Iran Hung an Iranian American Citizen

Report: Iranian-American Hanged in Iran (Updated)

Iranian-American Hanged in Iran

Kredo/WFB: A human rights organization claimed on Tuesday that an Iranian-American man had been hanged by the Islamic regime for committing murder in California.

The report could not be independently verified and it remains unclear if the man was an American citizen, as he had not been listed among any of the known U.S. prisoners being held in Iran.

“According to confirmed sources, Iranian authorities carried out the death sentence for Hamid Samiee and another prisoner at Karaj’s Rajai Shahr Prison on Wednesday November 4,” Iran Human Rights, a nonprofit organization that claims to have sources within Iran, disclosed on Tuesday.

“Samiee, reportedly accused of committing an act of murder in California, was arrested by Iranian authorities upon his return to Iran,” according to the organization’s report. “He was sentenced to death by Branch 71 of Tehran’s Criminal Court for the murder of an Iranian man identified as Behrouz Janmohammadi.”

“Confirmed sources say Samiee was arrested in 2008 after the murder victim’s family had reported him to Iranian authorities,” according to Iran Human Rights.

Samiee and Janmohammadi were reportedly friends living in Californian until an altercation took place between them, according sources who spoke to the human rights organization.

“Hamid and Behrouz were friends in California until they were involved in an altercation that resulted in Behrouz drawing a knife on Hamid; and Hamid exercised self defense, which resulted in Behrouz’s death,” the group reported, citing “an individual close to Samiee who asked to be anonymous.”

“Following the incident, Hamid managed to make his way back to Iran where he was arrested by authorities just a few months after his arrival,” the source continued. “Hamid endured extreme torture and was forced to confess against himself; and a lot of his confessions were false.”

The organization claims that Iranian officials “extracted forced confessions” from Samiee and refused to believe that had acted in self-defense.

“All they cared about was that Hamid confessed the way they instructed him to,” according to the source who spoke to Iran Human Rights.

Samiee’s family is reported to have visited the Swiss Embassy in Tehran to meet with two individuals purportedly responsible for “protecting the interests of the U.S. in Iran.”

One of these representatives, an individual referred to in the report only as Mr. Meyer, “reportedly informed the relatives that he would personally look into Samiee’s case and will coordinate his efforts with the US Department of State.”

A State Department official did not immediately respond to a request for comment and information about the credibility of the report.

Iran Human Rights did not respond to a request for more information. The Los Angeles Police Department also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

UPDATE 1 December, 2015, 1:04 PM:

A State Department official told the Free Beacon Tuesday afternoon that Samiei is a dual citizen and that it is looking into the reports on his hanging.

“We are aware of reports of the execution in Iran of a dual citizen, Mr. Hamid Samiei,” said the State Department official, who was not authorized to speak on record. “We do not yet have official confirmation of his death and are seeking more information.”

The State Department has been aware of Samei’s plight since late October, the source said.
“This case was brought to our attention on October 28, immediately after the Foreign Interests Section at the Swiss Embassy in Tehran was notified of Mr. Samiei’s impending execution,” the official said. “We are not aware of any notification to the Department of State or the Swiss Foreign Interests Section of Mr. Samiei’s arrest, sentencing, or imprisonment prior toOctober 28. Iran does not recognize dual nationality.”
The Iranians often leave the State Department in the dark when it detains dual nations, the source said.

“The Iranian government does not notify the Department of State when it detains dual nationals,” according to the official. “We generally learn about these cases through the detainees’ family or friends. Once we learned about this case, through the Swiss we asked for a stay of execution and expressed our deep concerns about the apparent lack of due process in this case.”

***

According to this individual, Samiee’s relatives visited the embassy of Switzerland in Iran and met with Ms Tamaddon and Mr Meyer, representatives who are responsible for protecting the interests of the US in Iran. Mr Meyer reportedly informed the relatives that he would personally look into Samiee’s case and will coordinate his efforts with the US Department of State. At the same time, Samiee’s relatives wrote a letter to Iran’s Head of Judiciary requesting for a halt in execution pending proper investigation and a new trial. According to Samiee’s relatives, they never received a response to their letter.

“Following an investigation conducted by detectives in Los Angeles, a police department in California charged Hamid with murder in self defense [justifiable homicide] and not first degree murder. These details were included in Hamid’s case file with Iran’s Judiciary, but were not considered by the Judge,” says the anonymous source.

According to Iran’s Islamic Penal Code, when an Iranian from any part of the world enters Iran, they are subject to the laws of the Islamic Penal Code.

Seizing Chapo Guzman’s Assets or Not

The highways in the United States belonged to El Chapo.

CatholicOnline: The cartel has such momentum trafficking heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, and marijuana from Mexico to the United States, that despite El Chapo’s incarceration in a Mexican prison, the cartel continued all operations.

The DEA report shows the Sinaloa cartel “maintains the most significant presence in the United States,” adding, “Mexican TCOs pose the greatest criminal drug threat to the United States; no other group is currently positioned to challenge them.”

Mexico seizes El Chapo’s planes, cars, houses

MEXICO CITY — As the hunt for fugitive drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán intensifies, Mexican authorities recently announced they have confiscated 11 planes, eight vehicles and six houses belonging to the kingpin in the past five months.

That’s likely just a fraction of the assets Guzmán has accumulated during his life of crime. The Sinaloa Cartel he oversees traffics billions of dollars worth of narcotics to the United States every year, according to estimates from the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The yawning gap between the seizures and Guzmán’s potential riches underscores a growing concern here: Why the Mexican government can’t or won’t seize more of Guzman’s ill-gotten gains. The problem, critics say, is a lack of laws with teeth, and the motivation to change that.

“Mexico is a weak state that has yet to form a political will around the implementation of such laws,” said lawyer Edgardo Buscaglia, who has addressed the Mexican Senate on asset forfeitures.

One issue is a 2009 law that was meant to give authorities broader powers to seize drug cartel members’ assets. Instead, the law allows only the attorney general — as opposed to local prosecutors — to confiscate assets, meaning that federal authorities are overburdened and cases routinely slip through the net.

The overall result is far fewer successfully prosecuted cases against organized crime — a total of 43 in the past six years in Mexico, about the same number neighboring Guatemala achieves each year, according to a Mexican Senate report.

The law also requires property owners to be sentenced before authorities can take their assets, delaying seizures by months or even years. Many cases collapse.

“Attacking criminal groups financially by pursuing the properties and firms that provide them with financial and logistical support is an essential part of the fight against organized crime,” said Antonio Mazzitelli, Latin American representative of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. “In Mexico, they put a criminal in jail, and nothing happens.”

Since 2007, the Treasury Department has banned 95 Mexican companies and hundreds more individuals linked to El Chapo’s drug empire from operating in the United States. All continue to operate freely in Mexico, however.

Last year, an American grand jury indicted Ignacio Muñoz Orozco, the owner of a Mexican clothing chain, on money laundering charges related to the Sinaloa Cartel. Orozco served as a higher-level official in the federal Social Development Ministry in the mid-2000s and has yet to be charged with a crime in Mexico.

“There are thousands of such cases that Mexican prosecutors decline to pursue,” Buscaglia said.

Guzman’s case underscores the nature of corruption in the country, where watchdog group Transparency International reports criminals have “captured” public institutions.

The drug kingpin escaped from a maximum security prison in July using a mile-long tunnel. Police have arrested the prison governor and several guards in connection with the breakout.

 

By the Numbers: Syrians are a Terror Threat

Syrians are a Terror Threat, Here are the Numbers

By Daniel Greenfield, Sultan Knish

Syria is a terror state. It didn’t become that way overnight because of the Arab Spring or the Iraq War.

Its people are not the victims of American foreign policy, Islamic militancy or any of the other fashionable excuses. They supported Islamic terrorism. Millions of them still do.

They are not the Jews fleeing a Nazi Holocaust. They are the Nazis trying to relocate from a bombed out Berlin.

These are the cold hard facts.

ISIS took over parts of Syria because its government willingly allied with it to help its terrorists kill Americans in Iraq. That support for Al Qaeda helped lead to the civil war tearing the country apart.

The Syrians were not helpless, apathetic pawns in this fight. They supported Islamic terrorism.

A 2007 poll showed that 77% of Syrians supported financing Islamic terrorists including Hamas and the Iraqi fighters who evolved into ISIS. Less than 10% of Syrians opposed their terrorism.

Why did Syrians support Islamic terrorism? Because they hated America.

Sixty-three percent wanted to refuse medical and humanitarian assistance from the United States. An equal number didn’t want any American help caring for Iraqi refugees in Syria.

The vast majority of Syrians turned down any form of assistance from the United States because they hated us. They still do. Just because they’re willing to accept it now, doesn’t mean they like us.

If we bring Syrian Muslims to America, we will be importing a population that hates us.

The terrorism poll numbers are still ugly. A poll this summer found that 1 in 5 Syrians supports ISIS.  A third of Syrians support the Al Nusra Front, which is affiliated with Al Qaeda. Since Sunnis are 3/4rs of the population and Shiites and Christians aren’t likely to support either group, this really means that Sunni Muslim support for both terror groups is even higher than these numbers make it seem.

And even though Christians and Yazidis are the ones who actually face ISIS genocide, Obama has chosen to take in few Christians and Yazidis. Instead 98.6% of Obama’s Syrian refugees are Sunni Muslims.

This is also the population most likely to support ISIS and Al Qaeda.

But these numbers are even worse than they look. Syrian men are more likely to view ISIS positively than women. This isn’t surprising as the Islamic State not only practices sex slavery, but has some ruthless restrictions for women that exceed even those of Saudi Arabia.  (Al Qaeda’s Al Nusra Front, however, mostly closes the gender gap getting equal support from Syrian men and women.)

ISIS, however, gets its highest level of support from young men. This is the Syrian refugee demographic.

In the places where the Syrian refugees come from, support for Al Qaeda groups climbs as high as 70% in Idlib, 66% in Quneitra, 66% in Raqqa, 47% in Derzor, 47% in Hasakeh, 41% in Daraa and 41% in Aleppo.

Seventy percent support for ISIS in Raqqa has been dismissed as the result of fear. But if Syrians in the ISIS capital were just afraid of the Islamic State, why would the Al Nusra Front, which ISIS is fighting, get nearly as high a score from the people in Raqqa? The answer is that their support for Al Qaeda is real.

Apologists will claim that these numbers don’t apply to the Syrian refugees. It’s hard to say how true that is. Only 13% of Syrian refugees will admit to supporting ISIS, though that number still means that of Obama’s first 10,000 refugees, 1,300 will support ISIS. But the poll doesn’t delve into their views of other Al Qaeda groups, such as the Al Nusra Front, which usually gets more Sunni Muslim support.

And there’s no sign that they have learned to reject Islamic terrorism and their hatred for America.

When Syrian refugees were asked to list the greatest threat, 29 percent picked Iran, 22 percent picked Israel and 19 percent picked America. Only 10 percent viewed Islamic terrorism as a great threat.

By way of comparison, twice as many Iraqis see Islamic terrorism as a threat than Syrians do and slightly more Palestinian Arabs view Islamic terrorism as a threat than Syrians do. These are terrible numbers.

Thirty-seven percent of Syrian refugees oppose US airstrikes on ISIS. 33% oppose the objective of destroying ISIS.

And these are the people whom our politicians would have us believe are “fleeing an ISIS Holocaust.”

Seventy-three percent of Syrian refugees view US foreign policy negatively. That’s a higher number than Iraqis. It’s about equal to that of Palestinian Arabs.

They don’t like us. They really don’t like us.

Obama’s first shipment of Syrians will include 1,300 ISIS supporters and most of the rest will hate this country. But unless they’re stupid enough to announce that during their interviews, the multi-layered vetting that Obama and other politicians boast about will be useless.

It only took 2 Muslim refugees to carry out the Boston Marathon massacre. It only took 19 Muslim terrorists to carry out 9/11.

If only 1 percent of those 1,300 Syrian ISIS supporters put their beliefs into practice, they can still kill thousands of Americans.

And that’s a best case scenario. Because it doesn’t account for how many thousands of them support Al Qaeda. It doesn’t account for how many of them back other Islamic terrorist groups such as Hamas that had widespread support in Syria.

While the media has shamelessly attempted to exploit the Holocaust to rally support for Syrian migrants, the majority of Syrians supported Hamas whose mandate is finishing Hitler’s work. The Hamas charter describes a “struggle against the Jews” that culminates in another Holocaust. Bringing Hamas supporters to America will lead to more Muslim Supremacist violence against Jews in this country.

But all of this can be avoided by taking in genuine Syrian refugees.

While Obama insists on taking in fake Syrian refugees, mainly Sunni Muslims from UN camps who support terrorism and are not endangered in Jordan or Turkey, both Sunni countries, he is neglecting the real refugees, Christians and Yazidis, who are stateless and persecuted in the Muslim world.

Instead of taking in fake refugees who hate us, we should be taking in real refugees who need us.

Obama and Paul Ryan have claimed that a “religious test” for refugees is wrong, but religious tests are how we determine whether a refugee is really fleeing persecution or is just an economic migrant.

The Sunni Muslims that Obama is taking in do not face persecution. They are the majority. They are the persecutors. It’s the Yazidis and the Christians who need our help. And these real refugees, unlike the fake Sunni Muslim refugees, are not coming here to kill us. They truly have nowhere else to go.

Syria is a disaster because its rival Muslim religious groups are unable to get along with each other. Bringing them to this country will only spread the violence from their land to ours. Instead of taking in the religious majority that caused this mess through its intolerance, we should take in their victims; the Christians and Yazidis who are being slaughtered and enslaved by ISIS.

During the entire Syrian Civil War, Obama has only taken in 1 Syrian Yazidi and 53 Christians.

It’s time that we had a refugee policy that protected the persecuted, instead of their Muslim persecutors. It’s time that we listened to Syrian Christians in this country who oppose bringing tens of thousands of Syrian Muslims to terrorize their neighborhoods the way that they are already terrorizing Syrian Christians in Germany.

Syrian Muslims are a nation of terrorist supporters. They destroyed their own country. Let’s not let them destroy ours.

It’s time that we kept our nation safe by doing the right thing. Let’s take in the real Christian and Yazidi refugees and let the fake Sunni Muslim refugees and terrorist supporters stay in their own countries.

*** Deeper questions need to be asked.

NRO: The jihad waged by radical Islam rips at France from within. The two mass-murder attacks this year that finally induced President Francois Hollande to concede a state of war are only what we see. Unbound by any First Amendment, the French government exerts pressure on the media to suppress bad news. We do not hear much about the steady thrum of insurrection in the banlieues: the thousands of torched automobiles, the violence against police and other agents of the state, the pressure in Islamic enclaves to ignore the sovereignty of the Republic and conform to the rule of sharia. What happens in France happens in Belgium. It happens in Sweden where much of Malmo, the third largest city, is controlled by Muslim immigrant gangs — emergency medical personnel attacked routinely enough that they will not respond to calls without police protection, and the police in turn unwilling to enter without back-up. Not long ago in Britain, a soldier was killed and nearly beheaded in broad daylight by jihadists known to the intelligence services; dozens of sharia courts now operate throughout the country, even as Muslim activists demand more accommodations. And it was in Germany, which green-lighted Europe’s ongoing influx of Muslim migrants, that Turkey’s Islamist strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan proclaimed that pressuring Muslims to assimilate in their new Western countries is “a crime against humanity.”
So how many of us look across the ocean at Europe and say, “Yeah, let’s bring some of that here”? None of us with any sense. Alas, “bring it here” is the order of the day in Washington, under the control of leftists bent on fundamentally transforming America (Muslims in America overwhelmingly support Democrats) and the progressive-lite GOP, which fears the “Islamophobia” smear nearly as much as the “racist” smear. This, no doubt, is why what is described as the “controversy over Syrian refugees” is among the most deceitful public debates in recent memory — which, by Washington standards, is saying something.
Under a Carter administration scheme, the Refugee Admissions Program, the United States has admitted hundreds of thousands of aliens since 1980 — and, as the Center for Immigration Studies explains, asylum petitions have surged since the mid-Nineties. If there is a refugee “crisis,” it most certainly is no fault of ours: For example, the U.S. took in two-thirds of the world’s refugees resettled in 2014, with Canada a distant second, admitting about 10 percent. Those figures come from an invaluable briefing by Refugee Resettlement Watch, which illustrates that the Syrian component is but a fraction of what we must consider. Tens of thousands of what are called “refugees” have come to our shores from Muslim-majority countries. From Iraq alone, the number is 120,000 since 2007, notwithstanding the thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of American taxpayer dollars sacrificed to make Iraq livable.
Many of the refugees are steered to our country by the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees. Naturally, the UNHCR has a history of bashing Israel on behalf of Palestinian Islamists — indeed, it works closely with the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, one of Hamas’s most notorious sympathizers. The UNHCR works in tandem with the State Department, which resettles the refugees throughout the U.S. with the assistance of lavishly compensated contractors (e.g., the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, other Christian and Jewish outfits, and the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants) — often absent any meaningful consultation with the states in which Washington plants these assimilation-resistant imports. Responsibility for vetting the immigrants rests with the Department of Homeland Security. As the ongoing controversy has illustrated, however, a background check is only as good as the available information about a person’s background. In refugee pipelines like Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Sudan, such information is virtually nonexistent. (But don’t worry, we can rest assured that the UNHCR is doing a fine job.)
Let’s assume for fantasy’s sake, though, that the vetting is perfect — that we have comprehensive, accurate information on each refugee’s life up to the moment of admission. We would still have a calamity. There are two reasons for this, and they are easily grasped by the mass of Americans outside the Beltway.
First, vetting only works if you vet for the right thing. Washington, in its delusional Islamophilia, vets only for ties to terrorism, which it defines as “violent extremism” in purblind denial of modern terrorism’s Islamist ideological moorings. As the deteriorating situation in Europe manifests, our actual challenge is Islamic supremacism, of which jihadist terrorism is only a subset. For nearly a quarter-century, our bipartisan governing class has labored mightily to suppress public discussion of the undeniable nexus between Islamic doctrine and terrorism. Consequently, many Americans are still in the dark about sharia, classical Islam’s societal framework and legal code. We should long ago have recognized sharia as the bright line that separates authentic Muslim moderates, hungry for the West’s culture of reason and individual liberty, from Islamic supremacists, resistant to Western assimilation and insistent on incremental accommodation of Muslim law and mores.
The promotion of constitutional principles and civic education has always been foundational to the American immigration and naturalization process. We fatally undermine this process by narrowly vetting for terrorism rather than sharia adherence. Yes, I can already hear the slander: “You are betraying our commitment to religious liberty.” Please. Even if there were anything colorable to this claim, we are talking about inquiring into the beliefs of aliens who want to enter our country, not citizens entitled to constitutional protections. But the claim is not colorable in any event — it just underscores how willful blindness to our enemies’ ideology has compromised our security. Only a small fraction of Islamic supremacism involves tenets that, in the West, should be regarded as inviolable religious conviction (e.g., the oneness of Allah, the belief that Mohammed is the final prophet, the obligation to pray five times daily). No one in America has any interest in interfering with that. For Muslims adherent to classical sharia, however, the rest of their belief system has nothing to do with religion (except as a veneer). It instead involves the organization of the state, comprehensive regulation of economic and social life, rules of military engagement, and imposition of a draconian criminal code.
Unlike the Judeo-Christian principles that informed America’s founding, classical sharia does not abide a separation of spiritual from civic and political life. Therefore, to rationalize on religious-liberty grounds our conscious avoidance of Islamist ideology is to miss its thoroughgoing anti-constitutionalism.
Sharia rejects the touchstone of American democracy: the belief that the people have a right to govern themselves and chart their own destiny. In sharia governance, the people are subjects not citizens, and they are powerless to question, much less to change, Allah’s law. Sharia systematically discriminates against women and non-Muslims. It is brutal in its treatment of apostates and homosexuals. It denies freedom of conscience, free expression, property rights, economic liberty, and due process of law. It licenses wars of aggression against infidels for the purpose of establishing sharia as the law of the land. Sharia is also heavily favored by Muslims in majority-Muslim countries. Polling consistently tells us that upwards of two-thirds of Muslims in the countries from which we are accepting refugees believe sharia should be the governing system.
Thus, since we are vetting for terrorism rather than sharia-adherence, and since we know a significant number of Muslims are sharia-adherent, we are missing the certainty that we are importing an ever-larger population hostile to our society and our Constitution — a population that has been encouraged by influential Islamist scholars and leaders to form Muslim enclaves throughout the West.
This leads seamlessly to the second reason why the influx of refugees is calamitous. Not only are we vetting for the wrong thing, we are ignoring the dynamics of jihadism. The question is not whether we are admitting Muslims who currently have ties to terrorist organizations; it is whether we are admitting Muslims who are apt to become violent jihadists after they settle here.
The jihadism that most threatens Europe now, and that has been a growing problem in the United States for years, is the fifth-column variety. This is often referred to as “homegrown terrorism,” but that is a misnomer. The ideology that ignites terrorism within our borders is not native: It is imported. Furthermore, it is ubiquitously available thanks to modern communications technology In assessing the dynamic in which ideological inspiration evolves into actual jihadist attacks, we find two necessary ingredients: (1) a mind that is hospitable to jihadism because it is already steeped in Islamic supremacism, and (2) a sharia-enclave environment that endorses jihadism and relentlessly portrays the West as corrupt and hostile.
One last point worth considering: Washington’s debate over refugee policy assumes an unmet American obligation to the world. It is as if we were not already doing and sacrificing far more than every other country combined. It is as if there were not dozens of Islamic countries, far closer than the United States to refugee hot-spots, to which it would be sensible to steer Muslim migrants.
Yet, there is nothing obligatory about any immigration policy, including asylum. There is no global right to come here. American immigration policy is supposed to serve the national interests of the United States. Right now, American immigration policy is serving the interests of immigrants at the expense of American national security and the financial security of distressed American workers. Our nation is nearing $20 trillion in debt, still fighting in the Middle East, and facing the certain prospect of combat surges to quell the rising threat of jihadism. So why is Congress, under the firm control of Republicans, paying for immigration policies that exacerbate our peril?
Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book is Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.

What About that Hillary Office Created at State?

As Hillary’s emails are released and investigated, as those emails are analyzed for perspective and as the FOIA requests filed by the media are processed and fulfilled, a new condition and picture is emerging on what Hillary was really doing in her role as Secretary of State with the cooperation of her agency and inner circle. In summary, it was more crony business missions versus global diplomatic achievements.

Clinton Opened State Department Office to Dozens of Corporate Donors, Dem Fundraisers

WASHINGTON (AP) — As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton opened her office to dozens of influential Democratic party fundraisers, former Clinton administration and campaign loyalists, and corporate donors to her family’s global charity, according to State Department calendars obtained by The Associated Press.

The woman who would become a 2016 presidential candidate met or spoke by phone with nearly 100 corporate executives, Clinton charity donors and political supporters during her four years at the State Department between 2009 and 2013, records show. Many of those meetings and calls, formally scheduled by her aides, involved heads of companies and organizations that were pursuing business or private interests with the Obama administration at the time, including with the State Department while Clinton was in charge.

In addition, at least 60 of those who met with Clinton have donated or pledged program commitments to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. A dozen have been among Hillary Clinton’s most reliable political fundraisers, bundling more than $100,000 in donations during her failed 2008 presidential campaign or providing larger amounts to Clinton-allied super political action committees this time. And at least six entities represented in the meetings paid former President Bill Clinton lucrative fees for speeches.


The AP found no evidence of legal or ethical conflicts in Clinton’s meetings, in its examination of 1,294 pages from the calendars. Her sit-downs with business leaders were not unique among recent secretaries of state, who sometimes called on corporate executives to aid in international affairs, according to archived documents.

But the difference with Clinton’s meetings was that she was a 2008 presidential contender who was widely expected to try again in 2016. Her availability to luminaries from politics, business and charity shows the extent to which her office became a sounding board for their interests. And her ties with so many familiar faces from those intersecting worlds were complicated by their lucrative financial largess and political support over the years — even during her State Department tenure — for her campaigns and her husband’s, and for her family’s foundation.

Among those she met with or spoke with by phone were chief executives such as General Electric Co.’s Jeff Immelt, PepsiCo Inc.’s Indra Nooyi, FedEx Corp.’s Fred Smith, former Morgan Stanley chairman John Mack and former Citigroup Inc. chairman Sanford Weill. There were also billionaires: investors George Soros and Warren Buffett and diet pioneer S. Daniel Abraham. Major Democratic Party fundraisers included entertainment magnate Haim Saban, real estate developer Stephen J. Cloobeck and American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten.

In its response to detailed questions from the AP, the Clinton campaign did not address the issue of the candidate’s frequent meetings with corporate and political supporters during her State Department tenure. Instead, campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said “Secretary Clinton turned over all of her work emails, 55,000 pages of them, and asked that they be released to the public. Some of that will include her schedules. We look forward to the rest of her emails being released so people can have a greater window into her work at the department.”

The State Department turned the Clinton calendars over to the AP earlier this month, documents the AP sought for two years under the Freedom of Information Act. The department censored many meeting entries for privacy reasons or to protect internal deliberations, making it impossible to discern all the identities of those who met Clinton. A State Department spokesman declined to comment on the agency’s redactions of the calendars or the arrangements for Secretary of State John Kerry’s daily schedules.

The AP has also sought detailed planning schedules that aides sent Clinton before each day’s events, but the State Department has declined to search through the files of some of Clinton’s close aides at the time. The State Department’s release of Clinton emails has so far turned up at least 155 planning schedules, called “minischedules,” but they account for only a tiny percentage of Clinton’s four-year stint — 7 percent of the 1,159 days covered by those email releases.

Merrill said Clinton was not sent the planning “minischedules” every day or when she traveled, “which would account for why you see some on some days and not on others.”

The AP also found at least a dozen differences between Clinton’s planners and calendars involving visits by donors and longtime loyalists. In one example, a June 2010 Clinton planning schedule that the State Department released uncensored shows a 3 p.m. meeting between Clinton and her longtime private lawyer, David Kendall. But Clinton’s formal calendar lists the 20-minute session only as “private meeting — secretary’s office,” omitting Kendall’s name.

The Clinton campaign could not explain those discrepancies but said the candidate had made a good faith effort to be transparent by giving her work-related emails to the State Department for public release.

The calendars offer hour-by-hour depictions of Clinton’s hectic diplomatic schedule in Washington and her foreign tours crammed with meetings with dignitaries. Even so, she found time to meet CEOs, loyalists and donors.

“It shows Hillary Clinton marrying her political interests with the business and policy interests of powerful people,” said Lawrence Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “These are the people you cultivate to lay the groundwork for running for president.”

Clinton favored a select group of visitors — at least two dozen — for repeated meetings. Abraham, the billionaire behind SlimFast diet products and chairman of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, met with Clinton at least three times and was slated to meet her three other times, according to her calendars and schedules. Clinton’s calendars showed they met at her office in May 2009 and October 2010. Clinton also spoke at an Abraham Center event in April 2010.

Abraham has given $5 million to $10 million to the Clinton Foundation and donated $1.2 million in 2012 to Priorities USA Action, a super PAC supporting Clinton in 2016. Abraham told the AP that he assumed that he and Clinton discussed Mideast policy during their contacts.

Teachers’ union chief Weingarten met Clinton three times, in 2009, 2010 and 2012. Emails released by the State Department show that Weingarten’s policy aide, Tina Flournoy, messaged Clinton at her private account in mid-September 2009 saying that “Randi and would like to visit you re: child labor issues — if that’s possible, whom should I contact to schedule?”

Clinton responded: “I would love to see you and Randi. I’m copying Lona (Clinton’s scheduling aide) to see how soon we can schedule. Hope you’re well.”

Less than three weeks later, Weingarten and Flournoy — now chief of staff to Bill Clinton — met Hillary Clinton for a half hour, according to the calendars. That year, the union spent nearly $1 million lobbying the government on issues that included child labor in Uzbekistan. The union also spent at least $1 million in both 2010 and 2012, the other years Weingarten met with Clinton.

“We discussed a range of issues with Secretary Clinton — including the growing refugee crisis, expanding access to education globally and curbing child labor practices,” said Kate Childs Graham, speaking for the union.

Weingarten’s union endorsed Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid in July, and Weingarten is on the board of Priorities USA Action. The union has also given $1 million to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation and committed, along with two banking partners, to launch a $100 million loan fund to expand classrooms for young children under the auspices of the charity’s Clinton Global Initiative.

PepsiCo CEO Nooyi also had at least three scheduled contacts with Clinton. In February 2010, Nooyi and GE’s Immelt met Clinton as part of the State Department’s efforts to secure corporate money for an American pavilion in China’s Shanghai Expo in May of that year.

PepsiCo spent $6.8 million in 2010 on government lobbying. Nooyi talked twice with Clinton by phone in 2012, a year when PepsiCo spent $3.3 million on lobbying Congress and federal agencies, including State Department officials, on issues such as trade pacts and Russia legislation.

PepsiCo spokesman Jon Banner declined to discuss conversations or meetings the firm’s senior leaders may have had. A top executive with PepsiCo’s main rival, Coca-Cola, which donated $5 million to $10 million to the Clinton Foundation, also discussed the Shanghai event with Clinton in a 2009 conference call along with executives from PepsiCo and several other firms.

Nooyi is not a prominent Clinton political supporter, but PepsiCo has been active with the Clinton Foundation. PepsiCo’s foundation pledged in 2008 to provide $7.6 million in grants to two water firms as a commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative. The Clinton charity also listed a PepsiCo Foundation donation of more than $100,000 in 2014, the same year the soda company’s foundation announced a partnership under the charity to spur economic and social development in emerging nations.

A dozen other executives and political supporters met or were in phone contact with Clinton at least twice during her State Department tenure — among them Immelt, Saban, Soros and Clinton intimate and now-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, according to the calendars.

Another was Alfonso Fanjul, one of four brothers who run a Florida-based sugar and real estate conglomerate and are politically active in the state’s Cuban-American community.

Fanjul, whose family subsidiaries include Domino Sugar and Florida Crystals, was a Florida co-chairman for Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign in 1992, supported Hillary Clinton’s 2008 run and has donated between $100,000 and $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Florida Crystals spent $1 million lobbying the Obama administration in 2011 and nearly that amount in 2009, 2010 and 2012 on issues related to sugar and its use as a biofuel.

Fanjul met Hillary Clinton for a half hour in October 2009. Gaston Cantens, a spokesman for the firm, said Fanjul sought the 2009 meeting because he was having “customs issues coming in and out of the country and wanted help.” Cantens said Fanjul’s entry and exit problems eased.

Clinton met Fanjul again at a 10-minute “pull-aside” during a Brookings Institution luncheon in June 2012. The event honored Saban and his wife, Cheryl, who both bundled donations to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign and whose family foundation has donated between $5 million and $10 million to the Clinton Foundation.

The calendar doesn’t say what they discussed, but the event came two months after Fanjul returned from a trip to Cuba with a Brookings delegation. Fanjul, a Brookings trustee who had been a longtime foe of U.S. trade with Cuba, has publicly reversed course on the issue and is now open to investments there.

Cantens said Fanjul and Clinton discussed topics “related to Brookings,” but added: “I’m not saying Cuba didn’t come up.”

Animation on How Europe is Today

Watch Europe’s Borders Change Rapidly Over 1,000 Years In This Awesome Animation  (Hat-tip Tyler)

Sometimes we forget just how chaotic Europe’s geopolitical past was. Long before the Nazis or the Soviet Union caused great shifts in the balance of power, endless conflicts shifted the continent’s borders time and time again. When put in perspective, empires rose and fell in the blink of an eye. This awesome animation shows just that.

It also highlights that even though we see Europe as largely stable today, changes to its borders continue. Not depicted in this animation is Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in early 2014.

The video below is very similar, but it is sped up to really showcase generally how much geographical flux Europe has seen over the last 1,000 years. Although some of these changes were a result of treaties or absorption of less powerful states, the majority was a result of conflict.

If you were from an alien race, looking down on so much chaos over such a tiny amount of time relative to pretty much anything else in the universe, it would be very hard to conclude that humans are a peaceful species.