Category Archives: Middle East

New Chilling Facts on Immigration in the U.S.

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Dick Morris weighs in on immigration, says we are drowning in immigrants.

Philadelphia: The School District of Philadelphia’s special registration for immigrant students who speak a language other than English closes on Aug. 28, giving families of such students roughly two weeks to register their child for the upcoming school year.

The school year begins Sept. 8 for grades 1 through 12, and on Sept. 12 for kindergarten students; interested families should contact the Multilingual Assessment Center at (215) 400–4240 and selecting option 1. The office is open for registration Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. until 5:30 p.m.

Student registration packets are also available through the district’s website at www.philasd.org/announcements/New-Immigrant-Student-Registration-Packet.pdf.

Last year, the center registered more than 800 students from more than 70 countries. Collectively, those students spoke more than 40 different native languages.

The district also noted families shouldn’t be concerned about registering their child based on their immigration status. The district referred to Plyler v. DOE, a U.S. Supreme Court decision which held that it is unconstitutional to deny free public education to children who are not legally admitted into the United States.

City immigrant populations have been on the rise since Mayor Michael Nutter’s signage of a pair of executive orders, starting in 2009.

 

“All city services, including but not limited to the following listed services, shall be made available to all city of Philadelphia residents, consistent with applicable law, regardless of the person’s citizenship or legal immigration status,” read a portion of one order. “[Those services include] police and fire services; medical services, such as emergency medical services, general medical care at community health centers and immunization; testing and treatment with respect to communicable diseases; mental health services; children protective services and access to city facilities, such as libraries and recreation centers.”

That order also stipulated that law enforcement officials alone are allowed to question an individual’s immigration status, or those who work for a municipally–governed service or program. Nutter’s second immigrant executive oder, signed in 2014, ended the procedure of detaining individuals without a warrant on behalf of Immunization and Customs Enforcement.

“No person in the custody of the city who otherwise would be released from custody shall be detained pursuant an ICE civil immigration detainer request,” read a portion of the most recent executive order, “nor shall notice of his or her pending release be provided, unless such person is being released after conviction for a first or second degree felony involving violence and the detainer is supported by a judicial warrant.

“The police commissioner, the superintendent of prisons and all other relevant officials to the city are nearby required to take appropriate action to implement this order.”

And earlier this summer, Jim Kenney, winner of May’s democratic mayoral primary, joined with pro–immigrant groups Juntos and Philadelphia Stands United to support Nutter’s stance on immigration and to roundly reject Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s comments on immigrants.

“I also would wish that the United States congress would be as animated and as energetic about gun violence and education as they are about holding immigrants without a warrant,” Kenney said. “Our neighborhoods are not safer if people are afraid of the police. They’re not safer if they’re afraid to come forward and be a witness. They’re not safer if the relationship between the police and the community is a negative one.”

Mayor’s Office of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs Executive Director Jennifer Rodriguez said Nutter has “repeatedly stated that a piecemeal approach to immigration is not effective and has called onto congress and the federal government to address our broken system by enacting reform that reflects the welcoming values that our nation and our city were founded on.”

Syrians?

In part from Refugee Resettlement: Yikes!  Look at this opinion piece posted at a “progressive” website of all places. This worldly Syrian woman, born in America and apparently now living in Syria, says many Syrian so-called ‘refugees’ arriving in Europe are not from unsafe parts of Syria, but are just looking for “El Dorado” (a mythical city of gold)—for Europe to give them free everything!

Here is some of what Deena Stryker says of her fellow Syrians (emphasis is mine):

“My husband is one of 10 children. Of that large extended family, many have taken the boats to Europe now. Some are in Sweden, Denmark, Italy and Germany. Several are in Turkey. None of these people needed to leave Syria. They were all living in safe, violence free zones (Latakia on the coast). None of them had been attacked or threatened or were in any danger from Syrian government, or police, etc.

Why did they leave? They left homes and cars and possessions here in order to take up the offer of FREE money and housing in Europe. They had been sure that once in Europe they will be given free medical, education, housing, food and provided for in every way forever. They think of Europe as “El Dorado”. There is also a large dose of jealousy involved, as they saw their neighbors going and they didn’t want to be left behind. Syrian hate to see someone else get a good deal, and not get a piece of the pie themselves.  More here.

 

U.S. Germany to Remove Missile Defense Systems from Turkey

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WTH??? Anyone who believes the reasons for these decisions needs to think again.
I personally will throw in my reason, it is part of the Iran Deal where under the P5+1, John Kerry and Wendy Sherman along with The White House gave up yet another major item….missile defense. Iran and the IRGC must be delighted.
 Germany to Withdraw Patriot Missiles From Turkey in 2016
Berlin:  Germany on Saturday said it would withdraw its two Patriot missile batteries from Turkey early next year, ending its role in a three-year NATO mission to help bolster the country’s air defences against threats from Syria’s civil war.

The German army, known as the Bundeswehr, said on its website that the mandate for the mission would run out on January 31, 2016, and would not be renewed.

Germany will also call back around 250 soldiers who are currently deployed in southeastern Turkey as part of the mission, the statement said.

“Along with our NATO partners, we have protected the Turkish people from missile attacks from Syria,” Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen was quoted as saying in the statement.

“We are ending this deployment in January 2016,” she said, adding that the main threat in the crisis-wracked region now came from the Islamic State group.

Turkey turned to its NATO allies for help over its troubled frontier after a mortar bomb fired from Syrian territory killed five Turkish civilians in the border town of Akcakale in 2012.

The United States, the Netherlands and Germany each sent Patriot missile batteries in response. Germany’s Patriot missile system is based in the Turkish town of Kahramanmaras, some 100 kilometres (60 miles) from the Syrian border.

Originally used as an anti-aircraft missile, Patriots today are used to defend airspace by detecting and destroying incoming missiles. NATO deployed Patriot missiles in Turkey during the 1991 Gulf war and in 2003 during the Iraqi conflict.

U.S. pulling Patriot missiles from Turkey

FNC: The U.S. military is pulling its Patriot missiles from Turkey this fall, the U.S. Embassy in Ankara announced Sunday.

It is unclear if the decision to pull the missiles is in response to Turkey’s unannounced massive airstrike against a Kurdish separatist group in northern Iraq on July 24. The strike endangered U.S. Special Forces on the ground training Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, angering U.S. military officials.

The U.S. military was taken completely by surprise by the Turkish airstrike, which involved 26 jets, military sources told Fox News.

Patriot missiles have been upgraded in recent years to shoot down ballistic missiles, in addition to boasting an ability to bring down enemy aircraft. The U.S. military has deployed these missiles along Turkey’s border with Syria.

When a Kurdish journalist asked the Army’s outgoing top officer, Gen. Raymond Odierno, about the incident over northern Iraq at his final press conference Wednesday, Odierno replied: “We’ve had conversations about this to make sure it doesn’t happen.”

The Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, has been listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. It is influenced by Marxist ideology and has been responsible for recent attacks in Turkey, killing Turkish police and military personnel. A separate left-wing radical group was responsible for attacking the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul last week.

State Department and Pentagon officials have said in recent days that Turkey has a right to defend itself against the PKK.

A senior military source told Fox News that Turkey is worried about recent gains by Syrian Kurds, some affiliated with the PKK. But the group is seen as an effective ground force against ISIS, helping pinpoint ISIS targets for U.S. warplanes.

The Turks, however, worry Syrian Kurds will take over most of the 560-mile border it shares with Syria.

Currently, ISIS controls a 68-mile strip along the Turkey-Syria border, but Turkey does not want Kurdish fighters involved in the fight to push out ISIS from this portion of the border because it would enable the Kurds to control a large swath of land stretching from northern Iraq to the Mediterranean. Right now Syrian Kurds occupy both sides of the contested 68-mile border controlled by ISIS.

Of the 30 million Kurds living in the Middle East, 14 million reside in Turkey. They are one of the world’s largest ethnic groups without its own country.

Despite Turkey being listed among the 62-nation anti-ISIS coalition, it has yet to be named as a country striking ISIS in the coalition’s daily airstrike report.

A week ago, after months of negotiations, the U.S. Air Force moved six F-16 fighter jets to Incirlik Air Base in Turkey from their base in Italy and several KC-135 refueling planes. Airstrikes against ISIS in Syria soon followed.

The decision to allow manned U.S. military aircraft inside Turkey came days after an ISIS suicide bomber killed dozens of Turkish citizens.

Part of Turkey’s reluctance to do more against ISIS is because Turkey wants the U.S. military to take on the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. But that is not U.S. policy.

“We are not at war with the Assad regime,” Pentagon spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis said recently.

The animosity between Turkey and Syria goes back decades. In 1939, Turkey annexed its southern most province, Hatay, from Assad family land. Syria has never recognized the move and the two countries have been at odds ever since.

There was no immediate reply from the Pentagon or State Dept. when contacted by Fox News asking what prompted the decision to pull the U.S. missiles from Turkey.

There are More Non-Official Email Accounts, Server-Gate

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Every day brings new information and keeping a timeline is difficult given the number of people and the countless moving parts. The previous list and timeline is here for reference an context.

Strip their security clearance NOW due to dereliction of duty, oath and reckless control of classified material.

Further a subpoena should be issued to Brian Pagliano, who actually built the infrastructure of the Hillary server and managed it during her presidential run in 2008 until the time the platform was turned over to Platte River. Pagliano also worked a dual job at the State Department once Hillary was confirmed as Secretary. He is now in a private IT practice.

It should also be noted that any external communications device that has any protective classifications on the material by default becomes the official property of the Federal government, which is policy.

State Dept. confirms Clinton aides had other unreported email accounts

By Stephen Dinan – The Washington Times – Friday, August 14, 2015

Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s top aides, used personal email accounts to conduct government business in addition to a State Department email and an account on the controversial server Mrs. Clinton kept at her New York home, the State Department confirmed to a federal court Friday.

The State Department admitted to the judge that it doesn’t have control over those documents, and can’t be sure it has all of the records from their time in the administration.

John F. Hackett, the top open-records official at the department, said they have officially concluded that Ms. Abedin and Ms. Mills “used personal email accounts located on commercial servers at times for government business.” Ms. Abedin, meanwhile, had an account at clintonemail.com, the domain tied to the Clinton home server.

Mr. Hackett also said he has no way of knowing what else might be out there, and has to trust the two women and their lawyers to turn over what they have.

“The department is not in a position to attest to non-department servers, accounts, hard drives or other devices that may contain responsive information,” Mr. Hackett said in a declaration filed with Judge Emmet G. Sullivan in a case brought by Judicial Watch, which is seeking records from Mrs. Clinton’s aides.

Judicial Watch has argued that Mrs. Clinton’s unique email arrangement, in which she used an email account tied to a server she kept at her home in New York, rather than using the regular State Department system, does not absolve her or her aides, who also used that server, of responsibility to make sure they are all stored by the administration as official records.

Tim Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said the Hackett declaration didn’t provide the answers his group and the court were seeking, and said it taints the Obama administration.

“The State Department refused to answer questions about what is even in its possession. Now we know that the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton have joined hands in this email scandal,” he said. “It is now clear that Mrs. Clinton is withholding servers and emails from the FBI and Justice Department, and Judge Sullivan is being misled to conclude otherwise. We will seek appropriate relief from the court.”

Mr. Hackett said the State Department “is not currently aware” of any other devices, such as computers or phones “issued by the department to former Secretary Clinton, Ms. Abedin or Ms. Mills that may contain responsive records.”

Mrs. Clinton has asserted, through her lawyer, that she has turned over all of her relevant documents to the State Department.

For her part, Ms. Mills said through her lawyer that she has already returned all documents she believes are official business.

Ms. Abedin’s lawyer said she’ll return her official government documents that she kept by Aug. 28.

The State Department for years had been performing records-searches without access to Mrs. Clinton’s emails — though it never publicly admitted the searches were likely incomplete. The situation became public earlier last year after the Benghazi panel learned of Mrs. Clinton’s use of a clintonemail.com account for official business, and demanded to see some of those messages.

The State Department then went back to Mrs. Clinton and asked her to return the records that were supposed to have been in the government’s possession, and she belatedly complied in December, or nearly two years after she left office.

She returned the messages — a total of about 30,000 — by printing them out on 55,000 pages. The State Department then spent months and manpower going back and re-digitizing those messages.

The story continues here.

Enter Mark Levin on Hillary vs. the Espionage Act.

Section 793 of the Penal Code, subsection (f) is a problem for Hillary Clinton. It is very specific in defining the offenses which meet the criteria for a violation and it appears that Ms Clinton has potentially thousands of counts, perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands, against her.

Levin: ‘Sect. 793 of Penal Code … Is What Hillary Clinton Has to Worry About’

 

al Qaeda and Taliban New Allegiance in Afghanistan

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The Taliban has raised their flag after they take control of the Helmand district in Afghanistan. Afghan soldiers bailed out and the Taliban has seized military gear supplied to the Afghanistan forces after killing 40 Afghan soldiers and police.

Sharia will be imposed and wield deeper power in the region.

After the official declaration of the deal of Mullah Omar was announced, the Taliban leadership was fractured due to a sense of betrayal. During many tribal meetings, it was soon announced that Mullah Akhtar Mansour would be the new leader.

 Omar

 Mansour

Ayman al Zawahiri, who took control of al Qaeda after the death of Usama bin Ladin made a declaration of pledge and cooperation with Akhtar Mansour where new threats against America have been officially broadcasted.


al Zawahiri has been thought to be hiding in the Pakistan border region and recently produced an audio raising news fears in the region. Additionally, while there have been several attempts at peace talks with the Afghanistan government, the Taliban is now formally opposed.

In part from Reuters: The swift announcement that Mansour, Omar’s longtime deputy, would be the new leader has riled many senior Taliban figures, and Omar’s family said this month that it did not endorse the move.

Mansour’s position could be shored up by the vote of confidence by al Qaeda, the global militant group that has maintained ties with the Taliban for almost two decades since the tenure of its founder and late leader Osama bin Laden.

“As leader of the al Qaeda organization for jihad, I offer our pledge of allegiance, renewing the path of Sheikh Osama and the devoted martyrs in their pledge to the commander of the faithful, the holy warrior Mullah Omar,” Zawahiri added.

Reiterating support for the Taliban is also a tacit rejection of Islamic State, the new ultra-radical Sunni Muslim movement that is ensconced in Iraq and Syria and has gained the support of a few Afghan insurgent commanders.

Al Qaeda is being challenged by Islamic State for leadership of the global jihadist movement, as determined backers of IS have cropped up in Libya and Yemen this year.

Al Qaeda was set up by Arab guerrillas who flocked to Afghanistan to fight Soviet occupation forces in the 1980s. It thrived under the Taliban’s 1996-2001 rule in Afghanistan before the U.S. invasion that followed Al Qaeda’s Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington drove both groups underground.

ISIS Uses Chemical Weapons in Iraq

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EDGARTOWN, Massachusetts (AP) — The United States is investigating whether the Islamic State used chemical weapons, the White House said Thursday, following allegations that IS militants deployed chemical weapons against Kurdish forces in northern Iraq.

 

Alistair Baskey, a spokesman for the White House’s National Security Council, said the U.S. is taking the allegations “very seriously” and seeking more information about what happened. He noted that IS had been accused of using such weapons before.

“We continue to monitor these reports closely, and would further stress that any use of chemicals or biological material as a weapon is completely inconsistent with international standards and norms regarding such capabilities,” Baskey said in a statement.

Earlier Thursday, Kurdish officials said their forces, known as peshmerga, were attacked the day before near the town of Makhmour, not far from Irbil. Germany’s military has been training the Kurds in the area, and the German Defense Ministry said some 60 Kurdish fighters had suffered breathing difficulties from the attack — a telltale sign of chemical weapons use. But neither Germany nor the Kurds specified which type of chemical weapons may have been used.

Confirmation of chemical weapons use by IS would mark a dramatic turn in the U.S.-led effort to rout the extremist group from the roughly one-third of Iraq and Syria that it controls.

Although the U.S. and its coalition partners are mounting airstrikes against the Islamic State, they are relying on local forces like the Kurds, the Iraqi military and others to do the fighting on the ground. Already, those forces have struggled to match the might of the well-funded and heavily armed extremist group.

At the United Nations, U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power said the U.S. was speaking with the Kurds who had made the allegations to gather more information. She said that if reports of chemical weapons are true, they would further prove that what IS calls warfare is really “just systematic attacks on civilians who don’t accord to their particularly perverse world view.”

“I think we will have to again move forward on these allegations, get whatever evidence we can,” Power said.

She added that as a result of earlier chemical weapons use by the Syrian government, the U.S. and its partners now have advanced forensic systems to analyze chemical weapons attacks. She said anyone responsible should be held accountable.

Similar reports of chemical weapons use by IS had surfaced in July. But it’s unclear exactly where the extremist group may have obtained any chemical weapons.

Following a chemical weapon attack on a suburb of the Syrian capital of Damascus in 2014 that killed hundreds of civilians, the U.S. and Russia mounted a diplomatic effort that resulted in Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government agreeing to the destruction or removal of its chemical weapons stockpiles. But there have been numerous reports of chemical weapons use in Syria since then — especially chlorine-filled barrel bombs. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the global chemical weapons watchdog, has been investigating possible undeclared chemical weapons stockpiles in Syria.

Word of the White House’s probe into possible chemical weapons use by IS came as President Barack Obama was vacationing with his family in Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. Also on Thursday, IS militants claimed responsibility for a truck bombing at a Baghdad market that killed 67 people in one of the deadliest single attacks there since the Iraq War.

Further details can be found here.