Boston Terror Suspects' Uncle was Married to CIA Officer's Daughter and Even Shared a Home with the Agent

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Photo Credit: APAn uncle of the Boston bombers was previously married to a CIA officer’s daughter for three years, it emerged today.

Ruslan Tsarni, who publicly denounced his two terrorist nephews’ actions and called them ‘Losers’, even lived with his father-in-law agent Graham Fuller in his Maryland home for a year.

Mr Fuller was forced to explain the relationship today as news of the family link emerged online.

He told Al-Monitor that his daughter, Samantha, was married to Ruslan, whose surname was then Tsarnaev, for three to four years in the 1990s. The couple divorced in 1999 more than ten years after he left the agency in 1987.

‘Samantha was married to Ruslan Tsarnaev (Tsarni) for 3-4 years, and they lived in Bishkek for one year where Samantha was working for Price Waterhouse on privatization projects,’ Mr Fuller said. ‘They also lived in our house in [Maryland] for a year or so and they were divorced in 1999, I believe.

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The Collapsing of the American Skull

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Photo Credit: National Review One of the most ingenious and effective strategies of the Left on any number of topics is to frame the debate and co-opt the language so effectively that it becomes all but impossible even to discuss the subject honestly. Take the brothers Tsarnaev, the incendiary end of a Chechen family that in very short time has settled aunts, uncles, sisters, and more across the map of North America from Massachusetts to New Jersey to my own home town of Toronto. Maybe your town has a Tsarnaev, too: There seems to be no shortage of them, except, oddly, back in Chechnya. The Tsarnaevs’ mom, now relocated from Cambridge to Makhachkala in delightful Dagestan, told a press conference the other day that she regrets ever having gotten mixed up with those crazy Yanks: “I would prefer not to have lived in America,” she said.

Not, I’m sure, as much as the Richard family would have preferred it. Eight-year-old Martin was killed; his sister lost a leg; and his mother suffered serious brain injuries. What did the Richards and some 200 other families do to deserve having a great big hole blown in their lives? Well, according to the New York Times, they and you bear collective responsibility. Writing on the op-ed page, Marcello Suarez-Orozco, dean of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and Carola Suarez-Orozco, a professor at the same institution, began their ruminations thus:

“The alleged involvement of two ethnic Chechen brothers in the deadly attack at the Boston Marathon last week should prompt Americans to reflect on whether we do an adequate job assimilating immigrants who arrive in the United States as children or teenagers.”

Maybe. Alternatively, the above opening sentence should “prompt Americans to reflect” on whether whoever’s editing America’s newspaper of record these days “does an adequate job” in choosing which pseudo-credentialed experts it farms out its principal analysis on terrorist atrocities to. But, if I follow correctly, these UCLA profs are arguing that, when some guys go all Allahu Akbar on you and blow up your marathon, that just shows that you lazy complacent Americans need to work even harder at “assimilating” “immigrants.” After all, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan were raised in Cambridge, Mass., a notorious swamp of redneck bigotry where the two young Chechens no doubt felt “alienated” and “excluded” at being surrounded by NPR-listening liberals cooing, “Oh, your family’s from Chechnya? That’s the one next to Slovakia, right? Would you like to come round for a play date and help Jeremiah finish his diversity quilt?” Assimilation is hell.

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First Strike: China Omission of No-First-Use Nuclear Doctrine in Defense White Paper Signals Policy Shift

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Photo Credit: APChina omitted a reference to its no-first-use strategic nuclear weapons doctrine in a recently published government white paper, indicating Beijing shifted the policy as part of its large-scale nuclear arms buildup.

The omission, along with recent comments by a senior Chinese military officer, is raising new concerns among Pentagon officials about China’s nearly opaque strategic arms buildup.

Chinese Maj. Gen. Yao Yunzhu, a senior researcher at China’s Academy of Military Science, revealed earlier this month that China is considering expanding its growing nuclear arsenal in response to U.S. missile defense deployments and upgrades.

“The current development, especially the deployment of missile-defense systems in East Asia would be, in Chinese eyes, would be a very, very disturbing factor having implications for the calculation of China’s nuclear and strategic arsenal,” she told a conference April 8 at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The statement was initially viewed as the general seeking to exploit U.S. concerns about China’s nuclear buildup as a way to force the Pentagon to scale back missile defenses, which China regards as undermining its large missile force.

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Sequester Madness: Obama Admin. Reportedly Spending Millions to Set Up Labor Unions in Foreign Countries

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Photo Credit: Reuters Senate Republicans say the Labor Department appears to be spending millions in taxpayer dollars to establish labor unions and promote collective bargaining in foreign countries and are asking top Obama administration officials for a full audit.

The request was sent by Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, the leading Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, and Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, the top Republican on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

“At a time when our federal budget is deteriorating rapidly … it is troubling to us that the department appears to be spending millions of dollars of taxpayer funds to establish labor unions and promote collective bargaining in foreign countries,” they said in a letter to acting Labor Secretary Seth Harris.

The purported activities were conducted by the agency’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs.

The bureau for the past several years has purportedly made numerous awards — worth millions of dollars — to the United Nations, the Solidarity Center and other similar groups, “whose stated objective is to help establish labor unions in foreign countries,” the senators said.

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Report: Baccalaureate Speaker Uninvited From Morehouse College Because He Criticized Obama

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Photo Credit: NatalieMaynorThe Rev. Kevin Johnson, senior pastor of Bright Hope Baptist Church in North Philadelphia, was disinvited from speaking at Morehouse College because he wrote a newspaper column critical of President Obama’s administration, according to a group of alumni.

The college denied that Friday. Efforts to reach Johnson were unsuccessful.

The controversy erupted Friday afternoon when a group called Citizens for Change issued a news release that gave the following account:

Johnson, a Morehouse alumnus, had been chosen as this year’s baccalaureate speaker, to address the college community a day before Obama’s graduation visit and commencement speech May 19.

On April 15, it said, Morehouse president John Silvanus Wilson Jr. phoned Johnson to rescind the invitation, saying he was concerned about Johnson’s recent column in the Philadelphia Tribune that said there was a scarcity of African American appointees in Obama’s cabinet and a lack of policies to reduce poverty.

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Bethel Native Sets Several US Powerlifting Records (+video)

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Photo Credit: Calista CorporationBethel Regional High School graduate, Natalie Hanson, is now the American powerlifting record holder in three of the sport’s biggest events. At 23-years old, Hanson set the official record for bench press, squat and total weight lifted for her age group and size. As of now, no one in the USA under 23-years old weighing under 75 kilos has ever officially lifted as much weight as she has.

“I’m in shock,” says Hanson about her record breaking performance, “it still doesn’t feel like that.”

Hanson broke the records at the Alaska State Championships for Power Lifting held in Anchorage, an event sanctioned by the USA powerlifting.

Hanson set the records in the Junior Division for ages 20 – 23.

Watch video here:

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Greece Starts Firing Civil Servants for First Time in a Century

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Photo Credit: John KolesidisPushed by its European creditors amid its crippling economic crisis, Greece began this week to do something it hasn’t done in more than 100 years: fire public-sector workers en masse.

Following weeks of tough negotiations with its lenders – the “troika” of the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, and the European Central Bank – the Greek government started laying off public-sector workers in an effort to implement the austerity that the troika has demanded. The first two civil servants were let go on Wednesday under a new law that speeds up the process – one, a policeman, for stealing debit cards, and the other for 110 days of unexcused absence.

The mass layoffs were announced last week in a televised address by the Greek prime minister himself, Antonis Samaras. Despite the massive unemployment in Greece, the goal of the government has become the laying off of 180,000 civil servants by 2015. “This is not a human sacrifice,” said Prime Minister Samaras. “It’s an upgrading of the public sector and it’s one demand of Greek society.”

Samaras though, promised new positions to be created: “An equal number [of employees] will be hired on merit,” he added.

A century without layoffs

Civil servants’ jobs have been protected by a law that dates back to the 1880s, which became enshrined in the century-old Greek constitution. Until that provision became law, each newly elected government would sack the civil servants hired by the previous government to replace them with their own party members, creating civil unrest and a dysfunctional state.

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Study: OPEC is Engaging in Price Fixing

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Photo Credit: APThe president and chief executive officer of one of the world’s largest corporations called for reform of America’s role in global energy markets during a Thursday speech at the Cato Institute.

“[We] did some very careful analysis of the energy situation, and we came to the conclusion that the oil market is indeed not a free market,” said Fred Smith, the president and CEO of FedEx Corporation. “More importantly, the dependence of the United States on imported petroleum from unstable and in many cases unfriendly parts of the world had created, after nuclear proliferation and biological weapons, probably our largest single economic and national security risk.”

Speaking at the Cato Institute hosted event “Monopolistic Global Oil Market,” Smith recommended a three-pronged approach to shifting American use and production.

“First and by far the most important was to maximize United States and western hemisphere oil and gas production to reduce the dependency of our economy on oil from these unfriendly and unstable parts of the world,” Smith said. “The second recommendation … was to use less petroleum, to reduce the amount of petroleum as a percentage of our GDP. … The third recommendation was to the extent it was economically feasible to do so, try to develop cost effective alternative power systems to diversify the U.S. transport sector away from petroleum.”

His speech coincides with the release of the study “Competition in Global Oil Markets: A Meta-Analysis and Review.”

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Immigration Bill Guts E-Verify For Years

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Photo Credit: J. Scott ApplewhiteThe Senate’s complex immigration bill would instantly gut the popular E-Verify system that is widely used to exclude illegal immigrants from jobs, and then create an enforcement gap for several years before the arrival of a replacement system.

“There’s no doubt that the bill eliminates E-Verify immediately upon signing,” said Kris Kobach, secretary of state of Kansas, told The Daily Caller.

“If there’s no statutory authority for E-Verify, there’s no E-Verify,” said Kobach, a lawyer trained at Harvard, Oxford and Yale universities, and a prominent advocate for reduced immigration.

The claim is vehemently disputed by the bills’ advocates, including staffers working for Sen. Marco Rubio.

However, Rubio staffers were unable to show TheDC any text in the legislation that gives the current E-Verify system legal backing until the new system is mandated in several years.

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Obama's Borrowed More Per Household ($53,616) Than Median Household Earns ($50,502)

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Photo Credit: APUnder President Barack Obama, the federal government’s debt has increased by an amount per household that exceeds the annual median household income.

Since Obama’s first inauguration on Jan. 20, 2009, the federal debt has climbed $6,167,472,778,984.22. That equals about $53,616 for each of the 115,031,000 households the Census Bureau currently estimates are in the country.

By contrast, the Census Bureau’s most recent estimate of the median household income was $50,502 (for 2011).

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