The Turkish government has faced strong criticism, including criticism from its own Kurdish citizens, for not doing enough to fight ISIS and help Kurds in Syria. A massive suicide bombing attributed to ISIS earlier this week greatly exacerbated these tensions.
Secretary of State John Kerry appeared before the Senate on Thursday to defend his administration’s nuclear deal with Iran. As expected, he took a great deal of heat from irate Republicans, plus a few skeptical Democrats, notably Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey. The headline-grabbing moment came when Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) said John Kerry had been “fleeced” by the Iranians.
Jason Rezaian’s employers at the Washington Post have turned to the United Nations for help in freeing him from Iranian prison, following a nuclear deal in which the White House failed to even bring up U.S. citizens currently jailed in the Islamic Republic.
First, there was an interview with Jake Tapper of CNN, in which she handled the Trump surge (saying that she shares the anger at professional politicians she feels Trump is tapping into), immigration policy, domestic security, and the Planned Parenthood videos. “Politics is not a game,” Fiorina said on Fox & Friends, “and it’s not entertainment. It’s deadly serious now. Because unless we solve some of these festering problems, and exhibit leadership to challenge the status quo in Washington, D.C., and exhibit leadership around the world, these times will continue to be perilous.”
According to a Friday afternoon report by the Wall Street Journal: “An internal government review found that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent at least four emails from her personal account containing classified information during her time heading the State Department.”
Judicial Watch notes that a lawsuit to squeeze documents about the targeting of individuals for audits out of the IRS was unsuccessful, even though a previous FOIA suit forced the agency to admit it was indeed keeping lists of individual donors to Tea Party and other conservative groups, for use in some sort of “secret research project,” even though IRS officials admitted “such information was not needed.”
On Thursday evening, the New York Times broke a bombshell story that could spell doom for Hillary Clinton’s already-faltering campaign. The headline read, “Criminal Inquiry Sought in Hillary Clinton’s Use of Email.”
The family of Chattanooga gunman Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez and their legal representation are pushing hard on the idea that he was not radical, a terrorist, or even particularly religious. The narrative they are pushing is that his deadly rampage was born of drug abuse and depression.
Chattanooga Police Sgt. Dennis Pedigo Jr. will be recovering from injuries sustained during the battle with shooter Mohammed Youssef Abdulazeez for some time to come.
On Wednesday, Kurdish militants allegedly shot two Turkish police officers, asleep in a shared residence on the Syrian border, they believed were collaborating with ISIS. The shooting has inflamed already dangerous tensions between Kurds and the Turkish government.
The University of Tennessee reports that Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning has established a Chattanooga Heroes Fund to “support the families of those who lost their lives as well as those who were wounded in the tragic shootings on July 16.”
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-AZ) says he will make sure the four Marines and a Navy Petty Officer killed during the attack on a Navy training center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, receive Purple Hearts.
Law enforcement officials have revealed that at least one of the service members attacked by Chattanooga killer Mohammed Abdulazeez was able to return fire with a handgun – possibly two, as the FBI is said to be examining another weapon recovered from the scene.
The Houston Chronicle notes that “Texas law doesn’t say how old is old enough for kids to be left alone,” but unnamed “authorities” warn that “inadequate supervision puts children at risk.” Yes, and inadequate common sense puts innocent people at risk. I guess you could say the Nanny State is practicing what it preaches, as it frets about leaving its child-citizens inadequately supervised. No wonder helicopter parenting is mandated.
This may be a case of “trolling” gone wild, an increasingly common and troubling phenomenon. It’s easy and cost-free for social media users to whip up campaigns of harassment, unleashing destructive passions that can spill over into far worse activities.
The government of Iran is presenting its deal with Obama to their people and legislature as a triumph, speaking openly about provisions that have been misrepresented to the American people and Congress by the Obama administration.
The Trump Moment was supposed to be a perfect opportunity for Hillary to lay low, while her loyal supporters, donors, and former employees in the mainstream media quietly strangled her scandals and pronounced the corpses “old news” that was no longer relevant. Instead, one of the more solid political polls, Quinnipiac, just released a new study that found Clinton’s poll numbers crashing even though she’s been kept out of the public eye.
Miffed that everyone is paying so much attention to Iran right now, North Korea piped up and declared it was not interested in making the kind of Iran-style deal nobody is offering them.
As the U.S. government and mainstream media rack their brains to figure out the motive behind last week’s shooting of four Marines and a Navy petty officer in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a few more clues to this inscrutable mystery have come up.
There’s a website looking to pick up what might be called the aftermarket business from cheater websites: FidelityDating.com, which is pitching itself to what the New York Post describes as “‘infidelity survivors’ seeking other singles who’ve also been through cheating scandals.”
The police department of Tallahassee, Florida responded to a bomb threat at the National Guard Armory on Tuesday morning. There is little public information, though there is a slight chance the threat is a hoax by someone seeking to take advantage of the apprehension over attacks on military personnel after the Chattanooga shootings.
State governors are stepping up to do President Obama’s job for him, lowering their flags to half-mast in honor of the Chattanooga dead.
The five men who were killed in Chattanooga were heroes, not just because they died in service to their country, but because of what they did while they were alive. The fifth, Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Randall Smith, succumbed to his wounds over the weekend, so he was not part of the tribute I wrote for the four Marines on Friday. Allow me to correct that omission.
It’s all the more puzzling because, as Stars & Stripes recalls, the flag was lowered after the Washington Navy Yard shooting in 2013, and even after traitor Nidal Hassan’s jihad rampage at Forth Hood in 2009 – the attack shamefully classified as “workplace violence” by this Administration. “We’ve lost five servicemen, and as you’ve said, the flag goes to half-mast for all types of other incidents around the country,” said Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-TN) told Stuart Varney of Fox News on Monday. “Here we have five servicemen who lost their lives. I can’t imagine why it hasn’t been lowered.”
ISIS has had a complicated relationship with poultry. Back in April, they were reportedly snatching boxes of frozen chicken away from starving people and burning them, because the chicken allegedly failed to meet the caliphate’s religious dietary standards. Now the UK Daily Mail reports that ISIS is conscripting chickens into service as suicide bombers.
