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Authorities say John Babbitt, 62, who is white, was punched by 31-year-old Lashawn Marten in New York City’s Union Square.
Two other people suffered injuries in the attack and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said detectives from the NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force are investigating the attacks.
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The amendment particularly has been invoked by opponents of President Obama’s many moves to expand the federal government’s reach, including in health care and state law enforcement.
So when Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, invoked the 10th Amendment in the Justice Department’s decision to not challenge state lawmakers in Colorado and Washington who challenged federal statutes by passing laws legalizing possession of marijuana, a Colorado congressman wanted to know the extent of Holder’s conversion.
“The real question is, ‘Does this mean that states now have the right to pre-empt federal law under the 10th Amendment?’” wrote Rep. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., in a letter to Holder.
The letter came after Holder confirmed publicly that the Department of Justice, which repeatedly has said that states cannot deviate from federal law, would defer to Colorado and Washington state laws regarding marijuana.
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The study, released two years after a tsunami killed thousands in Japan, identified several communities that are particularly vulnerable to flooding because of their low elevation and lack of protection from waves.
They include Marina del Rey and the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach as well as the low-lying coastal areas extending from the ports to Newport Beach.
The report, compiled by dozens of scientists, emergency responders and industry representatives, is the most extensive examination of what a tsunami would do to California’s coastline. The research simulated a 9.1 quake off the Alaska coast that would send damaging waves to California.
While waves would be larger in Northern California — between 10 and 23 feet — the damage could be greater in Southern California because the region has more coastal development and fewer coastal cliffs.
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The adult film industry appears to have made a disappointing August jobs report look even worse.
The report shows carnage in the movie business. It lost 22,000 jobs on the month, or nearly 6 percent of its total jobs:
Photo Credit: Bureau of Labor Statistics
That’s a huge drop. It’s probably enough to change how analysts see this jobs report, from kinda gloomy to really gloomy. But what’s behind it?
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Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Forces, Wednesday told the Assembly of Experts — the body that chooses the supreme leader — that “[w]e will support Syria to the end.”
And in an unprecedented statement, a former Iranian official has warned of mass abductions and brutal killings of American citizens around the world and the rape and killing of one of Obama’s daughters should the United States attack Syria.
Alireza Forghani, the former governor of southern Iran’s Kish Province, threw down the gauntlet last week. Forghani is an analyst and strategy specialist in the supreme leader’s camp and closely aligned with Mehdi Taeb, who heads the regime’s Ammar Strategic Base, a radical think thank, and thus speaks with the blessing of the Islamic regime.
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On Friday, the BLS reported that the 90,473,000 Americans not currently in the labor force marked the first time the figure exceeded the 90 million threshold.
In January 2009, when President Obama first took office, there were 80.5 million Americans 16 years and older not in the labor force, meaning the number of Americans not in the labor force has increased 10 million during his presidency.
For men, the BLS reported the labor force participation rate, the percentage of the population working or considered looking for work, was 63.2 percent in August, basically unchanged from 63.5 percent in July. It’s also a record low.
The BLS also reported the unemployment rate dropped 0.1 percent to 7.3 percent in August, but the figure was almost completely driven by negative factors.
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The United States has intercepted an order from an Iranian official instructing militants in Iraq to attack U.S. interests in Baghdad in the event the Obama administration launches a military strike in Syria, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
The American embassy in Baghdad was a likely target, according to unnamed U.S. officials quoted by the newspaper. The Journal said the officials did not describe the range of potential targets indicated by the intelligence.
In addition, the State Department issued a warning on Thursday telling U.S. citizens to avoid all but “essential” travel to Iraq.
President Barack Obama has asked the U.S. Congress to back his plan for limited strikes in response to a chemical weapons attack on civilians that the United States blames on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.
The Journal reported that the Iranian message was intercepted in recent days and came from the head of the Revolutionary Guards’ Qods Force. The newspaper said the message went to Iranian-supported Shi’ite militia groups in Iraq.
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Senior Master Sgt. Phillip Monk found himself at odds with his Lackland Air Force Base commander after he objected to her plans to severely punish an instructor who had expressed religious objections to homosexuality. During the conversation, his commander ordered him to share his personal views on homosexuality.
“I was relieved of my position because I don’t agree with my commander’s position on gay marriage,” he told me. “We’ve been told that if you publicly say that homosexuality is wrong, you are in violation of Air Force policy.”
In one of her first meetings with Monk, the commander expressed concern about the chaplain who would deliver the benediction at her promotion ceremony.
“She said she wanted a chaplain but objected to one particular chaplain that she called a bigot because he preached that homosexuality is a sin,” Monk said.
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Take Tulsi Gabbard, a Hawaii Democrat who doesn’t yet know how she’ll vote on the measure. Gabbard worries about the unintended consequences of a strike in the Middle Eastern nation, which is riven by a complex civil war.
“If this authorization is approved and this limited strike occurs as the president has presented, there are a number of things outside of our control that could occur, which could potentially further obligate us into something within Syria and the region,” Gabbard told POLITICO Friday morning after leaving a classified briefing.
If Obama hopes for victory in Congress, he must gain the support of undecided Democrats like Gabbard, who served in the military in Iraq and remains active in the National Guard. Democrats are expected to shoulder a Senate vote, if it’s successful. Few rank-and-file Democrats have taken the step of publicly expressing their support for Obama and his Syria mission, even though Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) predicts the legislation will ultimately pass the Senate.
And the House simply cannot pass — at this time — a use-of-force measure without support from the vast majority of the House Democratic Caucus. A vote in the House is expected in the “next two weeks,” Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) wrote in a memo to colleagues Friday.
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Microsoft said it had “significant concerns” about reports that the National Security Agency and its British counterpart, GCHQ, had succeeded in cracking most of the codes that protect the privacy of internet users. Yahoo said it feared “substantial potential for abuse”.
Google said it was not aware of any covert attempts to compromise its systems. However, according to a report in the Washington Post on Saturday, the company said that it had accelerated the encryption of information in its data centres in a bid to prevent snooping by the NSA and the intelligence agencies of other governments.
Documents obtained by whistleblower Edward Snowden and published jointly by the Guardian, the New York Times and the nonprofit news organisation ProPublica on Thursday show that agents at GCHQ have been working to undermine encrypted traffic on the “big four” service providers, named as Hotmail (the Microsoft email service now known as Outlook), Google, Yahoo and Facebook.
Yahoo responded with a strongly worded statement on Friday. “We are unaware of and do not participate in such an effort, and if it exists, it offers substantial potential for abuse. Yahoo zealously defends our users’ privacy and responds to government requests for data only after considering every applicable objection and in accordance with the law,” a spokesman said.
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