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Ruth King

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Exclusive: Manchester suicide bomber used student loan and benefits to fund terror plot BYRobert Mendick, Martin Evans, Victoria Ward

By on May 27th, 2017

The Manchester suicide bomber used taxpayer-funded student loans and benefits to bankroll the terror plot, police believe.

Salman Abedi is understood to have received thousands of pounds in state funding in the run up to Monday’s atrocity even while he was overseas receiving bomb-making training.

Police are investigating Abedi’s finances, including how he paid for frequent trips to Libya where he is thought to have been taught to make bombs at a jihadist training camp.It comes as Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley, Britain’s most senior counter-terrorism officer, said detectives had made “immense progress” in dismantling Abedi’s terror network.

In further developments, a barber shop in Manchester was raided with one theory that Abedi may have obtained hydrogen peroxide – a chemical used in the hairdressing industry but which can also be used to construct bombs – from the salon.

Abedi’s finances are a major ‘theme’ of the police inquiry amid growing alarm over the ease with which jihadists are able to manipulate Britain’s welfare and student loans system to secure financing.

One former detective said jihadists were enrolling on university courses to collect the student loans “often with no intention of turning up”.

Abedi was given at least £7,000 from the taxpayer-funded Student Loans Company after beginning a business administration degree at Salford University in October 2015.

It is thought he received a further £7,000 in the 2016 academic year even though by then he had already dropped out of the course. Salford University declined to say if it had informed the Student Loans Company that Abedi’s funding should have been stopped.

Separately, the Department for Work and Pensions refused to say if Abedi had received any benefits, including housing benefit and income support worth up to £250 a week, during 2015 and 2016. It would only say he was not claiming benefits in the weeks before the attack.

Abedi, 22, never held down a job, according to neighbours and friends, but was able to travel regularly between the UK and Libya.

Abedi also had sufficient funds to buy materials for his sophisticated bomb while living in a rented house in south Manchester.

Six weeks before the bombing Abedi rented a second property in a block of flats in Blackley eight miles from his home, paying £700 in cash.

He had enough money to rent a third property in the centre of Manchester from where he set off with a backpack containing the bomb.

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EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

MY SAY: …THAT WHAT AND WHEREFORE OF EVERGREEN COLLEGE

By on May 27th, 2017

There is much ado about Evergreen State College which hosts an annual event called a “Day of Absence” where, minority students and faculty stay away from the campus for the day to show just how significant their impact is. Additionally, white students attend workshops on racism.

So here’s the scoop on this great institution of learning: Their motto is “omnia extares” roughly translated as “let it all hang out.”

Evergreen State College is an accredited public liberal arts college and a member of the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges, located in Olympia, Washington, USA. Founded in 1967, Evergreen was formed to be an experimental and non-traditional college. Full-time students enroll in interdisciplinary academic programs instead of classes. Programs typically offer students the opportunity to study several disciplines in a coordinated manner. Faculty write narrative evaluations of students’ work in place of issuing grades.

Evergreen offers a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Bachelor of Science, Master of Environmental Studies, Master of Public Administration, and Master in Teaching. In 2016, there were 4,089 students, 3,787 of whom were undergraduates, and 229 faculty members.

Student groups include Evergreen Socialist Alternative (Part of the national Socialist Alternative organization), the Giant Robot Appreciation Society (Japanese animation club), a branch of the International Solidarity Movement, The Evergreen Shellfish Club, Evergreen State Permaculture, Freedom First Dance Collective (formerly known as the Evergreen Dance Co-Op), The Evergreen Players’ club (Magic the Gathering), Hip-Hop Congress, The Electronic Music Collective, Abolish Cops and Prisons, and Riot to Follow Theater Productions; Evergreen Young Americans for Liberty, among many others.

Oh yes, I nearly forgot that among the illustrious alums is the late anti- Israel Rachel Corrie ‘peace activists” who was accidentally killed on one of her forays in Israel, and Rep. Dennis Heck(D.Washington District 9) who has a dismal score for legislation and bills passed in Congress: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/denny_heck/412584/report-card/2016.

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Another Professor, Another Mob If social-justice warriors can come for a man like Bret Weinstein, they can come for anyone. By Elliot Kaufman

By on May 27th, 2017

Evergreen State College, a small liberal-arts school in Washington State, has long had an interesting tradition. Each year, there is a “Day of Absence” on which students and faculty members of color meet off campus to hold solidarity-building activities, leaving the remaining community members to recognize the absence — and thus the value — of their peers. Later there is a “Day of Presence,” with similar activities but for the entire campus community.

But this year, the event changed. On the April 12 Day of Absence, minority students and faculty remained on campus, while whites were asked to leave. According to the local student newspaper, the decision reflected concerns following the 2016 election that students of color no longer felt comfortable on campus. This was to be their chance to reassert their right to belong on campus . . . by asking everyone else of a particular skin color to leave.

One liberal biology professor, Bret Weinstein, took issue with this change. Weinstein wrote a powerful e-mail to his colleagues on March 15. Deeply respectful and generous in tone, he made a simple point:

There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and underappreciated roles . . . and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away. The first is a forceful call to consciousness which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.

You may take this letter as a formal protest of this year’s structure, and you may assume I will be on campus on the Day of Absence.

For this fundamentally liberal argument and act of protest, Professor Weinstein has been pilloried. More than that, those words — words forming as reasonable a dissent as any — incited a mob on Tuesday. Students occupied and barricaded the campus library, and accosted Weinstein outside his classroom. As you can see in this video, the mob surrounded him, yelled at him, swore at him, and openly admitted they did not want to allow him to respond.

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HOMELAND SECURITY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How Sharia Supremacism and Judicial Imperialism Threaten National Security Having failed to define the real threat — sharia supremacism — Trump walked into a trap of his own making. By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on May 27th, 2017

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal’s ruling against President Trump’s so-called travel ban empowers both radical Islam and judicial imperialism. The combination portends lasting damage to the United States.

To rehash, the executive order (EO) proclaimed temporary restrictions (the main one, for 90 days) on travel to the United States by the nationals of six countries — Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Those countries, along with Iraq (cited in Trump’s original executive order, but not the revised EO at issue), had previously been singled out by Congress and President Obama — not because they are Muslim-majority countries, but because a) the presence or promotion of terrorism in their territories makes their nationals suspect and b) their anti-Americanism and/or dysfunctional governments render it impossible to conduct background checks on visa applicants.

This Fourth Circuit’s en banc review of prior invalidations of the EO by “progressive” activists masquerading as jurists produced 205 pages of opinions. The outcome was about as uncertain as Secretariat at Belmont, with ten of the tribunal’s 13 judges joining Chief Judge Roger Gregory’s majority ruling to one degree or another.

Three judges filed compelling dissents that will prove quite useful when, as Trump promises, the case proceeds to the Supreme Court. The continuation of the litigation is an unfortunate outcome, even if conservatives and other rule-of-law types, buoyed by Justice Neil Gorsuch’s appointment, may be right that the EO has a better shot in the High Court.

That’s because the EO doesn’t matter. You may not have noticed, but sharia supremacism has already won, regardless of what the Supreme Court does.

See, the EO was never an end in and of itself. It is a means — a fatally flawed one — to a vital end. That end is a vetting system that enables our security services to distinguish pro-Western Muslims from sharia supremacists. That’s the goal. The EO was conceived as a temporary pause while the vetting system took shape.

From a security perspective, though, the EO was utterly ineffective: applicable to a negligible slice of the global anti-American threat. More significantly, as a strategy, starting with the EO rather than getting to vetting has been a catastrophe.

As we have previously observed, in order to install the vetting system we need, the challenge of Islam must be confronted head-on and without apology. That is unavoidable. You can’t flinch. It is a certainty that the Democrat-media complex — of which Islamist organizations are members in good standing — is going to smear you as a racist “Islamophobe.” (Yes, this is another race-obsessed “progressive” narrative, so Islam gets to be the “race,” so that defenders of the Constitution and Western culture can be cast as “the oppressor.”) You have to be content with knowing that you are not a racist, with knowing that you are defending religious liberty, including the religious liberty of pro-Western Muslims.

There is a single battle that must be won. American culture must be convinced that Islam, while it has plenty of diversity, has a mainstream strain — sharia supremacism — that is not a religion but a totalitarian political ideology hiding under a religious veneer.

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Police Tell Prof He’s in Danger for Not Participating in Campus ‘No Whites’ Day By Tom Knighton

By on May 27th, 2017

Evergreen State College hosts an annual event called a “Day of Absence” where, traditionally, minority students and faculty step away from the campus for the day to show just how significant their impact is. Additionally, white students attend workshops on racism.

This year, the school apparently thought it would just be a hoot to change things up and just kick all the white folks off campus instead. Biology professor Bret Weinstein, however, took issue with the event.

Now, students are calling for his head:

Students at Evergreen State College in Olympia, who filmed their exploits and posted the videos on social media, have occupied and barricaded the library, shouting down anyone who disagrees with them or shows insufficient passion for racial justice.

Biology professor Bret Weinstein was berated by dozens of students outside of his classroom Tuesday morning for refusing to participate in an event in which white people were invited to leave campus for a day. Now, he says police have told him to hold his classes off campus due to safety concerns.

Things are “out of control at Evergreen,” he said.

“Police told me protesters stopped cars yesterday, demanding information about occupants,” Mr. Weinstein told The Washington Times. “They believe I was being sought. It appears that the campus has been under the effective control of protesters since 9:30 a.m. Tuesday. Police are on lockdown, hamstrung by the college administration. Students, staff and faculty are not safe.”

A student interviewed denies any knowledge of Weinstein being specifically sought.

Weinstein’s sin is simply thinking that asking white folks to leave the campus was very different than minorities choosing to remove themselves from campus. He has a point. It appears that the original intent of this event is to show just how important minorities are to the proper functioning of the school. So why will demanding 66.7 percent of the student body, as well as Lord only knows how many faculty and staff, accomplish that same purpose?

Weinstein took issue with the change in an email, which led to him being confronted by students who refused to listen to the professor:

When the professor tells the students he will listen to them if they listen to him, one student responds, “We don’t care what terms you want to speak on. This is not about you. We are not speaking on terms — on terms of white privilege. This is not a discussion. You have lost that one.”

Another protester asks the professor whether he believes “black students in sciences are targeted.”

After asking for a clarification, Mr. Weinstein says, “I do not believe that anybody on our faculty, with intent, specially targets students of color.”

That remark prompts shrieks of outrage.

Way to keep those lines of communication open, kids. Way to go.

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Trump quietly doubling number of refugees entering U.S. By Ed Straker (Absolutely appalling!!!!!rsk)

By on May 27th, 2017

President Trump has decided to double the number of refugees admitted every week, but hasn’t made a major announcement about it. Why not? Won’t that help make America great again?

Despite repeated efforts by President Trump to curtail refugee resettlements, the State Department this week quietly lifted the department’s restriction on the number of refugees allowed to enter the United States.

The result could be a near doubling of refugees entering the country, from about 830 people a week in the first three weeks of this month to well over 1,500 people per week by next month, according to refugee advocates. Tens of thousands of refugees are waiting to come to the United States.

The State Department’s decision was conveyed in an email on Thursday to the private agencies in countries around the world that help refugees manage the nearly two-year application process needed to enter the United States.

Although it came the same day as an appeals court ruling that rejected government efforts to limit travel to the United States from six predominantly Muslim nations, the move by the State Department had nothing to do with the court ruling.

Refugee groups now predict that entries into the United States could increase so rapidly that the total number of refugees admitted by Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year, could exceed 70,000. That is well below the 84,994 refugees admitted in fiscal year 2016, but not by nearly as much as many advocates had feared.

Refugee advocates were delighted by the State Department’s decision.

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CNN =CERTAINLY NOT NEWS BY ROBIN DOLGYN

By on May 27th, 2017

Newscaster Bob Schieffer unwittingly demonstrated the depths his colleagues will descend to disparage President Trump at CNN.

Schieffer broke from the standard CNN narrative to remark that the president “actually” sounded “dignified and even presidential,” during his momentous speech before more than 50 Arab and Muslim leaders delivered recently in Saudi Arabia. Apparently, Schieffer had gone too far in his faint praise of the president.

“You know, Bob,” said his on-air colleague John Berman, “There will be people who look at that last comment you made and say, you’re normalizing the president.” That was just the wind-up before landing the real punch: Berman mused aloud over making laudatory remarks about the president just “because he (Trump) met this admittedly very low bar for not sounding foolish.”

This time Berman wasn’t dealing the race card, but rather pulled out the character assassination card from the bottom of the deck. After all — you wouldn’t want to “normalize” a wife beater, or serial killer. Why would you think of “normalizing” the president? Liberal hysteria is now a national condition.

There is a glimmer of hope on the horizon. Schieffer wasn’t going to be shamed into marching back his remarks on President Trump: “I’m not trying to normalize him in any way,” Schieffer replied. “I’m trying to do what reporters do — report and try to emphasize what I think is important.”

Being an old-school journalist, Schieffer may be raising the bar for his colleagues at the Trump-bashing network. Sadly, in the end, Schieffer joined his colleagues at the cable channel in both condescending rhetoric and mean-spirited tone.

“He didn’t sound like the guy at the end of the bar popping off,” Schieffer added. “You may agree or disagree with what he said but he sounded like a president. This went over very well — mainly because he stayed on script. He sounded like someone who actually thought about what he was going to say before he said it. No tweets today.” Faint praise indeed.

Schieffer never veered too far off script himself: But, just for a moment, he actually sounded like he was a newscaster “trying to do what reporters do — report.”

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Manchester, Murder & New York Politicians want to honor a terrorist on Puerto Rican Day. See note please

By on May 27th, 2017

Where is there any indignation at the WSJ that our presidents have honored Mahmoud Abbas, a dyed in the wool terrorist whose finger prints are on atrocities committed against innocent civilians including babies swaddled in cribs in every corner of Israel? rsk
What’s the difference between last Monday’s suicide bomb attack at a pop concert in Manchester, England, and the 1975 Fraunces Tavern bombing in New York that also killed the innocent?

The answer is no difference save for the body counts and the causes for which the innocent were targeted. Which makes it all the more outrageous that the Speaker of the New York City Council and her allies on the board of the Puerto Rican Day Parade would honor a leader in a terror organization that was responsible for more than 120 bombings in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Speaker is Melissa Mark-Viverito, and the terrorist is Oscar López Rivera, a leader in the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN in Spanish) who was serving a 70-year prison term until President Obama commuted his sentence in January. Because Ms. Mark-Viverito supports Puerto Rican independence, and because the FALN committed its bombings on behalf of Puerto Rican independence, she supports her allies on the parade board who have honored López Rivera as a “National Freedom Hero” for this year’s June 11 parade.

This is incredibly insulting to the city’s law-abiding Puerto Rican residents—and they know it. Among the first to withdraw from the parade was the New York Police Department’s Hispanic Society. Others who have dropped out include Goya Foods, the New York Yankees and JetBlue Airways . Mayor Bill de Blasio is still a go, as he’s never seen a left-wing cause he couldn’t endorse. Governor Andrew Cuomo, after weeks of dithering, finally decided on Friday that he won’t run to the front of this parade.

Especially after the massacre in Manchester this week, these progressive politicians stand exposed for putting identity politics above the community values of public safety and respect for the law. As bad as Ms. Mark-Viverito’s judgment has been, López Rivera wouldn’t be able to attend any parade if Barack Obama hadn’t freed a man no morally different from the killers who plotted death in Manchester.

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The Trump-Russia Story Starts Making Sense The Kremlin seems to have bet big on the willingness of U.S. intelligence agencies to leak. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

By on May 27th, 2017

The Trump -Russia business is finally coming into clearer, more rational focus. Former Obama CIA chief John Brennan, in testimony this week, offered no evidence of Trump campaign cooperation with Russian intelligence. Instead he spoke of CIA fears that Russia would try to recruit/blackmail/trick Trump colleagues into being witting or unwitting agents of influence.

This is a realistic fear of any incoming administration. It’s especially realistic in the case of an “outsider” campaign full of naive, inexperienced and unvetted individuals. But it’s quite different from “collusion.”

The other shoe was dropped by the Washington Post. Finally we have details of an alleged email exchange showing influential liberals trusting in then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch to corral an inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s email practices. According to the Post, this email appears not to exist. It was cited in a secret Russian intelligence document that inspired FBI chief James Comey to usurp the attorney general’s role and publicly clear Mrs. Clinton of intelligence mishandling. Allegedly, he feared the real email (which didn’t exist) would surface and discredit any Justice Department announcement clearing Mrs. Clinton.

Are you now thinking of the Trump dossier circulated by former British agent Christopher Steele, which also felt like a Russian plant? While the political circus in Washington has focused on purloined Democratic emails and fake news spread during the election by Russian bots, the more effective part of Moscow’s effort may have been planting fake leads to prod U.S. enforcement and intelligence agencies to intervene disruptively in the campaign.

This also should shed new light on today’s anti-Trump leakers in the intelligence agencies: They may be the real unwitting agents of Russian influence.

There are plenty of lessons to go around. Mr. Trump, if he ever really thought Vladimir Putin was his friend, probably has wised up by now. He should have wised up the moment the Steele document came into view, supposedly based on plumbing Mr. Steele’s peerless Russian intelligence contacts. It always appeared possible, even likely, that Mr. Steele was the semi-witting vehicle for Russian rumors designed expressly to undermine Mr. Trump just as Russia was also trying to undermine Mrs. Clinton.

Plenty of people in Washington could also afford to rethink how their partisan idiocy makes them soft touches for such Russian disruption efforts. That includes Rep. Adam Schiff, top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. It includes Mr. Trump too. Overdue is an inquiry into a possible Russian role in flogging the birther conspiracy and the 9/11 truther miasma. Mr. Trump, who loves a conspiracy theory, might consider how he and his ilk showed Russia a vulnerability in American political discourse that it could exploit.

Let’s remember that ex-FBI chief Robert Mueller’s mission is to investigate Russian influence in the election, not the narrow matter of Trump collusion. Whether Russia suborned or tried to suborn people like Paul Manafort, Carter Page and Michael Caputo is a necessary question. Whether Russia exploited Facebook to proliferate fake anti-Hillary news is a necessary question. But so is the provenance of the Steele document and the fake email purporting a Democratic coverup of Hillary Clinton’s server activity. If the FBI’s Mr. Comey allowed himself to be manipulated by Russian intelligence into intervening in the race, that’s something we need to know about. And we need to know about the leaks.

Mr. Brennan, the former CIA chief, has pointed out that these leaks are palpable, unambiguous crimes. Recall that Russia twice sent us detailed warnings about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber. President Trump is entitled to share terrorism intelligence with Russia’s ambassador. The only criminal leak occurred when anonymous officials relayed the classified content of these briefings to the press. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Egypt Launches Airstrikes in Libya in Retaliation for Deadly Attack on Christians Egypt’s military says it determined the attack that killed 28 Coptic Christians earlier Friday originated with militants trained in eastern Libya By Tamer El-Ghobashy

By on May 27th, 2017

Egypt’s military launched six airstrikes in eastern Libya late Friday in response to an attack by unidentified gunmen who killed 28 Coptic Christians in an ambush south of Cairo earlier in the day, the military said in a video statement.

The Egyptian military said the strikes were conducted after it determined the attack on the Coptics originated with militants trained in Libya.

The strikes, the first Egypt has launched in Libya since 2015, came as President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi addressed the nation in a televised speech and vowed an aggressive response to the attack on a bus carrying Coptic pilgrims to a monastery in Minya, about 190 miles south of Cairo.

“As I address you now, a very strong airstrike has been carried out against those camps,” Mr. Sisi said, referencing camps where the unknown perpetrators of Friday’s attack allegedly trained. “Egypt will never hesitate to conduct airstrikes against terrorist camps anywhere, inside or outside Egypt.”

While Mr. Sisi didn’t mention Libya, security officials told the MENA state news agency that the airstrikes targeted militant sites near the Libyan city of Derna.

It was an unusually swift response to an incident that has so far not been claimed by any group and Egyptian authorities didn’t publicly identify any suspects.

Egypt last struck Derna in February 2015 after Islamic State militants released a video showing the execution and beheading of a group of Coptic Egyptian laborers on a beach in Libya. At the time, Islamic State had taken control of Derna, but the group has since been driven out.

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