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2016

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Data Breach You Haven’t Heard About Foreign hackers may be reading encrypted U.S. government communications, yet basic information about what happened still isn’t available.By Will Hurd

By on January 27th, 2016

Rep. Hurd, a Republican from Texas, sits on the House Homeland Security Committee and is chairman of the IT Subcommittee on Oversight and Government Reform.
A security breach recently discovered at software developer Juniper Networks has U.S. officials worried that foreign hackers have been reading the encrypted communications of U.S. government agencies for the past three years. Yet compared with the uproar over the Office of Personnel Management breach, first disclosed last June, this recent breach has gone largely unnoticed.

On Dec. 17 the California-based Juniper Networks announced that an unauthorized backdoor had been placed in its ScreenOS software, and a breach was possible since 2013. This allowed an outside actor to monitor network traffic, potentially decrypt information, and even take control of firewalls. Days later the company provided its clients—which include various U.S. intelligence entities—with an “emergency security patch” to close the backdoor.

The federal government has yet to determine which agencies are using the affected software or if any agencies have used the patch to close the backdoor. Without a complete inventory of compromised systems, lawmakers are unable to determine what adversaries stole or could have stolen.

If government systems have yet to be fixed then adversaries could still be stealing sensitive information crucial to national security. The Department of Homeland Security is furiously working to determine the extent to which the federal government used ScreenOS. But Congress still doesn’t know the basic details of the breach.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Donald Trump to Skip GOP Debate Front-runner to boycott final forum before Iowa caucuses due to fight with Fox News By Aaron Zitner and Rebecca Ballhaus

By on January 27th, 2016

MARSHALLTOWN, Iowa— Donald Trump’s presidential campaign said the GOP front-runner plans to skip the Fox News debate Thursday in Des Moines, the final one before the Iowa caucuses, in the latest turn in its long-running dispute with the TV network.

Mr. Trump told reporters Tuesday he would likely skip the televised event. Shortly afterward, his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, said the candidate had decided to bypass the debate.

“He is definitely not participating in the Fox News debate on Thursday,” Mr. Lewandowski said.
The announcement came amid a long-running public spat between Mr. Trump and the network. The billionaire businessman had threatened to boycott the debate if Fox’s Megyn Kelly served as a moderator, calling her “biased.”

A Fox News spokesman later Tuesday criticized Mr. Trump’s decision not to participate in the debate, calling it “near unprecedented.”

“We’re not sure how Iowans are going to feel about him walking away from them at the last minute, but it should be clear to the American public by now that this is rooted in one thing—Megyn Kelly, whom he has viciously attacked since August and has now spent four days demanding be removed from the debate stage,” the spokesman said.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Pope Francis Welcomes Iran’s President to the Vatican Meeting between the pontiff and Hassan Rouhani highlights close ties between Vatican and Iran By Deborah Ball And Francis X. Rocca

By on January 27th, 2016

ROME—Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s campaign to reintroduce Tehran to the West took a step forward with a high-profile audience with Pope Francis that focused on human rights and Iran’s role in Middle East conflicts.

The meeting—the first between a pontiff and an Iranian leader since 1999—came Tuesday on the second day of a four-day visit by Mr. Rouhani to Italy and France that is meant to cement the country’s ties with the West. The trip is the first by the Iranian president since sanctions on Iran were loosened this month in the wake of an agreement to implement key restrictions on its nuclear program.

Most of Mr. Rouhani’s visit, including meetings with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and French President François Hollande, is focused on jump-starting Iran’s economic relations with Europe.

But the meeting with Pope Francis is particularly significant because of the close ties the Vatican and Iran have enjoyed for decades and Iran’s desire to project an image of a tolerant country in a region beset by strife.

The pontiff and Mr. Rouhani met for 40 minutes—extraordinarily long compared with typical state meetings held by the pope. Mr. Rouhani was accompanied by a 12-person entourage, including Iran’s foreign minister

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BOOKS Comments turned off

When Holocaust Refugees Almost Found a Caribbean Haven Efforts to aid Jews fleeing Europe with shelter in the U.S. Virgin Islands ran into bureaucratic hostility.By Richard Hurowitz see note please

By on January 27th, 2016

Some Jews did find refuge in the Caribbean in the Dominican Republic, when the dictator Trujillo offered rescue to 100,000 Jews…at the Evian conference in 1938. He was alone among 32 nations that huffed and puffed but limited their offer to only handfuls of desperate Jews. Alas, only three thousand Jews made their way to Sosua in the north of the country, and about 1,000 remained to farm there. Agricultural experts from Palestine came to help them learn farming techniques. In 1985 I attended services in the synagogue with the handful of Jewish immigrants and their children who remained there. Dominicans are very proud of their effort and their early recognition of Israel. They have issued many stamps with portraits of Ben Gurion and the Israeli flags…rsk
With immigration matters of all kinds in the news, International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27 brings to mind the plight of Jewish refugees during World War II, when the world offered too little help. America’s record on this subject is often considered marred by the Roosevelt administration’s indifference, if not outright hostility, to the refugees, but some members of the American government stand out for efforts that could have put them in the company of Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg and others who saved many innocent lives.

The honor-roll-that-might-have-been includes then-Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, whose wartime humanitarian efforts are fairly well known, and—less familiarly— Lawrence W. Cramer, the Columbia-educated academic who served as governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands before the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. The members of the archipelago’s legislature also deserve mention.

On Nov. 18, 1938, nine days after the attacks on Jews throughout Germany in what became known as Kristallnacht, Cramer proclaimed the bucolic island chain a refuge for those fleeing Hitler. The territory’s legislature in St. Thomas unanimously declared that refugee peoples “shall find surcease from misfortune in the Virgin Islands of the United States.”

The idea had originated in the late 1930s with Interior Secretary Ickes as a way to circumvent the notoriously anti-Semitic State Department’s opposition to accepting the refugees. Ickes resolved to provide a haven in the territories under his jurisdiction. The U.S. Virgin Islands—home to 25,000 people but covering more than 130 square miles—could easily accommodate tens of thousands of refugees.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Why Vote for Trump? Part of the electorate thinks it has nothing to lose. Most of us do.

By on January 27th, 2016

Can Republicans and conservatives bring themselves to maybe support Donald Trump after all?

The question has come up as people like Bob Dole and Rudy Giuliani have begun to express themselves on the preferability of Mr. Trump to Ted Cruz, though it’s far from obvious that the choice comes down to those two. At the other end are the conservative writers at National Review who’ve tried to excommunicate Trump from themselves, or vice versa.

Mr. Trump calls himself a conservative because it is convenient to do so when stumping for GOP primary votes. He has adopted positions on abortion and guns that nobody believes.

He’s an avatar of New York values, goes the slur, but that’s a way of saying he fits the mold that umpty-million upscale voters say they want; a socially liberal, fiscally conservative candidate.

Indeed, if Mr. Trump bothered to know what he really thinks, as a lifelong New Yorker, business person and multiple divorcee, he probably slots right in with GOPers who aren’t social conservatives or evangelicals. And yet his success so far has been almost entirely with the social conservatives and evangelicals.

If angry white populists can make the unlikely Mr. Trump a vessel for their hopes, why not economic conservatives with NYC values? Coalition building!

Immigration has been central to his campaign but try to figure out what he’s saying. A respected social scientist like Christopher Jencks can admit that low-skill migrants may undermine the earnings of low-skill workers. The phrase downward assimilation has been adopted for the fact that not all second- and third-generation immigrant kids climb the educational and income ladder; some expand the ranks of the underclass.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Hypocrisy Toward Israel on Display By Lawrence J. Haas

By on January 26th, 2016

Lawrence J. Haas, senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, is author of the forthcoming book Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg, and the Partnership That Created the Free World.
With rising “tensions and violence between Israelis and Palestinians” and “a diplomatic stalemate,” America’s ambassador to Israel said the other day, “we must find ways of preserving the viability of a two-state solution for the future – Israel’s only path to avoid becoming a bi-national state, arrest negative trends that pull us away from the goal and prevent the terrible violence we have recently seen.”

Speaking in Tel Aviv, Dan Shapiro went on to criticize Israel’s settlements and then sharply condemned its West Bank policy: “Too many attacks on Palestinians lack a vigorous investigation or response by Israeli authorities, too much vigilantism goes unchecked and at times there seem to be two standards of adherence to the rule of law: one for Israelis and another for Palestinians.”

That’s rich. Israel’s not perfect, but the bigger double standard emanates from Washington, where a blind administration applies it to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – too critical of Israel, too forgiving of the Palestinian leadership.

Even Shapiro acknowledged the odd timing of his blast, for it came in the aftermath of brutal Palestinian terror. The day before he spoke, a Palestinian terrorist slashed Dafna Meir, a 38-year-old mother of six, to death at the entrance of her home in a West Bank settlement, in front of her children. A day later, as Meir’s funeral convoy was traveling to Jerusalem, another Palestinian terrorist slashed and badly wounded a 30-year-old pregnant woman who was shopping in the West Bank.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Missing in America: Millions of Non-Immigrant Aliens DHS report documents hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens who entered last year. Michael Cutler

By on January 26th, 2016

In January 19, 2016 The Department of Homeland Security posted a notice in its official website about a report with important national security implications “DHS Report: Entry/Exit Overstay Report for FY 2015.”

The actual report “Entry and Exit Overstay Report, Fiscal Year 2015” focused only on the arrival and departure of nonimmigrant aliens (temporary visitors) though international airports and seaports but did not include aliens who were admitted at land border ports of entry.

This report noted that hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens who have failed to depart the United States represented a very small percentage of the total number of nonimmigrant aliens who departed from the United States within the time limit imposed at the time they entered the United States- however, we must remember that we are still dealing with hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens who had been admitted into the United States during FY 2015 and that each and every year more such aliens enter the United States and fail to depart or otherwise violate the terms of their admission into the United States.

The DHS report noted that the number of overstays represented only a tiny proportion of the number of aliens who left the United States within the time they were granted to visit the United States, however, the number of aliens who violated the terms of their admission approached a half million and this is without including aliens who entered through land border ports of entry and/or aliens who may have otherwise failed to abide by the terms of their admission.

The administration has done virtually nothing to locate these illegal aliens.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The “More Muslims, Less Homicides” Hoax Islam provides Muslims with a license to kill. Daniel Greenfield

By on January 26th, 2016

“No, Islam Isn’t Inherently Violent, And The Math Proves It,” M. Steven Fish declared in the Daily Beast. Vox’s headline writers went one better, “This study obliterates the myth that Muslims are more violent”. Salon claimed that Richard Dawkins and Bill Mater were wrong about Islam. “Here’s how data proves it”.

The left is enamored with claiming that science proves something. It rarely however bothers looking at the actual data. That would spoil all the fun.

How did M. Steven Fish, a Berkeley political science professor, prove that Islam isn’t inherently violent? In the Washington Post’s fishwrap, Fish wrote, “Predominantly, Muslim countries average 2.4 murders per annum per 100,000 people, compared to 7.5 in non-Muslim countries.”

Fish concluded that, “More Muslims, less homicide.”

Is this really true? It’s as true as the data that Fish uses as the basis for his alternate version of reality. And this data claims that Sudan is much safer than Canada, that you’re as safe in Iraq as in America and that Egypt is one of the safest places on earth.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

San Bernardino, Paris, and Jerusalem: Israeli Experience and Obama’s Risky Strategy When it comes to radical Islamism, the president is dangerously ‘patient’ By Hillel Fradkin & Lewis Libby

By on January 26th, 2016

The Obama administration is talking tough about terror, and its focus is revealing. President Obama’s State of the Union address proclaimed that terrorists

pose a direct threat to our people, because in today’s world, even a handful of terrorists . . . can do a lot of damage. They use the Internet to poison the minds of individuals inside our country. Their actions undermine and destabilize our allies. We have to take them out.

Only a few days earlier, an NSC spokesman noted that “the horrific attacks in Paris and San Bernardino this winter underscored the need” to prevent “violent extremists” from radicalizing and mobilizing recruits at home and abroad. Stopping terror’s spread, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes proclaims, requires taking away terrorists’ safe havens and their control of “major swaths of territory and population centers.”

The California and Paris attacks rightly spurred Western anger and action to staunch the radicalization that kills innocents. Yet in these same months there were dozens of other terror attacks that also merit anger and appropriate response.

Starting last October, Palestinians launched a new wave of daily terror against Israelis. We have seen the videos: Palestinians wielding kitchen knives stab unsuspecting Israelis from behind; Palestinian drivers crush Israelis awaiting buses. Israeli women, men over 70, and an Israeli pushing a baby carriage are among the score of dead. Just last week, a pregnant Israeli woman was stabbed, and a mother of six killed in her home. Taken together, Israeli deaths in this period exceed proportionally those suffered in Paris.

A sad but common bond ties Israeli dead to their Parisian and San Bernardino counterparts: Their killers were inspired, applauded, and rewarded by those holding power in sanctuary states. In the Islamic State, black-clad spokesmen publicly behead Westerners. In Palestinian territories, authorities encourage mayhem more subtly, but clearly enough for those they influence.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Cruz Dares to Take On King Corn By Rich Lowry

By on January 26th, 2016

Ted Cruz has dared to provoke the ire of one of the most ruthless and vengeful political forces on the planet, and it’s not Donald Trump. The Texas senator has crossed the ethanol industry in Iowa, which is a little like getting on the wrong side of the Catholic Church in Vatican City.

Cruz’s core theme is fighting the “Washington cartel,” which would be a lot easier if its tentacles didn’t extend all the way into the state crucial to Cruz’s presidential hopes.

Other Republicans have refused to bow and scrape before the ethanol industry — John McCain wouldn’t do it in 2000, but he didn’t compete in Iowa. Cruz, in contrast, has staked an enormous amount there. His campaign could have been engineered in a lab for Iowa: He is an evangelical who is a hard-liner on immigration and has organized relentlessly on the ground. The only dissonant note is his opposition to the so-called Renewable Fuel Standard that is a government prop for the industry. Cruz’s stand against it is an act of reckless courage.

The Renewable Fuel Standard requires that ethanol is blended into the nation’s gasoline, and in ever-increasing amounts. The mandate increases the price of gas while doing nothing for the environment. Even former boosters like Al Gore have given up on ethanol as a green wonder fuel. It does much less than advertised to reduce carbon emissions once the entire process of producing it is taken into account.

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