Two FBI Agents Have Been Shot in St. Louis During a Siege at a Residential Home Close to Protests

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Photo Credit: Getty Images

By Ted Thornhill.

Two FBI agents have been shot in St. Louis, near riot-ravaged Ferguson, after attending a siege at someone’s home.

The agents were injured by gunfire early on Wednesday morning after racing to investigate reports of a person barricaded inside a house on the intersection of North Hanley Road and Monroe Avenue.

The shooting occurred at 3.15am but their conditions aren’t known.

The suspect is a 33-year-old man, according to Fox TV’s John Pertzborn, but it’s not known if the incident is connected to the protests happening a few miles away.

News of the shooting comes after a second night of rioting in St Louis.

Read more from this story HERE.

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VIDEO: Will The Real Black Americans Please Stand Up

Arkansas, Mississippi Gay Marriage Bans Overturned

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gay_marriageArkansas and Mississippi became the latest two states Tuesday to have their gay marriage bans overturned by federal judges, but there are no rushes to the altar as both orders are on hold so the states can consider appeals.

Like several states, Arkansas and Mississippi had voter-approved constitutional amendments pass in 2004 that defined marriage between one man and one woman.

In Arkansas, U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker ruled in favor of two same-sex couples who had challenged the amendment. They argued the ban violated the U.S. Constitution and discriminated based on sexual orientation.

“The fact that Amendment 83 was adopted by referendum does not immunize it from federal constitutional scrutiny,” Baker wrote in her ruling.

Besides the amendment, Mississippi has a 1997 law that bans same-sex marriage.

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Police: Florida High School Student Led Prostitution Ring

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Photo Credit: KAZUHIRO NOGI / AFP / Getty Images

Photo Credit: KAZUHIRO NOGI / AFP / Getty Images

A 17-year-old recruited fellow high school students for a prostitution ring and coordinated deals on social media, charging $50 to $100 in cash and alcohol, police in Florida said.

The teen is charged with felony human trafficking after a Friday arrest in Venice, near Sarasota on Florida’s Gulf Coast. The Associated Press generally doesn’t name juveniles accused of crimes.

John Michael Mosher, 21, also was arrested Friday. Police say he paid $40 and a bottle of liquor to have sex with a 15-year-old girl. She did not want to participate in the sex act, according to police.

Mosher is charged with felony sexual battery on a victim older than 12. He’s being held without bond and has been ordered to have no contact with the victim or the 17-year-old.

Police Capt. Tom Mattmuller told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune that a third arrest is expected Tuesday.

Read more from this story HERE.

IT BEGINS: Administration Orders Agents to Release Illegals

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

THE ICE GUIDE TO AVOIDING DEPORTATION IN FIVE EASY STEPS

By Jonathan Strong.

President Obama’s executive amnesty for an estimated five million illegal aliens is, from the perspective of Republicans, an unconstitutional power grab that threatens the republic. In Obama’s telling, over soft piano music in a campaign-style YouTube video, it “just comes down to people.”

Another version is the one agents of U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) experience in trying to enforce U.S. immigration laws – specifically a five point checklist they were provided Friday evening and obtained by Breitbart News.

The bureaucratic document uses the Orwellian title “Parental Accountability Checklist.” The line below that explains it is a “Checklist for NOT Arresting/Removing Individuals Under Deferred Action Expansion.”

First, agents must ask detained aliens: did you have a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident child on Nov. 20, 2014? Have you resided in the U.S. since Jan. 1, 2010? Were you physically present in the U.S. on Nov. 20, 2014? And were you “without lawful immigration status” on Nov. 20, 2014?

If the alien answers “yes” to these questions, and they have not been convicted of serious crimes, “the individual should be released from custody or not removed, and referred to USCIS to seek deferred action,” the document instructs.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Obama-85pngROBERT RECTOR: AMNESTIED ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS TO COST TAXPAYERS $2 TRILLION OVER THEIR LIFETIME

By Caroline May.

The undocumented immigrants granted amnesty by President Barack Obama’s executive orders will likely cost taxpayers $2 trillion, according to Heritage Foundation poverty expert Robert Rector.

“The net cost — which is total benefits minus total benefits paid in — of the amnesty recipients I estimate will be around $2 trillion over the course of their lifetime,” Rector explained in an interview with Breitbart News Monday. He added that the calculation is based on the assumption that 4 million undocumented immigrants will participate and they will live, on average, 50 years.

According to Rector — who has published extensively on welfare, poverty, and immigration — the cost has two components: The first is the potential to access Social Security and Medicare, given amnestied undocumented immigrants’ ability to obtain work permits and Social Security Numbers.

“What [Obama] is doing is he is putting these 4 million people — who on average have a 10th grade education — into the Social Security and Medicare programs,” Rector said. He used much of the same methodology he incorporated in his May 2013 study on the cost of amnesty to reach his conclusions.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama in Vegas: 32 Minutes for Immigration Speech, 9 Hours for Golf

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Photo Credit: AP / Steven Senne

Photo Credit: AP / Steven Senne

President Barack Obama traveled to Las Vegas on Friday to speak to high school students about his plans to shield up to five million illegal aliens from deportation.

His speech at Del Sol High School lasted 32 minutes, according to pooled press accounts distributed by the White House, from 12:50 p.m. to 1:22 p.m.

On Saturday, the president spent approximately seven hours playing 27 holes of golf at the Shadow Creek Golf Course in North Las Vegas. On Sunday, he spent an additional two hours at the driving range and on the putting green at the Reflection Bay Golf Course on Lake Las Vegas.

The president therefore spent 17 times more time playing golf than he did selling his executive order – a 1,700 percent difference between the time he spent speaking and golfing.

The pool reporter said it an email to other reporters that the Shadow Creek Golf Course is “one of the most exclusive golf courses in the world.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Four Pinocchios: WaPo Fact-Checker Shreds WH on Executive Amnesty 'Precedent'

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Photo Credit: TownHall

Photo Credit: TownHall

If you’ve been following our coverage of President Obama’s executive action on immigration, you already know that a key pillar of the White House’s defense is that plenty of precedent exists for this type of move. Nothing to see here, except a bunch of anti-Obama overreaction from the usual suspects (if the “usual suspects” include multiple Congressional Democrats and Independents). We’ve repeatedly linked to a pair of columns that take apart the Obama administration’s dishonest justification; they point out that Obama’s move is much, much broader in scope and implication than anything executed by his predecessors — whose far narrower previous orders either applied to discrete, targeted groups of people, or were issued in an effort to enforce a duly-passed law. The White House seems to be gravitating toward one ostensible parallel in particular, stating that Obama’s decision is comparable to President George HW Bush’s 1990 action on immigration. The president himself touted this exampleduring his appearance on ABC’s This Week, which we discussed earlier:

“If you look, every president – Democrat and Republican – over decades has done the same thing as I mentioned in my remarks,” he added. “George H. W. Bush, about 40 percent of the undocumented persons at the time were provided a similar kind of relief as a consequence of executive action.” When asked about using executive action, the president said his view on the issue has not changed. “If you look – the history is that I have issued fewer executive actions than most of my predecessors, by a longshot,” Obama said. “The difference is the response of Congress, and specifically the response of some of the Republicans. But if you ask historians, take a look at the track records of the modern presidency, I’ve actually been very restrained, and I’ve been very restrained with respect to immigration. I bent over backwards and will continue to do everything I can to get Congress to work because that’s my preference.”

First off, tallying the raw number of executive orders is pure misdirection. Conservatives aren’t objecting to how many unilateral actions Obama has taken; they’re upset about the magnitude, impact and context of those decisions. Obama surely realizes this, but since he’s staked much of his legacy on the “stupidity” of the American people, this sort of answer is par for the course. As for the ‘Bush did it, too!’ excuse, Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler — who last week dismantled Obama’s ‘royal flip-flop’ on the legality of this decree — again goes to work:

Bush’s action in 1990 was designed to ease family disruptions caused by the landmark 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which allowed nearly 3 million illegal immigrants to gain legal permanent residency…The 1.5 million [40 percent] figure is too fishy to be cited by either the White House or the media. As best we can tell, this is a rounded-up estimate of the number of illegal immigrants who were married (1.3 million became 1.5 million.) But that figure was already overstated because it included applications that were pending or on appeal…Indeed, the 100,000 estimate that the INS gave on the day of the announcement might have been optimistic. Fewer than 50,000 applications had been received before the policy was superseded by a new law. The numbers generated by that law — a little more than 140,000 — further indicate that the universe of potential applicants was much smaller than 1.5 million, especially given that the law eased restrictions even more. In the end, 200,000 amounts to about 6 percent of the illegal immigrant population at the time, not 40 percent. Small wonder the White House prefers the larger number.

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Who Will Pay Ebola Patients' Medical Bills in the U.S.?

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Photo Credit: Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty

Photo Credit: Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty

The arrival of Ebola in the United States this year led to an unprecedented medical response involving experimental drugs, round-the-clock care, and layers upon layers of protective gear. And none of it has been cheap.

Nine people have been treated for the virus in the U.S. since August. Seven recovered. The National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, which treated one of them, estimates treatment for patients diagnosed with Ebola costs $50,000 a day. Officials at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, which cared for two patients, put the daily cost at $30,000, and the total at $1.16 million for a single patient. Most patients have been hospitalized for more than two weeks.

The U.S. has shown it can beat Ebola. But who will pay for the expensive care it takes to do it?

It’s a tough question, and one that the people holding the bills seem reluctant to answer. Hospitals that have treated patients in Georgia, Nebraska, New York, and Texas did not respond to requests for comment, nor did the governors’ offices of these states. NIH was forthcoming about cost of care, but the feds pick up the tab for treatment there.

The topic of payment came up during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing earlier this month but only briefly. The Obama administration had requested $6.18 billion in emergency funding for Ebola response efforts in the U.S. Missing from the request, said Sen. Mike Johanns, was funding that would cover treatment of patients with Ebola on American soil. The federal government should cover the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s costs, he said, because it had asked the medical facility to take in patients.

Read more from this story HERE.

VA Department Fires Phoenix Hospital Director

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Photo Credit: AP / Veterans Affairs Department

Photo Credit: AP / Veterans Affairs Department

The head of the troubled Phoenix veterans’ hospital was fired Monday as the Veterans Affairs Department continued its crackdown on wrongdoing in the wake of a nationwide scandal over long wait times for veterans seeking medical care and falsified records covering up the delays.

Sharon Helman, director of the Phoenix VA Health Care System, was ousted nearly seven months after she and two high-ranking officials were placed on administrative leave amid an investigation into allegations that 40 veterans died while awaiting treatment at the hospital. Helman had led the giant Phoenix facility, which treats more than 80,000 veterans a year, since February 2012.

The Phoenix hospital was at the center of the wait-time scandal, which led to the ouster of former VA Secretary Eric Shinseki and a new, $16 billion law overhauling the labyrinthine veterans’ health care system.
VA Secretary Robert McDonald said Helman’s dismissal underscores the agency’s commitment to hold leaders accountable and ensure that veterans have access to high-quality, timely care.

An investigation by the VA’s office of inspector general found that workers at the Phoenix VA hospital falsified waiting lists while their supervisors looked the other way or even directed it, resulting in chronic delays for veterans seeking care. At least 40 patients died while awaiting appointments in Phoenix, the report said, but officials could not “conclusively assert” that delays in care caused the deaths.

About 1,700 veterans in need of care were “at risk of being lost or forgotten” after being kept off the official waiting list at the troubled Phoenix hospital, the IG’s office said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Pentagon Chief Hagel Stepping Down Under Pressure

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Photo Credit: AP / Susan Walsh

Photo Credit: AP / Susan Walsh

Under pressure from President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel submitted his resignation Monday amid White House concerns about his effectiveness and broader criticism from outside about the administration’s Middle East crisis management.

The president said he and Hagel had determined it was an “appropriate time for him to complete his service.”

Hagel, a former Republican senator, never broke through the White House’s notably insular national security team. Officials privately griped about his ability to publicly communicate administration policy and more recently questioned whether he had the capacity to oversee new military campaigns against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria.

Hagel is the first high-level member of Obama’s national security team to step down in the wake of both a disastrous midterm election for the president’s party and persistent criticism about the administration’s policies in the Middle East and elsewhere. It’s unclear whether Hagel’s forced resignation signals the start of a broader shake-up of the president’s team; White House officials said it was possible there could be more departures.

Among the leading contenders to replace Hagel is Michele Flournoy, who served as the Pentagon’s policy chief for the first three years of Obama’s presidency. Flournoy, who would be the first woman to head the Pentagon, is now chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security, a think tank that she co-founded.

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Mysterious Malware Performs 'Stealthy Surveillance'

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Photo Credit: REUTERS

Photo Credit: REUTERS

A highly sophisticated piece of malware began quietly spying on governments and businesses in 2008, according to security specialist Symantec, which warns that the complex code was likely the handiwork of a nation state.

In a note released on Sunday, Symantec Security Response described the Regin malware as a “top-tier espionage tool,” which enables “stealthy surveillance.”

Regin is what is known as a backdoor Trojan, which lets an attacker gain access, or send commands to, a compromised computer. Like the mysterious Stuxnetworm which crippled Iran’s nuclear production in 2010, Regin loads onto a targeted computer in stages – it can also be customized to specific targets.

“Its capabilities and the level of resources behind Regin indicate that it is one of the main cyberespionage tools used by a nation state,” explained Symantec. The malware, it added “has been used in systematic data collection or intelligence gathering campaigns.”

While fear of a cyber attack on critical U.S. infrastructure is high at the moment, Regin appears to be a bigger worry for foreign powers. The Russian Federation accounts for 28% of Regin “infections,” according to Symantec, closely followed by Saudi Arabia. Other countries experiencing Regin infections include Mexico, Ireland, India, Afghanistan, Iran, Belgium, Austria and Pakistan.

Read more from this story HERE.