Unbelievable: Watch Newswoman Claim Ambassador Stevens Killed In Benghazi Attack By Smoke Inhalation

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Photo Credit: YouTube Eleanor Clift, the Newsweek and Daily Beast contributor, asserted today on The McLaughlin Group that Ambassador Christopher Stevens was not murdered at the embassy in Benghazi.

A portion of the conversation:

Eleanor Clift: I would like to point out Ambassador Stevens was not murdered. He died of smoke inhalation in the safe room in that CIA installation.

Susan Ferrechio: I don’t think that’s a fact, Eleanor.

Clift: I think that is a fact.

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No, Uncle Sam Doesn’t Really Want YOU: Military Now Turns Down 80% of Applicants (+video)

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These days, the U.S. military is only taking 20 percent of the applicants who walk into their local recruiter’s office intent on enlisting in the armed services.

Army Sgt. 1st Class Terrence Hoard told the Kansas City Star that his recruitment office once needed to sign up 16 to 20 soldiers per month to meet recruitment goals. Today, he can get by with 10 to 12.

“We’re turning down twice as many as before,” he told the paper, which reported that four of every five adults who seek to join the military in 2014 do not make the cut.

The U.S. Army hopes to hit 57,000 recruits for active duty this year. It’s on pace to do just that, even while applying a stricter set of standards as it pertains to physical fitness, appearance (i.e., tattoos), intelligence test results and an applicant’s criminal history.

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Jake Tapper Hammers White House Chief of Staff: How Many Dead Vets Do You Need?

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By Mike Miller.

CNN’s Jake Tapper went hard at White House Chief of Staff Dennis McDonough Thursday over the VA scandal that has seen delayed treatment and preventable deaths at VA facilities across the nation.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Getty Senators Lose Patience With ‘Out-of-Touch’ Shinseki

By Newsmax Wires.

New complaints about long wait lists and falsified patient appointment reports have surfaced at Veterans Affairs hospitals and clinics across the country, the department’s internal watchdog said Thursday, but he said there’s no proof so far that delays in treatment have caused any patient’s death.

VA Secretary Eric Shinseki said he was “mad as hell” about allegations of severe problems and said he was looking for quick results from a nationwide audit. He rejected calls for him to resign and a senator’s suggestion that he call in the FBI to investigate.

At a sometimes-combative congressional hearing, Richard Griffin, the department’s acting inspector general, said that after an initial review of 17 people who died while awaiting appointments at the Phoenix VA hospital, none of the deaths appeared to have been caused by delays in treatment.

“It’s one thing to be on a waiting list, and it’s another thing to conclude that as a result of being on the waiting list that’s the cause of death, depending on what your illness might have been at the beginning,” Griffin told the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee.

Griffin said his office is working off several lists of patients at the giant Phoenix facility, which treats more than 80,000 veterans a year. He said a widely reported list of 40 patients who died while awaiting appointments “does not represent the total number of veterans that we’re looking at.”

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Photo Credit: APSex Change For Manning As Vets Die From VA Neglect

IBD Editorial.

Abuse: The Pentagon tries to transfer convicted national security leaker Bradley Manning to a civilian prison to treat a gender disorder while veterans suffer and die waiting in vain on phony Veterans Administration lists.

Or should we say Pvt. Chelsea Manning, the name chosen by the convicted leaker of sensitive classified documents to anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. Manning has asked for hormone therapy and to be able to live as a woman and the Pentagon is trying to help.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel last month gave the Army approval to try to work out a transfer plan with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which, unlike the Defense Department, does provide such treatment to inmates, two Pentagon officials not authorized to speak on the record told the CBS affiliate in Washington, D.C.

The name change from Bradley to Chelsea was approved last month by a Leavenworth County District Judge, a request the Pentagon did not oppose.

Manning has been diagnosed by military doctors multiple times, including last fall after arriving at the Fort Leavenworth, Kan., prison,with gender dysphoria, the sense of being a woman in a man’s body.

Read more from this story HERE.

Feds Released Hundreds of Immigrant Murderers, Drunk Drivers, Sex-Crimes Convicts

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Photo Credit: Washington Times Immigration officials knowingly released dozens of murderers and thousands of drunken drivers back into the U.S. in 2013, according to Obama administration statistics that could undercut the president’s argument that he is trying to focus on the most serious criminals in his immigration enforcement.

Among the 36,000 immigrants whom U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement released from custody last year there were 116 with convictions for homicide, 43 for negligent manslaughter, 14 for voluntary manslaughter and one with a conviction classified by ICE as “homicide-willful kill-public official-gun.”

The immigrants were in deportation proceedings, meaning ICE was trying to remove them from the country and could have held them in detention but released them anyway, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, which published the numbers Monday. The Washington Times also obtained the data.

“This would be considered the worst prison break in American history, except it was sanctioned by the president and perpetrated by our own immigration officials,” said Rep. Lamar Smith, Texas Republican. “The administration’s actions are outrageous. They willfully and knowingly put the interests of criminal immigrants before the safety and security of the American people.”

The data raised thorny questions about how the government decides which immigrants to detain and which it will release as they await court hearings and final action on deportation.

Read more from this story HERE.

Dept. of Agriculture Orders Ballistic Body Armor (+video)

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Photo Credit: Breitbart A May 7th solicitation by the U.S. Department of Agriculture seeks “the commercial acquisition of ballistic vests, compliant with NIJ 0101.06 for Level IIIA Ballistic Resistance of body armor.”

According to the solicitation, “The U.S. Department of Agriculture, Office of Inspector General,” seeks “Body Armor [that] is gender specific, lightweight, [having] trauma plate/pad (hard or soft), [and] concealable carrier.” The order includes “tactical vest, undergarment (white), identification patches, accessories (6 pouches), body armor carry bag, and professional measurements.”

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More Obamacare Workers Reveal They Were Paid to Do Nothing (+video)

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More workers hired to process Obamacare applications are revealing how they’ve been filling their days sleeping, playing board games, reading, or fighting with each other on many days when there was little or no work.

“I walk out every day feeling as if I have contributed nothing,” a worker from the London, Ky., Serco facility told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Thursday.

A former worker at Serco’s processing facility in Wentzville, Mo., Lavonne Takatz, said she and other workers played games or slept because there was nothing for them to do. She and other workers said company and government supervisors knew they were being paid to do little or no work at all.

“We played Pictionary. We played 20 Questions. We played Trivial Pursuit,” said Takatz.

In some cases, the boredom led to gossiping and fights, former employees said. Monica Colvin, who worked in Wentzville’s facility until January, said co-workers pushed her and unplugged her computer, and eventually she had to visit a doctor for anxiety and depression.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Edward Snowden Guide to Encryption: Fugitive’s 12-Minute Homemade Video Ahead of Leaks Explaining How to Avoid NSA from Tracking Emails

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

By Damien Gayle.

Ordinary people must learn to scramble their emails, privacy campaigners said today, as an encryption how-to video made by Edward Snowden was made public for the first time.

The former NSA employee who blew the whistle on the agency’s all-pervasive online surveillance made the video to teach reporters how to communicate with him in secret.

The 12-minute clip, in which Mr Snowden has used software to distort his voiceover, explains how to use free software to scramble messages using a technique called Public Key Encryption (PKE).

The video’s description on Vimeo says: ‘By following these instructions, you’ll allow any potential source in the world to send you a powerfully encrypted message that ONLY YOU can read even if the two of you have never met or exchanged contact information.’

Mr Snowden made the video last year for Glenn Greenwald in an effort to get the then-Guardian reporter to communicate securely with him online so he could send over documents he wanted to leak.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Greenwald On NSA Leaks: ‘We’ve Erred On The Side Of Excess Caution’

By NPR.

Photo Credit: Vincent Yu / AP

Photo Credit: Vincent Yu / AP

When Edward Snowden was ready to leak the classified documents he’d stolen from the National Security Agency, the first journalist he contacted was Glenn Greenwald. Snowden knew of Greenwald through his coverage of the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping scandal, and he said he believed Greenwald could be counted on to understand the dangers of mass surveillance and not back down in the face of government pressure.

The first story Greenwald broke from Snowden’s documents was about how the government collects the metadata from telecom companies, including the metadata of calls made by people in the U.S. Ever since publication, Snowden and Greenwald have been at the center of controversies about leaking and journalistic ethics.

Greenwald’s new book, No Place To Hide, tells the story of how he met Snowden, the editorial decisions he’s made and the revelations contained in some of the documents Snowden leaked. Greenwald tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross about why Snowden decided to leak the documents and whether the leaks have impeded NSA’s ability to detect terrorist threats.

On a common misunderstanding about Edward Snowden

One of the things … that I think has been misunderstood about Edward Snowden … is that he actually hasn’t released a single document to the public. He could have if he wanted to: He could have uploaded the documents to the Internet on his own; he could have given them to foreign powers. There are all sorts of things he could have done, and what he did instead is he came to journalists and said, “I don’t actually think that I, Edward Snowden, am the person who should be making the decisions about what the public should and shouldn’t see. I actually think that’s journalists who ought to be making that call and I want you to work within media organizations that have experience in making these decisions and make those judgments yourself.” … There’s a huge responsibility that comes from making those choices.

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Broward County Schools Caught Lying About Bible Ban, Faces Lawsuit (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Updating our previous story about a fifth grader told by his teacher he could not read his Bible during free time, school lawyers for Broward County Public Schools have now gotten involved and changed their story.

They now say that the time in question is not free reading time, but instead Accelerated Reader Program time. During this period, students can only read certain approved books, and the Bible is not among them. Hence, Broward County Public Schools will continue banning the Bible.

Read more from this story HERE.

John Bolton: Children Are In Charge Of Obama’s Foreign Policy (+video)

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When asked about the Administration’s response to the kidnapping of over 200 Christian girls by a radical Islamist group in Nigeria, Bolton told WMAL radio in Washington, DC, that the President’s “hashtag diplomacy” is “embarrassing” and merely a “way of emoting. I bet it makes the people who do it feel good, but it has no impact on what’s actually going on in Nigeria.”

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WATCH: Dem Congressman Picks His Ear, Eats The Wax On Live TV

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Democratic Florida Rep. Joe Garcia appeared to pick something out of his ear and then eat it on live TV last week.

During a House Judiciary Committee markup broadcast live on C-SPAN May 7, Garcia blatantly stuck a finger in his ear, picked at it, examined his catch, and then ate it.

Read more from this story HERE.