A man has been arrested for allegedly supporting ISIS and planning an attack on New Year’s Eve.
Emanuel Lutchman, 25, a Muslim convert with mental health problems who is a former convict was picked up by authorities after they learned he was preparing a machete attack on diners at a local restaurant or bar in Rochester, New York.
Federal prosecutors claim Lutchman had been in contact with a member of the terrorist organization in Syria who urged him to kill non-Muslims.
He has now been charged with with attempting to provide material support to ISIL, which is publishable by up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
“Star Wars” creator George Lucas has compared Disney, which purchased his signature franchise for $4 billion, to “white slavers.”
Lucas made the comments during an interview with Charlie Rose that aired on Christmas, but is receiving attention a few weeks after the franchise’s newest installment, “The Force Awakens,” has taken the movie industry by storm.
“These are my kids,” Lucas said of the franchise. “I loved them, I created them. I’m very intimately involved with them.”
When pressed about why he sold Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012, Lucas said, “I sold them to the white slavers that take these things and …” He trailed off laughing before completing the sentence.
A report published by the National Wildlife Foundation finds that the majority of Americans can expect to suffer mental health problems as a result of global warming and warns that our mental health system is not equipped to handle it.
“The interplay between the climate realities we likely face and the potential psychological fallout from them was the subject of a conference convened in Washington D.C., in March 2009,” write Lise van Susteren, MD, and Kevin J. Doyle, JD, introducing their work. “A highly respected group of experts offered insights. Their thoughts, recommendations and supporting evidence are presented in this report.”
“The Psychological Effects of Global Warming on the United States,” examines the hitherto undiscussed effects of increasingly prevalent extreme weather, sea level rise, drought and other impacts of climate change on mental health. How will we cope with a changing world?
“The incidences of mental and social disorders will rise steeply. These will include depressive and anxiety disorders, post traumatic stress disorders, substance abuse, suicides, and widespread outbreaks of violence. Children, the poor, the elderly, and those with existing mental health disorders are especially vulnerable and will be hardest hit.”
Or as Biden would call it, this is a big f*cking deal.
WASHINGTON – The administration issued a record amount of heft in the federal rule book in 2015 as President Obama’s team, carrying out his orders to work around Congress, pushed his expansive government agenda on environmental, labor and Wall Street policy.
With one day to go, the administration added 81,611 pages to the Federal Register, according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s count of the official record-keeping digest of federal agencies’ rule-making. It’s the highest total on record and the third time Mr. Obama has crossed the 80,000-page level during his presidency, the institute’s Clyde Wayne Crews calculated.
“This is the pen and phone era, and the president has made clear he’s going to go around Congress when he gets the chance,” Mr. Crews said. “We expected Congress to do something about it, but it didn’t.”
Instead, it was the federal court system that challenged the executive branch in 2015, and Mr. Obama was dealt several significant defeats in front of judges who shut down two of his biggest initiatives: to rewrite immigration law and to extend the hand of the federal government to permitting decisions throughout the country.
All told, the administration has proposed 2,334 rules and finalized 3,378 rules and regulations during the year, Mr. Crews said.
Comedian-in-Chief Barack Obama on Wednesday fired off quips alongside Jerry Seinfeld to open season 7 of “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.”
“I always wanted to be in a show about nothing and here I am,” Obama says.
“There’s nothing more nothing than this,” Seinfeld responds. “Nothing.”
The online series features Seinfeld driving around various cities with other comedians. This time, however, the president joined Seinfeld for a trip across the South Lawn in a blue 1963 Corvette Stingray Split Window Coupe before heading into the White House for coffee.
“This is a sweet car right here,” Obama says as he and Seinfeld approach the vehicle parked outside the White House. “This is beautiful.”
“My thought: the coolest car, American-made, for the coolest guy ever to hold this office,” Seinfeld explains, much to the president’s liking.
Oregon State University will hold four racially-exclusive “Social Justice Retreats” focusing on “white privilege,” “microaggressions,” and “institutional racism” in the first month of 2016 alone.
During the weekend of January 8-10, the university will have two retreats — one specifically for white students, “Examining White Identity in a Multicultural World,” and “Racial Aikido,” which is specifically for non-white students.
According to the university website, the white students’ retreat will focus on “white privilege,” while the retreat for non-white students will seek to “empower students of color.”
The university will hold another retreat on January 30th titled “Multiracial Aikido”– just for multiracial students. The university website invites multiracial OSU students to attend and gain “a better understanding of your multiracial identities.”
During her eight years in the U.S. Senate, Hillary Clinton sponsored just three bills that eventually became law.
Clinton served as the junior senator from New York from January 2001 to January 2009, during George W. Bush’s presidency. The three pieces of legislation that became law named a highway, renamed a post office and designated a historic site.
The first piece of legislation S.3145, designated a portion of U.S. Route 20A, located in Orchard Park, N.Y., as the “Timothy J. Russert Highway,” after the former “Meet the Press” host.
The second piece of legislation S. 3613, renamed the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 2951 New York Highway 43 in Averill Park, New York, as the “Major George Quamo Post Office Building.”
Since when does TV closely align with reality? Pretty rarely. However, whenever there’s an agenda to be achieved by doing so, you can expect liberals to chime in.
Recently, NPR reported results from a University of California study that revealed TV portrayals of women who have abortions make them whiter, younger, wealthier and less likely to already have children than true statistics reflect.
According to research sociologist Gretchen Sisson, “very few people have a context for the reality of abortion care, so these fictional stories that happen on-screen can have greater power to influence perceptions of what that care looks like in real life.”
A Huffington Post article weighed in on the same study. “Abortion on the small (and big) screen helps to push the conversation forward, normalize a still very taboo topic, and de-stigmatize abortions and the women who have them.” Aha! So there’s the agenda.
The misrepresentative factors on TV work “to build an interesting social myth,” Sisson continued. The top on-screen reasons for abortion “contribute to the construction of abortion as a self-focused decision, and to the belief that abortions are ‘wanted’ because of personal desires rather than ‘needed’ because of circumstances such as poverty.” Even if you acknowledge the rare cases of a mother’s life being jeopardy, abortions would be rarely “needed.” There’s a great solution for impoverished mothers who can’t support their babies – adoption. Maybe Sisson hasn’t heard of it.
Politico reports that President Obama’s upcoming executive gun control will force a number of private gun sellers to get their Federal Firearms License (FFL) and perform background checks on every gun sold.
This is will not do away with the nonexistent “gun show loophole,” but it will further limit Americans’ freedom to sell guns to their neighbors or family members without a background check–which is ultimately what Democrats want to accomplish anyway.
According to Politico, “Obama will tighten the definition of what it means to be ‘engaged in the business’ of firearms sales.” Currently, those who sell firearms with the “principal objective of livelihood and profit” must have an FFL. Those selling as hobby or those who sell occasionally from a private collection do not. Obama plans to change the language so that those who sell as a hobby will be placed under the same heading as those who sell for a living.
Breitbart News previously reported that Micheal Bloomberg met with Obama in mid-December to discuss using an executive action to bypass Congress and secure this gun control expansion.
Obama is also expected to add new requirements to the numerous ones already in place for FFLs by “[imposing] tighter rules for reporting guns that get lost or stolen on their way to a buyer.”
Neither of these executive gun controls would have prevented even one of high profile shootings from the last decade, but both will succeed in placing a further burden on the exercise of the 2nd Amendment.
In the 1960s, Malcolm X was regularly frustrated when people expected black athletes and entertainers to be effective spokesmen on civil rights issues. Back then, and now, it often leads to a whole lot of disappointment. Once in a blue moon the earth gives us a Harry Belafonte or Muhammad Ali, but they are the ultra rare exceptions to the rule.
LeBron James is one of my favorite athletes. The dude has a work ethic on and off the court that is unmatched. His character as a husband and father are unquestioned and he appears to be an incredibly altruistic and generous man. Sadly, with his recent comments on the death of Tamir Rice and the lack of charges for the officers who killed him, LeBron James has proven that he is not an exception to the rule.
As a fan, I am sincerely surprised and highly disappointed in what LeBron said (and didn’t say) about the case.
Speaking after a recent game, when asked about Tamir’s death, LeBron said, “For me, I’ve always been a guy who’s took pride in knowledge of every situation that I’ve ever spoke on. And to be honest, I haven’t really been on top of this issue. So it’s hard for me to comment. I understand that any lives that [are] lost, what we want more than anything is prayer and the best for the family, for anyone. But for me to comment on the situation, I don’t have enough knowledge about it.”
LeBron is a father to two young sons close to Tamir’s age. The shooting death and subsequent decision not to prosecute the officers is the most covered news story of police violence in Cleveland’s history. It has absolutely gripped the nation, but somehow, most of us know about this case and LeBron doesn’t.
Listen, I know LeBron isn’t Muhammad Ali and I definitely knew he isn’t Malcolm X, but for him to basically say he can’t even comment on this case because he simply doesn’t know enough about it is appalling.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s usual New Year speech will be available with Arabic subtitles this year, in the surest sign yet that Germany is bending to the hordes of migrants that have settled there, rather than requiring them to learn the native language.
The announcement was made by the state television broadcaster, ZDF, which has already made available a video message from the German President, Joachim Gauck, with Arabic subtitle.
The speech, which is usually between six and seven minutes long, traditionally includes a roundup of the year gone by, and a message from the German leader about the prospects for the year ahead. It tends to be overtly political, and a way for the Chancellor to hammer home her side of the story on the years’ events.
This year will no doubt centre around the migrant crisis, which has served as the catalyst for a slump in Mrs. Merkel’s party approval ratings, as well the rise of the PEGIDA movement and the Alternative fur Deutschland party.
The ZDF has even set up a dedicated Arabic subdomain on its website: http://arabic.zdf.de, as well as a mobile site called “ZDFarabic”.
The Arabic subtitles are not set to be broadcast on television, but online only, and the Middle Eastern language joins English as the only language the speeches were previously subtitled into.
The Horned-One penned this absurd op-ed for the Guardian:
… The jihadi terrorists’ ultimate goal is to convince Muslim youth worldwide that there is no alternative to terrorism. And terrorist attacks are the way to achieve that goal, because the fear of death will awaken and magnify the latent anti-Muslim sentiments in Europe and America, inducing the non-Muslim population to treat all Muslims as potential attackers.
And that is exactly what is happening. The hysterical anti-Muslim reaction to terrorism is generating fear and resentment among Muslims living in Europe and America. The older generation reacts with fear, the younger one with resentment; the result is a breeding ground for potential terrorists. This is a mutually reinforcing, reflexive process.
How can it be stopped and reversed? Abandoning the values and principles underlying open societies and giving in to an anti-Muslim impulse dictated by fear certainly is not the answer, though it may be difficult to resist the temptation. I experienced this personally when I watched the last Republican presidential debate; I could stop myself only by remembering that it must be irrational to follow the wishes of your enemies. […]
Consider the Syrian conflict, which is the root cause of the migration problem that is posing an existential threat to the European Union as we know it. If it was resolved, the world would be in better shape. It is important to recognise that Isis is operating from a position of weakness. While it is spreading fear in the world, its hold on its home ground is weakening. The United Nations security council has unanimously adopted a resolution against it, and the leaders of Isis are aware that their days in Iraq and Syria are numbered.
Of course, the outlook for Syria remains highly uncertain, and the conflict there cannot be understood or tackled in isolation. But one idea shines through crystal clear: it is an egregious mistake to do what the terrorists want us to do. That is why, as 2016 gets underway, we must reaffirm our commitment to the principles of open society and resist the siren song of the likes of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, however hard that may be.
German officials have ordered a cover-up of crimes committed by migrants to prevent causing alarm, a local newspaper has claimed.
Asylum seekers are being recruited across the country as cheap drug dealers as well as petty thieves, says German newspaper, Bild – the biggest daily paper in the country.
The paper accused the police of covering up the extent of migrant crimes in order to stop concerns among the general population.
It also claimed asylum seekers were prepared to work for a few euros couriering drugs across the country and said they were being signed up almost as soon as they had registered as asylum seekers.
At Hillary Clinton’s confirmation hearing for secretary of state, she promised she would take “extraordinary steps…to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.”
Later, more than two dozen companies and groups and one foreign government paid former President Bill Clinton a total of more than $8 million to give speeches around the time they also had matters before Mrs. Clinton’s State Department, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.
Fifteen of them also donated a total of between $5 million and $15 million to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, the family’s charity, according to foundation disclosures.
In several instances, State Department actions benefited those that paid Mr. Clinton.
