California Wildfire Threatens Forest Homesby webdesk@voanews.com (Reuters)
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California Wildfire Threatens Forest Homesby webdesk@voanews.com (Reuters)
A wildfire raging in California's Kings Canyon National Park forced the evacuation of about 20 homes and a heat wave prompted concern that the blaze will continue to spread, authorities said on Tuesday. At 98,000 acres (40,000 hectares), the so-called Rough Fire is the largest wildfire currently burning in California, the U.S. Forest Service said, as the state wilts under a heat wave expected to bring temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37 Celsius). The Rough Fire cast smoke...
The nuclear accord with Iran has won enough support to prevent the U.S. Congress from blocking the deal, and – possibly – to prevent a resolution of disapproval from reaching President Barack Obama’s desk. As VOA’s Michael Bowman reports, more than 40 Democratic senators now back the pact, enough to keep the chamber from voting on a resolution if deal supporters unite to stop it.
China Aims to be First to Land Probe on Moon's Far Sideby webdesk@voanews.com (Associated Press)
China's space program says it plans to attempt the first-ever landing of a lunar probe on the moon's far side. Zou Yongliao from the Chinese Academy of Sciences' moon exploration department told state broadcaster CCTV on Wednesday that the Chang'e 4 mission is planned for some time before 2020. Zou said the objective of the mission would be to study geological conditions on the moon's far side, also known as the dark side. Radio transmissions from Earth are unable...
US Presidential Hopefuls to Hold Dueling Events on Iranby webdesk@voanews.com (William Gallo)
Presidential candidates from both major U.S. political parties on Wednesday will hold dueling events in Washington to discuss the merits of the Iran nuclear deal, which appears to now be assured of Congressional approval. Businessman Donald Trump will team up with fellow Republican presidential hopeful, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, and other major conservative figures at the U.S. Capitol for the"Stop the Iran Nuclear Deal Rally." Ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the...
Indian Muslims Condemn Islamic State as 'Un-Islamic'by webdesk@voanews.com (Associated Press)
More than 1,000 Muslim clerics in India have ratified a religious ruling condemning the Islamic State, calling the extremist group's actions “un-Islamic.” Religious leaders from hundreds of Islamic mosques, education institutions and civic groups across India have signed the edict, or fatwa, saying the actions of the Islamic State group went against the basic tenets of Islam. The edict was issued by a leading Mumbai-based cleric, Mohammed Manzar Hasan Ashrafi Misbahi, and has been...
Khamenei: No Iran Talks With US Outside Nuclear Dealby webdesk@voanews.com (William Gallo)
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said any future talks with the U.S. will only deal with issues related to the nuclear deal reached with world powers, and not any other areas. In a statement on his website Wednesday, Khameini said, "We approved talks with the United States about nuclear issues specifically. In other areas, we did not and will not allow negotiations with the U.S." Negotiations on other issues would only provide an opportunity for the U.S. to...
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Al-Qaida-Led Rebels Seize Airport From Syrian Militaryby webdesk@voanews.com (VOA News)
Islamist rebels have captured a major airbase from government forces in Syria's northwestern Idlib province, expelling all of President Bashar al-Assad’s military, according to Syrian state television and a war monitoring group. Wednesday's report is the latest in a series of setbacks in recent months in the nearly five-year civil war which has claimed more than 250,000 lives and forced more than four million Syrians out of their home country. State TV reported the military...
US Issues New Requirements on Cellphone Surveillanceby webdesk@voanews.com (Associated Press)
Federal law enforcement officials will be routinely required to get a search warrant before using secretive and intrusive cellphone-tracking technology under a new Justice Department policy announced Thursday. Establishing a legal standard The policy represents the first effort to create a uniform legal standard for federal authorities using equipment known as cell-site simulators, which tracks cellphones used by suspects. It comes amid concerns from privacy groups and...
Raw video footage of migrants on the Serbian border, Sept. 9, 2015.
Fire Grounds British Airways Jet in Las Vegasby webdesk@voanews.com (VOA News)
Passengers and crew aboard a British Airways jet bound for London had a close call after an engine caught fire shortly before taking off from Las Vegas late Tuesday afternoon. "All of a sudden you heard a boom, and it shook the plane," said Karen Bravo, one of 172 people aboard Flight 2276. The 60-year-old passenger from Las Vegas told the Las Vegas Review-Journal she’d "thought it was a tire blowing out, and then you heard another one and then the plane just...
In pictures: A Look at Europe migrant crisis
Queen Elizabeth Becomes Longest-Reigning British Monarchby webdesk@voanews.com (Marissa Melton)
Britain's Queen Elizabeth made history Wednesday, surpassing her great-great-grandmother to become Britain's longest-ruling monarch. The queen marks the day in an understated fashion, making a public appearance at the opening of a Scottish rail line and hosting a private dinner at her Balmoral Castle retreat in the Scottish Highlands. Meanwhile the British press is publishing tributes to Elizabeth, who has seen the nation through the decolonization of the British Empire, the...
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U.N. officials expect 7,000 migrants to cross the border from Macedonia into Serbia, continuing the massive flow of mostly Middle Eastern refugees into Europe. VOA Europe Correspondent Luis Ramirez reports from a makeshift refugee camp in northern Serbia, near the border with Hungary.
McDonald's to Switch to Cage-free Eggs Over Next Decadeby webdesk@voanews.com (Associated Press)
McDonald's says it will switch to cage-free eggs in the U.S. and Canada over the next decade, marking the latest push under CEO Steve Easterbrook to try and reinvent the Big Mac maker as a "modern, progressive burger company." Under pressure to revive slumping sales, McDonald's has already announced a number of changes since Easterbrook stepped into his role earlier this year. In March, the Oak Brook, Illinois Company said it would switch to chickens raised without most...
Protests in Turkey Stoke Fears of Ethnic Tensionsby webdesk@voanews.com (Dorian Jones)
Nationalist protests erupted Wednesday across Turkey after Kurdish PKK rebels killed more than 30 members of Turkey's security forces in the days since Sunday. Many pro-Kurdish HDP offices were targeted in the violence. Turkey's political parties called for restraint, but there are fears Turkey is edging toward an ethnic conflict. An angry mob, waving Turkish flags and calling for revenge, attacked the headquarters Tuesday night of the pro-Kurdish HDP in Ankara. Two floors were...
European Commission Chief Jean-Claude Juncker has called for the resettlement of 160,000 refugees across the 28 members of the European Union – and a permanent asylum mechanism to cope with future crises. Henry Ridgwell reports from London on the latest attempt by Brussels to deal with the huge influx of migrants and refugees.
Clinton Campaign Reset Comes as Biden Contemplates Runby webdesk@voanews.com (Jim Malone)
U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is in the midst of a major campaign reset, hoping voters will turn the page on an email controversy that has raised questions about her credibility and dogged her White House hopes for months. In an interview with ABC News anchor David Muir, Clinton indicated she now regrets her use of the private email account during her time as President Barack Obama’s secretary of state. “I should have used two accounts — one for personal and...
A look at the best news photos from around the world.
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US Targets Iran Proxiesby webdesk@voanews.com (Jamie Dettmer)
The U.S. State Department announced Tuesday that it is adding several top Hamas and Hezbollah operatives to its terrorism list. The timing of the announcement - just days before Congress is likely to vote on the recently struck nuclear deal with Iran - appears to be a signal from the Obama administration that it will intensify efforts to counter Tehran-backed militancy in the Middle East, say analysts. Congressional and overseas critics of the deal - especially in Israel and the Gulf -...
Health Professionals Using Social Media in Europe’s 'Slow-Moving Disaster' by webdesk@voanews.com (Doug Bernard)
For the thousands of Syrian refugees attempting to escape their war-torn nation in favor of safe haven in European nations like Germany, their needs often are simple: food, water, clothing and diapers top the list. And, increasingly, so are Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp. The uses of social media and digital communications during times of humanitarian crises have perhaps never been so much on display as they are currently in Europe, which is struggling to respond to a massive influx of...
Venezuela’s government extended its closing of the border with Colombia, saying it was deploying 3,000 more troops to border towns to fight the smuggling it blames for the country’s economic crisis.
China’s economic slowdown and Beijing’s fumbling policy response have battered U.S. markets recently. But a slower-growing China, over the long haul, could be a plus for the U.S. in several ways.
Two senior Mexican prosecutors pushed back against a independent report critical of their investigation into the disappearance and presumed killing last year of 43 teaching students in southern Mexico.
Otto Pérez Molina is awaiting trial on corruption charges linked to an alleged customs-fraud ring.
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Adults carry life-like American dolls that have been blessed by Buddhist monks, hoping that they bring good fortune.
U.S. and European officials said there is a growing consensus that the multinational military campaign against Islamic State must focus more on targeting the group’s nerve centers in Syria.
The Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s largest and most powerful yakuza crime syndicate, is undergoing a major split on its 100th anniversary after years of police crackdowns and financial strains.
The European Union has proposed the redistribution of 160,000 refugees and the speeding up of the repatriation of migrants who do not qualify for asylum.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said his country wouldn’t negotiate with the U.S. beyond nuclear issues.
Queen Elizabeth II arrived at an engagement in Edinburgh to cheering crowds on the day she is set to become Britain’s longest-reigning monarch.
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Chinese movie executives are taking aim at a patriotic state-backed film they claim has stolen box-office thunder.
China’s recent market turmoil and growing concern about the strength of its economy have thrust fiscal issues to the fore of President Xi Jinping’s state visit to Washington later this month.
After more than four years of conflict, Syria’s neighbors, under severe financial strain, are paring back support from bulging refugee populations.
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has dismissed 123 deputy ministers and general managers as part of a reform push aimed at reducing corruption and mismanagement which has made the country nearly impossible to govern.
BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - Brazil's popular but scandal-weary former leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva endorsed Argentina's ruling party presidential candidate on Wednesday, shoring up Daniel Scioli's credentials with the political left a month and a half before the election.
Battle shaping up in European Union over migrant quotasby By LORNE COOK and RAF CASERT
BRUSSELS (AP) -- The European Union implored its member countries Wednesday to better share the burden of refugees flooding the continent, but the numbers involved were small compared with the half-million who have already arrived and the hundreds of thousands more on their way....
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Uploaded on Jul 25, 2010
In my opinion, the best jazz song ever!!!
The Pentagon must adapt its approach to technology to incorporate commercial developments more fluidly into defense
The Middle East's most vexing challenges have little to do with Iran's capacity to build a nuclear weapon — one that a consensus of arms control experts believes will be curtailed by the current proposed agreement. Here's what is far more of a problem.
Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone
By Scott Shane
Published by Tim Duggan Books (2015)
Nearly three years ago, testifying before a congressional hearing, I observed that “the [Anwar] Al-Awlaki case will be someday the subject of a truly wonderful book. It’s a very complicated and interesting history.”
Around the same time, a journalist friend of mine asked me to suggest a counterterrorism-related book project, and I suggested Al-Awlaki.
The story, I argued, bridges the entire period of contemporary American counterterrorism. Al-Awlaki, then an imam in the United States, knew some of the 9/11 hijackers, and there was a continuing mystery as to whether he may have played a role in the September 11 attacks. Yet his subsequent demise at the business end of a Predator drone reflected the rise of the the Obama administration’s major counterterrorism initiative. At different times, Al-Awlaki played the moderate Muslim leader, and he later played the radical Muslim leader and terrorist operative. Was his story of that of the sleeper agent feigning moderation? Or was it the story of a moderate hounded by the US government into radicalism?
And then there’s the matter of Al-Awlaki’s US citizenship. For whatever else his story is, Al-Awlaki’s story is also one of the limits of the relationship between citizen and government. It’s the story of what it takes to dissolve that relationship, and when—if ever—it is legitimate for a government to hunt one of its citizens to the ends of the earth and incinerate him, and what an individual has to do to warrant that
The day I predicted in my congressional testimony has arrived, though not at the hands of the journalist to whom I suggested the project. And Scott Shane of the New York Times opens his remarkable new book on Al-Awlaki with a very similar argument for the subject’s importance to the one I advanced:
This book grew from an obsession with three questions: Why did an American who spent many happy years in the United States, launched a strikingly successful career as a preacher, and tried on the role of bridge builder after the 9/11 attacks end up dedicating his final years to plotting the mass murder of his fellow Americans? How did a president and former professor of constitutional law, who ran against the excesses of George W. Bush’s counterterrorism programs and vowed to forge a new relationship with the Muslim world, come to embrace so aggressively the targeted killing of suspected terrorists, sometimes with the emphasis on “suspected”? And what was the role of the technology that would link Obama and Awlaki, the armed drone, which was created to meet the challenge of terrorism, killed some very dangerous people, got oversold and overused, and further poisoned relationship with Muslims worldwide?
. . .
The life of Anwar al-Awlaki, who knew two of the future 9/11 hijackers at his San Diego mosque in the months before their plot unfolded, and who was killed a decade later after a high-tech, no-holds-barred manhunt, seemed to encompass the era. His story spanned four presidencies, raised in pointed ways the dangers of both terrorism and the reaction to it, and seemed emblematic of the defining conflict between America and an extreme school of Islam.
Shane’s book, Objective Troy: A Terrorist, A President, and the Rise of the Drone, takes on both the bureaucratic and military story of the rise of the drone program and Obama’s investment in it and the human story of Al-Awlaki’s own development and transformation. Objective Troy is a gripping read. It’s also one of the more informative accounts of the development of American counterterrorism—and the development of America’s terrorist enemies—that I’ve read in a while. Shane has done a great deal of reporting in a great deal of depth, from the high echelons of the White House to Yemeni friends and family of Awlaki. It’s a very impressive work across a number of axes. And to my mind, at least, it unravels some of the important mysteries about one of the more mysterious figures to arise in the post-9/11 era.
What Shane does so well in this book is to untangle several distinct narrative threads that cumulatively make the Al-Awlaki case both objectively important and subjectively fascinating. There’s the character of the man himself. Who was he really, and how and why did he radicalize—assuming he was not always a terrorist plotter? There’s the story of the development of the drone program, and Obama’s reliance on it. There’s the story of the controversy over the targeting of US citizen. There’s the story of Al-Awlaki’s impact on many English-speaking Muslims around the world, for whom he became a particularly tantalizing voice of radicalism. And there’s the story of the manhunt: how Al-Awlaki went from a guy the FBI could visit and chat with—and who could lead prayers at the Pentagon and take calls from any number of journalists—to someone who taunted American intelligence while the ACLU litigated to prevent his targeting.
Shane does an excellent job telling these stories—both disaggregating them from one another and weaving them back together. He does a particularly good job on the human side of the story: the development of Al-Awlaki’s character and thought and the impact of the whole episode on his family. Shane had the cooperation of the preacher’s father, brother, and uncle, so he is able to describe in considerable depth both the family’s efforts to restrain Al-Awlaki and its efforts to protect him.
The tragedy for the family actually went well beyond the killing of Al-Awlaki himself, because Al-Awlaki’s eldest son—then 16 years old—was also killed in a separate strike a few weeks later, after abandoning the family house to go seek out his father. However sympathetic with the Al-Awlaki strike one may be, and I have no problem with Obama’s decision, it is impossible not to sympathize with the man’s family after what these people have been through. One of the interesting features of the book is how attractive members of Al-Awlaki’s family are.
Shane, in general, does a very good job making people confront the hardest arguments and facts for whatever position they may hold. For those enthusiastic about drone strikes, he is candid about how imprecise—even incompetent—some of them have been and how many civilians have lost their lives as a result. Abdurrahman Al-Awlaki is not the only kid who died. Conversely, for those who whitewash Al-Awlaki as just a radical preacher, he lays out the evidence unsparingly that by the end, at least, he was a lot more than that. He was an operational terrorist committed to killing Americans. And for those who reflexively oppose drone strikes, his story highlights why drones hold such an attraction for Obama: because they let the US reach dangerous people it couldn’t otherwise get without resorting to major ground operations.
The book’s particular strength, at least in my opinion, is its depiction of Al-Awlaki. Shane makes a persuasive case that he probably was not involved in any way with the 9/11 plot, though he does not whitewash some suggestive facts. He also makes a persuasive argument that Al-Awlaki’s sudden abandonment of the United States in 2002 probably had little to do with jihadism or ideology and more to do with prostitution. Al-Awlaki had a bit of habit of using prostitutes, and his departure coincided with his discovery that the FBI knew about it. His radicalization, Shane’s story suggests, follows this period and may have been more a result of his leaving the U.S. than a cause of it.
Shane does not resolve the mystery of Al-Awlaki’s past completely. Those who believe that he had advance knowledge of 9/11—or played some more active role in it—have tantalizing bits to hang on. But I found Shane’s account of his emotional and intellectual trajectory pretty compelling. He was a man who could have taken any of several very different roads. He became more radical as his career options grew leaner and his following grew larger, angrier, and hungrier.
I have three relatively minor criticisms of Objective Troy.
The first is that one of the author’s conceits for the book seems to me a bit silly. In his prologue, Shane juxtaposes Obama and Al-Awlaki, as though theirs are parallel stories and developments:
When the Awlaki family strolled the streets of Manhattan on the way west that idyllic summer, a lanky, brown-skinned young man a decade older than Anwar was walking the same crowded sidewalks. . . .
Like Anwar al-Awlaki, Barack Obama had been born in the United States to a secular-minded foreign father of Muslim background who had come on scholarship to further his education. Like young Anwar, he had left the United States as a child and lived in a Muslim country. . . . Obama would embrace America and ultimately vault to the pinnacle of power, his election as president in 2008 sending a message of empowerment and possibility that resonated with millions overseas, including the Awlaki family. Awlaki would briefly sample American fame, becoming a national media star as a sensible-sounding, even eloquent cleric after 9/11 when Obama was still an unknown. Later, he would gradually and then decisively reject America and finally devote himself to its destruction. The men would never meet, except virtually, clashing in the public battleground of ideas, where the cleric’s mastery of the Internet would serve his jihadist cause, and violently, when Obama dispatched the drones that carried out Awlaki’s execution.
This reads a little preciously to me. Al-Awlaki is not interesting because he has a few life experiences in common with Obama—or vice versa. And we don’t actually learn much about America from these two men’s divergent reactions to it.
The conceit might work better if, in fact, Obama were a Muslim, so one could juxtapose their experiences as, in some sense, representative of different American Muslim reactions to the United States. But the overheated imagination of Obama’s critics aside, he isn’t a Muslim, and nothing about Obama represents the experience of American Muslims. As such, the parallels between the two men just aren’t interesting enough to be interesting. Fortunately, this theme doesn’t return all that often in the book, and when it does, it isn’t especially obtrusive.
The second problem is that Shane’s narrative sometimes makes the Al-Awlaki case seem a little harder than it really was—at least to officials within the government. He makes a lot, for example, of how ruling on the legality of the killing put David Barron and Martin Lederman—the two OLC lawyers who had to opine on it—in a difficult position. Both were severe critics of the Bush era approaches to counterterrorism, after all. And now they were defending robust government counterterrorism action.
But here, I fear, Shane’s admirable reporting tells a slightly different story. As other lawyers in the government reviewed the matter, he writes, the group “recognized the unprecedented nature of the case and discussed it at length, debating the fine points of the law and discussing whether capture might be possible. But in the end, there was no dissent.” Nobody doubted that “killing Awlaki would be legal and constitutional.”
Obama himself put it succinctly, in Shane’s telling: “This is an easy one.”
Shane notes the disparity between the unanimity on the killing in government and the more mixed perceptions outside of it. And he also notes that people outside of government tend to offer different views of the strike when he describes the evidence of what Al-Awlaki was up to than when he doesn’t. But at the end of the day, I fear that Shane may make the matter seem harder than it really is, at least legally speaking. If there is any merit at all to the United States’ view of the conflict with Al Qaeda, then surely Anwar Al-Awlaki—a man who, by Shane’s own account, was playing a leadership role in attempted attacks against the United States in a conflict authorized by Congress—was a legal target.
My final quibble with Shane’s book involves a minor sin of omission: In a long narrative about the case, he never once mentions an important option available to Al-Awlaki. Long before Al Awlaki was killed, I wrote of the debate over his being placed on the “kill list”:
The idea that Anwar al-Alauqi is being targeted for death and has no means of availing himself of his rights as a U.S. national is wrong. Like the hostage-taker, he has a remedy that will ensure his safety and give him the opportunity to defend himself: He can turn himself in. He can knock on the door of any U.S. consulate and say, "I hear you guys are looking for me." No special forces guys, Predator drones, or air strikes are going to take him out if he does this. In other words, this situation is, in conceptual terms, a fairly close analogue to the one in which cops surround a building and say, "Come out with your hands up or we'll shoot."
Shane never mentions that Al-Awlaki had the option of surrender. He makes clear that the preacher knew he was wanted. He makes clear that he had no regard for the US justice system. Yet he still falls into the trap of describing Obama as executing him without charge or trial and without any possibility of due process. It bears mention that had Al-Awlaki wanted due process, it was there for the taking. It was precisely because he didn’t wish to avail himself of legal processes—and desired to plot the deaths of Americans from the Yemeni mountains—that the drone became an attractive, and perhaps the only, option for Obama.
These are, at the end of the day, minor gripes. Shane has written an excellent book—one that looks at several big topics through the lens of what seems, at first glance, to be the narrow story of the strange death and stranger life of a single man. Given the number of people who continue to be inspired by Al-Awlaki’s words, it’s a story that—the drone that killed him notwithstanding—will be with us for a long time to come.
(Benjamin Wittes is editor-in-chief of Lawfare.)
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Iran's supreme religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a series of threatening tweets Wednesday, said Israel would not survive the next 25 years and Iran would reject any negotiations with the U.S., or the "Great Satan," beyond the nuclear deal.
An image posted to Mr. Khamenei's official Twitter account shows ...
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iran's supreme leader said Wednesday that Tehran will not expand talks with the United States beyond the international negotiations over its nuclear program and predicted that Israel would not exist in 25 years.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's statements underscored his lingering distrust of the United States and ...
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 Washington Times |
CIA to release John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson intelligence briefings
Washington Times The CIA announced Wednesday that it will be releasing previously classified President's Daily Brief (PDB) articles from the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas. The PDBs contain intelligence ... |
At the Brookings Institution, Hillary Clinton addressed the Iran deal and its implications for the future of national security and U.S. foreign policy in the region.
You can watch the full event below:
National Review Online |
FBI: Gun Sales Surged to Record Levels in August
National Review Online FBI data suggests gun sales in the U.S. shot up in August after a barrage of high-profile shootings led to renewed calls for stronger firearm laws. The FBI posted 1.7 million background checks required of gun buyers at federally-licensed dealers — the ... Gun Sales In August: Best Since FBI Background Checks Began In 1998Town Hall all 3 news articles » |
Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday declared her support for President Obama's nuclear deal with Iran but pledged to back up the deal with the threat of military action, subtly breaking with the president she served as secretary of state.
"I will not hesitate to take military action ...
September 9, 2015, 5:01 PM (IDT)
Military sources of DEBKAfile report that the Russian nuclear submarine Dmitri Donskoy TK-208, which is headed to Syrian territorial waters, crossed the Dardanelles Strait on Wednesday on is way to Syrian waters. The world’s largest submarine, accompanied by two anti-submarine warfare carriers, carries 20 intercontinental ballistic missiles and up to 200 nuclear warheads.
The sources report that military circles in Israel and other countries in the Middle East were surprised that the submarine has already reached the strategic strait linking the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, even though it only departed from its northern base September 4. It had been estimated that the submarine would need at least 10 days to reach the Middle East.
On September 7, DEBKAfile’s sources were the first to report the submarine’s voyage.
The sources report that military circles in Israel and other countries in the Middle East were surprised that the submarine has already reached the strategic strait linking the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, even though it only departed from its northern base September 4. It had been estimated that the submarine would need at least 10 days to reach the Middle East.
On September 7, DEBKAfile’s sources were the first to report the submarine’s voyage.
WASHINGTON — Lawmakers are still in negotiations over the National Defense Authorization Act, the chairmen of the House and Senate armed services committees told reporters yesterday.
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Hillary Clinton’s campaign is planning to showcase a more spontaneous and fun side of Clinton in a strategy shift.
“In extensive interviews by telephone and at their Brooklyn headquarters last week, Mrs. Clinton’s strategists acknowledged missteps—such as their slow response to questions about her email practices—and promised that this fall the public would see the sides of Mrs. Clinton that are often obscured by the noise and distractions of modern campaigning,” a report in the New York Timessaid.
The campaign now wants to show potential voters that Clinton can be funny and heartfelt.
“They want to show her humor,” the paper reported. “The self-effacing kind (‘The hair is real, the color isn’t,’ she said of her blond bob recently, taking note of Mr. Trump) has played better than her sarcastic retorts, such as when she asked if wiping a computer server was done ‘with a cloth.’ They want to show her heart, like the time she comforted former drug addicts in a school meeting room in New Hampshire.”
Clinton’s 2008 campaign made a similar shift in strategy after losing the Iowa caucus. Clinton showed a softer side, including tears, in the runup to her victory in the New Hampshire primary.
The post Report: Hillary Clinton to Begin Being Spontaneous, Fun appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.
September 9, 2015, 5:28 PM (IDT)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, accompanied by his wife Sara, departed for London on Wednesday in order to hold talks aimed at strengthening security cooperation with his British counterpart David Cameron.
Before embarking on the trip, Netanyahu said, "Europe needs to support Israel, not pressure Israel and not attack Israel, but support Israel, which is the only true protection Europe has in the Middle East against surging extremist Islam."
He added that,"We are prepared to act together with Europe in Africa and other places to fight extremist Islam but this requires a change of approach. This change will take time but we will implement it. This will be one focus of my talks with David Cameron."
Meanwhile, some 300 demonstrators waving flags and "Free Palestine" banners staged a noisy protest in central London against Netanyahu's two-day visit to Britain.
Before embarking on the trip, Netanyahu said, "Europe needs to support Israel, not pressure Israel and not attack Israel, but support Israel, which is the only true protection Europe has in the Middle East against surging extremist Islam."
He added that,"We are prepared to act together with Europe in Africa and other places to fight extremist Islam but this requires a change of approach. This change will take time but we will implement it. This will be one focus of my talks with David Cameron."
Meanwhile, some 300 demonstrators waving flags and "Free Palestine" banners staged a noisy protest in central London against Netanyahu's two-day visit to Britain.
Bobby posted on Monday about the UK decision to target and kill a UK national in Syria who was part of ISIS. (Another UK national also died in the strike.) Bobby’s post discusses the similarities between the UK legal theory, as it’s been presented publicly, and the legal theory the U.S. Government asserted in its strike on Anwar al-Awlaki. As Bobby notes, the United Kingdom’s theory is that it was acting in national self-defense against an imminent or continuing threat to the United Kingdom (which it cast as a “direct threat” in which the UK target was “seeking to orchestrate specific and barbaric attacks against the West”). But there is an aspect of the UK legal theory that merits emphasis.
Embedded in the theory justifying the UK strike in Syria is the idea that the Syrian government was unwilling or unable to suppress that threat. The UK government has not invoked the concept in explicit terms in explaining why it believes that the strike was lawful. But Prime Minister Cameron articulated that the strike was necessary – in his words, there was “no other means to stop them.” To conclude that the strike was necessary implies that it would have been impossible or ineffective to ask Syria to exercise military or police force to stop the threat. That is, because Syria was unwilling or unable to stop the threat, it was necessary for the UK itself to undertake the strike.
We should not be surprised that this is where the UK ended up. Daniel Bethlehem QC, former legal adviser to the Foreign Office, included the concept in his paper entitled, “Principles relevant to the scope of a state’s right of self-defense against an imminent or actual armed attack by nonstate actors.” In that paper, he wrote that the requirement for consent to use force in self-defense against a non-state actor in another state’s territory does not operate when there is a reasonable and objective basis for concluding that the third state is unwilling or unable to restrain the armed activities of the non-state actor, such that it is necessary for the state to act in self-defense, with no other reasonably available means to address an imminent or actual armed attack.
It’s also worth noting that France, too, appears to be prepared to invoke the “unwilling or unable” concept in the Syria context. The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that France is preparing to engage in strikes against ISIS on Syrian territory to suppress direct threats to France. If that occurs, France almost certainly will rely on the same legal theory as the United Kingdom. And Australia, whose ground forces already have been fighting ISIS in Syria, has committed to participate in airstrikes there, apparently relying on a collective self-defense of Iraq/unwilling and unable theory. These actions will add important state practice to the growing pile.
NORFOLK, Va. (AP) - An Air Force report says spatial disorientation caused an F-16 pilot to fatally crash his plane in November in the Gulf of Mexico.
Fifty-eight-year-old civilian pilot Matthew J. LaCourse of Panama City Beach was piloting the jet during a routine training exercise when it crashed near ...
WASHINGTON (AP) - Former senior CIA officials instrumental in extracting information from al-Qaida prisoners through what most Americans consider to have been torture have published a book defending their conduct.
The book, titled "Rebuttal," takes aim at the Senate intelligence committee report released last year that revealed gruesome details of ...
 Minneapolis Star Tribune |
Former CIA Leaders Release Book Defending Brutal Tactics
ABC News Former senior CIA officials instrumental in extracting information from al-Qaida prisoners through what most Americans consider to have been torture have published a book defending their conduct. The book, titled "Rebuttal," takes aim at the Senate ... Former CIA leaders say Senate report on interrogations distorted realityMinneapolis Star Tribune Shocker: The CIA Isn't Sorry For TortureHuffington Post Former CIA officials release book defending agency interrogationsWashington Post all 55 news articles » |
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Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) excoriated the Iran nuclear deal made by the Obama administration in a speech on Capitol Hill Wednesday, saying it made the White House in effect a leading sponsor of radical Islamic terrorism.
Cruz, a contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, railed against the agreement for allowing billions of dollars to go to “radical Islamic terrorists” across the world that will be used to murder people around the world. He also said the deal had gone through while four American hostages stayed stuck in an “Iranian hellhole.”
“The third consequence of this deal going through if it does is it will facilitate and accelerate the nation of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons,” Cruz said. “There is no greater threat to the safety and security of America. There is no greater threat to the safety and security of Israel.”
While no Republicans support the agreement, the deal is nearly certain to survive now that 42 Senate Democrats have publicly announced they will support the agreement. Cruz pointed this out to jeers from the crowd at Capitol Hill.
“It is my hope and prayer that every one of those Senate Democrats reconsiders, that they go home and they fall to their knees and they pray tonight,” Cruz said. “I agree with former Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman, that this vote is quite likely the most important vote that any member of Congress, any member of the Senate will cast in their entire career.”
Cruz said “sadly” there are fewer and fewer Democrats who care about national security in today’s Congress, asking whether they cared more about party loyalty to the White House instead of Americans. He said he wondered how they could look mothers of soldiers killed by Iranian IEDs in the eye after voting to lift sanctions on the regime.
“Americans will die, Israelis will die, Europeans will die,” Cruz said. “Osama bin Laden never had $100 billion. He was filled with bilious hatred, and using rudimentary tools, murdered nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001. We’re now talking about giving the Ayatollah Khamenei, a theocratic homicidal maniac, who hates America every bit as much as bin Laden did, giving him $100 billion to carry out his murderous plan.”
The post Cruz Blasts Iran Nuclear Deal at Capitol Hill Rally appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.
Mark Hoffman's YouTube channel was mostly focused on shotguns and pistols until he got his hands on an XM42, one of two personal flamethrowers put on the market this year and the subject of his rollicking video review. Anyone with $899 and an Internet connection can buy one. No background checks, no permits, and in 48 states, no regulation.
Today's Headlines and Commentaryby Elina Saxena, Cody M. Poplin
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