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Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal to announce 2016 plans June 24

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal will announce his decision on whether to join the crowded field of Republicans running for president later this month.
Jindal, 43, will make the announcement at an event in New Orleans June 24. The two-term governor had previously said that he would wait until the last week of June, after the conclusion of the state's legislative session, before announcing whether or not he would run.
Nine Republicans have already entered the 2016 race. The latest, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, announced his candidacy Monday in his home state. Former Texas governor Rick Perry is expected to become the tenth person to join the field with an official announcement Thursday at an airfield outside Dallas.
Jindal formed an exploratory committee on May 18. In his announcement, Jindal said "Economic collapse is much closer to the door than people realize, our culture is decaying at a rapid rate and our standing in a dangerous world is at an all-time low."
On Tuesday, Jindal was one of the speakers at a GOP economic gathering in Florida that also featured Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, both would-be presidential candidates.

ISIS' frightening arsenal: Remote-controlled sniper rifles, steel plated suicide trucks

KIRKUK, Iraq –  Captured ISIS weapons show the black-clad militants are developing an arsenal of sophisticated arms, and Kurdish fighters told FoxNews.com they fear the terrorist force's expanding manufacturing capability is making it more formidable by the day.
In a dusty outpost near the Kurdish-held northern city of Kirkuk, a Peshmerga commander recently displayed two weapons that show his enemy's increasing adaptability on the battlefield. One was a scoped sniper rifle, customized and mounted on a welded steel platform and built to track targets by computer and fire by remote control. The other was a much different type of weapon - a truck reinforced with two-inch thick steel plates to ensure its load of explosives could crash through checkpoints and make it to its target before detonating.

"They are using high-tech (weaponry), and have the know-how from all over the world."
- Peshmerga Maj. Gen. Sirwan Barzani

"They have more weapons than us, they have mines, C4, sniper rifles, humvees and tanks," said Peshmerga Commander Kemal Kurkuki.
In Anbar Province, where ISIS is fighting the U.S.-equipped Iraqi army, the terrorists are using weapons taken from their vanquished foes. But on the northern front where the Peshmerga clash daily with ISIS, the militant fighters have powerful equipment either modified or built within the so-called caliphate known as Islamic State.

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This customized sniper rifle seized from ISIS weeks ago operates by remote control. (Gavin John)

Kerkuki revealed the captured weaponry along with bullet riddled black flags and photographs of other ISIS munitions captured during a successful Peshmerga operation against ISIS just weeks ago. The gun was operated attached to a computer by four long cables that controlled barrel elevation, gun rotation, the trigger and the camera. An operator could place the weapon at an elevated vantage point, and then hide out of sight while controlling the weapon via the computer screen like a lethal video game.
Kerkuki said it was not clear who built the weapon or where it came from. Controls and labels on the wires were written in English, but the deadly innovation of the device led some to suspect it was built by Chechen fighters, who have poured in to join ISIS.
"[ISIS] has all types of weapons, heavy machine guns, tanks," said Peshmerga Maj. Gen. Sirwan Barzani. "They are using high-tech (weaponry), and have the know-how from all over the world."

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Peshmerga Commander Kemal Kerkuki says ISIS is developing new weapons to adapt to US air strikes. (Hurbakis.net)

The truck, which looked like something driven off the set of an apocalyptic zombie movie, featured an armored turret on top with space for heavy machine guns. But its cargo left no need for speculation about its true purpose. Packed with hundreds of containers of C4, it was the ultimate suicide vehicle, impervious to small arms and built by ISIS mere miles from the Kurdish lines. The Kurds deemed the bomb-laden truck so dangerous they requested and got an American air strike to destroy it.
Kurdish military sources said the improvised weapons show ISIS is adapting from its use of conventional weapons easily spotted from air and vulnerable to coalition sorties. Peshmerga commanders say that, while coalition air superiority has changed the dynamic of the war, they need weapon for troops on the ground to combat ISIS. To a man, they complain that the central government in Baghdad, which has always eyed the semi-autonomous Kurds suspiciously, is slow to send supplies needed for the fight they share.

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Two-inch thick steel plating on this truck was intended to ensure it delivered its deadly payload past Kurdish checkpoints. (Gavin John)

Advanced weapons in the hands of Kurds, they say, would negate any need for U.S. boots on the ground. As ingenious and frightening as ISIS arsenal in northern Iraq may be, the Kurds say, vehicles such as the suicide truck would be no match for advanced weapons such as the American or European surface-to-surface missile systems.
But the Peshmerga, whose name translates to "Ones who confront death," will fight ISIS with whatever they have on hand.
"Their weapons are strong, but our goals are bigger than theirs," Kurkuki said. "ISIS has no future in Kurdistan."

HRC EMAILS: Federal officials voiced growing alarm over Clinton’s compliance with records laws, documents show

Over a five-year span, senior officials at the National Archives and Records Administrations (NARA) voiced growing alarm about Hillary Clinton’s record-keeping practices as secretary of state, according to internal documents shared with Fox News.
During Clinton’s final days in office, Paul Wester, the director of Modern Records Programs at NARA – essentially the agency’s chief records custodian – privately emailed five NARA colleagues to confide his fear that Clinton would take her official records with her when she left office, in violation of federal statutes.
Referring to a colleague whose full name is unknown, Wester wrote on December 11, 2012: “Tom heard (or thought he heard) from the Clinton Library Director that there are or may be plans afoot for taking her records from State to Little Rock." That was a reference to the possibility that Clinton might seek to house her records at the Clinton Presidential Center, which was largely funded by the Clinton Foundation.
"[W]e need to discuss what we know, and how we should delicately go about learning more about…the transition plans for Secretary Clinton’s departure from State," Wester added. He did not specify why the situation required “delicate” handling, but added that colleagues had “continued to invoke the specter of the Henry Kissinger experience vis-à-vis Hilary [sic] Clinton.”
That was a reference to how the secretary of state during the Nixon and Ford administrations, preparing to leave office in January 1977, stashed large segments of his classified papers on the upstate New York estate of his friend, Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller. It wasn’t until 2001 that Kissinger relented to demands from scholars and the U.S. government and made the documents available for research.
Under the Federal Records Act, NARA is entrusted with official oversight of Executive Branch agencies and their employees, aimed at ensuring that the records they generate in the discharge of their official duties are being properly preserved and stored.
The Wester email and 72 other internal documents released by NARA and the State Department earlier this month show NARA officers repeatedly expressed concerns that Clinton and her office were not observing the federal laws and regulations that govern recordkeeping – but that NARA never did much about it.
The 73 documents from NARA and State were turned over to Cause of Action, a non-partisan government accountability watchdog that had filed a Freedom of Information Act request in March, after the New York Times revealed that Clinton had exclusively used a private email server and domain name during her tenure as secretary of state. Cause of Action shared the documentswith Fox News on an exclusive basis, ahead of Senate testimony by the group’s executive director, Daniel Epstein.
“Given NARA’s stated concerns,” Epstein said in written testimony submitted this week to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, “it either was aware of the failure to preserve Mrs. Clinton’s emails or was extremely negligent in its efforts to monitor [the preservation of] senior officials’ emails.”
The alarm bells sounded fairly early in Clinton’s tenure at Foggy Bottom. In a November 2009 email, written when Clinton had not yet completed her first year on the job, NARA archivist David Langbart wrote to his colleague, Michael Kurtz, about a “huge issue on which there has been little progress” – namely, the proper preservation of “high-level memos” generated by employees at “S/ES.” That is the abbreviation for the office of the secretary of state within the State Department’s Executive Secretariat.
“[Members of a task force] are still working with the Executive Secretariat on the high-level memos issue,” Langbart wrote on November 2. “Earlier it sounded like S/ES was going to rely on SMART [an updated recordkeeping program for the State Department] but it now appears that they will be establishing their own recordkeeping system…”
Previously unpublished notes taken at a conference of NARA and State Department officials in July 2014, after Clinton had left the government, reflect continued concern that recordkeeping practices at Clinton’s agency had never met federal standards.
The handwritten notes, turned over to Cause of Action, refer to employees at State “using gmail with no r/k [recordkeeping] system,” and lamenting the “total disaster” that had apparently occurred when the Department of Interior had adopted a Google app for government use. The notes show the officials discussed “targeting senior leaders” at the State Department, in part by having assistant secretaries of state at each of the department’s bureaus establish “Bureau Records Coordinators.”
The notes show that the officials considered starting such procedures with a test run at the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL), which was thought to be an “easy” venue for such trials, then moving to the Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS) and then “into the Office of the Secretary w/ Principles [sic]” on the “7^th Floor” – where the secretary’s office suite is housed.
The most recent private expressions of concern by NARA officials came after Michael Schmidt, the New York Times reporter who broke the Clinton private emails story on March 2, began making inquiries at NARA a few days before his story ran. “I’m working on a story about government employees who use their personal email addresses to conduct government business,” Schmidt wrote, without disclosing initially that his focus was on Clinton, in a February 27 email to NARA general counsel Gary Stern.
Within about two hours, Stern secured approval from NARA Chief Operating Officer William Bosanko (“No objections from me”) for Stern to speak with Schmidt. The two connected on Sunday, March 1, after which Stern privately emailed the National Archivist himself, David Ferriero, and Wester, the agency’s chief records custodian, who had two years earlier expressed fears about Clinton unlawfully taking her records with her when she left office.
“As Paul surmised,” Stern wrote, Schmidt “has learned that when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, she apparently used a personal email account to conduct government business.” Stern, who has served as general counsel at NARA since 1998, added: “NARA does look into allegations of this type, with our interest being to ensure that the agency recovers any alienated [withheld] records and has policies in place to ensure prevent such events from occurring again. This case, if true, would present a concern.”
Particularly stung by the Times’ bombshell was James Springs, the acting inspector general at NARA, who responded to the story with an agitated March 3 email to Wester that asked: “Were we aware the gov[ernment] email system was not being used by Ms[.] Clinton. [sic] If we were not aware why not. [sic] What checks and balances do we have in place to ensure the gov email systems are being used. [sic]”
Wester forwarded Springs’ email to seven NARA colleagues, stating only: “I will talk to James, hopefully later this afternoon or tomorrow.”
Wester did not respond to a message left on his office voice mail by Fox News. Appearing at a National Press Club panel discussion in April, Jason Baron, the attorney who formerly served as the director of litigation at NARA, expressed amazement that NARA officials had not done more to discharge their supervisory duty over Clinton’s recordkeeping practices.
“I remain mystified by the fact that the use of a private e-mail account apparently went either unnoticed or unremarked upon during the four-year tenure in office of the former secretary,” said Baron, now in private practice at the firm of Drinker Biddle & Reath.”Simply put, where was everyone? Is there any record indicating that any lawyer, any FOIA officer, any records person, any high-level official ever respectfully confronted the former secretary with reasonable questions about the practice of sending e-mails from a private account? It is unfathomable to me that this would not have been noticed and reported up the chain.”
Clinton has disclosed that late last year she turned over 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department, printed out, and unilaterally deleted another 30,000 emails she deemed “personal.” Her spokesman, Nick Merrill, told reporters when the controversy first erupted that the secretary had obeyed the “letter and spirit of the rules.”

Police kill Massachusetts man, arrest another in anti-terror investigation

Authorities in Massachusetts arrested a man in connection with a counterterror investigation late Tuesday, hours after another man under surveillance by the Joint Terrorism Task Force was shot and killed after he refused to put down a military-style knife while approaching two officers.
Authorities identified the deceased man as 26-year-old Usaama Rahim, who was shot outside a CVS Pharmacy in Roslindale, Mass. at approximately 7 a.m. local time Tuesday. A law enforcement official with knowledge of the case told the Associated Press that Rahim had been making threats against law enforcement personnel.
Boston Police Commissioner William Evans told reporters that members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force approached Rahim to question him about "terrorist-related information" they had received when he moved toward officers with the knife.
Evans said officers repeatedly ordered Rahim to drop the knife but he continued to advance. He said task force members fired their guns, hitting Rahim once in the torso and once in the abdomen. Rahim was taken to Brigham and Women's Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
WFXT reported that three different Joint Terrorism Task Force teams had been carrying out 24-hour surveillance on at least three different people in the Boston area, though it was unclear how long that had been going on. One source told the station that they had been investigating an "active plot" centered around harming law enforcement officials, although it is unclear if it was operational. The plot may have been inspired by the terror group ISIS, who have repeatedly called on followers in the United States to attack law enforcement officials or military installations.
Vincent Lisi, special agent in charge of the Boston FBI office, said authorities "don't think there's any concern for public safety out there right now."
Evans did not comment on the report that Rahim had been radicalized by ISIS, but said "Obviously, there was enough information there where we thought it was appropriate to question him about his doings ... He was someone we were watching for quite a time."
Evans later said authorities knew Rahim "had some extremism as far as his views."
Evans said the officers didn't have their guns drawn when they approached Rahim. He said police have video showing Rahim "coming at officers" while they are backing away. That account differs from one given by Rahim's brother Ibrahim Rahim, who said in a Facebook posting that his youngest brother was killed while waiting at a bus stop to go to his job.
"He was confronted by three Boston Police officers and subsequently shot in the back three times," he wrote. "He was on his cellphone with my dear father during the confrontation needing a witness."
The officer and the agent involved in the shooting weren't physically injured but were evaluated at a hospital for what Evans described as "stress."
WFXT reported that Rahim worked in loss prevention at several CVS stores in the Boston area. However, it was not clear that the store where he was killed was among them. Boston voter registration records seen by the Associated Press list Rahim as a student. Other records indicate that as recently as two years ago he was licensed as a security officer in Miami, but don't specify in what capacity.
The Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center said its security firm hired Rahim as a security guard for a month in mid-2013. Executive director Yusufi Vali said Rahim didn't regularly pray at the center and didn't volunteer there or serve in any leadership positions.
Later Tuesday, the FBI and local police arrested a man at a home in Everett, Mass., in an action authorities said was related to the Roslindale shooting. Christina Diorio-Sterling, a spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, said David Wright was taken into custody from his home in suburban Everett. She said Wright will face federal charges and is expected to appear in U.S. District Court on Wednesday.
The Boston Globe reported, citing a law enforcement official with knowledge of the case, that the charges against Wright will related to an alleged plot to kill a member of law enforcement.
The FBI and Rhode Island State Police also searched a property in Warwick, R.I. in relation to the Roslindale shooting. Police sealed off a street, requiring anyone who lived there to show identification to pass the police cordon, but it was not clear if they had anyone in custody.
A 17-year-old told the Boston Globe that police had asked him about a neighbor in his mid-20s named Nick. The teen told the paper Nick often wears long robes and prays in his front yard.