Dangerous Times: Is Rouhani Rolling Obama?

Photo Credit: American Thinker When Mullah Rouhani was smiling for the abject media in New York the other week, Obama got double-teamed but good. The President of the United States asked to meet Rouhani three different times and was refused three times. Then when the truck bomber of the U.S. Marine Barracks of 1984 flew back to Tehran, he granted POTUS fifteen minutes on the phone. And then his boss, Ayatollah Khamenei, publicly disavowed his puppet by telling the media that Rouhani should never have done it.

And there you have it: Three humiliations in a row as Obama bowed and bowed to Rouhani, a contemptuous 15 minute phone call so the U.S. media could glorify Obama’s “breakthrough,” and then Khamenei pulls out the rug. Rim shot, maestro!

So much for Obama’s pathetic bows to bloodthirsty tyrants. If our liberals were capable of shame and embarrassment they would be dying of shame over Obama’s “diplomacy” in the Middle East. But people who live in layers of deception and self-deception can’t recognize a slap in the face to their hero even if it resounds all over the Middle East. The mullahs achieved their purpose, to soften Obama up for the talks going on between Kerry and the Persian rug sellers out of the limelight. Obama is now deeply, humiliatingly invested in getting that Jimmy Carter photo op, between Iran and Israel, with his arms spread wide to celebrate another piece of paper promising peace.

Rouhani at the UN has all the makings of a phony peace, which is why Bibi Netanyahu is now in the role of Winston Churchill warning about Hitler before the Munich appeasement of 1938. Netanyahu is the only leader in the world who is telling the truth, and secretly everybody knows it: That the mullahs are violent fanatics with a totalitarian war theology. War priests who ordered hundreds of kids on motorcycles to blow themselves up in Saddam’s minefields are going to make mincemeat out of Western metrosexuals. In the hard world of international power plays, Obama is now known as a habitual liar who had to be rescued from his own folly by Vladimir Putin. The mullahs know that Obama desperately needs another ego victory before his term ends three years from now. In just one year they may have fully enriched uranium. Are they really going to surrender their Key to Paradise to please Obama? Gimme a break.

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Gunman in Clown Suit Kills Senior Mexican Drug Cartel Member

Photo Credit: Steve SnodgrassA gunman in a clown costume shot and killed the oldest brother of one of Mexico’s most notorious drug trafficking families in the resort of Los Cabos, authorities said on Saturday.

Francisco Rafael Arellano Felix, 63, a former leader of the Tijuana Cartel, was shot in the head late on Friday at a family gathering in the southern tip of the state of Baja California Sur, a spokesman for state prosecutors said.

“A person dressed as a clown took his life,” he said.

Local media reported that the killer had two accomplices, but this was not yet clear, the spokesman said. The gunman fled the scene.

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Soft on Iran, Hard on Israel

Photo Credit: adam jonesThe New York Times has been quick to gush over the new round of negotiations in Geneva between major world powers and Iran. Reading the Times one would think that Iran suddenly has become quite reasonable about a possible deal to rein in its nuclear ambitions. The pro-Iran slant pops up in both the news pages of the Times and in its editorial page.

Let’s start with Mark Landler’s lengthy report about Iran’s supposedly new and more forthcoming positions in the negotiations, which in his view should hold off a new batch of sanctions on Iran (“White House Weighs Easing Iran Sanctions’ Bite With Slow Release of Assets” page A10, Oct. 18)

According to Landler, there now has been a “promising first round of nuclear diplomacy and the White House quite rightly is weighing ways to “ease the pain of sanctions.” Landler assures Times readers that “Iranian officials were more candid and substantive than in previous diplomatic encounters.” So naturally they deserve to have Congress “hold off on voting on a new bill to strangle Iran’s oil exports further.”

The entire slant of Landler’s piece is to pump up Iran’s new “positive” bona fides while depicting additional sanctions as the worst possible medicine at this juncture.

In short, Landler and the Times are enthralled by Tehran’s charm offensive. Completely overlooked is the fact that there already has been a sharply negative response in Tehran — from the Supreme Leader on down — against any serious compromises or concessions on the nuclear front.

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Chinese Couple Sold Baby to Pay for iPhone

Photo Credit: EPAAn unemployed couple will stand trial in Shanghai for allegedly selling their baby and using the proceeds to bankroll an online shopping spree, including the purchase of an iPhone.

The couple, named only as Mr Teng and Ms Zhang, began posting online adverts for the child in June this year, Shanghai’s Jiefang Daily newspaper reported on Friday. The adverts suggested they would be willing to part with their unborn baby in exchange for up to 50,000 yuan (£5,070).

After a home birth, designed to cover-up the crime, they handed over the baby girl and received a large cash payment into their bank account on the very same day.

Mr Teng and Ms Zhang reportedly told prosecutors they were acting in their daughter’s best interests, claiming they had hoped to place her with a financially stable family who could provide an education.

“We did not give the baby away for money but in order to give it more security,” they were quoted as saying.

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New EU Rules to Curb Transfer of Data to US after Edward Snowden Revelations

Photo Credit: Yves Herman/ReutersNew European rules aimed at curbing questionable transfers of data from EU countries to the US are being finalised in Brussels in the first concrete reaction to the Edward Snowden disclosures on US and British mass surveillance of digital communications.

Regulations on European data protection standards are expected to pass the European parliament committee stage on Monday after the various political groupings agreed on a new compromise draft following two years of gridlock on the issue.

The draft would make it harder for the big US internet servers and social media providers to transfer European data to third countries, subject them to EU law rather than secret American court orders, and authorise swingeing fines possibly running into the billions for the first time for not complying with the new rules.

“As parliamentarians, as politicians, as governments we have lost control over our intelligence services. We have to get it back again,” said Jan Philipp Albrecht, the German Greens MEP who is steering the data protection regulation through the parliament.

Data privacy in the EU is currently under the authority of national governments with standards varying enormously across the 28 countries, complicating efforts to arrive at satisfactory data transfer agreements with the US. The current rules are easily sidestepped by the big Silicon Valley companies, Brussels argues.

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Israel Finds Tunnel Dug Under Its Gaza Border, Blames Hamas

Photo Credit: APIsrael displayed on Sunday what it called a Palestinian “terror tunnel” running into its territory from the Gaza Strip and said it was subsequently freezing the transfer of building material to the enclave.

“The discovery of the tunnel … prevented attempts to harm Israeli civilians who live close to the border and military forces in the area,” Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon said in a statement, accusing Gaza’s ruling Hamas Islamist movement of being behind construction of the 2.5-km (1.5 mile)-long tunnel.

There was no claim of responsibility in Gaza but a spokesman for Hamas’s armed wing wrote on Twitter that “the determination deep in the hearts and minds of resistance fighters is more important than tunnels dug in the mud”.

Hamas, along with other militant groups, tunneled into Israel in 2006 and seized an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who was held for five years before being exchanged for 1,400 Palestinians in Israeli jails.

The Israeli military said it found the tunnel along its fortified Gaza border last week near a kibbutz, or communal farm. It invited journalists to view it on Sunday.

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Green Britain: Energy Blackouts Imminent

Photo Credit: FrontPageMagThe UK is facing its greatest risk of blackouts since 2007/08 in the coming winter. The National Grid, responsible for balancing the country’s supply and demand of energy, last week has given this warning because Britain’s reserves of electricity have halved in 12 months.

The UK and the USA are in the same boat here. Both countries have governments that have – or pretend to have — fallen for the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory hook, line, and sinker.

The Obama Administration’s regulations to limit carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, which The New York Times has described as “an aggressive move by Mr. Obama to bypass Congress on climate change with executive actions he promised in his inaugural address this year,” have been denounced as part of the president’s “war on coal.”

White House climate adviser Daniel P. Schrag, director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, admitted in an interview with the paper that this is exactly what it is:

The one thing the president really needs to do now is to begin the process of shutting down the conventional coal plants. Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they’re having a war on coal. On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.

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Bashar al-Assad: The Nobel Peace Prize Should Have Been Mine

Photo Credit: GETTY IMAGESBashar al-Assad, the president of Syria, has joked that he deserved to win the Nobel Peace Prize after it was awarded to the international weapons watchdog currently destroying his regime’s massive chemical arsenal.

The prize, which was given to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) on Friday, “should have been mine,” he said.

The remark, which the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar quoted, was made “jokingly” during a recent meeting with visitors at the presidential palace, the newspaper said.

However, it might be viewed as inappropriate when uttered by a president whose civil war has already cost more than 115,000 lives. A chemical weapons attack in Damascus in August, widely blamed on the Syrian government, reportedly killed more than 1,200 people.

The OPCW and the United Nations have a team of 60 experts and support staff, based in Damascus, working to destroy the country’s chemical stockpiles. The arsenal is reportedly the largest in the Middle East, and the OPCW hopes to destroy it all by 2014. It is the first time that the body has attempted such a project in a war zone.

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US Soldier Shot Dead in ‘Insider Attack’ in South-Eastern Afghanistan

Photo Credit: Xinhua/Landov/Barcroft MediaAn Afghan man wearing an Afghan army uniform shot at US soldiers in south-eastern Afghanistan, killing at least one serviceman on Sunday, local officials and the Nato-led coalition said.

The so-called “insider attack” in Paktika province is the fourth in less than a month and is likely to strain already tense ties between coalition troops and their allies, with most foreign troops scheduled to withdraw by the end of next year. A Reuters tally shows Sunday’s incident was the tenth this year, and took the death toll of foreign personnel to 15.

“A man wearing an Afghan army uniform shot at Americans in Sharana city [the provincial capital] near the governor’s office,” said an Afghan official, adding that two soldiers had been hit by the gunfire.

The Nato-led coalition confirmed one soldier had been shot by a man in security forces uniform, but did not comment on his nationality or whether the Afghan was wearing a army uniform.

Insider attacks threaten to further undermine waning support for the war among Western nations sending troops to Afghanistan. A similar flurry of attacks last year prompted the Nato-led force to briefly suspend all joint activities and take steps to curb interaction between foreign and Afghan troops.

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US Man Found Hanged in Egypt Jail Cell

Photo Credit: Getty ImagesAn American man was found hanged in a jail cell on Sunday in a police station near the banks of the Suez Canal.

The man, identified by the U.S. state department as 66-year-old James Lunn, had apparently committed suicide. He had been arrested on August 29 for breaking the curfew put in place amid the violent unrest that followed the military’s ousting of President Mohammed Morsi in early July.

The American embassy in Cairo confirmed the death to ABC News, saying he died of “apparent suicide.” The State Department also issued confirmation of the death today, and said that his family has been contacted.

Egypt officials had identified Lunn as a retired U.S. Army officer, but the U.S. State Department said Sunday that he was not a veteran.

Lunn was found after breakfast was served in the Ismailia police station, hung from the bathroom door of his prison cell, Egypt’s public prosecutor said. A black belt wrapped around his neck was attached with string to both his shoes, which were tangled up on the other side of the door, according to the prosecutor. The statement said that blood was seen coming from his nose and that he had already died when they found him.

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