WWII Vet, Beaten by Teens Outside Eagles Lodge, Dies

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Photo Credit: kxly

Photo Credit: kxly

WWII veteran Delbert Belton survived being wounded in action during the Battle of Okinawa only to be beaten and left for dead by two teens at the Eagles Lodge in Spokane on Wednesday evening.

Belton, 88, succumbed to his injuries Thursday morning at Sacred Heart Medical Center.

Witnesses say Belton was in the parking lot of the Eagles Lodge at 6410 N. Lidgerwood, adjacent to the Eagles Ice-A-Rena, around 8 p.m. Wednesday when the two male suspects attacked him as he was about to head inside to play pool.

Police responded with K-9s to track the suspects’ scent but were not able to locate them.

“It does appear random. He was in the parking lot, it appears he was assaulted in the parking lot and there was no indication that he would have known these people prior to the assault,” Spokane Police Major Crimes Detective Lieutenant Mark Griffiths said.

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Ted Cruz: Eric Holder ‘Working to Undermine the Integrity of our Elections’

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eric_holder1177Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas accused Attorney General Eric Holder of “working to undermine the integrity of our elections” in response to a Justice Department lawsuit that would block Texas voter ID and redistricting laws and require the Lone Star State to seek federal approval for other election changes.

“Today’s decision by the U.S. Department of Justice to sue Texas is, sadly, only the latest manifestation of the DOJ’s increasing politicization under this Administration,” Cruz said in a statement.

“Americans overwhelmingly support voter ID laws because they understand that voter fraud weakens our democracy, and unfortunately it is often minority voters who are the victims of that fraud. The Department of Justice should not be working to undermine the integrity of our elections.”

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Bradley Manning Seeks Gender Change

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Pfc. Bradley Manning said Thursday that he wants to live his life as a woman and be known as Chelsea Manning as he begins a 35-year prison sentence for leaking classified government information to WikiLeaks.

Less than 24 hours after being sentenced for being the source of one of the biggest classified leaks in U.S. history, Pfc. Manning said he wants to begin hormone therapy and be known by a new name.

“As I transition to the next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me,” he said in a statement made on NBC’s “Today” show. “I am Chelsea Manning.”

Pfc. Manning’s sexuality became a focal point of his defense during the court-martial at Fort Meade, Md.

His defense team argued that the 25-year-old former Army intelligence analyst suffered from gender-identity issues that were largely ignored by commanders who should have removed him from the position in Iraq, where he had access to classified U.S. documents.

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Were Hackers Behind NASDAQ Chaos? Experts Say Technical Difficulties that Shut Market Resemble ‘Denial of Service Attack’

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Officials say the Nasdaq stock exchange outage on Thursday was likely due to a technical difficulty, though some experts say the incident resembles recent cyber attacks against U.S. banks and other financial institutions.

‘My first thought is that it is a denial-of-service attack, but I’m not sure,’ Gartner banking security analyst Avivah Litan told USA Today. ‘It’s a very attractive target. It’s very visible, and that’s what these Iranian state attacks are all about, making a political statement by disrupting a visible website.’

A wave of denial-of-service attacks started last September, knocking several banks offline including Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and PNC Bank.

The attacks were attributed to Cyber Fighters of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, an Iranian hacking collective.

The second wave of denial-of-service attacks came in January, shutting down the websites of credit unions and mid-level banks. A third wave, in March, targeted credit card companies and financial brokerages.

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Feds are Building a Detective Squad to Target Consumers and Companies that Don’t Follow Obamacare’s Rules

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

More than 1,600 new employees hired by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Resources in the aftermath of Obamacare’s passage include just two described as ‘consumer safety’ officers, but 86 tasked with ‘criminal investigating’ – indicating that the agency is building an army of detectives to sleuth out violations of a law that many in Congress who supported it still find confusing.

On the day President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law in 2010, HHS received authority from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to make as many as 1,814 new hires under an emergency ‘Direct Hiring Authority’ order.

The Obama administration ordered that employment expansion despite a government-wide hiring freeze.

A total of 1,684 of those positions were filled. An analysis by MailOnline shows that at 2010 federal government salary rates, the new employees’ salaries alone cost the U.S. at least $138.8 million every year.

Had the agency filled all its available jobs, that cost would have been a minimum of $159 million.

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Top ‘LGBT Friendly’ Colleges Offer ‘Gender-Free’ Bathrooms, ‘Queer Studies’ Minor

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Campus Pride, a gay rights advocacy group, released its annual list of the “Top 25 LGBT Friendly Colleges and Universities” on Tuesday, which includes schools with gender-neutral bathrooms and a minor in “queer studies.”

The top 25 schools had to achieve five stars in overall, sexual orientation, and gender identity/expression categories in order to be listed in the top 25. Each school also had to be 4.5 stars or above in eight LGBT-friendly factor areas.

The final Top 25 had the highest percentage ratings and reflects colleges with student populations from 2500 to over 25,000, both public and private schools.

The University of Oregon is the only institution in the state to offer Queer Studies as a minor in their Department of Women’s and Gender Studies.

“Help change the world with your newfound critical thinking skills by promoting respect in the workplace. Aid a city as it institutes its new gay-marriage law. Promote diversity in adoption rights. You’ll be able to create and foster a culturally responsive community wherever you go,” the university said its website.

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Obama’s Brother Linked to Muslim Brotherhood

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

President Obama’s half-brother in Kenya could cause the White House more headaches over new evidence linking him to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and establishing that controversial IRS supervisor Lois Lerner signed his tax-exempt approval letter.

Malik Obama’s oversight of the Muslim Brotherhood’s international investments is one reason for the Obama administration’s support of the Muslim Brotherhood, according to an Egyptian report citing the vice president of the Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt, Tehani al-Gebali.

In a news report on Egyptian television of a Gebali speech, translated by researcher Walid Shoebat, a former Palestinian Liberation Organization operative, Gebali said she would like “to inform the American people that their president’s brother Obama is one of the architects of the major investments of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

“We will carry out the law, and the Americans will not stop us,” she said. “We need to open the files and begin court sessions.

“The Obama administration cannot stop us; they know that they supported terrorism,” she continued. “We will open the files so these nations are exposed, to show how they collaborated with [the terrorists]. It is for this reason that the American administration fights us.”

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UPS Drops Health Insurance for Employee Spouses, Blames Obamacare

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Photo Credit: zyphbear

Photo Credit: zyphbear

United Parcel Service, the nation’s largest package delivery company, plans to drop health insurance coverage for thousands of employees’ spouses in a cost-cutting move it blames partially on President Obama’s health care law.

Of 33,000 spouses on UPS’s plan, about 15,000 are eligible for health coverage through their own employers and won’t be covered by the company beginning next year, according to a memo to employees published by Kaiser Health News.

Since the Affordable Care Act requires employers to provide affordable coverage, the shipping giant says those 15,000 spouses should be covered by their own employer “just as UPS has a responsibility to offer coverage to you, our employee,” the memo said. “Limiting plan eligibility is one way to manage ongoing health care costs.”

UPS said the coverage shift is “consistent with the way many large employers are responding to the costs associated with the health-care reform legislation.”

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Gallup: Unemployment Rate Jumps from 7.7% to 8.9% in 30 Days

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

By John Nolte.

Outside of the federal government’s Bureau of Labor statistics, the Gallup polling organization also tracks the nation’s unemployment rate. While the BLS and Gallup findings might not always perfectly align, the trends almost always do and the small statistical differences just haven’t been worthy of note. But now Gallup is showing a sizable 30 day jump in the unemployment rate, from 7.7% on July 21 to 8.9% today.

This is an 18-month high.

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Number of Long-Term Unemployed ‘Unprecedented’ Under Obama

By Bill McMorris.

The economy has seen an “unprecedented” number of long-term unemployed under the Obama administration, according to a liberal think tank, and economists say plans pursued by Democrats in Washington are unlikely to curb the problem.

Nearly 5 million workers are classified as long-term unemployed, while 900,000 more have stopped looking for work altogether, according to a new series of reports issued by the Urban Institute.

Three percent of the labor force has been out of work for more than six months, an improvement of only one percentage point since unemployment spiked in October 2009, according to the study.

“That long-term unemployment would rise during a recession is not at all surprising, but the extent of the increase and its persistently high level since the start of the recovery are both troubling and unprecedented,” the report states. “The U.S. economy is now well into its fourth year of recovery, the unemployment rate is below 8 percent, yet the long-term share of unemployment is still near 40 percent.”

The center-left think tank said that those startling figures are unlikely to change unless the United States can achieve dramatic job growth, rather than the middling 2 percent overall economic growth figures the Obama administration has averaged.

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Rush Limbaugh Eviscerates Media: Thrill Kill of White Athlete is ‘Trayvon Martin in Reverse, Only Worse’

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh went after the mainstream media over its shallow coverage of the racial details in the Oklahoma shooting of student Chris Lane “for the fun of it.” On his radio show Wednesday, he said the case is like “Trayvon Martin in reverse, only worse.”

“This is nowhere near self-defense…this was cold-blooded, first-degree, recreational, for the fun of it because they were bored, murder,” Limbaugh said.

As TheBlaze previously reported, Lane, a 22-year-old Australian student and baseball player, was shot by three teenagers who were reportedly bored. Two of the suspects are black and one is white.

James Edwards, 15, and Chancey Luna, 16, were reportedly charged with first degree murder and face life in prison if convicted. They are being held without bond. Michael Jones, 17, was reportedly charged with using a vehicle to facilitate the discharge of a weapon and accessory after the fact of murder in the first degree.

“No matter where you look in the media, it’s not a racial event. This is the epitome of media irresponsibility,” Limbaugh reflected. “This is a classic illustration of just what role the mainstream media is playing in the destruction of American culture and society.”

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