherNation TV wrote on his blog last week.

Record cold and snow has been reported in dozens of cities, with the worst of the chill in the Rockies, upper Midwest and northern Plains. Several baseball games have been snowed out in both Denver and Minneapolis.

Cities such as Rapid City, S.D.; Duluth, Minn.; and Boulder, Colo., have all endured their snowiest month ever recorded. (In all three locations, weather records go back more than 100 years.) In fact, more than 1,100 snowfall records and 3,400 cold records have been set across the nation so far in April, according to the National Climatic Data Center.

Unfortunately for warm-weather lovers, after some mild temperatures the past few days, the chill is forecast to return as the calendar turns to May: Accumulating snow is forecast overnight Tuesday night and Wednesday in Denver and in Minneapolis-St.Paul by Wednesday night and Thursday, said AccuWeather meteorologist Mark Paquette.

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