Saturday, April 25, 2015
8 things to know about the Armenian Genocide 100 years ago (yesterday)
CNN Translations:Armenian = Christian
Ottoman = Muslim
(CNN)The mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, which began 100 years ago Friday, is said by some scholars and others to have been the first genocide of the 20th century, even though the word "genocide" did not exist at the time.
The issue of whether to call the killings a genocide is emotional, both for Armenians, who are descended from those killed, and for Turks, the heirs to the Ottomans. For both groups, the question touches as much on national identity as on historical facts.
Some Armenians feel their nationhood cannot be fully recognized unless the truth of what happened to their forebears is acknowledged. Some Turks still view the Armenians as having been a threat to the Ottoman Empire in a time of war, and say many people of various ethnicities -- including Turks -- were killed in the chaos of war.
In addition, some Turkish leaders fear that acknowledgment of a genocide could lead to demands for huge reparations.
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| Turkish official teases starving Armenian children by showing them a piece of bread during the Armenian Genocide in 1915. |
So, what do we know about happened in those fateful days? Here are some answers:
What preceded the mass killings of Armenians that began 100 years ago?
The Ottoman Turks, having recently entered World War I on the side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were worried that Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire would offer wartime assistance to Russia. Russia had long coveted control of Constantinople (now Istanbul), which controlled access to the Black Sea -- and therefore access to Russia's only year-round seaports.
How many Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire at the start of the mass killings?
Many historians agree that the number was about 2 million. However, victims of the mass killings also included some of the 1.8 million Armenians living in the Caucasus under Russian rule, some of whom were massacred by Ottoman forces in 1918 as they marched through East Armenia and Azerbaijan.
How did the mass killings start?
By 1914, Ottoman authorities were already portraying Armenians as a threat to the empire's security. Then, on the night of April 23-24, 1915, the authorities in Constantinople, the empire's capital, rounded up about 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders. Many of them ended up deported or assassinated.
April 24, known as Red Sunday, is commemorated as Genocide Remembrance Day by Armenians around the world. Friday is the 100th anniversary of that day.
How many Armenians were killed?
This is a major point of contention. Estimates range from 300,000 to 2 million deaths between 1914 and 1923, with not all of the victims in the Ottoman Empire. But most estimates -- including one of 800,000 between 1915 and 1918, made by Ottoman authorities themselves -- fall between 600,000 and 1.5 million.
Whether due to killings or forced deportation, the number of Armenians living in Turkey fell from 2 million in 1914 to under 400,000 by 1922.
How did they die?
Almost any way one can imagine.
While the death toll is in dispute, photographs from the era document some mass killings. Some show Ottoman soldiers posing with severed heads, others with them standing amid skulls in the dirt.
The victims are reported to have died in mass burnings and by drowning, torture, gas, poison, disease and starvation. Children were reported to have been...
University of Florida suspends frat over abuse of wounded vets
GAINESVILLE, Fla. – The University of Florida suspended one of its fraternities on Friday after allegations that its members hurled drunken insults and spat at a group of disabled military veterans at a Panama City Beach resort.
The school said on Friday that it is charging the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity with obscene behavior, public intoxication, theft, causing physical or other harm, and damage to property.
The suspension came after the fraternity had already suspended operations itself and expelled three of its members after finding they had behaved inappropriately.
"I am personally offended and disappointed by the behavior that has been described to me," Dave Kratzer, the school's student affairs vice president and retired U.S. Army major general, said in a statement.
The situation occurred while the fraternity and veterans with the Warrior Beach Retreat were at...
The school said on Friday that it is charging the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity with obscene behavior, public intoxication, theft, causing physical or other harm, and damage to property.The suspension came after the fraternity had already suspended operations itself and expelled three of its members after finding they had behaved inappropriately.
"I am personally offended and disappointed by the behavior that has been described to me," Dave Kratzer, the school's student affairs vice president and retired U.S. Army major general, said in a statement.
The situation occurred while the fraternity and veterans with the Warrior Beach Retreat were at...
NPR Cut Dana Perino’s Heartwarming Story About George W. Bush
Dana Perino’s new book features a touching encounter between President George W. Bush and an injured—and intubated—Marine receiving the Purple Heart. She follows it with another story involving a dying soldier’s mother yelling at the president about the war.
Both stories were recounted by Perino in an excerpt from “And the Good News Is…” that was published by The Daily Signal this week. But if you listened to NPR’s interview with the former White House press secretary on “Morning Edition” today, you would’ve only heard one.
NPR’s edited version of the interview that aired included the story about the mother who yelled at Bush, but not the more uplifting story about the Marine, who happened to be intubated in his hospital bed but opened his eyes upon Bush’s comments to the Marine’s son.
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Here’s part of that story:
Everyone stood silently while the military aide in a low and steady voice presented the award. At the end of it, the Marine’s little boy tugged on the president’s jacket and asked, “What’s a Purple Heart?”
The president got down on one knee and pulled the little boy closer to him. He said, “It’s an award for your dad, because he is very brave and courageous, and because he loves his country so much. And I hope you know how much he loves you and your mom, too.”
As he hugged the boy, there was a commotion from the medical staff as they moved toward the bed.
The Marine had just opened his eyes. I could see him from where I stood.
The CNO [chief of naval operations] held the medical team back and said, “Hold on, guys. I think he wants the president.”
The president jumped up and rushed over to the side of the bed. He cupped the Marine’s face in his hands. They locked eyes, and after a couple of moments the president, without breaking eye contact, said to the military aide, “Read it again.”
So we stood silently as the military aide presented the Marine with the award for a second time. The president had tears dripping from his eyes onto the Marine’s face. As the presentation ended, the president rested his forehead on the Marine’s for a moment.
Perino told The Daily Signal she recounted the whole story to NPR’s David Greene when he asked about the hospital visit. When The Daily Signal reached out to NPR to understand why it chose to feature only part of Perino’s interview, a spokeswoman told us this:
Dana Perino told many anecdotes in her wonderful interview. It’s too bad we could not include them all because of time constraints.The entire story...
She spoke, for example, of the president’s graciousness with her father. She also spoke of a mother who yelled at him—and then described how the president quite deliberately stayed and listened and absorbed the woman’s anger. It was an interaction the president himself remembered on Marine One, as Dana recounted. For these reasons, we chose to include it, while making sure to highlight that the reaction in that room was an exception.
Friday, April 24, 2015
Republican Senate Confirms AG Who Says Illegals Have Right to Work But Partially Born Babies Have No Right to Life
(CNSNews.com) - A Republican-controlled U.S. Senate voted to confirm an attorney general today who says that illegal aliens have a right to work in the United States but that partially born babies do not have a right to life.The Senate took two votes on the nomination of Loretta Lynch: first, a "cloture" vote to end debate and allow a final vote on confirmation, and, then, the final vote itself.
Neither of these votes would have taken place had not Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell brought her nomination to the floor for...
The American Teen Whose Death-by-Drone Obama Won't Explain
On Thursday, President Barack Obama appeared in the White House press room to reveal that a US strike in January on an Al Qaeda compound had killed two hostages held by the terrorist group, Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian, and Warren Weinstein, an American. He offered his condolences to their families for the mistake that led to their deaths.It's remarkable that Obama spoke of this at all. The US targeted killing program is shrouded in secrecy, and the president had never before issued a statement like this about people accidentally killed by US drone strikes. (He did not use the word "drone.") One such death that stands out is that of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a 16-year-old American citizen who was killed in a US drone strike.
Abdulrahman was the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical cleric turned Al Qaeda propagandist. The father was killed in a drone strike that targeted him in Yemen in September 2011. The son was killed weeks later in a separate strike in Yemen. According to his family, the attack was on a restaurant. Attorney General Eric Holder later said that this strike did not "specifically" target the young man.
The US government has never said that Abdulrahman was involved in terrorist activities. In 2012, I asked Obama during a Reddit AMA what he thought about the teen's death, and...
Rick Perry: ‘Outrageous’ Lack of Accountability After Veterans Scandal
Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, says it is “outrageous” that so few people have been held accountable at the Department of Veterans Affairs after the Obama administration promised action would be taken against those found responsible for manipulating wait times at VA hospitals.Internal documents obtained by the New York Times show that despite claims by the department that at least 14 people had been fired, only three actually have lost their jobs.
“It is outrageous that the Obama administration has not held people accountable for manipulating wait times in VA hospitals after promising to take action against those implicated in the scandal,” said Perry.
The documents reveal that the department punished only eight of the 280,000 employees. According to the Times, “one was fired, one retired in lieu of termination, one’s termination is pending, and five were reprimanded or suspended for up to two months.”
This falls far short of claims by VA officials.
Secretary Robert A. McDonald, who was appointed in the wake of the scandal, asserted...
Thursday, April 23, 2015
Make No Mistake: The Press Is Going After The Clinton Foundation Because They Want Elizabeth Warren..
I predicted it way before many even knew who she was... HERENone other than the New York Times is going after them (the Clinton Foundation) now so make sure their pick, Elizabeth Warren will win the nomination.
More Lefty Love And Righty Disdain For Elizabeth Warren:
MoveOn.org preparing million dollar ‘draft Elizabeth Warren’ campaign
Ramadi and Obama’s Phony Air War Against ISIS
The Obama Administration continues to show complete
incompetence in dealing with ISIS. Case in point: It’s decided that Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province in western Iraq, is expendable—thereby showing it understands nothing about the value of the city or even its own capacity to defend it.
The reason? According to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey, Obama is emphasizing defending a refinery in the same province to protect the oil supplies. As if we couldn’t do both—and then some.
For the past eight months, the Administration has settled for little more than jabs when it could have landed flurries of punishing roundhouse blows. According to the latest 24-hour report Defense Department report, the U.S. launched just 36 airstrikes against ISIS in both Iraq and Syria. That’s actually much higher than normal. But nevertheless equals about one per fighter-bomber aboard the U.S. carrier normally stationed in the Persian Gulf, each of which can fly several sorties daily.
Now add in the vast numbers of area ground-based F-16s, F-15s, F-22s, A-10s, B-1 heavy bombers, helicopters, and Reaper and Predator drones among U.S. forces, plus aircraft of 11 other coalition nations. The day before there were only 13 airstrikes,fewer than a single Reaper can perform on one mission.
Cruise missiles are also in theater, and the U.S. can hit with heavy B-52 and B-2 bombers from anywhere in the world. Yet with this massive armada and with assets on the ground to help identify targets, the administration seems unable to find and strike more than a handful of targets daily. A machine gun here, a truck there. There’s been little effort to translate success in pinpoint assassination efforts,such as that which at least temporarily has knocked ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi out of the fight, into a war-fighting effort.
Which brings us back to Ramadi—a city that’s no big deal, says Dempsey. “It has no symbolic meaning.” That’s an incredible statement: The city’s meaning is both...
The reason? According to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey, Obama is emphasizing defending a refinery in the same province to protect the oil supplies. As if we couldn’t do both—and then some.
For the past eight months, the Administration has settled for little more than jabs when it could have landed flurries of punishing roundhouse blows. According to the latest 24-hour report Defense Department report, the U.S. launched just 36 airstrikes against ISIS in both Iraq and Syria. That’s actually much higher than normal. But nevertheless equals about one per fighter-bomber aboard the U.S. carrier normally stationed in the Persian Gulf, each of which can fly several sorties daily.
Now add in the vast numbers of area ground-based F-16s, F-15s, F-22s, A-10s, B-1 heavy bombers, helicopters, and Reaper and Predator drones among U.S. forces, plus aircraft of 11 other coalition nations. The day before there were only 13 airstrikes,fewer than a single Reaper can perform on one mission.
Cruise missiles are also in theater, and the U.S. can hit with heavy B-52 and B-2 bombers from anywhere in the world. Yet with this massive armada and with assets on the ground to help identify targets, the administration seems unable to find and strike more than a handful of targets daily. A machine gun here, a truck there. There’s been little effort to translate success in pinpoint assassination efforts,such as that which at least temporarily has knocked ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi out of the fight, into a war-fighting effort.
Which brings us back to Ramadi—a city that’s no big deal, says Dempsey. “It has no symbolic meaning.” That’s an incredible statement: The city’s meaning is both...
Kurdish girl killing 400 ISIS fighters with huge machine gun Read more at http://universalfreepress.com/kurdish-girl-killing-400-isis-fighters-with-huge-machine-gun/
As the war in the Middle East against ISIS drags on, the fighters seem to be getting younger and younger. A couple of weeks ago, we showed you the latest ISIS terrorist school for Jihadist that is training the next generation to hate Christians and how to behead them. Here is the other side of the story.This little girl looks about six or seven years old. She chats away with an off-camera adult, who asks her how many Islamic State fighters she has killed. “Four hundred!” she says, speaking in a Kurdish dialect local to Sulaymaniyah in northern Iraq. Then the little girl leans over a machine gun bigger than she is, and using both hands, she fires away into the distance. As the shots echo across the desert, the man behind the camera eggs her on: “Kill! Kill!”
The footage this picture is taken from appears to have first surfaced in mid-January on a Facebook page devoted to pro-Kurdish videos, and shortly thereafter it cropped up on a YouTube channel called “Kurdish YPG”. The YPG, or People’s Protection Units, are the armed wing of the...
Insiders Detail Culture of Secrecy at California’s Obamacare Exchange
This is part 2 of this article, read part 1 HERE
Please refrain from writing a lot of draft contract language in government email … And don’t clarify via email … No email.
Later, concerned about contractor performance, Hill conducted an Internet search for “best practices” information to forward a superior. Afterward he got this text:
Aiden—Please stop using government email for your searches.
Hill saw the text messages as a deliberate effort to avoid a paper trail subject to public disclosure. And he says some higher-ups grew increasingly upset by his efforts to flag alleged incompetence and waste.
“They stuck their head in the sand and pretended the contractors could fix things by the launch date, which they couldn’t and didn’t,” says a former Covered California call center manager who worked under Hill and asked not to be named to protect his status at a different state job. “It was always say that everything was fine and we’re going to make it through the process.”
The officials allege it was conflicts of interest that led...
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Former airman, Playboy model plans demonstration for US flag
VALDOSTA (Tribune News Service) — An Air Force veteran and former Playboy model who was banned from Valdosta State University last week after taking an American flag from a group of demonstrators is now organizing her own demonstration that she said is to show support for the military and the flag.
Michelle Manhart was detained but not arrested by VSU police after she took the flag from a group of protesters. She said she was not planning to take the flag from the protestors, but she had heard about the group’s recent campus demonstrations and wanted to take action.
“I did not want anything like this, but I got a call from a student who told me that the flag was on the ground, and they were walking on it,” said Manhart. “I was just going over there to pick up the flag off the ground. I don’t know what their cause is, but I went to pick it up because it doesn’t deserve to be on the ground.” The group reportedly elected not to press charges against Manhart, and campus police issued her a criminal trespass warning, effectively banning her from the school. She told The Valdosta Daily Times that she resisted arrest after seeing the flag being...
The Socialist Sinking Ship: Then and Now
A little late to the party, the BBC wonders at the surreal and ongoing failure of the Venezuelan regime to provide its citizens with life’s basic amenities. Goods such as flour, sugar, cooking oil, shampoo and detergent, and the oft-mentioned toilet paper are now in such short supply that people are given time off work to queue in front of the stores. But in good socialist fashion, matters seem otherwise pretty “well organized”. Authorities are advising stores to allow customers to queue in underground parking lots so that they don’t get sunburnt, and have also instituted some measures to trim down the number of shoppers: people can “only buy scarce goods on certain days of the week depending on what number their ID card ends in”.At this stage, further comments on the economics of what’s happening in Venezuela (which we wrote about in the past) are hardly necessary. It’s interesting to point out, however, that around the world these kind of ultimate failures of socialism not only originate from the same causes, but tend to manifest themselves in strikingly similar manner.
About 30 years ago on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Romanians used to wait in line for hours in front of mostly empty shelves. But for them, the situation had long ceased to be a temporary crisis, as Venezuela’s problems are still portrayed. The Romanian communist regime, in place already for more than two decades, had rationalized most food shortages as...
Incompetence, Mismanagement Plague California’s Obamacare Insurance Exchange
Now, several senior-level officials integral to the launch of Covered California—who enthusiastically support the Affordable Care Act—are speaking about what they view as gross incompetence and mismanagement involving some of the $1 billion federal tax dollars poured into the state effort.
‘Somebody Must Have Been Smoking Something’
Consultant Aiden Hill became a “foxhole convert” to Obamacare in July of 2010 when he lost his insurance, had a serious medical issue and couldn’t get a new policy.
“I lived through a health care nightmare. That’s one reason why I took a cut in my pay rate to work for Covered California.”
In March 2013, Hill was hired as project manager over Covered California’s massive $120 million call center effort. In just six short months, it would face an avalanche of customers seeking insurance mandated under the new law.
But five months on the job converted Hill from avid supporter to disenchanted whistleblower. He says the secretive and dysfunctional culture was...
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
Army HUMILIATES Male Soldiers, Forces Them To Wear Women’s Clothing As Part Of Mandatory Training..
As part of the Army’s mandatory Sexual Harassment and Assault
Prevention (SHARP) training, some units are requiring Soldiers to participate in a Walk a Mile In Her Shoes event, in order to bring awareness to rape and sexual assault, and “stop men’s sexualized violence against women.”
Sounds positive, right? Well there’s just one little detail that is causing quite the controversy, as these male Soldiers will all be forced to cross-dress, wearing red high heeled shoes during the 1.26 mile walk.
One cadet from Arizona ROTC said that any personnel who refused to participate in the event, would receive a negative counseling form from their leadership, which would state that the Soldier didn’t support their unit’s rape and sexual prevention program...
Sounds positive, right? Well there’s just one little detail that is causing quite the controversy, as these male Soldiers will all be forced to cross-dress, wearing red high heeled shoes during the 1.26 mile walk.
One cadet from Arizona ROTC said that any personnel who refused to participate in the event, would receive a negative counseling form from their leadership, which would state that the Soldier didn’t support their unit’s rape and sexual prevention program...
ICE Wasted $41.1 Million Transporting Detainees on Empty Flights
Poor management practices at the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) air program have potentially cost taxpayers $41.1 million by allowing for detainees to be transferred on nearly empty flights, according to a new audit.
The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) also found that the agency’s database for tracking the transfer of detainees is riddled with errors, leaving ICE unsure of a detainees’ criminal history, gang affiliation, or even gender.
ICE Air uses charter and commercial flights to transfer detainees to foreign countries or within the United States. In many instances, the audit found, the flights are less than half full.
“Although ICE Air met its mission by transporting 930,435 detainees over a 3-1/2 year period, it could have used its resources more effectively,” the audit said. “In fact, ICE Air may have missed opportunities to improve the program’s overall effectiveness even though it has identified some ways to reduce costs associated with detainee transportation.”
“The lack of reliable data limits the ability of management to make informed decisions regarding how many planes it needs to transport the current level of detainees, whether it should...