U.S. Gave Asylum to Accused Chechen Terror Leader Who Lived in Boston

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Photo Credit: WNDWith the help of President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a high-ranking Chechen separatist leader accused of terrorism by Russia was granted political asylum in the U.S. and lived for a period of time in Boston.

Ilyas Akhmadov, who also served as Chechnya’s foreign minister, insists he was falsely accused by the Kremlin.

He has been on Russia’s most-wanted list, charged with organizing terrorist training camps and armed insurgent actions. Despite Russian objections, Akhmadov now lives in Washington, D.C., after the U.S. said it could find no links to terror.

Akhmadov was once the deputy to the radical Chechen Islamist leader Shamil Basayev, who was killed in 2006 before being described by ABC News as “one of the most-wanted terrorists in the world.”

Also living in Boston is Chechen surgeon Khassan Baiev, a physician who was granted asylum after treating the wounded on both sides of the Chechnya conflict, including Basayev.

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American Pastor Now Moved to Solitary in Iran may be Suffering Organ Failure

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Photo Credit: ACLJThe American pastor jailed in Iran for his faith has been placed in solitary confinement and may now be suffering organ failure, according to family members in Iran who are increasingly alarmed at his deteriorating health.

Saeed Abedini, the 32-year-old Christian and American citizen who is serving an eight-year prison term in Iran, was put in solitary confinement following a “peaceful, silent protest” in an outside courtyard at Iran’s notoriously brutal Evin prison, according to family members. Conditions at the prison prompted Abedini and other prisoners to sign a petition decrying the lack of medical care and the threats and harsh treatment facing family members who come to visit.

The protest angered prison officials who retaliated by placing Abedini and nine others in solitary confinement.

“Saeed had previously told his family that when he was in solitary confinement in the past, that was the hardest time in his life. That every hour was like one year and that he was losing his memory and his health was deteriorating quickly,” said his wife, Naghmeh Abedini, who is at the family’s home in Idaho with their two young children.

“We believe that he is being beaten in solitary confinement. We have no way of finding out about his health. There will be no more visitations allowed and we will have no way of knowing how Saeed is doing,” she said.

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Rampant American Bribery in Afghanistan: CIA Pays Bags of Cash in Failed Effort to Buy Friends

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Photo Credit: APFor more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.

All told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the C.I.A. to the office of President Hamid Karzai, according to current and former advisers to the Afghan leader.

“We called it ‘ghost money,’ ” said Khalil Roman, who served as Mr. Karzai’s deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005. “It came in secret, and it left in secret.”

The C.I.A., which declined to comment for this article, has long been known to support some relatives and close aides of Mr. Karzai. But the new accounts of off-the-books cash delivered directly to his office show payments on a vaster scale, and with a far greater impact on everyday governing.

Moreover, there is little evidence that the payments bought the influence the C.I.A. sought. Instead, some American officials said, the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.

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US to Subsidize Chinese Car Maker in California

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Photo Credit: APA Chinese car maker is setting up shop in the U.S., with small ambitions but a clear goal: Get the federal government to subsidize the sales of the company’s American-made electric buses.

BYD Co., 002594.SZ +3.06% an electric-car and battery maker that counts Warren Buffett among its investors, will open an electric-bus assembly facility in Lancaster, Calif., on Wednesday.

The company’s U.S. expansion won’t create many jobs yet. The new plant will employ a few dozen people at the outset, according to Stella Li, BYD senior vice president. “We are starting small,” she said.

But the benefits of BYD’s move will be immediate, allowing it to sell its buses to local transit companies at a huge discount—with the federal government picking up the rest of the tab.

BYD spokesman Micheal Austin said the company’s U.S. production facility meets “Buy America” procurement guidelines, enabling its customers to tap federal subsidies that cover up to 80% of the cost of the electric buses they buy. The availability of government aid was one of the main motivations behind BYD’s move to the U.S., he said.

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Israeli Minister: Nuclear Iran is Like 30 Nuclear North Koreas (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTubeInternational Relations Minister Yuval Steinitz warned on Sunday that Iran having a nuclear weapon would be equal to “thirty nuclear North Koreas”.

“We have the right and the ability to defend ourselves,” he said in a speech at the Jerusalem Post Conference in New York. “The cooperation with the United States is very important but ultimately each country will make its own decisions on maintaining its security,” said Steinitz, stressing that “Israel can deal with any threat.”

80 years ago, said Steinitz, “only one person identified on time and warned the world against the rearmament of Nazi Germany. This was Winston Churchill, but people refused to listen. Some people even mocked him.”

Watch video here:

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Russia Told US that Boston Bomber and Mother Were Muslim 'Religious Extremists' – Apparently Not Enough for FBI

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Photo Credit: Vjeran PavicRussian authorities secretly recorded a telephone conversation in 2011 in which one of the Boston bombing suspects vaguely discussed jihad with his mother, officials said Saturday, days after the U.S. government finally received details about the call.

In another conversation, the mother of now-dead bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev was recorded talking to someone in southern Russia who is under FBI investigation in an unrelated case, officials said.

The conversations are significant because, had they been revealed earlier, they might have been enough evidence for the FBI to initiate a more thorough investigation of the Tsarnaev family.

As it was, Russian authorities told the FBI only that they had concerns that Tamerlan and his mother were religious extremists. With no additional information, the FBI conducted a limited inquiry and closed the case in June 2011.

Two years later, authorities say Tamerlan and his brother, Dzhohkar, detonated two homemade bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three and injuring more than 260. Tamerlan was killed in a police shootout and Dzhohkar is under arrest.

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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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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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