The Killer was in America Under Obama’s DACA

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CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — She was a Serbian-born model and self-described “wild-child” who said she began walking runways in her new North Carolina hometown at age 12.

But a blossoming career in modeling for Mirjana Puhar, who reached national attention on “America’s Next Top Model,” ended tragically when police found her body and two others in a house in Charlotte this week.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police say 19-year-old Emmanuel Jesus Rangel-Hernandez is charged with three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of the 19-year-old Puhar and two other victims. Authorities have said the killings were drug-related, but have not said how the three were killed.

 

The Charlotte Observer reported on Puhar’s emerging career in a story published in 2014. She told the newspaper that her family fled Serbia after the Kosovo War and moved to North Carolina a decade later.

*** This led Senator Grassley, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee to ask in written form of Secretary of Department of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson if Hernandez was in the United States under the White House, Barack Obama DACA program. Several days later, the answer is YES.  From Daily Caller: “Mr. Rangel-Hernandez allegedly applied for and received deferred action under the President’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program,” Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, wrote to Johnson.

There are more chilling facts in this case. He’s also being charged with a murder in Matthews, North Carolina, that occurred on February 22 at a hotel. WCNC reports that the victim in that shooting is named Rosool Jaleel Harrell. Cops in Matthews say that Rangel has been charged along with a man named Edward Sanchez, who is also charged with murder and Emily Isaacs, who is charged with accessory after the fact. Both of those suspects were arrested in Harris County, Texas.

Until just a week ago when a Federal judge ordered a suspension of DAPA, DACA continues and is the program is defined below:

What Is DACA

On June 15, 2012, the Secretary of Homeland Security announced that certain people who came to the United States as children and meet several guidelines may request consideration of deferred action for a period of two years, subject to renewal. They are also eligible for work authorization. Deferred action is a use of prosecutorial discretion to defer removal action against an individual for a certain period of time. Deferred action does not provide lawful status. NOTE: On November 20, 2014, the President made an announcement extending the period of DACA and work authorization from two years to three years.

Border Surge, Crime Fighting, Chilling Report

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Border surge harming crime fighting in other parts of Texas, internal report finds

To download the report, click here.

AUSTIN – The deployment of additional state police and Texas National Guard troops to the southern border last June has reduced illegal border crossings but cost more than $100 million and compromised the Department of Public Safety’s ability to combat crimes elsewhere, according to an internal DPS assessment prepared for Gov. Greg Abbott and lawmakers. “The Department of Public Safety is understaffed throughout the state, and a sustained deployment of personnel to the border region reduces the patrol and investigative capacity in other areas of the state that are also impacted by transnational crime,” according to the report, which was distributed late last month on the condition that it not be publicly released.

The 68-page assessment, obtained by the Houston Chronicle, largely cast the border surge ordered by state leaders last summer as a success, citing the reductions in illegal border crossings and cartel activity in the operation zone.

The report also said that millions spent to bring state police officers and guardsmen to the border and give them time to develop relationships with local law enforcement helped push the cost of Operation Strong Safety II beyond $100 million.

“The permanent assignment of a sufficient number of troopers, agents and Texas Rangers to the border region is more effective and efficient than short-term deployments from around the state,” the report found.

The current deployment, which began last June in response to a spike of unaccompanied children crossing the border that quickly subsided, has now stretched to eight months. The guardsmen have been on the border to support the mission for six months, drawing increasing criticism from some state lawmakers and prompting a search for a long-term solution.

Among other recommendations, the report said the state should immediately fund 320 more patrol vehicles for the operation and eventually replace the deployed guardsmen with technology and 500 Department of Public Safety officers – a suggestion that mirrors the plan Abbott announced last week.

Abbott has named border security as an emergency item, allowing bills related to it to be passed in the first 60 days of the legislative session. Both the state House and Senate have also prioritized the issue, proposing budgets with unprecedented levels of spending on border security.

By this summer, the state will have spent nearly $1 billion on border enforcement since 2008, nearly half of that in the two-year budget period that ends Aug. 31.

A key question is how long the guardsmen should stay on the border. Abbott has called for them to remain until his proposed 500 extra officers arrive. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick also supports a continued deployment, but state House Speaker Joe Straus is more skeptical.

The internal report did not directly mention the issue but said the guardsmen should be replaced “as resources become available.”

Overall, the document mostly provided a more detailed version of what Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw and Texas National Guard Adjutant General John Nichols have said at a series of committee hearings during the early part of this session, including at a Monday meeting in which several state senators called for the operation to have more defined goals.

While the report gave more detail than has been publicly released about the claim often made by Patrick and other state leaders that the deployment has reduced crime, it focused on illegal crossings and cartel activity in the operation zone, providing less detail about local crimes and leaving open the possibility that criminals have simply shifted their efforts elsewhere.

Cartel arrests

In addition to the steep reduction in crossings since the mission began, which some experts have attributed to other factors, the report said that encounters with gang members in the operation area have dropped by 38 percent, pursuits in Hidalgo and Starr counties have dipped by 29 percent and documented human stash homes have plummeted by two-thirds.

Documented drug stash houses have slightly increased, said the assessment, which found that 150 tons of illegal drugs have been seized as part of the operation.

The report also said the chiefs of the Mission and McAllen police departments have credited the deployment with decreased local crime.

The mission has also led to the arrest of several high-profile cartel leaders, according to the assessment.

In its detailed cost breakdown, the report found that the Department of Public Safety has spent about $22 million on salaries, $21 million on overtime payments, $5 million on vehicle fuel and maintenance, $2.5 million on flight costs and $7 million on “travel,” presumably for officers to get to and from the operation.

Among other costs, the Texas Military Department has spent $16 million on wages, $550,000 on food for undocumented immigrants, $181,000 on fuel, $78,000 on building rent and $16 million on “operating expenses.”

IRS Emails Found, Moves to Criminal Investigation

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As the hearings continue in the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, interesting and chilling facts came out. The short video is here.

For a full summary to date on the IRS scandal against conservative groups click here. Meanwhile the hearing yesterday blew the lid off much of the scandal over just one document that was missing leading to finding backup tapes with the emails.

“It looks like we’ve been lied to, or at least misled,” said Rep. John Mica, R-Fla. at a congressional hearing Thursday evening,

IRS Deputy Inspector General Timothy Camus, who testified alongside Inspector General J. Russell George, said his organization was investigating possible criminal activity. He did not elaborate, other than to suggest a key factor is whether documents were intentionally withheld.

The emails were to and from Lois Lerner, who used to head the IRS division that processes applications for tax-exempt status. Last June, the IRS told Congress it had lost an unknown number of Lerner’s email when her computer hard drive crashed in 2011.

At the time, IRS officials said the emails could not be recovered. But Camus said investigators recovered thousands of emails from old computer tapes used to back up the agency’s email system, though he said he believed some tapes had been erased.

“We recovered quite a number of emails, but until we compare those to what’s already been produced we don’t know if they’re new emails,” Camus told the House Oversight Committee.

Neither Camus nor George would describe the contents of any of the emails at Thursday’s hearing.

The IRS says it has already produced 78,000 Lerner emails, many of which have been made public by congressional investigators.

Camus said it took investigators two weeks to locate the computer tapes that contained Lerner’s emails. He said it took technicians about four months to find Lerner’s emails on the tapes.

Several Oversight committee members questioned how hard the IRS tried to produce the emails, given how quickly independent investigators found them.

“We have been patient. We have asked, we have issued subpoenas, we have held hearings,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the Oversight Committee. “It’s just shocking me that you start, two weeks later you’re able to find the emails.”

Though the IG’s office is looking at possible criminal activity, Washington, D.C.-based attorney Patrick O’Donnell said the Justice Department would have the final say on whether anyone at the IRS would face charges. O’Donnell, who has worked on government enforcement matters, told FoxNews.com the IG’s office typically refers their recommendation to the DOJ, though in some cases the IG will work in tandem with the DOJ throughout an investigation.

At the hearing, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., questioned the significance of the recovered emails in an exchange with Camus.

“So as I understand it from your testimony here today, you are unable to confirm whether there are any, to use your own words, new emails, right?” she asked Camus.

“That is correct,” Camus replied.

Maloney: “So what’s before us may be material you already have, right?”

Camus: “That is correct”

Maloney. “So may I ask, why are we here?”

The IRS issued a statement saying the agency “has been and remains committed to cooperating fully with the congressional oversight investigations. The IRS continues to work diligently with Congress as well as support the review by the Treasury inspector general for tax administration.”

The IRS estimated it has spent $20 million responding to congressional inquiries, generating more than one million pages of documents and providing agency officials to testify at 27 congressional hearings.

The inspector general set off a firestorm in May 2013 with an audit that said IRS agents improperly singled out Tea Party and other conservative groups for extra scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status during the 2010 and 2012 elections.

Several hundred groups had their applications delayed for a year or more. Some were asked inappropriate questions about donors and group activities, the inspector general’s report said.

The week before George’s report, Lerner publicly apologized on behalf of the agency. After the report, much of the agency’s top leadership was forced to retire or resign, including Lerner. The Justice Department and several congressional committees launched investigations.

Lerner’s lost emails prompted a new round of scrutiny by Congress, and a new investigation by the inspector general’s office.

Lerner emerged as a central figure in the controversy after she refused to answer questions at two House Oversight hearings, invoking her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself at both hearings. At the first hearing, Lerner made a statement saying she had done nothing wrong.

Last year, the House voted mostly along party lines to hold her in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions at the hearings.

Cables Reveal Iran’s Weapons Status

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Item 7 of leaked intelligence cables from 2012 explains conditions on status of weapons.

Item 7 Iran

 

From an IAEA brief noted December 2014:
*Iran has had a nuclear weapons program since at least the late 1980s.
*In 1989, it set up a management structure for the program responsible to the Ministry of Defence, which it has reorganized over the years.
*At the start, a lot of Iran’s technical knowledge to produce nuclear weapons came from the same underground network which helped countries like Libya. *Iran has also been getting help from an unnamed “nuclear weapon state” (Russia? China?), but it has developed considerable scientific and technical capabilities of its own.
*The program has involved extensive procurement activity, much of it clandestine using false front companies, but benefitting from the fact that many of the components sought have both civilian and military applications.
*In addition to enriching uranium, Iran has been working on converting highly enriched uranium (HEU) into metal, and casting and machining it into the components of a nuclear core.
*It has done modelling and calculations on how an HEU device would function.
*Engineering work has been done on integrating a nuclear device into a missile delivery vehicle.
*Iran has been experimenting with a multipoint initiation system, with the explosives used having the dimensions of a payload that would fit into the warhead chamber of an Iranian Shahab 3 missile which has a range of some 1300 kilometers. (Iran is also working on a longer range missile.)
*Iran has been working on the development of safe, fast-acting detonators which can be triggered within a microsecond of each other in order to set off an implosion-type nuclear device.
*Work has been done on a prototype system for fuzing, arming and firing a nuclear weapon which could explode both in the air above a target and on impact.
*Iran has conducted a number of practical tests to determine how firing equipment might function over long distances with a test device located down a deep shaft; and it has studied safety arrangements for conducting a nuclear test.

***  

By the next decade, according to the IAEA, the regime would consolidate its weaponization researchers under an initiative called the “AMAD Plan,” headed by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a Ph.D. nuclear engineer and senior member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The AMAD Plan was charged with procuring dual-use technologies, developing nuclear detonators and conducting high-explosive experiments associated with compressing fissile material, according to Western intelligence agencies. The AMAD Plan’s most intense period of activity was in 2002-03, according to the IAEA, when current President Hasan Rouhani headed Iran’s Supreme National Security Council before becoming its chief nuclear negotiator.

Feeling the heat from the MEK’s disclosure of two nuclear facilities in 2002 and the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the mullahs apparently halted the AMAD Plan’s activities in late 2003. But Mr. Fakhrizadeh and his scientists didn’t stop their weaponization work. As former United Nations weapons inspector David Albright told us, “Fakhrizadeh continued to run the program in the military industry, where you could work on nuclear weapons.” Much of the work, including theoretical explosive modeling, was shifted to Defense Ministry-linked universities, such as Malek Ashtar University of Technology in Tehran.

Mr. Fakhrizadeh has continued to oversee these disparate and highly compartmentalized activities, now under the auspices of Iran’s new Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research, known by its Persian acronym, SPND. The MEK first disclosed the SPND’s existence in 2011. Now the opposition group has obtained what it says are key new biographical details and the first photograph of the 56-year-old Mr. Fakhrizadeh, whom Iran has refused to make available to the IAEA for long-sought interviews.

The MEK has also compiled a list of what it says are 100 SPND researchers. Far from disbanding the SPND, the MEK alleges, the Tehran regime has kept its nucleus of researchers intact. Possibly to avoid detection by the IAEA, the MEK says, the regime recently relocated the SPND’s headquarters from Mojdeh Avenue in Tehran to Pasdaran Avenue. “The new site,” the MEK adds, “is located in between several centers and offices affiliated to the Defense Ministry . . . , the Union of IRGC, the sports organization of the Defense Ministry . . . and Chamran Hospital.”

To further mask the illicit nature of the relocation from the IAEA, the MEK says, “parts of Malek Ashtar University’s logistical activities were transferred to the former site of SPND. The objective was to avoid closing [the former] center, and in the event of inspections, to claim that the site has always had the current formation.” Don’t expect the regime to fess up to much of this by the August 25 deadline set in its joint communique with the IAEA.

The fact that the IAEA and the Western powers are now turning to the weaponization question is a sign of how far the Iranian nuclear-weapons program has progressed. As the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center’s Henry Sokolski, a former nonproliferation director at the Pentagon, told us: “A concern about weaponization followed by testing and use is the moral hazard when you don’t pay attention to fissile-material production.”

In other words, having ceded a right to enrich and permitted the Islamic Republic to develop an advanced enrichment capability, the West is now left with preventing weaponization as the final barrier against a nuclear-capable Iran. The diplomacy of Mr. Rouhani and his Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif, is intended to soothe jittery Western nerves on weaponization.

That palliative effect will be reinforced by the IAEA’s latest quarterly report, also released last week, in which the Agency reported that Iran has sharply reduced its stock of 20% uranium and hasn’t enriched above 5% since the November interim agreement took effect. The report also highlights the Islamic Republic’s new willingness to address at a technical level the “possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program,” including Tehran’s development of exploding bridge-wire detonators and high-explosives testing.

But if past is precedent and the MEK’s new disclosures are to be believed, Mr. Fakhrizadeh will continue to do his work as he has to this day. The snake may shed its skin but not its temper, runs an old Persian proverb.

Islamic State Destroying Civilization’s Artifacts

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Last month, Islamic State was in Mosul destroying tangible history on civilization, some items were rare manuscripts dating back 3000 years. Books were loaded into trucks and taken away to be destroyed.

An Iraqi lawmaker, Hakim al-Zamili, said the Islamic State group “considers culture, civilization and science as their fierce enemies.”

Al-Zamili, who leads the parliament’s Security and Defense Committee, compared the Islamic State group to raiding medieval Mongols, who in 1258 ransacked Baghdad. Libraries’ ancient collections of works on history, medicine and astronomy were dumped into the Tigris River, purportedly turning the waters black from running ink.

“The only difference is that the Mongols threw the books in the Tigris River, while now Daesh is burning them,” he said, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group. “Different method, but same mentality.”

If you still doubt the Islamic State mission to destroy all things non-Islamic, which Barack Obama does doubt, then consider Gilgamesh as part of part of the history.

Gilgamesh was a legendary king and hero of the city-state of Uruk. The historical Gilgamesh was a Sumarian king of Uruk around 2700 BC. According to the Sumerian king list, Gilgamesh was the fifth king of Uruk (Early Dynastic II, first dynasty of Uruk), the son of Lugalbanda. Legend has it that his mother was Ninsun, a goddess. Sumarian fragments of the legend that grew up around him have been found dating back to about 2000 BC.

The Gilgamesh Epic is the most notable literary product of Babylonia discovered in the mounds of Mesopotamia. In the epic named after him, Gilgamesh, the Sumerian king of Uruk, seeks to escape death, but ultimately concludes this is futile and turns to lasting works of culture to achieve immortality. The Babylonian king Gilgamesh was said to be one-third human and two-thirds god. He ruled the city of Uruk on the Euphrates River more than four thousand years ago in what is now Iraq. According to legend, the gods sent him a series of ordeals, starting with the wild man Enkidu, who challenged the king and reformed his abuses of power. Once reconciled, the two embarked on a quest to fell all the cedar trees of southern Iran and slay Humbaba, the demon residing there. So begin the tales of Gilgamesh.

The Islamic State released a video Thursday showing sledgehammer-wielding militants destroying artefacts dating back thousands of years in Mosul’s central museum, yet another act of destruction in the radical Islamist group’s rampage through the Middle East.

The five-minute video begins with a verse from the Koran condemning idol worship, followed by an ISIS militant denouncing the polytheism of the ancient Assyrian and Akkadian cultures. The militant cites Muhammad’s destruction of the idols in Mecca as the precedent for their actions.

“These statues and idols, these artifacts, if God has ordered its removal, they became worthless to us even if they are worth billions of dollars,” he declares.

The militants then set on the statues with sledgehammers.

The video also includes footage from an archeological site in Mosul in which a fighter drills through a 7th century BC Assyrian sculpture of a winged bull.

A caption claims that the artefacts did not exist in the time of the prophet, having since been put on display by “devil worshippers,” possibly a reference to the Yazidi minority.

The international community has condemned this latest act of destruction by the extremist group. The Guardian provided some of the reaction from influential voices in the region:

 “The birthplace of human civilisation … is being destroyed”, said Kino Gabriel, one of the leaders of the Syriac Military Council – a Christian militia – in a telephone interview with the Guardian from Hassakeh in north-eastern Syria. […] “In front of something like this, we are speechless,” said Gabriel. “Murder of people and destruction is not enough, so even our civilisation and the culture of our people is being destroyed.”

“When you watch the footage, you feel visceral pain and outrage, like you do when you see human beings hurt,” said Mardean Isaac, an Assyrian writer and member of A Demand for Action, an organisation dedicated to protecting the rights of the Assyrians and other minorities in Syria and Iraq. […]

“I’m totally shocked,” Amir al-Jumaili [a professor at the Archaeology College in Mosul] told the AP. “It’s a catastrophe. With the destruction of these artefacts, we can no longer be proud of Mosul’s civilisation.” […]

Isaac said: “While the Islamic State is ethnically cleansing the contemporary Assyrian populations of Iraq and Syria, they are also conducting a simultaneous war on their ancient history and the right of future generations of all ethnicities and religions to the material memory of their ancestors.”