As Army veteran Matthew Whalen was wheeled down the halls of Plaza Fort Worth Medical Center in Texas in his final moments on Monday, current and former service members stood at attention in an emotional tribute.
His wife, fellow veteran Hannah Whalen, said her final and tearful “I love you.” But Staff Sergeant Whalen’s heroism continued into the moments past his death as his organs were donated—to two other veterans, reports Fox4KC.
“It’s almost as if it were meant to be that the two donor recipients happened to be veterans,” friend Sean Hatton’s posted on Facebook. Hatton’s cell phone video of the tribute has been viewed more than 8.5 million times as of this writing.
He notes that “there is no SOP or protocol for this type of ceremony, but with the help of Matt’s wife Hannah, all of his family, the nursing staff, and an Honor Guard we were able to show our love and appreciation in the best way we could.” The 35-year-old suffered a massive stroke on Saturday, reports CBS Local; he was diagnosed with a hemorrhage in his brain and it was determined he wouldn’t recover.
The decision was made to take him off life support when it became clear that in his death he could save two others. “That’s what Matt deserved,” Hannah said of the touching ceremony.
“He was a four-time combat veteran. He was an exceptionally loving dad. … That ceremony that they did, he deserved that recognition.” Whalen is survived by his wife and three young children, Logan, Mattix, and Sadie.
A GoFundMe page has been set up to help Hannah with the medical bills and other expenses. It surpassed the $50,000 goal in just one day.
Outrage is growing in a small northeastern Pennsylvania town after a local columnist lied about being a veteran to score free drinks at a bar — forcing the newspaper’s publisher to apologize Tuesday.
A Dec. 23 column in The Weekender — published by The Times Leader Media Group and owned by parent company Civitas Media — began in part as follows:
“I discovered the secret to getting a few drinks without having a vagina: just say you’re a veteran. Everyone wants to buy a vet a free drink.”
The column, titled, “free drinks come at a price,” was written by Justin Adam Brown, who went on to brag about tricking a Vietnam veteran into believing he had served in Iraq so he could receive free drinks.
Brown wrote that he accepted drinks from the unnamed veteran after telling him, “I fought in Iraq.” He joked about how his friend also sold a camouflage shirt to the veteran for $100, falsely claiming he got the shirt from President George W. Bush. The shirt was purchased at Macy’s, according to Brown.
The Internet buzzed about Hillary Clinton on Tuesday after a New Hampshire town hall meeting, with right-wingers and a few journalists speculating that a 9-year-old boy who asked Clinton a question about gender pay equity might have been coached.
‘My mother, over there, is complaining that she does not get much more money than my father,’ young Relic Reilly asked the former secretary of state.
‘My mother is an engineer, I meant, teacher. My father is the engineer. And I think that my mother is working more harder than my … I think my mother is working much harder, is working more harder than my father and she deserves to have more money, like, get more money, than my father. Because she’s taking care of children and I just don’t think it’s fair.’
Relic’s mother Bita Reilly, according to her LinkedIn profile, is a pre-K teacher at a cooperative preschool on the grounds of the tony Groton School, a co-ed boarding school in Groton, Massachusetts.
She told DailyMail.com via email that she and her son ‘talked last night about what we would ask’ if Clinton were to call on one of them. But she insisted that ‘my son had his own question.’
President Barack Obama’s latest Hawaiian vacation with his family is costing U.S. taxpayers about $500,000 per day and $8.1 million over the course of his presidency, according to new reports published Tuesday.
A native Hawaiian, Obama has visited the islands while president eight times for an annual Christmas vacation – with another possible in December 2016, shortly before he leaves office.
The latest trip is costing Americans approximately $500,000 a day, according to a report in the Washington Examiner that was based on Department of Homeland Security documents of Secret Service expenses for the Obamas’ Dec. 2013-Jan. 2014 trip to Hawaii.
The documents were given to the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch by a federal court.
“Today” show host Savannah Guthrie gave former President Bill Clinton the benefit of the doubt on Tuesday, by saying his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky was “alleged.”
Guthrie made the blunder while asking presidential candidate Donald Trump about his argument that Clinton’s sex scandal was fair game if Hillary Clinton continues to argue that Trump is a sexist.
“You mention Monica Lewinsky,” Guthrie asked. “Are you saying an alleged extra-marital affair, that of course he has now admitted, is that fair game?”
“Is it alleged? I don’t think that’s alleged,” Trump pounced. Clinton’s relationship with Lewinsky became clear after Lewinsky turned over a semen-stained dress of hers to investigators, and Clinton ultimately admitted an “improper” relationship with her in August, 1998.
Despite promising to shut down eavesdropping operations on American allies nearly two years ago, the Obama Administration has continued to monitor the communications of friendly heads of state, most notably Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The National Security Agency “captured communications between Mr. Netanyahu and his aides that inflamed mistrust between the two countries,” a senior intelligence official told The Wall Street Journal.
According to the official, the White House kept spying on Netanyahu because it served a “compelling national security purpose,” and used the information gleaned to counter Netanyahu’s campaign against President Obama’s proposed Iran Nuclear Deal.
Through the probe, the White House discovered Netanyahu’s office had “coordinated talking points with Jewish-American groups against the deal,” and communicated with American lawmakers to see “what it would take to win their votes.”
ISIS’ all female police force, the al-Khansaa Brigade, brutally murdered a woman breastfeeding her infant in public. The unnamed woman was wearing her full-veil burqa and held her son underneath the burqa, but was still spotted.
“An ISIS policewoman took the baby, gave it to another woman, and then killed the mother,” Aisha, a former Raqqa resident now living Turkey, told the Sunday Times. The mother was ruled in violation of “public decency.”
According to ISIS-linked social media accounts, before the mother was murdered, she was mutilated.
The owners of the now-closed Sweet Cakes Bakery in Gresham, Oregon have paid out more than $135,000 in damages for refusing to bake a cake for a lesbian wedding.
Klein turned in a check for $136,927.07, which included interest on the July 2015 state-ordered judgment, to the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries in Portland after violating the Laurel and Rachel Bowman-Cryer’s civil rights, according to OregonLive.com.
“My clients are happy the Kleins paid the fine and are moving forward,” the Bowman-Cryer’s lawyer Paul Thompson told the Oregon paper. “I hope to see the ruling upheld on appeal.”
The incident took place back in 2013, when Laurel Bowman-Cryer went to the bakery for a wedding cake tasting. She was told the bakery could not make the cake for religious reasons. Bowman-Cryer filed a complaint with the State of Oregon and the labor commissioner awarded the damages, claiming it was a violation of state law to discriminate based on sexual orientation.
President Barack Obama will be making good use of Air Force One while he still can.
Obama has asked aides to set a busy international travel schedule for him in his final year, with “half a dozen” trips already in the works and more potentially coming together. The travel will be aimed at cementing a foreign policy legacy he hopes will include the Trans-Pacific Partnership, increased attention to Asia, an opening of Latin America, progress against the Islamic State and significant global movement on climate change.
He’ll be fighting the same battle to keep the world from looking past him as he will be at home. But White House aides insist that what they’ve got ahead in 2016 is more than just a standard eighth-year world tour to try to assert themselves and stay clear of the presidential campaign.
The only continents the White House is ruling out as presidential destinations are Australia and Antarctica. And while another multi-stop trip to Africa is also off the table (after a visit to Kenya and Ethiopia in 2015), aides familiar with the matter say, a single stop there tacked onto another trip, perhaps one to Europe, is still possible.
Police are seeking to identify a man who placed raw bacon on the door handles of a Las Vegas mosque, an apparent hate crime that was recorded by surveillance cameras.
According to cops, the defacement of the Masjid Tawheed mosque occurred around 3:15 AM Sunday. Video captured a man first placing bacon on the handle of the mosque’s rear door. The vandal then walked to the mosque’s main entrance and stringed several pieces of bacon across the front door handles (as seen in the adjacent photo).
The bacon was discovered hours later by worshipers arriving at the mosque for early morning prayers. Muslims are prohibited from touching or consuming bacon and other pork products.
Based on surveillance video, the suspect, who wore a baseball cap and glasses, appears to be a white male with a mustache, goatee, and long sideburns. It is unclear how he arrived at the mosque in Spring Valley, a town two miles from the Las Vegas Strip.
In April, an Oklahoma mosque reported to cops that “someone put uncooked bacon on the door handles of the men’s and women’s mosques” on a Sunday morning. No arrests have been made in connection with the incident at the Islamic Society of Edmond.
Over the past year, I’ve written more stories about Tamir Rice, his murder, what I believed is a concerted coverup, the corruption of the Cleveland Police Department and the Cuyahoga Prosecutor’s Office, and the unbelievable pain experienced by Tamir’s family than any other single topic of injustice. As a father of five young kids, no police murder simultaneously kicked me in the gut and broke my heart like that of a 12-year-old boy playing in his local park getting shot and killed by police.
A British couple who plotted to bomb a popular London shopping mall and the city’s subway system were found guilty of terrorism Tuesday by a U.K. court, the latest in a string of prosecutions aimed at homegrown Muslim extremists inspired by Islamic State.
Mohammed Rehman, 25, from Reading, west of London, and his wife, Sana Ahmed Khan, 24, from the nearby town of Wokingham, assiduously set about constructing explosives capable of causing mass casualties and were on the brink of executing their plans when specialist counterterrorism police arrested them in late May, prosecutors said.
Belgian authorities said Tuesday they had potentially broken up a plan for attacks during the holiday period, holding two people on terrorism charges and seizing military-style clothing and Islamic State propaganda.
Among the intended targets were the Grand Place, the capital’s central square and site of its largest Christmas market, and a nearby police station, according to a person briefed on the investigations.
Parts of the city’s New Year’s Eve celebrations are also scheduled to take place in the area, but authorities said they didn’t have information about a specific date when the attacks were supposed to take place.
The mayor of Cleveland confirmed today that there will be an administrative review of the police officers’ actions in the Tamir Rice shooting, one day after a grand jury decided not to press criminal charges against the officers involved.
“People are upset, and legitimately and rightfully so,” Mayor Frank Jackson said at a press conference this afternoon.
Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty announced Monday that a grand jury declined to indict two police officers in connection with Tamir’s death. Tamir was holding a toy gun when he was shot by officer Timothy Loehmann at a Cleveland playground in November 2014.
One of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s deputy chiefs of staff was attacked Sunday evening while attending a vigil for Bettie Jones and Quintonio LeGrier, who were fatally shot by Chicago Police in West Garfield Park on Saturday.
According to a source, Vance Henry was attending the vigil about 5:50 p.m. at the site of the shooting in the 4700 block of West Erie when he was attacked.
The police department’s Office of News Affairs confirmed that a 50-year-old man was at the vigil when “he was approached by an unknown person who began to make verbal threats which escalated to a physical altercation.”
Saudi Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz has claimed that the Islamic State (Daesh) militants are Israeli soldiers and the Saudi-led 34-nation military alliance of Islamic countries will defeat it.
The statement came after Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the secretive leader of the terror group, called for an uprising in Saudi Arabia and pledged to attack Israel, in an audio recording released Saturday and attributed to him, AFP reported.
Terming the extremist group’s threat to attack Israel a ‘lie’, Aziz alleged that IS is a part of the Israeli army.
“This threat against Israel is simply a lie. Actually, Daesh is part of the Israeli soldiers,” said the grand mufti, who is also a chairman of Senior Scholars’ Commission and Ifta Council, during a telephonic interview with Saudi Gazette.
Criticising the militant group, he said the members of the terror outfit were causing a deal of harm to Islam and Muslims.
WASHINGTON — Even as the Obama administration scrambles to confront the Islamic State and resurgent Taliban, an old enemy seems to be reappearing in Afghanistan: Qaeda training camps are sprouting up there, forcing the Pentagon and American intelligence agencies to assess whether they could again become a breeding ground for attacks on the United States.
Most of the handful of camps are not as big as those that Osama bin Laden built before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But had they re-emerged several years ago, they would have rocketed to the top of potential threats presented to President Obama in his daily intelligence briefing. Now, they are just one of many — and perhaps, American officials say, not even the most urgent on the Pentagon’s list in Afghanistan.
The scope of Al Qaeda’s deadly resilience in Afghanistan appears to have caught American and Afghan officials by surprise. Until this fall, American officials had largely focused on targeting the last remaining senior Qaeda leaders hiding along Afghanistan’s rugged, mountainous border with Pakistan.
At least in public, the administration has said little about the new challenge or its strategy for confronting the threat from Al Qaeda, even as it rushes to help the Afghan government confront what has been viewed as the more imminent threat, the surge in violent attacks from the Taliban, the Haqqani network and a new offshoot of the Islamic State. Former administration officials have been more outspoken — especially those who were on the front lines of the original battle to destroy Al Qaeda’s central leadership.
“I do worry about the rebirth of AQ in Afghanistan because of what their target list will be — us,” said Michael Morell, the deputy director of the C.I.A. until two years ago, whose book, “The Great War of Our Time,” recounts the efforts of the Bush and Obama administrations to destroy the Qaeda leadership
