President Obama phoned the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi on Sunday evening to congratulate him on becoming Egypt’s new president, the U.S. Embassy in Cairo said in a Twitter message around 7 PM eastern time.

Earlier, White House press secretary Jay Carney in a statement called the Islamist’s election a “milestone” in Egyptians’ transition to democracy.

“Millions of Egyptians voted in the election, and President-elect Morsi and the new Egyptian government have both the legitimacy and responsibility of representing a diverse and courageous citizenry,” he said.

Egypt’s election commission earlier announced that Morsi had beaten his second-round opponent, former prime minister Ahmed Shafiq, by a margin of 51.7 to 48.3 percent – or just 800,000 votes.

Results had been delayed for four days, worsening an already tense atmosphere after an incident-laden campaign, including a recent court ruling dissolving the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated parliament and claims of a power grab by the ruling military council.

Read more at CNS News HERE.

Lord Christopher Monckton told The New American in an exclusive interview Saturday that the United Nations’ Rio+20 conference that concluded the day before was not about saving the planet from environmental devastation or about eradicating poverty. Instead, he said, it was about shackling the planet under a global government. He also optimistically stressed that the “pointy heads here in Rio” have failed despite their declaration of success and that “the game is up.”

Lord Monckton served as science advisor to Margaret Thatcher when she was Prime Minister of Great Britain. He heads the policy unit of the UK Independent Party and is chief policy advisor to the Washington, D.C.-based Science and Public Policy Institute. He has spoken widely and written extensively to expose the alarmism used to justify global government, saying that the controls envisioned by the UN are unnecessary.

In his interview with The New American, Monckton noted that climate-change alarmism no longer has the appeal it once did, and that the alarmists have therefore backed away from it. “This whole conference right from the start has had the stink of death upon it,” he observed. “The environment is no longer cool. It’s no longer green. It’s no longer fashionable.” He added: “They realized they could no longer bring forward the climate as an excuse, and you barely heard climate change mentioned here. Oh it’s still in the text. It’s still there, but it’s no longer the number one issue.”

But if the discredited climate-change alarmism is no longer the number one issue, what is? Monckton noted: “The beginning paragraph of this [Rio+20] document said that the worst problem facing the world was not climate change but poverty.” He added: “Now that I find myself in agreement with. Poverty is completely unnecessary. It arises almost exclusively from socialism.”

Ironically, though, global socialism is exactly what the would-be managers of the world are offering as the means to end poverty. Of course, global socialism would result in more poverty, not less; and it would also result in the loss of freedom. At Rio+20, Monckton noted, “They were still effectively talking about a mechanization for setting up a global government so that they could shut down the West, shut down democracy, and bring freedom to an end worldwide.”

Read more at the New American HERE.

President Barack Obama is starting to channel his inner Cheney.

For years, Obama talked about the limits on presidential power. Now, driven either by principle or political expediency, he’s working to build and maintain a powerful presidency that pushes the edge of what it can do, while often telling Congress and the courts to mind their own business.

In the last week alone, he refused a subpoena to share Justice Department emails with Congress, told courts he doesn’t have to justify his claimed power to assassinate suspected terrorists and decided to stop deporting certain illegal immigrants even though Congress has refused to enact a law to do that.

Those moves cap a slow buildup of executive branch power since Obama took office in January 2009. Some actions build on war powers seized by the administration of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Some assert new domestic authority.

Taken together, they reinforce the strengthening presidential power that Cheney pursued ever since he served as White House chief of staff to Gerald Ford and watched Congress take power away from a presidency weakened by Vietnam and Watergate.

Read more at McClatchy.com HERE.

While many retail businesses around the country have taken up the trend of plastering “no guns allowed” signs on their front doors, one national restaurant chain has boldly declared the right to bear arms key to what makes this nation “great.”

Denny’s restaurants, a diner chain famous for being open every hour of every day, earlier this month released a commercial titled “Greatness,” which asks what makes America great, only to answer with – among other things – the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

“Kids,” the father in the commercial asks after receiving a “Midwestern Meat & Potatoes Sandwich” he’s clearly admiring, “do you know what it is that makes this country great?

“The Constitution our forefathers wrote?” asks his daughter in return.

“Our unified belief in the American dream?” his son suggests.

The other customers in the restaurant then get in on the act, while strains of patriotic music play in the background.

“Our melting-pot heritage that proves our differences really are our strengths?” a man proposes.

“It’s our right to bear arms!” insists an elderly lady, referring to the wording of the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment.

Read more at WND HERE.

We like to think of the drone war as something far away, fought in the deserts of Yemen or the mountains of Afghanistan. But we now know it’s closer than we thought. There are 64 drone bases on American soil. That includes 12 locations housing Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles, which can be armed.

Public Intelligence, a non-profit that advocates for free access to information, released a map of military UAV activities in the United States on Tuesday. Assembled from military sources — especially this little-known June 2011 Air Force presentation (.pdf) – it is arguably the most comprehensive map so far of the spread of the Pentagon’s unmanned fleet. What exact missions are performed at those locations, however, is not clear. Some bases might be used as remote cockpits to control the robotic aircraft overseas, some for drone pilot training. Others may also serve as imagery analysis depots.

The medium-size Shadow is used in 22 bases, the smaller Raven in 20 and the miniature Wasp in 11. California and Texas lead the pack, with 10 and six sites, respectively, and there are also 22 planned locations for future bases. ”It is very likely that there are more domestic drone activities not included in the map, but it is designed to provide an approximate overview of the widespread nature of Department of Defense activities throughout the US,” Michael Haynes from Public Intelligence tells Danger Room.

The possibility of military drones (as well as those controlled by police departments and universities) flying over American skies have raised concerns among privacy activists. As the American Civil Liberties Union explained in its December 2011 report, the machines potentially could be used to spy on American citizens. The drones’ presence in our skies “threatens to eradicate existing practical limits on aerial monitoring and allow for pervasive surveillance, police fishing expeditions, and abusive use of these tools in a way that could eventually eliminate the privacy Americans have traditionally enjoyed in their movements and activities.”

As Danger Room reported last month, even military drones, which are prohibited from spying on Americans, may “accidentally” conduct such surveillance — and keep the data for months afterwards while they figure out what to do with it. The material they collect without a warrant, as scholar Steven Aftergood revealed, could then be used to open an investigation.

Read more at Wired.com HERE.