All posts by Tim Palin

FYI, News

Dems pressure Obama on vow to resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees

By Kristina Wong – 05/18/16 11:40 AM EDT
A group of 27 Democratic senators on Wednesday called on President Obama to fulfill his commitment to resettle at least 10,000 Syrian refugees in the U.S. by October.

The lawmakers say the administration has so far only admitted 1,736 Syrian refugees, out of the 10,000 pledged.

“To fulfill the commitment you announced last year, at least 8,264 Syrian refugees would need to be admitted during the remaining five months of the fiscal year,” said the group, led by Sens. Dick Durbin (Ill.) and Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), in a letter to the president.

“We would appreciate an update on specific measures your Administration plans to take to fulfill its stated commitment to resettle the additional Syrian refugees by the end of September 2016,” they added.

The State Department launched a surge operation in Amman, Jordan, earlier this year to increase the pace of interviews of potential refugees.

Staff interviewed about 12,000 refugee applicants between February and April, a department spokesperson told The Hill earlier this month.

“Not all of the applicants approved by [the Department of Homeland Security] during the February-April period will be admitted to the United States in FY 2016. Some will be admitted in FY 2017,” the spokesperson, who requested anonymity, said.

The plan’s critics argue it could endanger U.S. national security, allowing terrorists to sneak through.

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Connecting The Dots, Corruption, Random Events, Free Will or Something Darker?

Welcome to a Bernie Sanders Wiccan ritual

Attending a rally for Bernie Sanders usually involves long lines and security screenings, but that wasn’t the case at an intimate, informal event Friday evening supporting the Vermont senator’s presidential campaign in a park here.

Instead of metal detectors, entrance required burning ceremonial sweetgrass.

Participants were “smudged,” meaning the smoke from the sweetgrass was wafted over them before they could enter the sacred circle and begin a Wiccan ritual to support Sanders ahead of Oregon’s primary on Tuesday.

“Welcome to the ‘Feeling the Bern ritual,’” Leigha Lafleur, 41, told the gathering as she prepared to lead them in the “amplification of positive energy of Bernie Sanders and the progressive movement.”

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Connecting The Dots, Corruption, Education

White House Sends Schools Guidance On Transgender Access To Bathrooms

The Obama administration issued guidance to schools Friday, saying they must allow transgender students to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity.

…The Department of Justice is already in a legal fight with North Carolina over its so-called bathroom law. By reaching out to all 50 states, the administration appears to be upping the ante.

…Attorney General Loretta Lynch — a North Carolina native — called the law discriminatory. “We see you, we stand with you,” she said, speaking directly to transgender people, “and we will do everything we can to protect you going forward.”

The administration now has extended that message to schools, not just in North Carolina, but across the country. Some will see that as the administration spoiling for a fight…

Under federal law, Title IX, schools that receive federal funding are not allowed to discriminate against students on the basis of sex. The guidance sent out to school districts on Friday makes it clear that as far as the departments of Justice and Education are concerned, that word “sex” includes gender identity.

DECEPTION OFF:
TRUTH ON:
Gender “identity” is an “Idea” of gender NOT A SEX !
TRUTH OFF:
DECEPTION ON:

…”[Obama] says he is going to withhold funding if schools do not follow the policy. Well, in Texas he can keep his 30 pieces of silver. We will not yield to blackmail from the president of the United States,” Patrick said. He went on to suggest that if the administration did withhold funds, low-income students who rely on free breakfasts and lunches would be the most affected.

He also said that opposition to the guidelines “has nothing to do with anyone being against a transgender child or a gay child. This has everything to do with keeping the federal government out of local issues.”

UNBELIEVABLE !

Connecting The Dots, News

Young Muslim kills 1 injures 3 in knife attack in German train station

(CNN) One man was killed and three people injured in a knife attack at a train station in southern Germany Tuesday morning, the Bavarian Criminal Office said.

Police have arrested a 27-year-old German man in connection with the attack, a police spokesman said, adding that a political motive could not be ruled out.
The attack happened shortly before 5 a.m. local time (11 p.m. ET Monday) in Grafing, 23 miles (37 kilometers) east of Munich, officials said.

The dead man, a 50-year-old, was inside a train bound for Munich when he was stabbed, police said. He later died at a hospital.

Three other men were injured, one of them seriously. Officials gave the injured men’s ages as 58, 55 and 43.

Police arrested the suspect near the station shortly after the attacks, said a police spokesman. A knife with a 10-centimeter (4-inch) blade was recovered, he said.

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Connecting The Dots, Corruption, Random Events, Free Will or Something Darker?, Religion

Out of the Shadows: Wicca Grows in Austin and Beyond

…Mary Caldwell has spiky pink hair, tattooed arms and works in customer service for a software company. She’s also the leader of a Wicca meet-up that gathers every other Monday at Monkey Nest Coffee on Burnet Road.

…as well as rituals and personal experiences with spirits. Recently, some members of the group had visited a local cemetery to commune with spirits.

“Some of the people in the group just see them, some just hear them and some of them just smell them,” said Caldwell, 44. “It was great fun.”

Wicca is a modern version of ancient pagan religions, created in England and brought to the United States in the 1960s. Its followers worship a goddess and a god, honor the Earth and practice ritual magic…

“We believe that everything is part of the One,” said Ed Fitch, 80, a Wiccan senior high priest and a member of Caldwell’s meet-up group, one of several Wiccan or witches’ groups in Austin. “Everything in the universe is linked to everything else in the universe.”

…The American Religious Identification Survey, which periodically surveys 50,000 Americans, said the number of self-identified Wiccans increased to 342,000 in 2008, up from 134,000 in 2001. The 2008 figures are the most recent available.

Wicca’s growth tracks the changing religious landscape in the U.S., as a growing number of people leave established religions and become either unaffiliated or switch to alternative religions. About 5.9 percent of Americans followed a non-Christian faith in 2014, up from 4.7 percent in 2007, according to the Pew Research Center,

“The number of people who have institutional affiliation are declining in general, so [Wicca] is part of a larger trend,” said Jennifer Graber, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Texas at Austin. “People are not aligning themselves in traditional religious ways.”

…“We don’t just have god, who in Christian values is a white male. We’ve got a goddess. They are equal to each other.”

…Caldwell dabbled in Wicca when she was a teenager, but said her interest faded as she grew up and had children. It was not until eight years ago that she became fully devoted the religion.

…“It’s funny, because I’ve got people who are devoted Catholics coming to me and saying, ‘I’ve got a problem, and can you do a spell for me?’ ” she said.

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Connecting The Dots, Corruption, History, Politics, Religion

British Muslim Sadiq Khan sworn in as London mayor touted as win for Qur’an

Acknowledge Muhammad as “the” prophet or face sharia law as an infidel:
“All Muslims are obliged to kill the infidel. An infidel (or kafir) is a non-Muslim. Many Muslims think that killing an infidel guarantees going straight to paradise.”

Labour party candidate comfortably outruns Conservative rival Zac Goldsmith, becoming the city’s first Muslim mayor.

The British Labour party’s Sadiq Khan has been sworn in as London’s new mayor after comfortably beating his nearest rival, Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith.

Speaking at the ceremony at Southwark Cathedral on Saturday, Khan called the city the “greatest in the world”, adding he was “proud” and “deeply humbled” by his win.

“I want every single Londoner to get the opportunities that the city gave to me and my family…the opportunities not just to survive, but to thrive,” Khan pledged.

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Connecting The Dots, Conspiracy Theory, Justice, News

Fallon: Clinton’s Lawyer Is In Constant Contact with Justice Department


Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said Friday that Hillary Clinton’s attorney has been in contact with the Justice Department throughout the investigation into her use of a private email server as secretary of state.

“David Kendall is her top counsel and he has been in touch with the Justice Department throughout this review. We’ve always been very upfront about that,” Fallon said in an interview on CNN.

The FBI has already interviewed Clinton’s closest aide, Huma Abedin, as well as some other Clinton confidantes, CNN reported Thursday. However, in an interview with MSNBC Tuesday, Clinton said that the FBI had still not contacted her “representatives.”

Fallon did not address Clinton’s apparent mistruth. Instead, the spokesman confirmed Clinton’s claim that the FBI still had not contacted her.

“She said no, because the honest answer is it hasn’t happened yet,” Fallon said. “But whenever they do, we’ll be happy to accommodate that and make it happen.”

In the same Tuesday interview, Clinton denied that foreign hackers breached her server. Fallon and the State Department have stood by her assertion, despite the Romanian hacker Guccifer’s claim Wednesday that he easily hacked into Clinton’s email.

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News, Politics

Pelosi, Vicente Fox plot to defeat Trump, Mexican calls Trump voters lazy drunks


Latin America’s toughest critic of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump spent 30 minutes with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi in Mexico this week plotting to help the Democrats defeat the businessman and give the presidency to Hillary Clinton.

…former Mexican President Vicente Fox also said that he is “becoming a fan of” Clinton, compared her to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and disparaged Trump supporters as lazy, uneducated, TV watching drunks.

…”We need to wake up that citizen. We need them to take them away from the TV and drinking beer, to working hard, to getting the skills, to getting knowledge, and they will come along, like everybody else.”

On a media tour to promote an anti-Trump, “compassionate, intelligent leadership” agenda, he said that he met with Pelosi at the airport in Mexico City Sunday and discussed ways he can help convince Latin American immigrants in the United States to reject Trump.

“What I’ve been saying here, I told her. Count with us, with all Mexicans, to support the Democratic Party…”

“We will never convince any Mexican either in the (United) States or in Mexico or any Latin American in the States or Latin America to support this false prophet,” he said.

He repeatedly called Trump “stupid,” and a “false prophet,” and called on Americans to “wake up” and reject the Republican.

WATCH FULL

News

Cannes: Terror Attack Ahead of Film Festival

“You have to be prepared for what we consider a multi-terror event,” said city security consultant Nitzan Nuriel.

With 200 extras on hand and fake car bombs going off, it could have been a film shoot. Instead, the city of Cannes Thursday morning conducted a simulation of coordinated terror attacks designed to test emergency responders ahead of the annual film festival next month.

The fake explosion rocked the city’s Palais and was followed by four armed terrorists forcing their way up the Palais’ grand entrance, where the red carpet will be rolled out in just three weeks. Local schools also participated, with security drills that would come into play in case of a terror attack.

The extras were lying “injured” in red vests along the Croisette and splayed across the steps of the Palais.

The simulations were the first of their kind, put in place to test out the city’s new security protocols following the Charlie Hebdo attacks last January and the Le Bataclan attacks in November in Paris.

ORIGIONAL

“I only found out we might be in danger when I saw that video,” says one industry veteran after Cannes staged a fake terror attack to test its security readiness ahead of next month’s festival.

With the world’s biggest film festival only a few weeks away, Cannes made a very public show of force. Last Thursday, the city on the Cote d’Azur staged a dramatic, some would say chilling, test run of what might happen if terrorists target the stars, film industry execs and thousands of fans who descend on the Croisette every year.

A video of the exercise, which featured masked gunmen with machine guns storming the famed red-carpeted steps of the Cannes Palais as shots rang out, played on repeat on French television and circulated widely on the internet.

The purpose, according to Palais president Claire-Anne Reix, was to show fest attendees “that we are training, that we are preparing, that we are ready. It’s not frightening. What should be frightening is all the videos you see on the internet, not the coverage of an exercise.”

But for many heading to Cannes, the images of gunfights between police and men in balaclavas and the sound of (fake) car bombs exploding was anything but reassuring.

“I only found out we might be in danger when I saw that video — I wasn’t thinking about it until then,” said Yuhka Matoi, an international sales exec for Japan’s Tokyo Broadcasting System. “Maybe I’ll stay away from the red carpet [this year].”

Cannes Faces Backlash Over Chilling Terrorist Simulation Video

Connecting The Dots, Conspiracy Theory, News

The Other Side of Cannes: Muslim Community Fights Prejudice as Jihadi Cell Linked to City

Six hundred meters from the Croisette lies a community of French Muslims who remained largely invisible until their mosque briefly became the unwitting base for one of the most dangerous terrorist cells in French history: Festivalgoers “have no idea of what’s really going on here.”

…the Mosquee Al Madina, the main mosque in Cannes, which sits above the Croisette, just 600 meters from the Palais des Festivals…

…the tension has escalated as the Cannes Film Festival gets underway amid heightened security in the wake of terrorist bombings in Paris and Brussels. Recent reports from Senegal via Italian intelligence warned of possible terrorist attacks on beaches in the South of France and Italy, raising the specter of small bombs, planted under deck chairs and hidden inside cans of energy drinks, just waiting to detonate…

…reporting the details of terror cells like the so-called Cannes-Torcy gang, a 22-member jihadi cell with ties to ISIS in Syria that attacked a Jewish grocery in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles…

…He first was detected crossing the Greek border but was let go — even though he had $1,700 in cash and a USB drive containing a document titled “How to Make Bombs in the Name of Allah” — because there was no warrant for his arrest in Europe. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested at his father’s high-rise apartment outside Cannes, where he was found with three Red Bull cans containing TATP explosives and wigs and disguises thought to be part of his plan to stage the carnival attack…

…The kosher grocery in Sarcelles that was attacked by members of the Cannes-Torcy terrorist cell…

Hollywood Reporter

Education, Politics

Saudi Arabia threatens economic ‘turmoil’ over 9/11 bill | New York Post

Saudi Arabia is threatening to sell $750 billion in American assets if Congress passes a bill that would allow 9/11 victims to hold the kingdom legally responsible for the terrorist attacks, a report said.

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir warned the Obama administration and congressional leaders last month that the kingdom would sell treasury securities and other assets if Congress didn’t yank the bill, The New York Times reported.

A Saudi sale could, in theory, destabilize the dollar and create global market turmoil, although some economists believe it is an empty threat.

The bill, co-sponsored by Sen. Charles Schumer, would remove immunity given to a foreign nations if the country’s government is found responsible for a terrorist attack on US soil — which could make the Saudi government vulnerable to a federal lawsuit by the families of 9/11 victims.

The threat comes before President Obama’s trip to the oil-rich nation for meetings with King Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud on Wednesday.

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Connecting The Dots, Conspiracy Theory, Corruption, Education

How US covered up Saudi role in 9/11 | New York Post

In its report on the still-censored “28 pages” implicating the Saudi government in 9/11, “60 Minutes” last weekend said the Saudi role in the attacks has been “soft-pedaled” to protect America’s delicate alliance with the oil-rich kingdom.

That’s quite an understatement.

Actually, the kingdom’s involvement was deliberately covered up at the highest levels of our government. And the coverup goes beyond locking up 28 pages of the Saudi report in a vault in the US Capitol basement. Investigations were throttled. Co-conspirators were let off the hook.

Case agents I’ve interviewed at the Joint Terrorism Task Forces in Washington and San Diego, the forward operating base for some of the Saudi hijackers, as well as detectives at the Fairfax County (Va.) Police Department who also investigated several 9/11 leads, say virtually every road led back to the Saudi Embassy in Washington, as well as the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles.

Yet time and time again, they were called off from pursuing leads. A common excuse was “diplomatic immunity.”

Those sources say the pages missing from the 9/11 congressional inquiry report — which comprise the entire final chapter dealing with “foreign support for the September 11 hijackers” — details “incontrovertible evidence” gathered from both CIA and FBI case files of official Saudi assistance for at least two of the Saudi hijackers who settled in San Diego.

Some information has leaked from the redacted section, including a flurry of pre-9/11 phone calls between one of the hijackers’ Saudi handlers in San Diego and the Saudi Embassy, and the transfer of some $130,000 from then-Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar’s family checking account to yet another of the hijackers’ Saudi handlers in San Diego.

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Connecting The Dots, News, Spirituality & Health

Dow Industrials Close Above 18000 for First Time Since July 20

The Wall Street Journal reports…

U.S. stocks rose Monday, propelling the Dow Jones Industrial Average above 18000 for the first time since July.

The blue-chip index has gained nearly 15% since mid-February, as early-year fears about the U.S. economy faded, oil prices rebounded and the Federal Reserve signaled a cautious approach to raising rates. With Monday’s advance, the Dow is up 3.3% for the year.

The Dow industrials rose 107 points, or 0.6%, to 18004, closing above 18000 for the first time since July 20. The S&P 500 added 0.7% and the Nasdaq Composite gained 0.4%.

Prophet must be in the zone…

Education, Email, FYI, News, Politics

The Washington Post: Hillary’s new star turn: heroine of children’s books

In a presidential election year, there will, of course, be political biographies. But political biographies for children? This month three children’s books about one candidate — Hillary Clinton — hit the shelves. Aimed at a variety of age groups, the books deliver a similar message of female strength, though admittedly one likely to go down easier in Democratic-leaning households.

Jonah Winter’s picture book “Hillary” (Schwartz & Wade, ages 4 to 8) begins with a slightly tongue-in-cheek overview of history’s notably strong women: Queen Elizabeth, Joan of Arc (“she was . . . kind of intense”), Rosie the Riveter, “and now there is . . . Hillary.” The first image, rendered delicately in watercolor, colored pencils and lithograph crayon by Raul Colón, shows young Hillary in a baseball cap, surrounded by tall boys, pointing assertively. “She was scrappy,” Winter writes. The tale that unfolds will be familiar to parental readers — Hillary graduating from law school, becoming a mother and first lady. There’s even a summary of her work for health care reform. In simple terms, Winter offers younger readers a portrait of someone who learns all she can and draws on her experience in tough situations. As secretary of state, “she was the hardest of workers, getting up earlier and staying up later than anyone, reading countless reports filled with important information, making decisions that might save lives or cost lives.”There is little subtlety to Winter’s depiction, and his author’s note says it most plainly: “By becoming president, she would demonstrate that a girl can grow up to be the most powerful person in the world. That’s the world where I want to live. And this is a story I am thrilled to tell.”

ORIGIONAL