P. Parenthood Cartoon

Potentially game-changing oil reserves discovered in Israel

Haifa, Israel – After Israel complained for years that it was surrounded by oil-rich states but didn’t have a drop within its own borders, it appears there’s a big-time turnaround with the announcement Wednesday that massive oil reserves have been located in the Golan Heights,close to the country’s border with Syria.
Afek Oil and Gas, an Israeli subsidiary of the U.S. company Genie Energy, confirmed the find in an interview with Israel’s Channel 2 TVbut conceded that until the oil is actually extracted, they won’t be sure of the actual amounts and quality of the oil that has been discovered.
“We are talking about a strata which is 350 meters thick and what is important is the thickness and the porosity,” the company’s chief geologist, Yuval Bartov, explained. “On average in the world, strata are 20-30 meters thick, so this is ten times as large as that, so we are talking about significant quantities. The important thing is to know the oil is in the rock and that's what we now know.”
“There is enormous excitement,” Bartov said. “It's a fantastic feeling. We came here thinking maybe yes or maybe no, and now things are really happening.”
According to a September 2014 Times of Israel report on the Golan exploration, Genie Energy is chaired by Howard Jonas and counts among its more notable investors the “former US Vice President Dick Cheney, Michael Steinhardt, Jacob Rothschild, and Rupert Murdoch.”
Experts say actually extracting meaningful quantities of oil from the deposits is likely some time away. Some have suggested that while the find could be very significant, the announcement might have as much to do with the share price of the exploration company as the actual certainty that oil will be produced at the site.
The other key consideration in the development of the potential oil feed is its close proximity to the vicious fighting taking place just over the border in neighboring Syria, where ISIS and other jihadi organizations had been battling the Syrian forces of President Assad and his Iran-backed allies Lebanon-based Hezbollah even before Russia’ recent entry into the regional conflict.
Most recent rocket strikes into Israel’s Golan territory have generally been declared stray fire by the Israel Defense Forces, but regional experts point out that the potential costs and challenges of protecting future oil fields so close to the war zone, as well as the large target it would provide for enemy fire, could prove challenging should the project indeed come to fruition and provide the Jewish state –where a reported 270,000 barrels of oil are consumed daily - with its own source of ‘black gold’.
A license to drill in the area was initially issued in April 2013 within an area of nearly 98,000 acres -approximately a third of the Golan itself - but a series of appeals to the Israeli courts by organizations such as the Society for Protection of Nature in Israel and Greenpeace, put all development of the site on hold until a December 2014 ruling gave the green light for drilling.
The main site is close to the small town of Katzrin, which lies northeast of the northern shore of the fabled Sea of Galilee and is home to a wide range of special plants and wild animals, including major nature reserves such as Gamla, home to Israel’s largest population of Griffon vultures.
The rugged land, captured from Syria during the 1973 Yom Kippur War and still under dispute between the two countries, includes vital underground water sources that feed directly into the Sea of Galilee itself, Israel’s main source of fresh water.
In recent years massive natural gas reserves have been discovered and developed off the Mediterranean coast of Israel, but political wrangling over who gets which piece of the financial pie has caused a delay in benefits from the find.
The long-running saga has proved a major embarrassment to the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, which in August received a further blow to what the Israeli government had anticipated would be its regional dominance in oil in the eastern Mediterranean when Egypt announced than an Italian company had discovered a gas field estimated at 30 trillion cubic feet. However, the Egyptian fields have yet be developed.

House forms special panel to probe Planned Parenthood

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WASHINGTON –  The Republican-led House has voted to create a special panel to investigate Planned Parenthood and its procurement of fetal tissue for research.
Wednesday's near party-line vote was 242-184. The roll call underscored how the GOP is pressing an issue that has galvanized conservatives.
Republicans say the committee is needed to examine whether Planned Parenthood is breaking laws or misusing taxpayer money.
Democrats call the effort a witch hunt motivated by politics.
They compare it to the Benghazi committee, which Republicans created to probe the 2012 attack that killed four Americans in Libya. Democrats maintain it is aimed at undermining Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time.
Four congressional committees are already investigating Planned Parenthood, which has said it's done nothing illegal.

House speaker candidates vow break from Boehner in race to replace him

The three Republicans vying for House speaker will face off Thursday in a vote that could signal whether a caucus beset by infighting and tactical confusion can come together once John Boehner leaves office.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., is considered the front-runner, but will compete against Reps. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, and Daniel Webster, R-Fla.
McCarthy is said to be trying to distance himself from Boehner, amid some conservative concerns he'd represent a mere continuation of the sitting speaker's term. The other candidates also are vowing a fresh start.
"I think McCarthy's pitch was `I'm not John Boehner, I'm going to run things differently, I'm my own man,"' Rep. Blake Farenthold, R-Texas, said after the candidates made their pitches to members during a meeting Tuesday.
The vote set for Thursday is not the final floor vote; that will take place Oct. 29. On Thursday Republicans will select their nominee for speaker, who then would be seen as the odds-on favorite for the post since they hold the majority in the chamber. However, parliamentary rules could make for an unpredictable vote on Oct. 29.
The speaker's race already has seen a few curveballs since Boehner suddenly announced his retirement at the end of the month and McCarthy swiftly positioned himself as the presumptive next in line.

More on this...

• Kevin McCarthy: Work of Benghazi committee is not political

• Daniel Webster makes pitch to be next House speaker

• Chaffetz: We need a fresh face as House Speaker

Shortly after announcing his candidacy, McCarthy was seen to stumble in a Fox News interview where he appeared to link Hillary Clinton's dropping poll numbers to the congressional Benghazi committee. His comments fueled Democratic charges that the committee is merely political, which GOP leaders deny.
McCarthy himself has walked back the comments, and the leader of that committee, South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy, told MSNBC on Wednesday that "Kevin screwed up." He also noted McCarthy had "apologized" for the remark.
Amid the backlash over McCarthy's Benghazi remarks, Chaffetz entered the leadership race over the weekend.
Boehner also decided to postpone other leadership elections until after the Oct. 29 full House vote for speaker.
Whether McCarthy can rally the GOP caucus behind him is an open question. He is thought to have by far the most votes in his corner, but Chaffetz -- while admitting he's the underdog -- says he's furiously talking to members. The media-savvy and highly visible chairman of the House oversight committee claims he can bridge the Boehner-era divide among House Republicans, whose differences have fueled fights over budgets, ObamaCare, the debt ceiling and most recently Planned Parenthood.
"I think it's time for a fresh new start," Chaffetz told Fox News. "Kevin clearly has the majority of our conference. My fear is (he) doesn't have 218 votes on the floor of the House."
Chaffetz, though, pledges he'll support the eventual nominee.
In another development, the House Freedom Caucus, consisting of some 30 to 40 members, issued a statement late Wednesday saying that after exchanges with all the candidates, it would vote for Webster in Thursday’s election because he would be “best equipped to earn back the trust of the American people.”
A divided vote on Thursday could preview problems for the Oct. 29 election and beyond.
That's because in order for the House to formally choose a speaker, a majority of members must back a single candidate. The magic number, referenced by Chaffetz, is likely 218 (though it could be lower, depending on absences and other factors) -- and nobody can win the speakership without reaching that level of support.
Republicans have nearly 250 members in the House and on paper have the numbers to win against the Democrats' nominee, likely Nancy Pelosi. But if the winning Republican nominee on Thursday comes out with a tally short of 218, he'll have to spend the next several weeks trying to rally support to get to that number.
Some conservative groups and members were pushing back against McCarthy's bid in the run-up to Thursday's vote. On Wednesday, the Tea Party Patriots were passing around shirts with a cartoon image of McCarthy holding a glass of wine and a cigarette over the name, "McBoehner," in a bid to cast him as the speaker's double.
In a curious development, Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., also sent a letter to House Republican Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., urging a full vetting of all leadership candidates to avoid a repeat of 1998, when the conference selected then-Rep. Bob Livingston in November to succeed outgoing House Speaker Newt Gingrich. It then emerged Livingston had been conducting an affair. Jones asked that any candidate who has committed "misdeeds" withdraw.
Asked by FoxNews.com to elaborate, Jones said he doesn't "know anything" specific about any of the candidates, but, "We need to be able to say without reservation that 'I have nothing in my background that six months from now could be exposed to the detriment of the House of Representatives.'" He said he wants to make sure the candidates have "no skeletons."

Clinton email server reportedly target of cyberattacks from China, South Korea, Germany

WASHINGTON –  Hillary Clinton's private email server, which stored some 55,000 pages of emails from her time as secretary of state, was the subject of attempted cyberattacks originating in China, South Korea and Germany after she left office in early 2013, according to a congressional document obtained by The Associated Press.
While the attempts were apparently blocked by a "threat monitoring" product that Clinton's employees connected to her network in October 2013, there was a period of more than three months from June to October 2013 when that protection had not been installed, according to a letter from Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. That means her server was possibly vulnerable to cyberattacks during that time.
Johnson's letter to Victor Nappe, CEO of SECNAP, the company that provided the threat monitoring product, seeks a host of documents relating to the company's work on Clinton's server and the nature of the cyber intrusions detected. Johnson's committee is investigating Clinton's email arrangement.
Clinton has not said what, if any, firewall or threat protection was used on her email server before June 2013, including the time she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013 and the server was kept in her home in the New York City suburbs.
A February 2014 email from SECNAP reported that malicious software based in China "was found running an attack against" Clinton's server. In total, Senate investigators have found records describing three such attempts linked to China, one based in Germany and one originating in South Korea. The attacks occurred in 2013 and 2014. The letter describes four attacks, but investigators have since found records about a fifth, officials who were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly said.
It was not immediately clear whether the attempted intrusions into Clinton's server were serious espionage threats or the sort of nuisance attacks that hit computer servers the world over. But the new revelations underscore the extent to which any private email server is a target, raising further questions about Clinton's decision to undertake sensitive government business over private email stored on a homemade system.

More on this...

• FBI's Hillary email net expands

• Hillary Clinton distances herself from President Obama

Any hackers who got access to her server in 2013 or 2014 could have stolen a trove of sensitive email traffic involving the foreign relations of the United States. Thousands of Clinton emails made public under the Freedom of Information Act have been heavily redacted for national security and other reasons.
Clinton "essentially circumvented millions of dollars' worth of cybersecurity investment that the federal government puts within the State Department," said Justin Harvey, chief security officer of Fidelis Cybersecurity.
"She wouldn't have had the infrastructure to detect or respond to cyber attacks from a nation-state," he said. "Those attacks are incredibly sophisticated, and very hard to detect and contain. And if you have a private server, it's very likely that you would be compromised."
A spokesman for the Clinton campaign did not answer detailed questions from The Associated Press about the cyber intrusions. Instead, spokesman Brian Fallon attacked Johnson by linking him to the House Benghazi committee inquiry, which the campaign dismissed in a recent media ad as politically motivated.
"Ron Johnson is ripping a page from the House Benghazi Committee's playbook and mounting his own, taxpayer-funded sham of an investigation with the sole purpose of attacking Hillary Clinton politically," campaign spokesman Fallon said by email. "The Justice Department is already conducting a review concerning the security of her server equipment, and Ron Johnson has no business interfering with it for his own partisan ends."
The FBI is investigating whether national security was compromised by Clinton's email arrangement.
In June 2013, after Clinton had left office, the server was moved from her Chappaqua, New York, home to a data center in northern New Jersey, where it was maintained by a Denver technology company, Platte River Networks, records show.
In June 2013, Johnson's letter says, Platte River hired SECNAP Network Security Corp. to use a product called CloudJacket SMB, which is designed to block network access by "even the most determined hackers," according to company literature. But the product was not up and running until October, according to Johnson's letter, raising questions about how vulnerable Clinton's server was during the interim.
SECNAP is not a well-known computer security provider. The company's website and promotional literature describe CloudJacket as a monitoring system designed to counter unauthorized intrusions and monitor threats around the clock. Corporate documents show SECNAP has been in existence since at least 2002, selling computer spam filter and firewall products.
A SECNAP representative declined to comment, citing company policy.
The AP reported last month that Russia-linked hackers sent Clinton emails in 2011 -- when she was still secretary of state -- loaded with malware that could have exposed her computer if she opened the attachments. It is not known if she did.
The attacks Johnson mentions in his letter are different, according to government officials familiar with them. They were probing Clinton's server directly, not through email.