Photo Credit: Reuters Former Reuters.com Deputy Social Media Editor Matthew Keys pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to federal charges that he aided members of the Anonymous hacking collective.
Keys, 26, on Monday said he was fired by Thomson Reuters (TRI.TO), the parent company of Reuters News.
Keys was indicted in March by a federal grand jury in Sacramento on three criminal counts, alleging he entered an Internet chatroom used by members of the hacking collective Anonymous and helped hackers gain access to the computer system of Tribune Co. in December 2010. A story on the Tribune’s Los Angeles Times website was altered by one of those hackers, the indictment said.
The alleged events occurred before he joined Reuters in 2012, the indictment indicated.
Keys was silent during the hearing in federal district court in Sacramento as his lawyer Jay Leiderman entered the plea. A status conference was set for June 12.
Photo Credit: Gage SkidmoreDepartment of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano acknowledged low morale among Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees and tension with ICE union leadership, after being pressed by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) during a Tuesday hearing.
The exchange centered around a lawsuit filed by a group of ICE agents last year, which takes issue with the executive actions taken by the Obama administration on immigration rules:
SESSIONS: [Chris Crane, head of the National ICE Council] testified that agents are prohibited from enforcing the law and that, indeed, ICE Officers have filed a lawsuit… I have never heard of a situation in which a group of law officers sued their supervisor, and you, for blocking them from following the law… [ICE Agents] were saying that the very oath they took to enforce the law is being blocked by rules and regulations and policies established from on high, and that this is undermining their ability to do what they are sworn to do.
Photo Credit: Reuters Israel’s top military intelligence analyst said in Tel Aviv on Tuesday that Syrian government forces had used chemical weapons – probably the nerve gas sarin – in their fight against rebels trying to force out President Bashar al-Assad.
He cited photographic evidence of victims foaming at the mouth, their pupils contracted.
The Israeli allegations, which came during a week-long visit by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to the Middle East, followed similar concerns of chemical weapons use voiced by Britain and France.
But so far, those assessments appear to lack the concrete proof Washington would need to accept the kind of deeper U.S. involvement in Syria’s civil war that Obama has resisted. That, in turn, raises questions about just how well-defined the president’s “red line” is.
White House spokesman Jay Carney walked a cautious line speaking to reporters, making clear that Washington was taking the Israeli accusations seriously but would require “conclusive evidence” before deciding whether to move forward.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-04-24 00:40:442016-04-11 11:23:00Now That Syria Has Crossed Obama's 'Red Line' with Nerve Gas, What Next?
Photo Credit: US NewsScientists have discovered an antibody that can turn stem cells from a patient’s bone marrow directly into brain cells, a potential breakthrough in the treatment of neurological diseases and injuries.
Richard Lerner, of the Scripps Research Institute in California, says that when a specific antibody is injected into stem cells from bone marrow—which normally turn into white blood cells—the cells can be triggered to turn into brain cells.
“There’s been a lot of research activity where people would like to repair brain and spinal cord injuries,” Lerner says. “With this method, you can go to a person’s own stem cells and turn them into brain cells that can repair nerve injuries.”
Antibodies are Y-shaped proteins that the immune system uses to help identify foreign threats to the body. They bind to foreign invaders in the body in order to alert white blood cells to attack harmful bacteria and viruses. There are millions of known antibodies.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-04-24 00:36:312016-04-11 11:23:01Scientists Find Way to Turn Stem Cells Into Brain Cells
Photo Credit: APIranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “has become a hostage” of an elite branch of Iran’s army that has quietly consolidated its economic and political power, a top analyst said Tuesday.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) appears to have supplanted Khamenei and other top clerics in a significant power shift that has left Iran a “military dictatorship,” according to Ali Alfoneh, who has spent years investigating the IRGC.
Khamenei “has become a hostage in the hands of his own praetorian guard,” Alfoneh said Tuesday during a discussion hosted by the American Enterprise Institute.
Thirty-four years since the Iranian revolution installed an extremist Islamic leader, the country has “degenerated into a military dictatorship which is disguising itself. … They want to preserve the illusion the regime” is still in power, he said.
The IRGC, Iran’s principal fighting force in its 1980 war with Iraq, has quietly seized control of Iran’s economy and political bodies and controls around $80 billion in private economic assets, according to Alfoneh.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-04-24 00:35:592016-04-11 11:23:01New Persian Rulers: Iran's Military has Apparently Supplanted the Clerics
Photo Credit: FreedomHouseTwo prominent Syrian bishops, who had warned of the threat to religious tolerance and diversity from the two-year conflict in their country, were kidnapped on Monday by armed rebels in the northern province of Aleppo, state media said.
SANA news agency said the Syriac Orthodox and Greek Orthodox Archbishops of Aleppo, Yohanna Ibrahim and Paul Yazigi, were seized by “a terrorist group” in the village of Kfar Dael as they were “carrying out humanitarian work.”
A Syriac member of the opposition Syrian National Coalition, Abdulahad Steifo, said the men had been kidnapped on the road to Aleppo from the rebel-held Bab al Hawa crossing with Turkey.
Several prominent Muslim clerics have been killed in Syria’s uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, but the two bishops are the most senior church leaders caught up in the conflict which has killed more than 70,000 people across Syria.
Christians make up less than 10 percent of the country’s 23 million people and, like other religious minorities, many have been wary of the mainly Sunni Muslim uprising against Assad, whose Alawite sect is an offshoot of Shiite Islam.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-04-24 00:34:492016-04-11 11:23:01Syria: Two Prominent Christian Leaders Kidnapped by Rebels
The federal agency charged with implementing the Affordable Care Act announced a multimillion-dollar public relations contract last week in order to convince people to join the program and keep it from collapsing, critics claimed.
Enrollment in Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges is lagging, raising concerns about the viability of the exchanges, which are the law’s primary means of delivering health insurance. The bill’s congressional architects have warned the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) may be unable to establish a functional health insurance marketplace.
HHS announced on Friday it would pay public relations firm Weber Shandwick $8 million to promote enrollment in Obamacare’s exchanges.
Ben Domenech, a health care expert with the Heartland Institute, said problems with implementation of the law could “scare off” some health care consumers who are already confused by the government-led overhaul of the nation’s health care system.
“Obamacare’s functional defects are becoming a liability, and the train wreck is getting closer, so the administration wants to get as many people dependent on it as fast as possible when it launches, whether the exchanges and other systems are ready for them or not,” Domenech told the Washington Free Beacon.
As is now traditional in these stories, we’re now being told that the Brothers Tsarnaev are merely the latest card-carrying members of Local 473 of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves. No broader pattern can be discerned, or should be discerned. All jihad is local. Nobody could have seen this coming:
Boston bombing suspects Tamerlan, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev appeared to lead normal lives
If by “normal lives”, you mean reported to the US Government by a major foreign power as possible terrorists, interviewed by the FBI, had your citizenship application put on hold, and cheerily posting a series of videos to YouTube as part of your “Terrorists” playlist. No doubt millions of people in America lead lives that “normal”.
The beatification of the pre-Marathon Tsarnaevs obscures a very disquieting pattern. As Michael Mukasey writes: “Tamerlan Tsarnaev is the fifth person since 9/11 who has participated in terror attacks after questioning by the FBI. He was preceded by [Fort Hood “workplace violence” facilitator] Nidal Hasan; drone casualty Anwar al Awlaki; Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad (born Carlos Leon Bledsoe), who murdered an Army recruit in Little Rock in June 2009; and David Coleman Headley, who provided intelligence to the perpetrators of the Mumbai massacre in 2008. That doesn’t count [Detroit’s incoming Pantybomber] Abdulmutallab, who was the subject of warnings to the CIA that he was a potential terrorist.”
That’s quite a high failure rate, with quite a cumulative death count.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-04-24 00:08:032016-04-11 11:23:02Steyn: There Ain't Nobody Here but Us Chechens
Since the horrific Boston Marathon bombings last week, the United States Constitution seems to have taken more criticism than Islamic jihadists. Instead of questioning why two Islamic terrorists would choose to wreak their armed havoc in a state with near-record low gun ownership and some of the nation’s strictest gun control laws, many of our so-called leaders are calling for us to abandon the Constitution.
Take New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, for example. Yesterday, he called on the nation to change its laws and “interpretation” of the Constitution so that we can prevent the type of attacks experienced in Boston:
[W]e live in a complex world where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.
This frightening reaction isn’t only restricted to Bloomberg. Increasingly, members of the GOP have asserted that the Constitution shouldn’t apply to the bombing suspect who was captured alive. Both John McCain and Lindsey Graham have argued that the bomber – a US citizen – should be treated as an enemy combatant. In other words, the Bill of Rights should not apply.
Most Americans have also heard that, even though the Obama Administration has decided to try the alleged bomber in a civilian court, that he has not been Mirandized or afforded access to an attorney given the special circumstances of the case.
Now, no one in his or her right mind would dare have any sympathy for the alleged bomber given what happened in Boston. He should be subjected to a vigorous prosecution and, if found guilty, be executed for his horrendous crimes.
But the fact that the federal government seems to now think it can, based upon its own unilateral classification, strip away all constitutional protections afforded to US citizens for the last 220-plus years should disturb any person concerned with liberty.
This isn’t the first time that critics of increasing federal power have raised the alarm. Just last month, Senator Rand Paul filibustered President Obama’s proposed CIA nominee over the Administration’s suggestion that the president has the authority to kill US citizens in America with armed drones. Given this thermal image of the bombing suspect from a police drone, it doesn’t seem that that day may be too far off:
Also alarming is how multiple federal and state agencies handled the search for the 19 year-old bombing suspect. The following videos show police demanding entry to residences in Massachusetts, presumably without warrants, forcing residents to exit their homes, and taking other actions that one would typically only see in a police state:
Here’s additional footage taken by another Watertown resident:
Terrorism is undeniably a major threat to the United States. But the rush of many within our ruling class to jettison our fundamental rights in exchange for a little perceived security poses a far greater threat to our future.
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“Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils.” General John Stark, 1809 (Revolutionary War hero, origin of New Hampshire’s state motto).
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Benjamin Franklin, 1775
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-04-23 04:09:032016-04-11 11:23:02US Constitution Under Sustained Assault in Wake of Boston Marathon Bombings (+video)
By Todd Starnes. The U.S. Army is directing troops to remove a Bible inscription that a vendor etched into the serial numbers of weapon scopes, Fox News has learned.
Soldiers at Fort Wainwright in Alaska told Fox News they received a directive to turn in their scopes so the Bible references could be removed.
The scopes were made by Trijicom and referenced New Testament passages in John 8:12 and Second Corinthians 4:6. The verses appeared at the end of the scope serial numbers – “JN8:12” and “2COR4:6.”
“The biblical verse (JN8:12) must be removed utilizing a Dremel type tool and then painted black,” read instructions on how to remedy the matter.
After the letters and numbers were scrapped off, soldiers were directed to use apply black paint to ensure the verses were totally covered. Read more from this story HERE.
Here are the Bible verses that are cited on the ACOG scopes:
John 8:12 – When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
2nd Corinthians 4:6 – For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-04-23 02:51:522016-04-11 11:23:02Fort Wainwright, Alaska Soldiers Ordered to Remove Bible Verses from Scopes
