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May 2019

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

At least seven tourists dead after Budapest tour boats collide amid heavy rains on Danube

By on May 30th, 2019

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/05/30/hungary-tourist-boat-capsizes-danube-leaving-seven-dead-21-missing/

Hungarian authorities are preparing to salvage the wreck of a sight-seeing boat that sank after a collision on the River Danube in Budapest left at least seven tourists dead and 21 people missing.

The salvage operation forms part of a massive search and rescue mission following the accident that late on Wednesday night when a small sight-seeing boat carrying 33 South Korean tourists and two Hungarian crew members was struck by one of the massive cruise vessels that ply the length of the Danube.

Concerns were raised on Thursday morning that the tragedy had been an “accident waiting to happen”, as the river had become so congested with tourist boats jostling for space on night tours. Hungarian police on Thursday launched a criminal investigation.

The force of the impact in Wednesday night’s collision sent the smaller boat, the Mermaid, to the bottom of the river but left only scratches on the cruise vessel, a hotel ship owned by Viking Cruises. Seven people were pulled from the water with minor injuries but the fate of the others remains unclear.

In Budapest rescuers have enlisted the help of a river mine sweeper to locate the wreck of the Mermaid.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

My father organised D-Day: the story of an unsung hero of the huge invasion By Joe Shute

By on May 30th, 2019

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/father-organised-d-day-nation-rallied-support-largest-assault/

In the early hours of June 6 1944, Allied forces launched the largest combined naval, air and land assault ever assembled.  Nearly 7,000 vessels including battleships, destroyers, minesweepers and assault craft poured across the English Channel to land more than 132,000 ground troops across five Normandy beaches.

In all, 18,000 paratroopers were dropped behind enemy lines, while 11,590 Allied aircraft flew in support.  “D-Day” simply denoted the date the invasion would commence. The stakes were surmised by how that name would go down in history.

The success of the invasion depended on the courage of those who were required to sacrifice everything for the liberation of Europe. But those brave souls were the tip of a vast planning operation which had been years in the making and strained every sinew of the British war effort.

Responsibility for ensuring the smooth passage of hundreds of tonnes of vehicles and ammunition lay with one man: Major General Sir Leslie ‘Bill’ Williams.

As head of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps (RAOC), he was in charge of operations on D-Day and implementing a plan to shift 380,000 tonnes of ammunition and 190,000 vehicles in the two months following.

In advance of the invasion, he rallied those on the home front in Britain to pack 350m items which would follow the troops over to France. Children, members of the Women’s Institute and those deemed unfit for military service were all recruited for the cause. While diminished by serving troops at the time who nicknamed them ‘blanket stackers’, their efforts were later commended by King George VI, who described it as “a remarkable story”.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Iran-Linked Individuals Faked Social Media Accounts, Blog Posts, Letters to the Editor By Jim Geraghty

By on May 30th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/iran-linked-individuals-faked-social-media-accounts-blog-posts-letters-to-the-editor/

A private cybersecurity firm, FireEye Threat Intelligence, recently announced that they had identified a network of English-language social-media accounts that engaged in inauthentic behavior and misrepresentation and that “we assess with low confidence was organized in support of Iranian political interests.” This is the second group of social media accounts identified by FireEye as part of an Iranian propaganda or disinformation campaign.

Narratives promoted by these and other accounts in the network included anti-Saudi, anti-Israeli, and pro-Palestinian themes. Accounts expressed support for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal; opposition to the Trump administration’s designation of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a Foreign Terrorist Organization; antipathy toward the Ministerial to Promote a Future of Peace and Security in the Middle East (a U.S.-led conference that focused on Iranian influence in the Middle East more commonly known as the February 2019 Warsaw Summit); and condemnation of U.S. President Trump’s veto of a resolution passed by Congress to end U.S. involvement in the Yemen conflict.

This Iranian operation is a little more sophisticated, and potentially more dangerous, than what we saw from Russia in 2016. Quite a few media institutions quoted the Russian Twitter accounts in their articles while covering that year’s presidential election. The Iranian accounts identified by Fire Eye managed to get letters, guest columns, and blog posts published in American publications and web sites, written under false names.

We observed some personas in the network leverage legitimate print and online media outlets in the U.S. and Israel to promote Iranian interests via the submission of letters, guest columns, and blog posts that were then published.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Sanctuary Policies Kill The road to hell — paved by malevolent politicians. Michael Cutler

By on May 30th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273877/sanctuary-policies-kill-michael-cutler

Our nation’s immigration laws were enacted to protect national security, public safety, public health and the jobs and wages of Americans.  Those laws are utterly and completely blind about race, religion and/or ethnicity. 

The 9/11 Commission was crystal clear in its findings that first and foremost, the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 and other attacks perpetrated by foreign nationals were only possible because of multiple failures of the immigration system.

Failures of border security and a lack of interior enforcement have enabled criminal aliens, members of transnational gangs and terrorists to flow easily into the United States and, once in the United States, into towns and cities across America.

Failures of border security have also enabled aliens with dangerous communicable diseases to enter the United States and have permitted foreign workers to enter the U.S. to displace American workers.

Because of the extreme politicization of immigration, the United States intentionally lacks an adequate number of ICE agents and other resources to enforce the immigration laws from within the interior of the United States. There are roughly 7,000 ICE agents and they are not only responsible for enforcing immigration laws but other laws that have nothing to do with immigration.  To put this in perspective, TSA has more than 45,000 employees and the NYPD has more than 38,000 police officers.  The entire United States of America functionally has about 3,000 agents dedicated to enforcing our immigration laws. 

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Federally Funded Study: Common Core Sunk U.S. Kids’ Test Scores In several cases student achievement reversed under Common Core, and in every subject studied students would have been better off if states had not adopted Common Core. By Joy Pullmann

By on May 30th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/30/federally-funded-study-common-core-sunk-u-s-kids-test-scores/

Researchers the Obama administration funded to assist Common Core’s rollout recently found, to their surprise, that under Common Core U.S. student achievement has sunk (h/t Lance Izumi).

“Contrary to our expectation, we found that [Common Core] had significant negative effects on 4th graders’ reading achievement during the 7 years after the adoption of the new standards, and had a significant negative effect on 8th graders’ math achievement 7 years after adoption based on analyses of NAEP composite scores,” the Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction and Learning (C-SAIL) preliminary study said. “The size of these negative effects, however, was generally small.”

The study found not only lower student achievement since Common Core, but also performed data analysis suggesting students would have done better if Common Core had never existed. The achievement declines also grew worse over time, study coauthor Mengli Song told Chalkbeat, an education news website: “That’s a little troubling.”

Common Core is 640 pages of K-12 curriculum and testing mandates that nearly every state switched to between 2010 and 2013 under heavy federal pressure. President Obama, his education secretary Arne Duncan, and private financier Bill Gates promised the nation that overhauling what students learn and how it is measured would lead to student achievement gains.

It’s not that teachers didn’t work really hard to make Common Core succeed, either. C-SAIL’s report says “More than three quarters (76%) of teachers surveyed, for example, reported having changed at least half of their classroom instruction as a result of the CCSS, and about four out of five mathematics teachers (82%) and three out of four English teachers (72%) reported having changed more than half of their instructional materials in response to the CCSS.” Between two-thirds and three-quarters of teachers also said in surveys that they thought Common Core benefited their students, so while their perception may not match reality it doesn’t appear negative teacher attitudes obstructed Common Core either.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Sorry, Alarmists, Climate Chaos Is Not Here Despite the Democrats’ cataclysmal framing of every weather event, Americans are safer than ever.By David Harsanyi

By on May 30th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/30/sorry-alarmists-climate-chaos-not/

Climate isn’t the same as weather—unless, of course, weather happens to be politically useful. In that case, weather portends climate apocalypse.

So warns Elizabeth Warren as she surveyed Iowan rainstorms, which she claims, like tornadoes and floods, are more frequent and severe. “Different parts of the country deal with different climate issues,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–Malthusia) cautioned as she too warned of extreme tornadoes. “But ALL of these threats will be increasing in intensity as climate crisis grows and we fail to act appropriately.”

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D–Ore.) recently sent a fundraising email warning Democrats that climate change was causing “growing mega-fires, extremely destructive hurricanes, and horrific flooding” which put “American lives are at stake.”

Even if we pretend that passing a bazillion dollar authoritarian Green New Deal would do anything to change the climate, there is no real-world evidence that today’s weather is increasingly threatening to human lives. By every quantifiable measure, in fact, we’re much safer despite the cataclysmal framing of every weather-related event.

How many of those taken in by alarmism realize that deaths from extreme weather have dropped somewhere around 99.9 percent since the 1920s? Heat and cold can still be killer, but thanks to increasingly reliable and affordable heating and cooling systems, and others luxuries of the age, the vast majority of Americans will never have to fear the climate in any genuine way.

Since 1980, death caused by all natural disasters and heat and cold is somewhere under 0.5 percent.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Shocker: Israel Heading Back to the Polls as Knesset Votes to Dissolve Itself By P. David Hornik

By on May 30th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/shocker-israel-heading-back-to-the-polls-as-knesset-votes-to-dissolve-itself/

Seven weeks ago a right-wing and religious coalition headed by Benjamin Netanyahu handily won the Israeli elections, gaining 65 seats of the 120-seat Knesset—and just missing 69 seats as another right-wing party fell a tiny bit short of the four-seat minimum.

On Wednesday night the new Knesset—sworn in a month ago—voted 74-45 to dissolve itself, and Israel is heading back to the polls on September 17. Seven weeks ago, no one at all saw it coming.

Basically one man—former defense minister Avigdor Liberman—is behind it.

Liberman—a mercurial politician who has also been foreign minister and deputy prime minister among other posts—is a longtime Russian immigrant who gets most of his votes from the Russian-Israeli community. This time around his party, Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home), won five mandates. Without Israel Our Home, Netanyahu’s would-be coalition had 60 seats—one short of a Knesset majority.

Liberman, in the end, refused to bring his five-seat party into the new coalition, and the house came crashing down.

Why did Liberman do it?

The Russian-Israeli community is unique in Israel in tending heavily both to hawkishness and secularism. Generally and statistically, religiosity correlates with right-wing hawkishness, secularism with left-wing dovishness (though secular right-wingers are not unusual; the right generally has the upper hand).

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Funny how no one wants to look into that report that Omar married her brother… By Monica Showalter

By on May 30th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/05/funny_how_no_one_wants_to_talk_about_that_report_that_omar_married_her_brother.html

You’d think they’d be all over this like tabloid papparazzi. Wild and prurient news always sells papers and draws viewer eyeballs, and the scattered reports about how America’s first Muslim congresswoman, Rep. Ilhan Omar, reportedly married her own brother in a bid to bring him into the country ahead of the others trying to get in, is quite a doozy. The press certainly got excited about the Stormy Daniels controversy for such a reason, but why the absence of interest in Omar’s kinky weird love life?

Now the fearless Michelle Malkin has taken up the case, wanting to know why this isn’t being looked into by either the press or more importantly, these law enforcers. She writes:

Investigations dating back to 2016 by blogger Scott Johnson of Power Line (which recently celebrated 15 years in the blogosphere), David North of the Center for Immigration Studies, Alpha News reporter Preya Samsundar and PJMedia.com reporter David Steinberg have determined that the outspoken Somalian Muslim refugee likely married her own brother named Ahmed Elmi in 2009 for some unknown ill-gotten gain while still informally married to the man she calls her husband and father of her three children, Ahmed Hirsi. After a Somalian website floated questions about the marriage arrangement with Elmi and Johnson’s initial reporting broke into the local news, Omar sought to divorce Elmi. Her use of $6,000 in state campaign funds, some of which went to pay a personal divorce lawyer, is currently under state investigation.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Right-wing documentary filmmaker enters Dem presidential race By Tal Axelrod

By on May 30th, 2019

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/442786-right-wing-documentary-filmmaker-ami-horowitz-enters-dem-race-solicits

Conservative documentary filmmaker Ami Horowitz announced Wednesday that he is running in the Democratic presidential primary to disrupt the party’s nominating process.

“The Democratic Party has become the party of socialism, open borders and late-term abortions. They’ve become so radicalized over the past several years that I feel compelled to try to bring some sanity into the discussion,” Horowitz said in an announcement video posted to Twitter. 

“So if you want to see me throw an intellectual hand grenade on the Democratic debate stage and hold them accountable, go to AmiForAmerica.com and donate some money. Send some cash. Anything!”

Horowitz wrote in a tweet announcing his candidacy that he is soliciting donations to reach the threshold of 65,000 individual donors set by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in order to appear on the primary debate stage next month.

He told The Hill that he is “pretty confident” he will garner the necessary funds, noting that he’s already raked in 2,756 donations in two hours before his website crashed.

Horowitz is unlikely to achieve the DNC’s polling threshold of hitting at least 1 percent on three different nationally recognized surveys.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

A Democrat Who Terrifies Other Democrats Thomas McArdle

By on May 30th, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/05/30/a-democrat-who-terrifies-other-democrats/

As impeachment noise reaches ever-louder crescendos among Democrats, with the real danger they will overplay their hand and end up investigating and subpoenaing themselves into defeat in 2020, there now emerges another threat: a little-noticed Democrat running for President who is reminding his party of the saner policies some of their most prominent leaders embraced not that long ago.

Democratic luminaries like Bobby Kennedy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, John F. Kennedy, and Henry “Scoop” Jackson – all of whom in their time represented dark blue states.

Ami Horowitz, a noted documentary filmmaker, announced his candidacy this month and expressed sentiments with which all four of those giants of the party’s history would agree. “The Democratic Party has become the party of socialism, open borders, and late-term abortions,” he said. “They’ve become so radicalized over the past several years that I feel compelled to try to bring some sanity into the discussion.”

Horowitz got thousands of donations within days of announcing, but needs many times that to get a place on the stage for the first two rounds of debates.

“The Democratic Party has been inexorably and decisively moving to the left,” he told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. He charged that the party now holds a position in favor of open borders that “90 percent of the country doesn’t believe in.” The same 90 percent opposition is the case on late-term abortion, he asserted.

“They’re running away from the word capitalism, which has brought more wealth to more people and lifted more people out of poverty than anything man has ever created – but they’re running away from it. So I want to go on the debate stage, I want to throw an intellectual hand grenade there, and make that debate stage a very unsafe space, intellectually speaking, for those people.”

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