Likely Obama Defense Pick Pushed U.N. Scheme

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Former Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., President Obama’s likely nominee to head the Department of Defense, has a long history of introducing legislation aimed at massive U.S. funding for the Third World, even pushing a de facto global tax.

With Obama, Hagel co-sponsored the Global Poverty Act, which would have imposed a new “tax” on the U.S. requiring the country to add 0.7 percent of the gross national product to its overall spending on humanitarian aid.

For fiscal 2009, for example, the bill would have translated into up to $98 billion in required new aid.

The bill passed reading in the Foreign Affairs Committee in July 2008 but was never scheduled for a vote on the Senate floor.

A key section of the bill would have required the U.S. president to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goal. The U.N. project purportedly aims to reduce by one-half the proportion of people worldwide who live on less than $1 per day.

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Panetta: Troop Pay May Be On Table in Future Budget Cuts

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At a packed National Press Club lunch event Tuesday afternoon, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta gave a talk full, as always, of ire at the unresolved specter of sequestration, but also spent time talking about how to implement further cuts to the Defense Department.

Under the 2011 Budget Control Act, Panetta and the military service chiefs carved out $487 billion from planned spending over the next fiscal decade. But if members of Congress can’t reach a budget deal that finds equivalent savings, the sequestration mechanism will kick in and lop an additional half-trillion dollars off the Defense Department’s bottom line.

“Because of political gridlock, this department still faces the possibility of another round of across-the-board cuts,” Panetta said. “Wherever I visit our troops, they make clear their concerns about those cuts. What does it mean for them and what does it mean for their families. We’re down to the wire now.”

But even while Panetta urged Congress Tuesday to put a halt to sequestration, he joined the new trend of defense hard-liners talking in earnest about additional Pentagon cuts.

“We obviously continue to look at areas where we can achieve efficiencies at the DoD. There’s no question there is duplication, there is overhead in a bureaucracy of three million people,” he said.

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Russia to Ban US Adoptions in Retaliation to Magnitsky Act

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The State Duma’s legislative committee has approved an amendment banning any US involvement in the adoption of Russian children. On Wednesday the Lower House will consider the second reading of the bill.

­The amendment bans both individual adoptions by US citizens and US companies and organizations acting as intermediaries for those who seek to adopt Russian kids. They were submitted jointly by United Russia and Liberal Democratic MPs.

United Russia, the majority party in Parliament, is ready to support the ban on US adoptions according to Deputy Duma Speaker Sergey Neverov. He added that if the ban is approved it must remain in force for as long as US courts pass ‘biased’ rulings in cases involving adopted Russian children. The minority factions also said they would vote in support.

Other suggested amendments deal directly with the potential for US citizens to influence Russian politics. These include a ban for US citizens to head or even to work in Russian NGOs that are engaged in political activities. It is also proposed that all NGOs receiving funding from the United States be closed.

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Gov. Haley Picks Tim Scott to Replace DeMint

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photo credit: North Charleston

Rep. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) will be appointed the first African-American senator from South Carolina next year, Gov. Nikki Haley (R) announced Monday.

Haley’s selection of Scott, a Tea Party favorite, delighted conservative groups that had sought a strong conservative replacement for Sen. Jim DeMint (R), who is resigning in January to lead the Heritage Foundation.

“It is with great pleasure that I am announcing that I am appointing our next U.S. senator-to-be, Congressman Tim Scott,” Haley said at a press conference in Columbia, S.C.

Scott has enjoyed a meteoric rise in the GOP since being elected to the House in 2010, and was DeMint’s preferred choice to fill his seat, according to sources in South Carolina.

“I can walk away from the Senate knowing that someone is in this seat that is better than I am, that will carry that voice-of-opportunity conservatism to the whole country in a way that I couldn’t do,” DeMint said at the press conference.

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Porkulus: Senator Begich Gets $150 Million Dollars for Hurricane Sandy Relief in Alaska?

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photo credit: afge

The Senate’s emergency spending bill to cover costs from Hurricane Sandy includes millions of dollars that will never touch the affected Northeast — including money for salmon fisheries in Alaska, cash for an expansion of train service into New York, and funds to preserve and repair historic properties.

Lawmakers begin debating the bill Monday on the Senate floor, where the first thing they will confront is the size and scope of the $60.4 billion package, which aims to repair damage and to build protection against storms.

President Obama submitted his wish list to Congress, but senators added their own priorities. For example, Mr. Obama asked for $32 million to repair part of the Amtrak rail system not covered by insurance, but the Senate multiplied that request more than tenfold, to $336 million, with the extra money going to cover Amtrak’s operating losses and to increase train capacity into New York City.

The Sandy recovery bill also includes more than $500 million for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which amounts to a full tenth of what the agency spends per year, nationwide.

Part of that is $150 million for “fishery disasters,” which means money could flow to Mississippi’s blue crab and oyster industries, and to Alaska, where one senator said Chinook salmon have suffered.

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More Global Warming Hysteria: Environmentalists Push For Nuclear Option in US Senate

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photo credit: bhamrecycled

More green groups are putting their weight behind an effort to change the Senate’s filibuster rules.

Friends of the Earth, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the League of Conservation Voters, Clean Water Action and Greenpeace signed onto a Monday letter to Democratic leaders calling for changes to the upper chamber’s rules, joining the Sierra Club, unions and social justice groups as members of the “Fix the Senate Now” campaign.

Green groups hope changes to Senate rules could make it easier to push clean energy and climate change-related bills through the chamber.

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Disabled Girl ‘Traumatized’ By TSA After Being Detained for ‘Bomb Residue’

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The 12-year-old girl left in tears after TSA agents detained her for nearly an hour at a Texas airport because they claimed to have found traces of bomb residue on her hands has revealed she is still ‘traumatized’ by the incident a week later.

Wheelchair-bound Shelbi Walser was traveling to Florida with her mother, Tammy Daniels, for treatment for her brittle bone disorder on December 8 when she was stopped at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport in Texas.

Shelbi Walser says she is still in shock by the event that caused a public outcry when video footage emerged showing Shelbi sobbing as officials detained her in front of hundreds of travelers at security, but refuse to allow her mother to get close enough to comfort her.

‘I didn’t know what was going to happen and what they were going to do to me. [I thought they might] take me away,’ she told RadarOnline.com.

The little girl makes the trip at least twice a year to receive treatment for brittle bone disease, which has left her wheelchair-bound. Her mom revealed that during the ordeal Shelbi told her that she didn’t want to go to Florida and that she wanted to go home. Shelbi said the unpleasant incident meant she would be more nervous in future and she would be washing her hands before going through security for fear that she might test positive again.

A TSA agent swabbed Shelbi’s hands and she tested positive for explosives. But the wheelchair, which is likely to have transferred any substance to her hands as she pushed it, was never tested, her mother said. Rather than ‘explosive residue’, her mom believes it was probably fertilizer they detected on Shelbi’s hands. The family live in the country and Daniels believes it could have transferred to her daughter’s hands via her wheels.

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Democrats to Introduce Gun Control Bill

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Two days after the shooting deaths of 26 people at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school, Sen. Dianne Feinstein pledged Sunday that she would introduce new gun-control legislation at the beginning of next year’s congressional session.

“It [the bill] will ban the sale, the transfer, the transportation and the possession,” the California senator said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Not retroactively, but prospectively. And it will ban the same for big clips, drums or strips of more than 10 bullets.”

Feinstein said the purpose of her proposal, a version of the assault-weapons ban that expired in 2004, is to get “weapons of war off the streets of our cities.”

Officials have said that most of those killed in Friday’s massacre — a toll that included 20 children — were shot with a semiautomatic assault-style rifle.

Feinstein has been at the forefront of gun-control efforts nationally. The assault weapons ban that she pushed followed mass killings in a Stockton schoolyard and in a San Francisco office tower. Feinstein was also at San Francisco City Hall in 1978 when Supervisor Dan White killed Mayor George Moscone and fellow Supervisor Harvey Milk. Feinstein saw White flee their offices and found Milk, memorably saying afterward that when she felt for a pulse, her finger slipped into a bullet hole. Feinstein, then the head of the Board of Supervisors, became mayor upon Moscone’s death.

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China Calls on United States to Adopt Strict Gun Control Without Delay

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The state news agency in China, the official voice of the government, has called for the United States to quickly adopt stricter gun controls in the aftermath of the shooting rampage in Connecticut that left 28 people dead, including 20 schoolchildren.

According to the state medical examiner who was overseeing autopsies of the children, all of them had been hit multiple times. At least one child had been shot 11 times.

All of the children were in the first grade.

“Their blood and tears demand no delay for U.S. gun control,” said the news agency, Xinhua, which listed a series of shootings this year in the United States.

“However, this time, the public feels somewhat tired and helpless,” the commentary said. “The past six months have seen enough shooting rampages in the United States.”

China suffered its own school tragedy on Friday — a man stabbed 22 children at a village elementary school in Henan Province. An 85-year-old woman also was stabbed.

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Video: Doctors Stunned as Brain-Computer Interface Allows Quadriplegic Woman to Feed Herself

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A woman who is paralysed from the neck down has stunned doctors with her extraordinary skill at using a robotic arm that is controlled by her thoughts alone.

The 52-year-old patient, called Jan, lost the use of her limbs more than 10 years ago to a degenerative disease that damaged her spinal cord. The disruption to her nervous system was the equivalent to having a broken neck.

But in training sessions at the University of Pittsburgh, doctors found she quickly learned to make fluid movements with the brain-controlled robotic arm, reaching levels of performance never seen before.

Doctors recruited the woman to test a robotic arm that is controlled by a new kind of computer program that translates the natural brain activity used to move our limbs into commands to move the robotic arm.

The design is intended to make the robotic arm more intuitive for patients to use. Instead of having to think where to move the arm, a patient can simply focus on the goal, such as “pick up the ball”. Read more from this story HERE.