Obama ask FBI to track citizens

Evidence continues to mount that the U.S. government is keen on tracking its citizens.

The FBI has started rolling out its $1 billion biometric Next Generation Identification (NGI) system, a nationwide database of mug shots, iris scans, DNA samples, voice recordings, palm prints, and other biometrics collected from more than 100 million Americans and intended to help identify and catch criminals.

The FBI has been piloting the program with several states and by the time it’s fully deployed in 2014 will have at its fingertips a facial recognition database that includes at least 12 million photos of people’s faces.

Read more : http://www.pcworld.com/article/262044/how_the_feds_are_tracking_us.html

Obama forces Christians to provide contraceptives

Evangelical and Catholic groups on Friday blasted the Obama administration over its decision not to expand religious exemption from the new health care law that will require them to provide insurance plans covering contraceptives, sterilization and some abortion-causing drugs.

 

Christian groups joined together in condemning “Obamacare” after the Health and Human Services announced its decision, which officials claimed was reached after reviewing more than 200,000 comments from interested parties and the public.

“Despite the fact that certain drugs and devices approved by the FDA can work after conception to destroy a newly developed baby, the Obama Administration mandate still forces all insurance plans to carry these drugs and devices even if employers are morally opposed,” Tom McClusky of Family Research Council Action said in a statement.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said religious groups would have one additional year to comply with the mandate (until August 2013 rather than August 2012). “I believe this proposal strikes the appropriate balance between respecting religious freedom and increasing access to important preventive services.”

But McClusky said the one-year delay “does nothing to change the anti-religious, anti-conscience, and anti-life contraceptive mandate, rather it only postpones its implementation until after the presidential election.”

The new rule also mandates that religious groups with a one-year reprieve in the meantime be “forced to tell their employees where to obtain contraceptives,” FRC Action pointed out. “This completely violates the conscience rights of many Americans. As we approach the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade tomorrow may all voters who respect life take note of the Obama Administration’s ardent policies against life and religious liberty and vote accordingly in November.”

 

The National Association of Evangelicals also said it was “deeply disappointed” by the White House decision that was announced Friday. Freedom of conscience is a “sacred gift from God, not a grant from the state,” said Galen Carey, vice president for Government Relations at NAE. “No government has the right to compel its citizens to violate their conscience. The HHS rules trample on our most cherished freedoms and set a dangerous precedent.”

The HHS policy includes a thin exemption for religious organizations that focus only on religious services to their own members.

“The exemption leaves the vast majority of religious employers who serve the entire community unprotected,” the NAE stated. “If this narrow definition of ‘religious employer’ is adopted in other areas of law, it may lead to further erosion of the conscience protections Americans have historically held.”

FRC Action also contended that the mandate, issued in August, violates the principles of the Church Amendment which protects conscience rights for those who object to contraceptives and other services on moral or religious grounds,. “Additionally, the U.S. government already funds domestic family planning at a level of $1.9 billion annually.”

Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan of New York also lambasted the Obama administration’s health care law. “Never before has the federal government forced individuals and organizations to go out into the marketplace and buy a product that violates their conscience,” he said in a statement. “This shouldn’t happen in a land where free exercise of religion ranks first in the Bill of Rights.”

He encouraged his community to tell their elected leaders that “you want religious liberty and rights of conscience restored and that you want the administration’s contraceptive mandate rescinded.”

Religious groups are not likely to comply, the Washington-based Becket Fund for Religious Liberty has hinted.

Given the anger among religious groups, they might choose to pay fines rather than act against their conscience, some believe.

Iran plans one-kiloton underground nuclear test in 2012

An underground nuclear test

According to debkafile’s Iranian sources, Tehran is preparing an underground test of a one-kiloton nuclear device during 2012, much like the test carried out by North Korea in 2006. Underground facilities are under construction in great secrecy behind the noise and fury raised by the start of advanced uranium enrichment at Iran’s fortified, subterranean Fordo site near Qom.
All the sanctions imposed so far for halting Iran’s progress toward a nuclear weapon have had the reverse effect, stimulating rather than cooling its eagerness to acquire a bomb.

Yet, according to a scenario prepared by the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) at Tel Aviv University for the day after an Iranian nuclear weapons test, Israel was resigned to a nuclear Iran and the US would offer Israel a defense pact while urging Israel not to retaliate.

As quoted by the London Times Monday, Jan. 1, INSS experts, headed by Gen. (ret.) Giora Eiland, a former head of Israel’s National Security Council, deduced from a simulation study they staged last week that. Their conclusion is that neither the US nor Israel will use force to stop Iran’s first nuclear test which they predicted would take place in January 2013.

Our Iranian sources stress, however, that Tehran does not intend to wait for the next swearing-in of a US president in January 2013,  whether Barack Obama is returned for a second term or replaced by a Republican figure, before moving on to a nuclear test.

Iran’s Islamist rulers have come to the conclusion from the Bush and Obama presidencies that America is a paper tiger and sure to shrink from attacking their nuclear program – especially while the West is sunk in profound economic distress.

debkafile’s sources stress that both Tehran and the INSS are wrong: The Tel Aviv scenario is the work of a faction of retired Israeli security and intelligence bigwigs who, anxious to pull the Netanyahu government back from direct action against the Islamic Republic, have been lobbying for the proposition that Israel can live with a nuclear-armed Iran.
Our Washington sources confirm, however, that President Obama considers the risk of permitting a nuclear-armed Iran to be greater than the risks of military action.

Monday, Jan. 9, top administration officials said that developing a nuclear weapon would cross a red line and precipitate a US strike. US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta: “If Iran takes the step to develop a nuclear weapon or blocking the Strait of Hormuz, they’re going to be stopped.” He was repeating the warnings of the past month made by himself and Chairman of the Joint US Chiefs of Staff. Gen. Martin Dempsey.

As for Israel, Dennis Ross, until recently senior adviser to President Obama, reiterated in a Bloomberg interview on Jan. 10: “No one should doubt that President Barack Obama is prepared to use military force to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon if sanctions and diplomacy fail.”
As for Israel, Ross said: “I wouldn’t discount the possibility that the Israelis would act if they came to the conclusion that basically the world was prepared to live with Iran with nuclear weapons,” he said. “They certainly have the capability by themselves to set back the Iranian nuclear program.”

Israel’s media screens and front pages are dominated these days by short-lived, parochial political sensations and devote few words to serious discourse on such weighty issues as Iran’s nuclear threat.
This is a luxury that the US president cannot afford in an election year.  Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear bomb and conduct of a nuclear test would hurt his chances of a second term. The race is therefore on for an American strike to beat Iran’s nuclear end game before the November 2012 presidential vote.

The INSS have also wrongly assessed Russia’s response to an Iranian nuclear test as “to seek an alliance with the US to prevent nuclear proliferation in the region.”
This fails to take into account that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, running himself for a third term as president in March, has already committed Moscow to a new Middle East policy which hinges on support for a nuclear Iran and any other Middle East nation seeking a nuclear program. This is part of Russia’s determined plan to trump America’s Arab Spring card. source – DEBKA

Mullahs in Iran going to fire missiles

 

Iran has been preparing Palestinian terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon to retaliate in the case of Israeli strikes against Tehran’s nuclear sites, according to Egyptian security officials speaking to WND.

The security officials said Tehran was convinced the Jewish state was going to attack its suspected nuclear sites in September, prompting Iran to hold joint military drills with Gazan jihad groups in August, including with Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Similar drills were held in August with Hezbollah militants in Lebanon.

Those drills were conducted by Iranian Revolutionary Guard members, the officials said. The exercises focused largely on coordinated missile onslaughts from both Gaza and Lebanon aimed at blanketing the Jewish.

According to the Egyptian security officials, any attack against Iran or Syria would result in an immediate Iranian missile campaign against Israel using proxies in Gaza and Lebanon.

The international news media has been replete with reports in recent days speculating Israel is strongly considering striking Iran’s suspected illicit nuclear sites.
Read more:Iran prepping for missile attack on Israel

 

Obama’s next target after Libya, Israel?

Arab League chief on board that created doctrine used to bomb nation

 

 

TEL AVIV – Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa served on the committee that invented the military doctrine used by President Obama as the main justification for U.S. and international airstrikes against Libya, WND has learned.

The discovery is particularly pertinent because on Sunday Moussa announced during a special meeting in Cairo that the Arab League plans to press the U.N. to impose a no-fly zone over the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip similar to the one imposed now on Libya.

Moussa said he plans to present the proposal to the U.N. Security Council.

The call comes as Hamas has fired over 140 rockets into Jewish civilian population zones, prompting Israel to carry out anti-terror operations in Gaza aimed at diminishing Hamas’ rocketing capabilities.

As WND was first to report, billionaire philanthropist George Soros is a primary funder and key proponent of the Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect, the world’s leading organization pushing the military doctrine. Several of the doctrine’s main founders sit on multiple boards with Soros.

The doctrine and its founders, as WND reported, have been deeply tied to Obama aide Samantha Power, who reportedly heavily influenced Obama in consultations leading to the decision to bomb Libya. Power is the National Security Council special adviser to Obama on human rights.

Now it has emerged that Moussa served on the advisory board of the 2001 commission that originally founded Responsibility to Protect.

That commission is called the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. It invented the term “Responsibility to Protect,” while defining its guidelines.

On the 2001 commission board with Moussa, as WND first revealed, was Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi, a staunch denier of the Holocaust who long served as the deputy of late PLO leader Yasser Arafat.

Also on the commission board was the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, which was founded by White House aid Samantha Power.

Power was Carr’s founding executive director and headed the institute at the time it advised in the founding of Responsibility to Protect. She is the National Security Council special adviser to Obama on human rights.

She reportedly heavily influenced Obama in consultations leading to the decision to bomb Libya.

Read more: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=286093

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• George Soros; The Responsibility to Protect act signals the end of Israel
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Hackers could take over space station

‘Threat to computer networks is tangible and expanding in both scope and frequency’

 

Paul Martin, the NASA inspector general, is reporting NASA‘s computer network was so vulnerable to cyber attack that computer hackers could take control of a spacecraft while in flight, according to a report fromJoseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.

In part, the report states, “We found that computer servers on NASA’s agency-wide mission network had high-risk vulnerabilities that were exploitable from the Internet. Specifically, six computer servers associated with IT assets that control spacecraft and contain critical data had vulnerabilities that would allow a remote attacker to take control of or render them unavailable.”

These weaknesses could have a “catastrophic” effect on NASA operations, his report explains.

Read more: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=283409

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Strategy to invade Israel posted on Facebook

Campaign states goal: ‘May the state of the sons of Zion fall’

 

 

Social-networking sites, specifically Facebook, are being used to promote a campaign that appears to target the very existence of Israel, with hundreds of thousands worldwide seeking to join in a plan to “return” to and take over the original homes of their families in “Palestine” on May 15.

According to an in-depth report by L. Barkan, a research fellow at the Middle East Media Research Institute, which monitors and analyzes media reports throughout the Middle East, the idea being circulated is “for millions of Palestinian refugees to march en masse in return to the original homes of their families in Israel.”

The movement’s plans call for this to be much more than just a visit, however.

“All the families of Jewish settlers in the Galilee area, including in the areas of Safed, Tiberias, and all the way down to Acre, must proceed to the port of Haifa and board ships back to their countries of origin in Europe,” explained one posting that is part of the campaign.

It provided instructions for others to report to other ports – all by the middle of March, a deadline long past.

“The message also warned that anyone trying to take ‘archeological artifacts [or anything belonging] to the Palestinian heritage, even a single ball of falafel, will be pursued and arrested by Interpol in his new place of residence,’” the report said.

One of the Facebook pages soliciting participants in what apparently would be an invasion and attempted overthrow of the region’s existing government has been removed by the Facebook administration, but not before collecting some 350,000 endorsements from readers. Other pages remain.

According to MEMRI, some of the Facebook pages “stress that the activities are meant to be peaceful and unarmed, while others hint at violence and armed resistance.”

“It also has gained the support of Palestinian officials, through the PLO Department of Expatriate Affairs … which has called on Palestinians living abroad to participate in the march and to publicize it among the Palestinian communities and organizations worldwide,” the MEMRI report said.

Timetables to coordinate the events have been posted by administrators who explain it is the moral and legal right of refugees to return to their homes.

One page, “The 2011 March of Return,” said, “The goal of [the Facebook] group … is to organize a march of millions, who, on May 15, 2011, will realize the Right of Return to Palestine in deed as well as in word.”

 

Read more: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=281293

 

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Islamists Are Elated by Revolts in the Middle East

Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American cleric who is a top propagandist for Al Qaeda, broke his silence on the uprisings in the Arab world on Wednesday, claiming that Islamist extremists had gleefully watched the success of protest movements against governments they had long despised.

“The mujahedeen around the world are going through a moment of elation,” Mr. Awlaki wrote in a new issue of the English-language Qaeda magazine Inspire, “and I wonder whether the West is aware of the upsurge of mujahedeen activity in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Arabia, Algeria and Morocco?”

Mr. Awlaki’s four-page essay, titled “The Tsunami of Change,” is among a handful of statements by Al Qaeda’s leaders countering the common view among Western analysts that the terrorist network looks irrelevant at a time of change unprecedented in the modern Middle East. In ousting the rulers of Tunisia and Egypt and threatening other Arab leaders, a core of secular-leaning demonstrators have called for democracy and generally avoided violence — all at odds with Al Qaeda’s creed as it tries to instill rigid Islamist rule across the world.

Mr. Awlaki asks, “Doesn’t the West realize how the jihadi work would just take off as soon as the regimes of the Gulf start crumbling?”

Read more

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/world/middleeast/31inspire.html?ref=world

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Iranian chocolate thief ‘to have hand chopped off

An Iranian judge has sentenced a man convicted of robbing a confectionery shop to have one of his hands cut off, Iranian media report.

 

The judge also sentenced the man to one year in prison.

Police arrested the man in May after finding $900 (£560), three pairs of gloves and a large amount of chocolate in his car, Fars news agency said.

Under Iran‘s Islamic law, amputations are usually reserved for habitual thieves.

Last week, authorities cut off the hand of a man convicted of two robberies in the north-eastern city of Mashhad.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11559750

Related Articles

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God bless Barack Obama

Unexpected comment among several stunning statements in Miami

 

By Drew Zahn

MIAMI – On the same morning that Floyd Brown rallied attendees of WND’s “Taking America Back Conference” with reasons to impeach the sitting president, speaker Aaron Klein surprised the audience by declaring, “God bless Barack Obama.”

The words may have sounded strange coming from Klein, WND’s senior reporter, WABC Radio host and author of “The Manchurian President.”

But Klein prefaced his comments by explaining his research over the past two years uncovering Obama’s ties to radical socialists and anti-American influences, as well as his work even longer to sound the alarm over radical Islam.

“God Bless Obama for waking up this country to these [radical Islamic] threats and the threat of what he is,” Klein said. “He did in a year and a half what I couldn’t do in five or six years.”

Alluding to the nation’s sweeping tea party movement, as well as to the crowd gathered in Miami, Fla., for the “Taking America Back” conference, Klein said, “God Bless Obama. If it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t be here, we wouldn’t be taking to the streets, we wouldn’t be organizing, we wouldn’t be awakening the nation.”

Klein wasn’t the only speaker at the conference, however, to make bold or surprising proclamations from the platform.

‘King of the birthers’

During a discussion panel in which audience members brought questions from the floor, an unidentified attendee asked the panel how Obama was able to avoid the scrutiny over his eligibility to serve as president that was leveled against his presidential election opponent, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

“Let ‘the birther king’ have the first stab,” joked WND CEO Joseph Farah, whose news agency has been at the forefront of investigations into Obama’s eligibility. “We found out in 2008 that there were no controlling authorities in place to vet presidential candidates across the board. No one took responsibility for that.

“But I still get questions every day from people who don’t know,” Farah explained. “They ask, ‘Don’t you think the FBI vetted Obama?’ They believe there are mechanisms in place. Much to my surprise, there are not.”

But Farah also surprised the audience by suggesting the dozens of lawsuits that have been filed challenging Obama’s eligibility may not bring any clarification to the controversy.

“I don’t believe this will be resolved in courts,” Farah said. “I don’t believe any judge at any level will stand up and say, ‘I want to see evidence.’”

Farah did, however, predict an end to the controversy:

“We need to get states to pass legislation in the next session to ensure presidential candidates in the future do not get on the ballot without proving their eligibility. Earlier this year, two states introduced such legislation, and both could have passed if they had enough time [before legislative recess]. I believe you will see two or more states pass that legislation. That’s all it’s going to take in 2012 to get answers.

“I am so convinced that Obama can’t prove his eligibility, or won’t because of something so embarrassing [in his personal records],” Farah predicted, “that he won’t run for re-election in 2012.”

During the session, which focused on the Declaration of Independence as the document than announced America’s birth to the world, Shawn Akers, dean of Liberty University’s Helms School of Government, quipped, “We don’t have any problem finding that birth certificate.”

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‘God bless Barack Obama’