US raises pressure on Israel over Palestinian state

Obama is Wrong.

The U.S. exerted new pressure against Israel by leaving open the possibility of letting the United Nations set a deadline for a Palestinian state, in what would be a departure from using American veto power to protect its close Mideast ally.
The prospect of a U.N. Security Council resolution arose Friday when French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Paris would introduce a measure setting a deadline for a negotiated settlement of the conflict and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, possibly within two years.
On dozens of occasions in recent decades, the U.S. has lobbied against approval of such resolutions, using its veto authority as a permanent member of the Security Council as a last resort. In response to past resolutions concerning the Middle East, the White House has echoed Israel’s contention that U.N. action cannot substitute for direct negotiations.
But the White House took a markedly different tack on Friday. Press secretary Josh Earnest said the Obama administration was aware of Mr. Fabius’s comments. “But we have not yet actually seen a text of a resolution so I’d reserve comment on a hypothetical resolution,” he said.
While he didn’t indicate whether the U.S. would actively favor such a resolution, the absence of any dissuasion was telling. White House officials didn’t elaborate on the Obama administration’s position.
If the U.S. were to abstain from voting on the resolution it could still pass if it gained the required nine-vote majority, further isolating Israel and fanning international criticism against it.
The adoption of such a resolution wouldn’t be expected to have an immediate impact on Israeli policy but would add to the mounting pressure.

Senate GOP asking new questions about emails for Clinton and Abedin, who had special employment status

Senate Republicans are renewing efforts to learn why Huma Abedin, a top assistant to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was allowed to keep working at the agency under a special, part-time status while also being employed at a politically-connected consulting firm.
The new requests are being made by Iowa GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, following revelations that both women used a private Internet server and email accounts for State Department correspondence.
Grassley says the earlier requests to the department have been largely ignored, so the new ones have gone to the department’s inspector general and to Secretary of State John Kerry, seeking their involvement.
Grassley’s probe started in 2013, when he requested all communications between Abedin, after she switched from a full-time deputy chief of staff for Clinton to a part-timer, then started working for Teneo, a consulting firm that says it “brings together the disciplines of government and public affairs.”
A July 2013 letter from the department to Grassley, provide by the senator’s office, states Abedin worked full-time from January 2009 to June 2012. It also states Abedin did not list outside employment upon ending her full-time employment and that the department retained her as an adviser-expert at the hourly rate of a SGA GS-15/10.
The most recent available federal documents show the rate as $74.51 with a maximum pay of $155,500 annually.
“A number of conflict-of-interest concerns arise when a government employee is simultaneously being paid by a private company, especially when that company (is) Teneo,” Grassley said in the March 19 letter to Kerry that also raised concerns about Abedin and other department employees appearing to have been “improperly categorized” as special government employees, or SGEs.
Grassley says he specifically wants to know “what steps the department took to ensure that … Abedin’s outside employment with a political-intelligence and corporate-advisory firm did not conflict with her simultaneous employment at the State Department.”
The letter to department Inspector General Steve Linick also questions whether the department’s “excessive” use of SGE designations undermines ethics standards and if Clinton and Abedin’s private emails have the potential to impede the department from fulfilling Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, requests, over which the upper chamber’s Judiciary Committee has legislative jurisdiction.
Grassley says the department’s answers have so far been “largely unresponsive” and points to a November 2014 response that in part states “an individual may receive an SGE designation if he or she is joining the department from the private sector or is coming from another government position.”
However, Abedin came neither from the private sector nor another government position, Grassley argues.
“She converted from a full-time employee … with seemingly little difference in her job description or responsibilities,” he wrote.
Grassley also argues that the purpose of the SGE program is to help the government get temporary services from people with special knowledge and skills whose principal employment is outside the government.
However, Abedin essentially kept the same job and was subsequently hired by Teneo and the Clinton Global Initiative.
“It is unclear what special knowledge or skills Ms. Abedin possessed that the government could not have easily obtained otherwise from regular government employees,” Grassley wrote.
The State Department says Abedin was an SGE until February 2013, essentially doing the same job that she did as a full-time employee, advising on Clinton’s schedule and travel. It also states she reviewed department ethics guidelines but was allows to work part-time without a new security clearance.
Grassley also says the department’s current use of the SGE designation “blurs the line between public and private sector employees” and that department employees getting full-time salaries for what appears to be part-time work is “especially troubling.”
“The taxpayer deserves to know,” Grassley wrote.

As deadline looms, Iran nuke talks take on frantic tone

The international negotiations to strike a nuclear agreement with Iran intensified and took on a frantic tone Saturday, as France and Germany joined in the talks that have recently been limited to the United States and Tehran.
The negotiators are trying to reach an outline of an agreement by Tuesday, toward a final agreement by June 30 that would end Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon.
Secretary of State John Kerry and the other negotiators have met multiple times this weekend in various formats in the Swiss town of Lausanne.
“The serious but difficult work continues,” a senior State Department official said. “We expect the pace to intensify as we assess if an understanding is possible.”
In another nod to the fast-approaching deadline, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani spoke by phone with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to emphasize the importance of reaching an agreement.
Iranian negotiator Majid Takht-e Ravanchi denied a news report that the sides were close to agreement on a text, and other officials spoke of remaining obstacles, including Iranian resistance to limits on research and development and demands for more speedy and broad relief from international sanctions.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told reporters as he arrived that the talks have been "long and difficult.”
“We've advanced on certain issues, not yet enough on others," he said.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, meanwhile, suggested the blame for any impasses lies with the U.S. and its partners.
"In negotiations, both sides must show flexibility," he wrote on Twitter. "We have and are ready to make a good deal for all. We await our counterparts' readiness."
Iranian nuclear agency chief Ali Akbar Salehi described one or two issues as becoming "twisted." He told Iran's ISNA news agency that the sides were working to resolve the difficulties.
Kerry met early in the day with Zarif, before extended sessions with Fabius and Germany's Frank-Walter Steinmeier. The foreign ministers of Russia, China and Britain also were expected in Lausanne on Sunday.
"We now are standing at the threshold of a political resolution and a collective political impulse,” said Russian deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov. “I think these chances (of an agreement) significantly exceed 50 percent."
But the diplomats also said their presence does not necessarily mean a deal is almost done.
Steinmeier avoided predictions of an outcome, saying only that a nuclear deal could help ease Mideast tensions.
"These are decisive days before us after 10 years, nearly 12 years, of negotiations with Iran," he told reporters. "The endgame of the long negotiations has begun. ... The final meters are the most difficult but also the decisive ones. ... I can only hope that in view of what has been achieved over the last 12 months that the attempt for a final agreement here will not be abandoned."

He also said that a successful conclusion of the nuclear talks with Iran "could perhaps bring a bit more calm to the region."
Iran says its nuclear ambitions are purely peaceful; other nations fear it is seeking to develop weapons.
Republicans in Congress and other critics of the Obama administration’s foreign policy fear the United States will agree to any deal, in an attempt to end years of negotiations.
The GOP-led Senate has pushed an effort to give Congress a vote on a final deal and has tried to impose additional sanctions on Iran, a strategy the White House has essentially rejected as a deal-breaker.
Progress has been made on the main issue: The future of Iran's uranium enrichment program. It can produce material for energy, science and medicine but also for the fissile core of a nuclear weapon.
The sides tentatively have agreed that Iran would run no more than 6,000 centrifuges at its main enrichment site for at least 10 years, with slowly easing restrictions over the next five years on that program and others Tehran could use to make a bomb.
The fate of a fortified underground bunker previously used for uranium enrichment also appears closer to resolution.
Officials have told The Associated Press that the U.S. may allow Iran to run hundreds of centrifuges at the Fordo bunker in exchange for limits on centrifuge work and research and development at other sites. The Iranians would not be allowed to do work that could lead to an atomic bomb and the site would be subject to international inspections.
Instead of uranium, any centrifuges permitted at Fordo would be fed elements used in medicine, industry or science, the officials said.
Even if the centrifuges were converted to enrich uranium, there would not be enough of them to produce the amount needed to make a weapon within a year -- the minimum time frame that Washington and its negotiating partners demand.
A nearly finished nuclear reactor would be re-engineered to produce much less plutonium than originally envisaged.
Still problematic is Iran's research and development program. Tehran would like fewer constraints on developing advanced centrifuges than the U.S. is willing to grant.
Also in dispute is the fate of economic penalties against Iran. Additionally, questions persist about how Iran's compliance with an agreement would be monitored.
Fabius said France was not yet satisfied on that point.

Indiana gov supports effort to 'clarify' religious objections law

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence said he would support legislation to “clarify the intent” of the new law that has drawn widespread scrutiny over concerns it could allow discrimination against gay people.
Pence told the Indy Star he has been in talks with legislative leaders and expects to introduce a clarification bill to the religious objections law sometime this week.  Pence did not provide any details, but told the newspaper that making gay Indiana residents a protected legal class is “not on my agenda.”
Pence disputes that the religious objections law would allow discrimination against gay people, although many Indiana businesses, convention-organizers and others have disagreed. The governor said he did not anticipate “hostility that’s been directed toward out state.”
"I just can't account for the hostility that's been directed at our state," he told the newspaper. "I've been taken aback by the mischaracterizations from outside the state of Indiana about what is in this bill."
Since the Republican governor signed the bill into law Thursday, Indiana has been widely criticized by businesses and organizations around the nation, as well as on social media with the hashtag #boycottindiana. Consumer review Angie’s List announced Saturday it had pulled out of a planned expansion in Indianapolis because of the new law.
Angie's List had sought an $18.5 million incentive package from Indianapolis' City-County Council to add 1,000 jobs over five years. But founder and CEO Bill Oseterle said in a statement Saturday that the expansion was on hold "until we fully understand the implications of the freedom restoration act on our employees.
Hundreds protested Saturday outside the Indiana Statehouse against the new law. Protesters held up signs reading “no hate in our state.”
Pence and other supporters of the law contend the discrimination claims are overblown and insist it will keep the government from compelling people to provide services they find objectionable on religious grounds. They also maintain that courts haven’t allowed discrimination under similar laws covering the federal government and 19 other states.
But state Rep. Ed DeLaney, an Indianapolis Democrat, said Indiana's law goes further than those laws and opens the door to discrimination.
"This law does not openly allow discrimination, no, but what it does is create a road map, a path to discrimination," he told the crowd, which stretched across the south steps and lawn of the Statehouse. "Indiana's version of this law is not the same as that in other states. It adds all kinds of new stuff and it moves us further down the road to discrimination."
The measure prohibits state laws that “substantially burden a person’s ability to follow his or her religious beliefs. The definition of a “person” includes religious institutions businesses and associations. The legislation takes effect in July.
Zach Adamson, a Democrat on Indianapolis' City-County Council, said to cheers that the law has nothing to do with religious freedom but everything to do with discrimination.
"This isn't 1950 Alabama; it's 2015 Indiana," he told the crowd, adding that the law has brought embarrassment on the state.
Among those who attended the rally was Jennifer Fox, a 40-year-old from Indianapolis who was joined by her wife, Erin Fox, and their two boys, ages 5 and 8, and other relatives.
Fox said they married last June on the first day that same-sex marriage became legal in Indiana under a federal court ruling. She believes the religious objections law is a sort of reward to Republican lawmakers and their Conservative Christian constituents who strongly opposed allowing the legalization of gay marriage in the state.
"I believe that's where this is coming from — to find ways to push their own agenda, which is not a religious agenda; it's aimed at a specific section of people," Fox said.
Although many Indianapolis businesses have expressed opposition to the law and support for gays and lesbians, Fox worries her family could be turned away from a restaurant or other business and that her sons would suffer emotionally.
"I certainly would not want them to think that there's something wrong with our family because we're a loving family," she said.
Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard, a Republican who opposed the law, said he and other city officials would be talking to many businesses and convention planners to counter the uproar the law has caused. "I'm more concerned about making sure that everyone knows they can come in here and feel welcome," Ballard said.
The Indianapolis-based NCAA has expressed concerns about the law and has suggested it could move future events elsewhere; the men's Final Four will be held in the city next weekend.

Satan Cartoon

State senator won’t back down, apologize for saying he’d shoot a cop

IDIOT

LINCOLN, Neb. — State Sen. Sen. Ernie Chambers isn’t backing down.
The state lawmaker from Omaha defiantly stood Thursday on the floor of the Nebraska Legislature and rejected many of his colleagues’ calls for him to apologize — or even resign — for comparing cops to ISIS terrorists and suggesting he’d shoot a cop if he weren’t nonviolent and had a gun.
“I meant what I said and I said what I meant,” Chambers said.
He said the irony is that lawmakers were discussing freedom of expression on Wednesday, and said it was ignorant and “idle talk” to suggest taking any kind of legal action, since lawmakers are immune from civil or criminal liability in connection with anything they say in the Legislature.
“I’m not going to resign,” he said. “I’m not going to apologize. Why do you think I would apologize?”
For two hours, senators took to the microphone to talk about what they thought of Chambers’ comments, which were made last week during a legislative hearing on a gun bill that would allow people to carry concealed guns in bars.
State Sen. Beau McCoy of Omaha led the charge, saying he’ll stand up every day and demand a “strong denouncement” and apology, noting Thursday morning that two police officers were killed in other states in the past 48 hours.

Senate Democratic Leader Reid announces retirement

Better Late than Never!

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid announced Friday he will retire at the end of his term, closing a long and controversial career in Congress that spanned four decades.
The five-term Nevada Democratic senator announced the decision in a YouTube video message.
Appearing with bruises on his face from a recent at-home exercising accident, Reid, 75, said the injury has allowed him and his family to have a "little down-time," giving him time to think.
"We've got to be more concerned about the country, the Senate, the state of Nevada than us. And as a result of that, I’m not going to run for reelection,” the senator said in the video.
Reid, ribbing his Republican counterpart, added: "My friend, Senator McConnell, don't be too elated. I'm going to be here for twenty-two months."
Though Reid plans to serve out his term, his departure touches off a leadership shuffle among Democrats. Reid already is endorsing Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., for his position -- and other Democrats are doing the same.
"It's the caucus' decision but Senator Reid thinks Senator Schumer has earned it," a Reid spokesman told Fox News.
Schumer's most obvious competition would have been Senate Democrats' No. 2, Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill. -- however, Durbin is backing Schumer, Fox News has learned.
Reid, who helped President Obama pass a series of initiatives including the health care law, has been a controversial figure -- and during his tenure as majority leader was blamed by Republicans for much of the dysfunction in the chamber. Republicans won the majority last fall.
"On the verge of losing his own election and after losing the majority, Senator Harry Reid has decided to hang up his rusty spurs," National Republican Senatorial Committee Director Ward Baker said in a statement welcoming the announcement.
Praise from fellow Democrats, meanwhile, was effusive.
Obama called him a "fighter" who stood up to special interests.
"Harry is one of the best human beings I've ever met," Schumer said. "His character and fundamental decency are at the core of why he's been such a successful and beloved leader."
First elected to the Senate in 1986, Reid previously served in the House. He has endured tough re-election battles in 1998, 2004 and most recently 2010 -- against Tea Party-backed candidate Sharron Angle.
Among other decisions, Reid will be remembered for allowing the so-called "nuclear option" in late 2013, when he unilaterally moved to change Senate rules to allow a simple majority vote to overcome filibusters for certain nominations. While procedural, the change was significant because it meant the Senate no longer needed the usual 60 votes to advance on controversial nominations.
Republicans quickly gloated that his seat would be a prime pickup opportunity in 2016. GOP figures ranging from Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval to Rep. Joe Heck and others could be interested.

NY gang boss resurfaced at Florida mosque, sending radicalized jihadists overseas, say feds

A Muslim extremist who once led a murderous New York gang dubbed “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” and then resurfaced decades later as a radical imam at a Florida mosque is begging for help funding his legal defense against charges he committed tax fraud to, according to authorities, finance terror training for his followers.
Marcus Dwayne Robertson, 46, a former U.S. Marine known to his supporters at his Orlando-based Fundamental Islamic Knowledge Seminary as “Abu Taubah,” is currently being held in a local jail on a gun conviction. He faces sentencing on April 30 on a 2014 conviction of tax fraud, but more serious charges could be coming, given that prosecutors say he used the money to send his radicalized followers to Africa to learn how to kill Americans.

“The United States believes that the defendant is still an extremist, just as he was in the early 1990s.”- Federal prosecutors

“The United States believes that the defendant is still an extremist, just as he was in the early 1990s,” prosecutors said in recent court filings. “The only differences are that the defendant is now focused on training others to commit violent acts as opposed to committing them himself and the violent acts are to occur overseas instead of inside the United States.”
Robertson, according to recent Facebook posts, will continue to proclaim his innocence to all remaining allegations against him.
“The Prosecution is attempting to characterize me as a ‘Teacher of Terrorists.’ … They are attempting to twist my statements to fit into a terrorist plot. …. In reality, they know I am not a terrorist teacher,” Robertson wrote on his web site.
In his younger life as the leader of the “Forty Thieves” gang, Robertson “murdered several individuals; participated in assassination attempts; used pipe bombs, C-4, grenades, other explosives, and automatic weapons; participated in a robbery resulting in a hostage situation; and attempted the murder of police officers,” according to federal prosecutors.
Court records and wiretap transcripts from 2011 to 2015 provide a gripping tale of Robertson’s life, and that of one student, Jonathan Paul Jimenez, who Robertson allegedly instructed to file false tax returns to obtain a tax refund to pay for travel to Mauritania, Northwest Africa, for study and violent jihadist training.

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Robertson's Orlando-based Fundamental Islamic Knowledge Seminary is not taking students while he fights charges against him. (Screengrab)

The tax fraud case led to the prosecution of Jimenez, who reportedly knew Robertson for 11 years and, by his own admission, trained with the imam for a year in preparation for his travel to Mauritania, where he would study and learn to kill U.S. military personnel.
Robertson denies sending Jimenez overseas "to commit violent jihad,” but prosecutors produced several wiretapped conversations from 2011 that they say prove Robertson trained Jimenez “in killing, suicide bombing, and identifying and murdering United States military personnel.”
According to court records:
•      Jimenez stated he and Robertson discussed suicide bombings. Robertson told Jimenez if one could "go to a place where there’s seven top generals, it would be permissible to use a suicide bomb to kill them.”
•      Jimenez said Robertson wanted him to “fight to kill” and taught him it is obligatory to kill military officers, specifically generals, because they “can lead an army.” He said Robertson had instructed him on how to kill people “in a good manner” and how to “do it with kindness.”
•      Jimenez said he was “getting ready for that grave, baby,” and Robertson was preparing to make him a “killer” after he completed the religious aspects of his training.
FBI investigators said Robertson’s computers held documents from the U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center, such as “How to think like a terrorist” and the “Militant Ideology Atlas,” American military reports on interrogation, polygraphs, psychological operations; survival kits issued to Army aviators and a diagram of names connected to Global jihad.
Jimenez pleaded guilty August 28, 2012, to making a false statement to a federal agency in a matter involving international terrorism and conspiring to defraud the IRS, and was sentenced April 18, 2013, to 10 years in federal prison.
Bill Warner, a private investigator in Sarasota, Fla., and anti-Mulsim extremist activist, has been tracking Robertson since 2009. He claims that in addition to the most recent crimes, Robertson has “links to Al Qaeda going back to at least 1993 in New York City” and also previously was associated with Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called “Blind Sheik” whose Muslim extremist group is blamed for the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. Rahman, convicted of seditious conspiracy with nine others, is serving a life sentence at the Butner Federal Correctional Institution in North Carolina.
In early 1991, Robertson joined with other former Muslim security guards to form a robbery gang they called the ‘Forty Thieves’ with Robertson as the leader known as "Ali Baba." They robbed more than 10 banks, private homes and post offices at gun point, shot three police officers, and attacked one cop after he was injured by a homemade pipe bomb, Warner said.
Government records confirm Warner’s allegations and add that Robertson personally gave more than $300,000 of stolen funds to mosques he attended. After he was arrested in 1991, Robertson cut a deal with prosecutors, and served just four years in prison while his cronies remain behind bars to this day.
Robertson faced more jail time after he was arrested in August, 2011, for illegally possessing a firearm and was sent to the John E. Polk Correctional Facility, in Seminole County, Fla., where he is still being held.
Just after pleading guilty to the firearms conviction in Jan. 2012, federal authorities charged him in March, 2012, with conspiring to defraud the IRS.
Robertson, who said he’s lived in New York, Florida, California, Japan, Mauritania in Africa and Egypt, claims he is a professor who has lectured at universities around the world, including American universities.
Videos of his lectures show him preaching against gays, “devil worshipers,” non-Muslims and such American pop culture icons as cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants, who he says is “gay.”
Robertson claims to have served in the elite counter-terrorism unit Joint Special Operations Command before leaving the military as a conscientious objector. A spokeswoman for the National Archives confirmed his service from May 16, 1986 to May 1994, in the U.S. Marine Corps 2nd Force Reconnaissance Company as a field radio operator, but records indicate he was released from active duty in March 1990, discharged in the rank of corporal. Records show he was trained in radio telegraph, scuba diving, marksmanship, parachuting, terrorism counteraction, surveillance, infantry patrolling and finance.
While Robertson is jailed in Orlando, classes at his Fundamental Islamic Knowledge Seminary are on hold, but through friends and one of his wives, he continues to publish pleas for help.
On Wednesday, a wife named Umm Taubah, thanked supporters, but announced their fundraising efforts were hurt when, on March 24, their GOFundMe account was taken down because “administrators claimed we violated the rules by soliciting funds for a suspected terrorist.”
The U.S. Attorney’s office and attorneys for Robertson were contacted for comment, but none would comment.