http://www.turkishweekly.net/news/138693/new-cyber-espionage-virus-found-targeting-iran.html Dubbed the “Mahdi campaign” by security experts, the software is the first to be written in Farsi, stole info from around the Mideast. BOSTON – Security experts have uncovered an ongoing cyber espionage campaign targeting Iran and other Middle Eastern countries that they say stands out because it is the first such operation using […]
http://news.yahoo.com/obama-bracing-outspent-romney-065038242.html
Never before has an incumbent president failed to outraise a challenger, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a campaign finance watchdog. In Obama’s record-setting 2008 campaign, he made history in September by raising $150 million.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Barack Obama was the first presidential candidate to raise more than $100 million in a month and in 2008 was the first to forgo public money for his campaign. Now, he faces the very real threat of being the first president to be outspent by a challenger.
Obama, who four years ago broke just about every fundraising record for a presidential hopeful, has now been forced to look his supporters in the eye and confess he might not keep pace with Republican Mitt Romney. It’s a sobering realization for his campaign, which had imagined an unlimited budget for ads, offices and mail.
“I will be the first president in modern history to be outspent in his re-election campaign,” Obama wrote to supporters recently.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Conservatives just two years ago feared Obama would raise and spend a billion dollars in the 2012 campaign. Now, there is a real possibility that Romney and his official partners at the Republican National Committee could overtake Obama in total spending.
How did Obama go from fundraising juggernaut to money chaser in just four years?
In the early days of the 2007 primaries, he used fundraising success to puncture Hillary Rodham Clinton’s aura of inevitability. Obama surpassed Clinton’s primary fundraising in the first two quarters of that year — $25 million to Clinton’s $20 million from January to April, and $31 million to Clinton’s $21 million in the three months that followed.
The numbers shocked observers and inspired supporters to give even more to the fresh-faced, first-term senator from Illinois. But now that magic seems elusive.
“They bought into hope and change and they’re not getting it. There’s some buyers’ remorse,” said Greg Mueller, a Republican strategist who is a veteran of Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaigns.
Then, the potential was so great that Obama became the first modern candidate to bypass the public financing available to presidential candidates, and the spending limits that come with it, since the system was created in 1976 in the wake of the Watergate scandal.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303754904577530720384291742.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion
Leave it to a small, little-known agency to prove just how out of control the United Nations can get.We learned last month that the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which oversees multilateral treaties involving patents, trademarks and copyrights, has been delivering computer hardware and “technical assistance” to none other than Iran and North Korea. The U.N. body’s actions are in blatant disregard of Security Council sanctions on Tehran and Pyongyang, prompting House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen to call last week for freezing U.S. contributions to the organization.
WIPO says it is merely fulfilling its responsibilities, in this case by improving the capabilities of Iranian and North Korean intellectual-property agencies. Translated: U.N. bureaucrats believed (or pretended to believe) that Pyongyang and Tehran wanted computer networks to beef up their patent offices, surely real beehives of activity. Whistleblowers who revealed the transgressions by going public with what they knew now face reprisals that could imperil their jobs.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304388004577530831334228966.html
AND CONDOLEEZA RICE AND COLIN POWELL AND JMAES BAKER AND MADELEINE ALBRIGHT WERE NO BETTER…IT’S BEEN SO AT STATE SINCE JOHN FOSTER DULLES….ONLY GEORGE SHULTZ WAS A FINE MAN AND A FINE SEC. OF STATE…TO THINK THAT THE OFFICE WAS ONCE HELD BY PEOPLE OF THE STATURE OF DANIEL WEBSTER….RSK
Suddenly we’re supposed to believe that Hillary Clinton is a great secretary of state.
Eric Schmidt of Google calls her “the most significant secretary of state since Dean Acheson.” A profile in the New York Times runs under the headline “Hillary Clinton’s Last Tour as a Rock-Star Diplomat.” Another profile in the current issue of Foreign Policy magazine is titled, wishfully, “Head of State.” The two articles are so similar in theme, tone, choice of anecdote and the absence of even token criticism that you’re almost tempted to suspect one was cribbed from the other.
The Hillary boomlet isn’t a mystery. She never lost her political constituency. In the cabinet she looks good next to Janet Napolitano and bright next to Joe Biden. She looks even better next to her boss. Democrats belong to the party of hope, and Barack Obama is hope’s keenest disappointment.
So Mrs. Clinton is back, resisting appeals for her to run in 2016 the way Caesar rejects the thrice-offered crown. No doubt she would have made a better president than Mr. Obama. But is that saying much? No doubt she’s been a hard-working and well-briefed secretary. But that isn’t saying much, either.
Egypt Attaches Strings to Peace with Israel Clinton silent as Egyptian officials reinterpret Camp David Accords
http://freebeacon.com/egypt-attaches-strings-to-peace-with-israel/
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was silent as a senior Egyptian official stated during a joint press conference that his country would only uphold its peace treaty with Israel if the Jewish state returns to its 1967 borders and gives Palestinians control over portions of Jerusalem.
During a press conference Saturday in Cairo, Clinton and Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohammed Kamel Amr were asked about Egypt’s longstanding peace treaty with Israel, which has come under scrutiny in recent months by officials of Egypt’s new, Muslim Brotherhood-led government.
“Egypt’s understanding of peace is that it should be comprehensive, exactly as stipulated in the treaty itself,” Amr said, referring to the original 1978 Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt.
“And this also includes the Palestinians, of course, and its right to—their right to have their own state on the land that was—the pre-June 4, 1967, borders with Jerusalem as its capital.”
Clinton remained silent following Amr’s statement. (The Obama administration also backs a return to the pre-1967 borders—a decision that was roundly condemned by Jewish leaders when it was announced by the president in May 2011.)
Congressional observers and other experts expressed concern that Egypt’s new government is emphasizing the Palestinian issue as a way to undermine their country’s peace treaty with Israel.
http://news.investors.com/article/618158/201207131919/world-deaf-to-uncredible-americas-tough-talk.htm
Our Non-Entity U.N. Ambassador Perfect For Obama
Foreign Policy: Our current U.N. ambassador is like the schoolmarm who never gained control over her unruly class. Even when she does talk tough, it doesn’t penetrate the noise.Does anyone know who Ambassador Susan Rice is? Certainly no one remembers anything she has ever said during her more than 3-1/2 years as America’s voice within that corrupt nest of vipers in the Turtle Bay section of New York City.
Last Wednesday, in a quintessential example, the ambassador complained that terror state Iran was not being helpful in its dealings with terror state Syria.
“Iran is definitely part of the problem in Syria,” Rice said. “It is supporting, aiding and abetting the Assad regime materially and in many other ways, and it has shown no readiness to contribute constructively.” Can anyone imagine the late, great Jeane Kirkpatrick uttering the understatement that Moscow was showing “no readiness to contribute constructively”?
No, Kirkpatrick played audio evidence of the Soviet empire shooting down a Korean airliner filled with innocents to the Security Council; she boasted of finally removing the “kick me” sign from America’s back; she wrote articles about “dictatorships and double standards,” namely the left’s refusal to see crucial differences between authoritarianism and totalitarianism.
Can anyone imagine ex-U.N. Ambassador John Bolton whining in frustration like Rice? He was too busy pointing out the U.N.’s hypocrisy in denouncing imaginary U.S. human rights abuses while being dominated by undemocratic regimes who slaughter their citizens.
To Free Iran — on The Glazov Gang
by Jamie Glazov
Three Iranian freedom fighters shed light on how the Islamic Republic can best be overthrown.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/i-am-neda-on-the-glazov-gang-1-1/
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2012/07/120703-israel-new-natural-gas/ For National Geographic News Israel’s northern port city of Haifa has been a crucial energy center for decades; refineries dating back to the British Mandate in this land have long processed the oil sent by pipeline or shipped here from abroad. Today, rigs are working off Haifa’s coast to tap the first major fossil-fuel […]
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3176/honor-violence-in-america
Other girls, unable to resolve the conflict between submitting to a marriage, and essentially being raped by a stranger – not to mention the physical torture and possible murder if they resist – prefer to end their lives.
Aiya Altemeemi, aged 19, suffered a punishment last February that none of her schoolmates in Phoenix, Arizona could have imagined: her father cut her throat with a kitchen knife. When she escaped to her bedroom, her mother and sisters followed, tied her to her bed, taped her mouth shut, and beat her. And this was not the first time: previously, when Aiya had expressed reservations about marrying the 38-year-old man her parents had chosen as her husband, her mother had shackled her to the same bed and burned her with a hot spoon.
Despite such treatment, Aiya, who arrived from Iraq with her parents around three years ago, soon after announced to stunned reporters that she understood why her mother had assaulted her: “Because I talked to a boy, and that is not normal with her, that is not my religion. My religion says no talking to boys.”
Alhough Aiya’s was among the few to receive media attention, stories like hers are far more common than most people would imagine. In what is known as “honor violence,” mistreatment includes not just beatings, but acid attacks, setting a woman on fire, severing her nose from her face — particularly in Pakistani and Afghan communities — and other forms of mutilation.
Such incidents, which occur mainly in Muslim and Hindu families, have been the focus of attention in Europe for several years — largely thanks to the efforts of Somali-Dutch activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who first brought the problem to light some ten years ago in the Netherlands. Since then, research has uncovered disturbing statistics: 400 to 600 incidents of honor violence are recorded annually in the Netherlands alone, with around 12 honor killings a year each in Germany and the Netherlands. And in England, where the directors of one center say they receive 500 calls for help from victims of honor violence every month, and where police estimate there are between 3,000 and 17,000 incidents of honor violence each year, a recent report contends that one-fifth of all South Asian immigrants believe that “certain acts thought to shame families were justification for violence.”
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3178/jihadi-tourism-europe
European security officials are especially concerned about reports that al-Qaeda is recruiting and training Western operatives who have “clean” criminal records and have the ability to travel freely and blend in with European and American cultures.
Increasing numbers of Muslims in Europe are travelling to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and other conflict zones to obtain training in terrorist methods.Although intelligence agencies have been following the trend since the July 2005 bombings of the London commuter system, which were perpetrated by four home-grown Islamic terrorists, the scale of the problem has come into greater focus in recent weeks.
European security officials are especially concerned about reports that al-Qaeda is recruiting and training Western operatives who have “clean” criminal records and have the ability to travel freely and blend in with European and American cultures.
In Norway, for example, an ethnic Norwegian convert to militant Islam who has received terrorist training from al-Qaeda’s offshoot in Yemen, is awaiting orders to carry out an attack on the West, officials from three European security agencies said on June 25.
European officials have confirmed that the man is “operational,” meaning he has completed his training and is about to receive a target. Although the terrorist-in-waiting is believed to still be in Yemen, even if he is found he cannot be extradited: under Norwegian law it is not a crime to attend a terrorist training camp.
The London-based newspaper Sunday Times, quoting intelligence services, published a story on July 1 that said the Norwegian jihadist had been trained by Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula [AQAP] to evade airport security and is plotting to hijack an American passenger plane and, in a suicide mission, crash it. The newspaper portrayed the plot as an attack on the upcoming London Olympics, to be held from July 27 to August 12, but said the target was specifically supposed to be an American aircraft.
