529 Morsi Supporters Sentenced to Death in Egypt

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Photo Credit: AFPAn Egyptian court sentenced 529 supporters of deposed Islamist president Mohamed Morsi to death on Monday after just two hearings, in the largest mass sentencing in the country’s modern history.

The shock verdict, which came amid a sweeping crackdown on Morsi’s supporters since his overthrow by the army last July, is likely to be overturned on appeal, legal experts said.

The defendants in the southern province of Minya are part of a larger group of more than 1,200 alleged Islamists accused of killing policemen and rioting on August 14, after police killed hundreds of protesters while dispersing two Cairo protest camps.

Of the 529 defendants sentenced to death, only 153 are in custody.

The rest were tried in their absence and have the right to a retrial if they turn themselves in.

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Canadian Man in Hospital with Ebola-Like Virus

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Photo Credit: AFPThe man had recently returned from Liberia in the west African region, currently suffering a deadly outbreak of an unidentified haemorrhagic fever.

He is in isolation in critical condition in Saskatoon, the largest city in Saskatchewan province.

A provincial medical official said there was no risk to the public.

Dr Denise Werker, the province’s deputy chief medical officer, declined to say how long the man had been in Africa but said he only fell ill after returning to Canada.

She said that was in line with the profile of common deadly haemorrhagic fever viruses Lassa fever and Ebola, which have an incubation period of up to 21 days.

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Biden Blames Putin Homophobia for Crimea Invasion

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Photo Credit: CNNBiden links Russia’s anti-gay laws to incursion into Ukraine

By Kevin Liptak.

Russia’s “gay propaganda” law that makes it illegal to tell children about gay rights is linked to the nation’s takeover of Ukraine’s Crimea, Vice President Joe Biden said Saturday night.

Speaking at a gala in Los Angeles for the gay rights group Human Rights Campaign, Biden suggested countries that don’t respect the rights of gays, lesbians and transgender people also disregard borders.

“As the great Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov said, ‘A country that does not respect the rights of its citizens will not respect the rights of its neighbors,’ and we’re seeing that today, we’re seeing that today in Ukraine,” the vice president said.

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Vladi­mir Putin, Russia’s spy in chief

By Jim Hoagland.

Shake hands with Vladimir Putin, as I have three times, and you do not feel you are in the presence of a master strategist or a visionary ready to change history with his ideas. Putin comes across in conversation as vain and petulant, with a taste for cruelly needling others.

This is key to understanding where the Crimea crisis goes next. The Russian Supreme Spy will probe for weaknesses and exploit them by buying, bullying or backstabbing his adversaries. Like all spies, he assumes there is a little treachery, and a lot of larceny, in us all. Proving that is what makes him tick.

Russia’s move to slice Crimea from Ukraine was an example of “black ops,” as Tom Donilon, President Obama’s astute former national security adviser, put it over the weekend. The White House may be going to school on the espionage novels of John Le Carre and Robert Ludlum rather than the memoirs of Dean Acheson and George Kennan.

The available evidence suggests that the former KGB colonel did not set out to restart the Cold War. He is not operating from a grand design to dismember Ukraine, though he would greedily pocket that outcome if it happens.

For now, he intends to extend his invasion deep into Ukraine’s east only if events encourage or, in his view, force him to do so. He acts out of opportunism and an obsession with inflicting payback on his professional rivals. He is, however, containable if confronted with consistency and clarity.

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Photo Credit: AP / Sergei GritsUkraine fears Russia ‘ready to attack’

By Dmitry ZAKS.

Ukraine’s Western-backed leaders voiced fears on Sunday of an imminent Russian invasion of the eastern industrial heartland following the fall of their last airbase in Crimea to defiant Kremlin troops.

Saturday’s takeover involving armoured personnel carriers and stun grenades provided the most spectacular show of force since the Kremlin sent troops into the heavily Russified peninsula three weeks ago before sealing its annexation Friday.

Alarm about a push outside Crimea by Moscow’s overwhelming forces — now conducting drills at Ukraine’s eastern gate — were fanned further Sunday by a call by its self-declared premier for Russians across the ex-Soviet country to rise up against Kiev’s rule.

The interim leaders in Kiev fear that Russian President Vladimir Putin — flushed with expansionist fervour — is developing a sense of impunity after being hit by only limited EU and US sanctions for taking the Black Sea cape.

“The aim of Putin is not Crimea but all of Ukraine… His troops massed at the border are ready to attack at any moment,” Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council chief Andriy Parubiy told a mass unity rally in Kiev.

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How Sanctions Against Russia Could Signal the Beginning of ‘World War III’

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Photo Credit; AP Photo/Alexander ZemlianichenkoRussia is preparing to fight World War III against the United States, not with conventional weapons but with the American dollar, a financial analyst told TheBlaze.

Kevin Freeman, a global financial analyst with expertise in financial warfare and terrorism, warned that Russia, along with allies like China, could cripple the U.S. financial system.

It’s not a theory but a “very real reality” that should not be ignored, he said.

“The real risk is if we go after them with economic weapons, they come back after us and this creates World War III,” said Freeman, who has consulted for the Pentagon, CIA and FBI. “This is a very tough game of chicken that we’re playing, and Putin is serious.”

On Wednesday, The Blaze TV’s For The Record investigative news magazine show will examine the global impact of the Ukraine crisis in “Resistance” (8 p.m. ET). For The Record will take viewers into Ukraine and reveal firsthand accounts of the deadly violence that has gripped the country, and explain how the international tug of war over Crimea could change the world.

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Physicist: To Deny Creation is To Deny Scientific Fact

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Photo Credit: WNDAn Israeli physicist says the breakthrough scientific discovery of further evidence of the Big Bang theory, which some are calling “cosmology’s missing link,” confirms the universe was created.

“One thing the announcement does do is make it clear that the universe had a definite starting point – a creation – as described in the book of Genesis,” Bar Ilan University physics Professor Nathan Aviezer told the Times of Israel.

“To deny this now is to deny scientific fact.”

A team of scientists headed by astronomer John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced Monday it had found the evidence it was seeking to support the theory that the universe had a beginning.

The New York Times’ headlined it story “Space ripples reveal Big Bang’s smoking gun.”

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Vatican Chief Justice: Obama’s Policies ‘Progressively More Hostile Toward Christian Civilization’

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Photo Credit: AP / Charles DharapakPresident Barack Obama’s policies “have become progressively more hostile toward Christian civilization,” Cardinal Raymond Burke, head of the highest court at the Vatican, said in a recent interview.

Cardinal Burke added that Obama wants to restrict religious freedom and force the individuals, outside of his or her place of worship, “to act against his rightly-formed conscience, even in the most serious of moral questions.”

In an interview first published in Polish in Polonia Christiana magazine and republished exclusively in English at LifeSite News, Cardinal Burke, the former archbishop of St. Louis, was asked about President Obama’s policies towards Christian civilization and if there are any “Catholic reactions against this policy? If yes, what are they, [or] if not, why?”

Cardinal Burke, who heads the Apostolic Signatura, the highest court at the Vatican, said: “It is true that the policies of the president of the United States of America have become progressively more hostile toward Christian civilization. He appears to be a totally secularized man who aggressively promotes anti-life and anti-family policies.”

“Now he [Obama] wants to restrict the exercise of the freedom of religion to freedom of worship; that is, he holds that one is free to act according to his conscience within the confines of his place of worship but that, once the person leaves the place of worship, the government can constrain him to act against his rightly-formed conscience, even in the most serious of moral questions,” said Cardinal Burke.

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Pope Warns Mobsters: Hell Awaits

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Photo Credit: AP / Andrew MedichiniPope Francis has a warning for Italy’s mobsters: They will go to hell if they don’t repent and renounce their “blood-stained money and blood-stained power.”

The pontiff on Friday delivered his most forceful denunciation yet of organized crime. The occasion was a prayer vigil at a Roman church for relatives of innocents killed by the mafia, during which the names of 842 victims were read aloud as a somber Francis looked on.

After voicing his solidarity with the family members, Francis said he couldn’t leave the service without speaking to those not present: the “protagonists” of mafia violence.

Addressing these absentee mafiosi, Francis was unsparing:

“This life that you live now won’t give you pleasure. It won’t give you joy or happiness,” he said. “Blood-stained money, blood-stained power, you can’t bring it with you to your next life. Repent. There’s still time to not end up in hell, which is what awaits you if you continue on this path.”

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Kerry: ‘I Don’t Know Anybody Who Says You Ought to Go to War over Crimea’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP / Riccardo De LucaBy Melanie Hunter.

In an interview Wednesday with a local Washington, D.C., affiliate, Secretary of State John Kerry said he doesn’t know anyone who wants the U.S. to go to war with Russia over Crimea, an autonomous republic in the southern region of Ukraine before Russia’s military intervention.

“I don’t know anybody in America who has suggested to go to war over Crimea. Do you want to go to war over Crimea? I don’t know anybody who says you ought to go to war over Crimea, so therefore, your options are economic and diplomatic and isolation,” Kerry said.

As CNSNews.com previously reported, despite repeated warnings by the Obama administration not to interfere in Ukraine’s soverneignty, Russia intervened militarily in the region. On March 2, the U.S. acknowledged that Russia was in control of Crimea. On March 16, Crimea voters approved a referendum to secede from Ukraine and join Russia.

On March 17, the White House announced it had imposed travel bans and froze the assets of seven senior Russian and four Ukrainian officials. Putin was not sanctioned though, because it would be “highly unusual and rather extraordinary” for the U.S. to sanction a head of a state of another country, a senior administration official said.

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner Congressional leaders sanctioned by Vladimir Putin celebrate on Twitter

By Charlie Spiering.

U.S. lawmakers celebrated Thursday on Twitter after the Russian government announced sanctions against nine White House officials and members of Congress.

“If standing up for #democracy & sovereignty in #Ukraine means I’m #SanctionedByPutin, I’ll take it,” Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., tweeted shortly after the announcement from the Russian government.

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UN Blasts Iran for Persecution of Christians, Other Religious Minorities

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Photo Credit: APThe election last year of self-professed moderate President Hassan Rouhani has not brought Iran’s Christians any relief, according to a new United Nations report which finds the Islamic Republic’s Bible believers more persecuted than ever.

The detailed report finds Iran has continued to imprison Christians for their faith and designated house churches and evangelical Christians as “threats to national security.” At least 49 Christians were among 307 religious minorities being held in Iranian jails as of January 2014, noted the UN, which also blasted the regime for its hostility to Jews, Baha’is, Zoroastrians and Dervish Muslims, the UN report stated.

“These are indicators that President Rouhani has no influence over hard-liners, who remain fully in charge of the judiciary and security apparatus, government entities that are responsible for the most severe abuses against religious minorities,” Dwight Bashir, deputy director for policy at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, told FoxNews.com.

Among the Christians held in Iranian prisons is American citizen and Christian pastor Saeed Abedini, who is serving an eight-year prison term for alleged crimes related to his faith. President Obama has called for Abedini’s release, even as his administration has negotiated a disarmament deal with Iran.

“This report is as an important reminder about the true nature of the Iranian regime,” Sen. Mark Kirk, (R-III), told FoxNews.com. “We can’t pretend we are negotiating with Western moderates – we are negotiating with Islamic radicals who persecute Christians, Baha’is, other religious and ethnic minorities and women, while denying all of its citizens basic human rights — including the freedom of speech and assembly.”

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Russia Warns West it May Change Stance On Iran, in Retaliation Over Sanctions

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsBy Fox News.

Russia reportedly is prepared to change its stand on Iran nuclear talks in a high-stakes gamble to counter expanded sanctions by the United States and the European Union over Crimea.

After the Obama administration on Monday hit 11 Russian and Ukrainian officials with sanctions — a move criticized by Republican lawmakers as too timid — Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov was quoted Wednesday by the Interfax news agency as saying the country may have to alter its position on the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.

The statement is the most serious threat of retaliation by Moscow since the disputed Crimea region voted to join Russia over the weekend, and Vladimir Putin’s government moved to annex the peninsula.

NATO and U.S. leaders say they’re prepared to do more.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday that the administration is looking to expand the sanctions further. “If you look at the executive orders, they provide a great deal of flexibility and an expansive range potential designations for sanctions including Russian government officials, the arms sector of Russia, and individuals who, while not holding positions within the Russian government, have influence over or provide material support to senior Russian government officials,” he said.

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Russian forces seize two Ukrainian bases in Crimea

By Aleksandar Vasovic and Maria Kiselyova.

The United States warned Moscow it was on a “dark path” to isolation on Wednesday as Russian troops seized two Ukrainian naval bases, including a headquarters in the Crimean port of Sevastopol where they raised their flag.

The dramatic seizure came as Russia and the West dug in for a long confrontation over Moscow’s annexation of Crimea, with the United States and Europe groping for ways to increase pressure on a defiant Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“As long as Russia continues on this dark path, they will face increasing political and economic isolation,” said U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, referring to reports of armed attacks against Ukrainian military personnel in Crimea.

Biden was in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, as part of a quick trip to reassure Baltic allies worried about what an emboldened Russia might mean for their nations. Lithuania, along with Estonia and Latvia, are NATO members.

“There is an attempt, using brutal force, to redraw borders of the European states and to destroy the postwar architecture of Europe,” Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite said.

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