Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them. …. from the challengers, the majority says “In this instance, the context and structure of the Act compel us to depart from what would otherwise be the most natural reading of the pertinent statutory phrase.”But no one should doubt that SCOTUS has saved the incompetence, and misleading blackmail against states Obama intended as well.
In only four months, the Islamic State (IS) has captured territory larger than the country of Britain, a march unprecedented in modern history, according to journalist and documentary filmmaker Itai Anghel.Truly sadistic. The filmmaker's done the right thing to warn what kind barbarism is lurking right nearby, and sooner or later, IS is going to cause horrifying disaster.
And IS fighters are closer to Israel than people think, he said. “I’m talking about the Peninsula of Sinai,” he said. “A large percentage of the Sinai calls itself IS. From the mainland of Egypt, they are afraid to go in.”
Anghel addressed the HonestReporting Mission on Tuesday to discuss how IS formed and how it operates. He learned the lessons firsthand reporting across Iraq and Syria, where he interviewed captured IS fighters as well as Kurdish soldiers, the only group that’s turned back the IS advance to date, among many others.
During one of his forays into Syria last year, news broke that a colleague of his, James Foley, had been captured and beheaded by IS. At the time, Anghel was only a mile away. He later interviewed a captured IS fighter who said he intentionally used dull knives for the beheadings he carried out to increase the pain. Anghel said he was forced to pause in the interview for a few minutes as he thought about the tragedy of his friend Foley.
PUERTO PRINCESA (PHILIPPINES) (AFP) -
Japan and the Philippines flew patrol planes near disputed South China Sea waters for a second straight day on Wednesday, despite Chinese criticism of this week’s air and sea exercises.
A Japanese P-3C Orion and a Philippine navy Islander conducted a search and rescue drill 50 nautical miles (93 kilometres) northwest of the Philippine island of Palawan, officials said.
The flight was in the general direction of the resource-rich Reed Bank claimed by both the Philippines and China, but officials refused to say if the planes flew directly over the area.
The Philippines is also holding separate exercises with long-time ally the United States off Palawan this week, as it seeks to bolster alliances in the face of its territorial disputes with China.
China’s claim over almost the entire South China Sea overlaps with those of the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and Taiwan.
It has intensified construction of artificial islands on reefs to reinforce its claim, sparking protests from the US and Japan as well as regional powers.
China has a separate dispute with Japan over an island chain in the East China Sea.The US Navy’s policy in the past was to IMMEDIATELY assert freedom of the seas (air) when such a claim/warning was made by overflying, or sailing right thru the area in question.
Unlike Pope Francis, I believe that air-conditioning and the capitalists responsible for the technology are blessings to the world. Perhaps the head of the Catholic Church, who condemned "the increasing use and power of air-conditioning" last week in a market-bashing encyclical, is unaware of the pioneering private company that has donated its time, energy and innovative heating, ventilating and air-conditioning equipment to the Vatican's most famous edifice for more than a decade.
That's right. While the pontiff sanctimoniously attacks "those who are obsessed with maximizing profits," Carrier Corporation — a $13 billion for-profit company with 43,000 employees worldwide (now a unit of U.S.-based United Technologies Corp.) — ensures that the air in the Vatican's Sistine Chapel stays clean and cool.
Last fall, Carrier unveiled a groundbreaking HVAC system for the Vatican to help preserve Michelangelo's masterpieces against pollution caused by the estimated six million visitors who descend on the Sistine Chapel every year to see its famous frescoes.
As the company described it, their new solution "uses two Carrier AquaForce(r) 30XWV water-cooled chillers with Greenspeed(r) intelligence, each with 580 kilowatts of capacity. It leverages specially designed software and components, as well as patented, energy-saving technologies to maintain optimal climate conditions for the protection of the paintings within the chapel."
State-of-the-art intelligent controls "anticipate visitor levels and adjust its performance intuitively." It also "delivers twice the efficiency and three times the capacity of the former system, which was built and installed by Carrier in the early 1990s."
Here's the lesson about air-conditioning capitalists that Pope Francis fails to appreciate:
Carrier's technological know-how and breakthroughs didn't just descend from the clouds. As I recount in my latest book, "Who Built That," every perfectly chilled home, office, movie theater, mall, factory, hospital, lab and museum owes its existence to the profit-seeking pioneers of manufactured weather: Willis Carrier and Irvine Lyle.
These early 20th-century inventive giants brought air-conditioning to the market and to the masses. Willis Carrier was the scientist-tinkerpreneur whose prolific stream of experiments and epiphanies, beginning in 1902, fueled historic technological advances in heating, refrigeration and air-conditioning.
Irvine Lyle was the mechanical engineer-turned-salesman who imagined countless new commercial applications for Carrier's work — and successfully turned those ideas into a multibillion-dollar business through relentless promotion, pitches, networking, advertising and outreach.
The scientists and their core team begged, borrowed and made stock sales to friends and neighbors. Carrier even enlisted his dentist for cash to get Carrier Engineering Corporation up and running in 1915.
Carrier, Lyle and five founding engineers together pitched in $32,600 in start-up funds. The Carrier capitalists risked it all in defiance of an economic depression and amid the tumult of world war. They couldn't afford their own factory and scrounged for made-to-order parts wherever they could find them. They dug into their own pockets to cover salary shortfalls.
The wealth wasn't handed to them. Carrier and Lyle, farm boys who both graduated from Cornell, drove their men hard and themselves harder. The Carrier team sold its products to businesses, large and small, that spanned the spectrum of human needs and wants.
The pope should know that in addition to sparing countless lives from death by heat wave, Carrier designed a special system for Jonas Salk that helped maintain constant temperatures in the vats where Salk's poliovirus strains grew. The Salk vaccine saved thousands of lives and spearheaded the vaccine revolution.
From Hollywood to the pharmaceutical industry to textiles to the retail industry to the military to homeowners, there isn't a sector of the American economy that Carrier and Lyle didn't help transform. Their zealous focus on helping businesses provide better products at cheaper costs resulted in the invaluable byproducts of increased health, comfort and happiness.
While the pope blames commercial enterprises and the "global market economy" for causing "environmental degradation," it is a worldwide commercial enterprise made in America that solved the (SET (ITAL) human-caused degradation of, and environmental damage to, the Vatican's most prized art and assets.
If the pontiff truly believes "excessive consumption" of modern conveniences is causing evil "climate change," will he be shutting down and returning the multimillion-dollar system Carrier generously gifted to the Vatican Museums?
If not, I suggest, with all due respect, that Pope Francis do humanity a favor and refrain from blowing any more hot air unless he's willing to stew in his own.
BERLIN – A Syrian woman believed responsible for helping to deliver hundreds of young European girls to ISIS has defected, and is now warning young women of the hell that awaits them in the black-clad Islamist army’s so-called caliphate.
“You are young,” the defector, who used the alias Um Asma in an interview with German newspaper Bild am Sonntag, told young women considering running away to join ISIS. “The caliphate is not what you think it is. Women are whipped, sold and stoned. Corpses are on display publicly for weeks.
One of America’s oldest organizations meant to combat anti-Semitism has joined an Obama administration campaign to discredit former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren, whose new memoir documents how the White House fought behind the scenes to undermine the historically close U.S.-Israel alliance.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) on Sunday surprised many observers when it attacked Oren amid a broader campaign by White House supporters to discredit Oren’s soon-to-be-released memoir, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide.
The revelations contained in Oren’s book ruffled feathers among Democrats and Obama administration supporters who have argued for years that the president is staunchly pro-Israel.
The organization, whose incoming leader is a former Obama administration official, has come under increasing criticism in the last five years for repeatedly running interference as the administration worked to undermine the U.S.-Israel relationship, sources said.
In his memoir, Oren recounts being intimidated and threatened by senior White House officials at many times during his tenure as Israel’s ambassador and documents how the administration explicitly sought to weaken the U.S.-Israel relationship.
The allegations have triggered a campaign of retaliation, as the White House has sought to stem criticism.
The ADL—a non-profit organization that once shunned overtly partisan political causes—joined the Obama administration’s campaign to discredit Oren on Sunday.
“In the days leading up to the forthcoming release of a memoir of his experiences as Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren appears to be using the very legitimate and sharp policy disagreements between Israel and the U.S. as an insensitive and unjustified attack on the president,” outgoing ADL national director Abraham Foxman said in a statement.
“Ambassador Oren revives the meme of the president’s ‘Muslim heritage’ to make the case that American foreign policy in the Middle East is primarily being promoted and dictated by the president’s early upbringing in the Muslim faith and in Muslim traditions,” added Foxman, who will soon be replaced at the ADL by former Obama administration official Jonathan Greenblatt.
The U.S. military and Iranian-backed Shiite militias are getting closer and closer in Iraq, even sharing a base, while Iran uses those militias to expand its influence in Iraq and fight alongside the Bashar al-Assad regime in neighboring Syria.
Two senior administration officials confirmed to us that U.S. soldiers and Shiite militia groups are both using the Taqqadum military base in Anbar, the same Iraqi base where President Obama is sending an additional 450 U.S. military personnel to help train the local forces fighting against the Islamic State. Some of the Iran-backed Shiite militias at the base have killed American soldiers in the past.MEANWHILE:
With some lawmakers chanting “Death to the America,” Iran’s parliament voted Sunday to ban access to military sites, documents and scientists as part of a future deal with world powers over its contested nuclear program.
The bill, if approved into law, could complicate the ongoing talks in Vienna between Iran and the six-nation group — the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany — as they face a self-imposed June 30 deadline.
The talks are focused on reaching a final accord that curbs Iran’s nuclear program in return for the lifting of economic sanctions. Of 213 lawmakers present on Sunday, 199 voted in favor of the bill, which also demands the complete lifting of all sanctions against Iran as part of any final nuclear accord.
The bill must be ratified by the Guardian Council, a constitutional watchdog, to become a law. The terms stipulated in the bill allow for international inspections of Iranian nuclear sites, but forbid any inspections of military facilities.
arliament Speaker Ali Larijani read the bill aloud in a session broadcast live on state radio. It states in part, “The International Atomic Energy Agency, within the framework of the safeguard agreement, is allowed to carry out conventional inspections of nuclear sites.” However it concludes that “access to military, security and sensitive non-nuclear sites, as well as documents and scientists, is forbidden.”
In an op-ed published Friday, Kulanu Knesset member and former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren speculates that President Barack Obama’s relentless outreach to the Muslim world may stem from the fact that he was abandoned by the two Muslim father figures in his life and therefore seeks acceptance by their co-religionists.
In the article, in Foreign Policy Magazine, Oren also posits that the world may look back on Obama’s approach to Middle East issues as naive and hard to credit. The piece marks Oren’s third op-ed critical of Obama published in major US media in less than a week.
In the first of the series, the former ambassador published “How Obama abandoned Israel” in the Wall Street Journal, followed by “Why Obama is wrong about Iran being ‘rational’ on nukes,” in the Los Angeles Times.
He also gave a lengthy interview to the Times of Israel this week in which he echoed charges in his new book, “Ally,” to the effect that aspects of US-Israel ties are “in tatters” because of the president.
The Obama administration responded bitterly to Oren’s earlier criticism of the president, calling it “absolutely false.” His opposite number, US Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro, said Oren was motivated by a desire to sell books.
But while freshman MK Oren’s party leader Moshe Kahlon on Wednesday apologized and distanced the party from the Wall Street Journal piece, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly refused a US request to do likewise.GO READ THE WHOLE THING.
