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Ben Carson likens Obama to psychopath

Ben Carson has called President Obama a lot of names. In a newly published magazine profile, he adds psychopath to that list.
The comment was published in an article in GQ, which described a conversation the potential 2016 Republican presidential candidate had as he prepared to watch Obama’s State of the Union address in January.
His “image-maker” and adviser, Armstrong Williams, said as the show started: “He looks good. … He looks clean. Shirt’s white. The tie. He looks elegant.”
“Like most psychopaths,” Carson responded, according to the article. “That’s why they’re successful. That’s the way they look. They all look great.”
Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon known for his strident criticism of the Obama administration, is weighing a presidential bid.
But the political newcomer has also found himself in hot water for past off-the-cuff remarks. Earlier this month, he apologized after saying in a CNN interview that inmates’ behavior in prisons proves that homosexuality is a choice.

Navy bans chaplain from ministering to family of dead sailor

It really takes a special kind of lowlife to stop a chaplain from ministering to the family and colleagues of a dead sailor.
But that’s exactly what happened last week at Naval Nuclear Power Training Command in Goose Creek, S.C., according to attorneys representing Chaplain Wes Modder.

It’s become clear to me Navy leadership cannot be trusted to protect religious liberty within the ranks. It’s time for our elected officials to intervene before Chaplain Modder’s commander brings more embarrassment and shame to the Armed Forces.

“For this Navy to bar a chaplain from comforting and ministering to sailors and families is a reprehensible violation of religious freedom and common human decency,” said Kelly Shackelford, the president of Liberty Institute, a law firm that specializes in religious liberty cases.
Some quick background before I explain what happened:
Chaplain Modder is facing the end of a stellar, 19-year-career in the Navy because he expressed his faith-based views on marriage and human sexuality during private counseling sessions with sailors.
Last December, a gay officer took offense at Christian chaplain’s take on homosexuality. Modder, who is endorsed by the Assemblies of God, was accused of discrimination and failing to show tolerance and respect, among other things.
Just a few months earlier, Modder’s commander had called him the “best of the best” and a “consummate professional leader.” But now he’s on the verge of being kicked out of the military.
Modder was relieved of his duties and temporarily reassigned pending the outcome of an investigation. The Navy has since denied the chaplain’s request to be reinstated.  for religious accommodation.
So that brings us to an incident that occurred last week, when a sailor in Modder’s previous unit unexpectedly died.
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Liberty Institute attorney Michael Berry tells me Modder was about to reach out to the sailor’s grieving family when he was stopped by a member of the command.
He was slapped with a “no contact” order – the Navy’s version of a restraining order – banning him from providing counsel or ministering to any members of his unit.
“This Navy official is using the ‘no contact’ order as a weapon to punish and humiliate a decorated military chaplain,” Berry said. “To deny Chaplain Modder of the ability to minister to a grieving family and other sailors is deplorable.”
The Navy went so far as to banish Modder from the base on the day of the sailor’s memorial service. The chaplain said that was adding “insult to injury.”
“One of the most important things chaplains do is to provide comfort and care after a tragic death,” Modder said. “I am heartbroken for the family, and yet the Navy won’t allow me to do my job of helping them grieve and mourn.”
It’s beyond me why the Navy would treat a Marine and highly decorated chaplain with such derision. This is a man who was deployed multiple times during the War on Terror. This is a man who once led chaplains who ministered to Navy SEALs.
Tens of thousands of Americans have petitioned the Pentagon to reinstate Modder, and a number of high profile-political and religious figures – including Mike Huckabee, Sen. Ted Cruz, Franklin Graham and Family Research Council President Tony Perkins – have offered their support.
I reached out to the Chief of Chaplains’ office for comment, but they did not return my call. I can only hope the reason is because they are just as speechless as I am.
It’s become clear to me that Navy leadership cannot be trusted to protect religious liberty within the ranks. It’s time for our elected officials to intervene, before Chaplain Modder’s commander brings more embarrassment and shame to the Armed Forces.

Obama reportedly snubs NATO chief as Russia makes new threats against allies

President Barack Obama reportedly will not meet with NATO's new secretary general when he is in Washington this week, despite requests from the alliance chief's staff for a discussion.
Bloomberg View reported Tuesday that Jens Stoltenberg's office requested a meeting with Obama in advance of his scheduled visit, but did not get any response from the White House. Instead, Bloomberg View reported that Stoltenberg had to settle for a last-minute meeting with Defense Secretary Ashton Carter.
Stoltenberg is scheduled to be in Washington through Thursday, primarily so he can attend a strategic brainstorm session involving military officials and experts from the U.S and NATO.
Stoltenberg, who replaced Anders Fogh Rasmussen as head of the world's largest military alliance in October, was able to meet with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper Monday, the day before Harper announced that Canada would expand its participation in the U.S.-led military campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
The report of Obama's snub comes amid Russia's growing willingness to test NATO's military readiness. On Tuesday, NATO jets were scrambled after four Russian military planes were spotted flying over the Baltic Sea with their transponders turned off. Over the weekend, a Danish newspaper published remarks by the Russian ambassador to Denmark in which he hinted that Russian missiles could target Danish warships if Copenhagen joins NATO's missile defense system.
But the most far-reaching example of Russian belligerence came Tuesday, when Britain's Daily Telegraph reported that Moscow was preparing to lease 12 long-range bombers to Argentina in exchange for shipments of beef and wheat. The report comes after a new round of rhetoric from Russian officials questioning Britain's claim to the Falkland Islands.
The Telegraph reports that Russian's ambassador to Britain, Alexander Yakovenko, compared a 2013 referendum in which 99.8 percent of the Falklands's inhabitants preferred to stay with Briain, to last year's vote which formalized Crimea's annexation by Russia. The U.K., along with the U.S. and NATO, denounced the Crimea vote as a sham held at gunpoint and directed by Moscow.
British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond repeated those claims earlier this week, prompting the embassy to respond "In its rhetoric [the] Foreign Office applies one logic to the referendum in the Malvinas/Falklands, and a different one to the case of Crimea."
Alexei Pushkov, the head of the Duma’s committee of international affairs, was even more blunt in a Twitter message that read, in part: "Crimea has immeasurably more reason to be a part of Russia than the Falkland Islands to be part of the UK."
The Russian position echoed remarks made by Argentina president Cristina de Kirchner, who said last year "“The Malvinas [Argentina's name for the archipelago] has always belonged to Argentina, the same way that Crimea also belonged to the Soviet Union until it was given to Ukraine."
On Tuesday, British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said that Britain would send two Chinook troop-carrying helicopters and a new surface-to-air missile system.

French Interior Minister says crashed Germanwings plane's voice recorder damaged, but 'usable'

France's Interior Minister said Wednesday that the recovered cockpit voice recorder from Germanwings Flight 9525 had been damaged when the plane crashed, but added that he believed it to be "usable" in the investigation, while another top French official said authorities were focused on the final seconds before air traffic controllers lost contact with the plane.
Bernard Cazeneuve told RTL radio that investigators were working to pull information for the recorder, which was found hours after the Airbus A320 went down in a remote part of the French Alps Tuesday morning. The cockpit voice recorder could provide vital clues about the condition of the pilots during the plane's final plunge from a cruising height of 38,000 feet to around 6,000 feet just prior to the crash.
Meanwhile, emergency workers continued the grim task of recovering bodies and searching for the flight data recorder, the second of the so-called "black boxes," as investigators tried to piece together the many puzzles surrounding the crash that is believed to have killed all 150 passengers and crew on board.
The single-aisle, medium-haul plane operated by a subsidiary of Lufthansa was less than an hour from completing its scheduled flight to Dusseldorf from Barcelona Tuesday morning when it unexpectedly went into a rapid descent, losing contact with air traffic controllers on the ground.
Segolene Royal, France's Minister for Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy, said Wednesday that the pilots stopped responding to radio calls after 10:31 a.m. local time, about 30 minutes into the flight. She said that the seconds after 10:30 a.m. are considered vital to the investigation.
France's civil aviation authority said the pilots had not sent out a distress call before losing radio contact with their control center. Instead, the Wall Street Journal reported that air traffic controllers issued an alarm after the plane disappeared from their radar screens. Moments later, the paper reported, the French military ordered a fighter jet to the area where the plane was last tracked.
In his interview with RTL Wednesday, Cazenueve said that terrorism was not considered likely to have been the cause of the crash, though it has not been formally ruled out. That is in keeping with the stance of governments on both sides of the Atlantic. On Tuesday, National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan said, "There is no indication of a nexus to terrorism at this time." The Journal reported that the French government had assigned prosecutors based in the nearby city of Marseilles to investigate the crash rather than its anti-terrorism unit, which is headquartered in Paris.
In another twist, the secretary-general of France's air traffic controllers union said that the plane did not appear to deviate from its flight plan as it went down, which is unusual for an aircraft in distress.
"If there’s a loss of control, pilots usually lose their way too," Roger Rousseau told the Journal. "That didn’t happen in this case."
"We cannot say at the moment why our colleague went into the descent, and so quickly, and without previously consulting air traffic control," Germanwings' director of flight operations, Stefan-Kenan Scheib, said Tuesday.
The wreckage was located at an altitude of about 6,550 feet at Meolans-Revels, near the popular ski resort of Pra Loup. The remote site is 430 miles south-southeast of Paris. French Interior Ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet said the crash site covered several acres, with thousands of pieces of debris, "which leads us to think the impact must have been extremely violent at very high speed."
Complicating the recovery and investigation is the inaccessibility of the site by road, forcing emergency workers to choose between hiking up from a base established in a nearby village or rappelling down from helicopters unable to land on the uneven terrain.