Friday May 16th 2014
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Long Weekend Edition
India Election 2014: Opposition Candidate Narendra Modi Will Be The Next Prime Minister
NEW DELHI, May 16 (Reuters) - Opposition candidate Narendra Modi will
be the next prime minister of India, with counting trends showing the
pro-business Hindu nationalist and his party headed for the most
resounding election victory the country has seen in 30 years.
Modi's
landslide was welcomed with a thundering rally on India's stock
markets and raucous celebrations at offices across the country of his
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), where supporters danced, exploded
fireworks and handed out sweets.
The BJP looked
certain of a parliamentary majority, giving the 63-year-old former
tea-seller ample room to advance economic reforms which were started 23
years ago by current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh but stalled in
recent years.
Singh's Congress party suffered its
worst ever wipeout, a big boost to Modi's goal of ending the dominance
of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that has governed for most of the 67 years
of independent India. Singh congratulated Modi on Friday with a telephone call.
Syrian state news agency says rebel rocket attack kills 13 in northern city of Aleppo
BEIRUT – Syria's state news agency says a rocket attack has killed 13 people in the northern city of Aleppo.
SANA says Friday's attack also wounded 17 people in the city's northern neighborhood of Achrafieh.
The
agency said the attack was carried out by "terrorists," the term the
government uses to refer to rebels trying to overthrow President Bashar
Assad.
It said the shells also damaged two houses in the area.
The attack came a day after similar shelling on the neighborhood killed three people and wounded 20.
Rocket attacks are common on residential neighborhood around Syria. The rockets can be wildly inaccurate.
Activists say Syria's 3-year-old conflict has killed more than 150,000 people. More than 2.5 million people have fled Syria to neighboring countries, while millions more are displaced within it.
The foreign secretary also announced the Syrian opposition would have its diplomatic status in the UK upgraded.
Syria's three-year conflict has left some 150,000 people dead.
The UK is continuing to push for President Assad to stand down, but he has sought a third seven-year term in the elections.
'Illegitimate' Mr Hague hosted a meeting of the The Friends of Syria group - made up of Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the UK and the US - in London.
Afterwards, he said: "We are of course united in our disgust and anger at what's happening in Syria and the ruthless utter disregard for human life."
The group agreed a short communique criticising the decision to hold an election at a time when millions of people were displaced and the bloodshed was continuing.
Mr Hague called on the whole international community to "reject these illegitimate elections", saying: "We've also agreed unanimously to take further steps to... do everything we can to hold the Assad regime accountable for the terror it is perpetrating."
He promised the UK government would increase its humanitarian efforts, with £30m of extra funding.
The disagreement had been looming in the background since talks began Feb. 18 on a comprehensive deal meant to constrain Iranian nuclear work that can make such arms in exchange for full sanctions relief on Tehran's economy. So negotiators had concentrated on less contentious components of a final deal in previous rounds.
But both sides reported difficulties as the talks went into their third day.
Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqhchi told Iran's IRNA news agency the negotiations are moving "very slowly and with difficulty."
A Western official with detailed knowledge of the negotiations was more specific, telling The Associated Press the two sides were at loggerheads over enrichment.
Iran denies any interest in nuclear weapons, saying its enrichment program is meant only to make reactor fuel. But because the technology can also create weapons-grade uranium for warheads depending on the level of enrichment, Washington and its allies want strict constraints on its size and scope.
They have mostly been blamed on the al-Shabab militant Islamist group from neighbouring Somalia.
Hundreds of British tourists have been evacuated from the coastal resort area of Mombasa amid warnings of an attack.
British tour companies have suspended flights to Mombasa, Kenya's second largest city.
High threat The Kenyan National Disaster Operation Centre said the first explosion occurred in a minibus, the second in the large open-air Gikomba market.
Police officials told the Reuters news agency they suspected the blast had been caused by an improvised explosive device.
Related Story: Eight dead, more than 70 wounded in Nairobi blasts
In a report Friday, the United Nations raised concern about the increasing human rights abuses in eastern Ukraine as armed groups took advantage of the breakdown in law and order.
Mariupol is the second-largest city in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region — one of two regions that declared independence Monday from the central government in Kiev. Citizen patrols began there earlier this week as Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine's richest man, urged steelworkers at his factories to help police restore order.
On Thursday, Akhmetov's company, Metinvest, agreed with steel plant directors, police and community leaders to help improve security in the city and get insurgents to vacate the buildings they had seized. A representative of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, which had declared independence, was also a party to the deal.
Metinvest has two steel plants Mariupol, a city of half a million people. The port and industrial center lies on the main road between Russia and Crimea, the peninsula annexed by Moscow in March. The city saw heavy fighting in the past weeks, including a shoot-out outside a police station that left one policeman and several insurgents dead. Without the city, Ukraine would lose a chunk of its coastline on the Sea of Azov, which links to the Black Sea.
Air strikes pounded militia bases at dawn and 6,000 troops converged on the city, storming a series of bases and checkpoints.
Eyewitnesses described a city in chaos, with jets streaking low over rooftops, tanks on the streets, heavy detonations and aggressive fighting.
"The fighting is close to my house," said one resident in the Hawari district. "Planes are going very low, there are explosions, there is fighting around the February 17 [militia] base."
But there were wildly different claims over whether the attacks have official sanction, with the government denouncing the offensive and the local army command saying it was monitoring the situation.
The attack is led by Khalifa Hiftar, a former commander of the 2011 uprising that deposed Muammar Gaddafi. Hitfar announced the operation was launched to clear Benghazi of Islamist militias and restore Libya's dignity.
Hiftar, who called on the army earlier this year to mount a coup against the government, appears to have the support of a significant proportion of Libya's armed forces. He insisted the operation was sanctioned by army commanders, saying: "All reserve forces are mobilised. If we fail today, the terrorists win."
But Libya's government insisted the operation had no official sanction, with the chief of the general staff, Abdul Salam Jadallah, branding Hiftar a criminal and ordering Benghazi's militias to fight back.
Air force planes struck the bases of the Rafalla al-Sahati and Ansar al-Sharia militias, the latter blamed by Washington for the attack two years ago on the US consulate that led to the death of ambassador Chris Stevens.
Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rai has said he will join the pope on his May 24-26 tour of the Holy Land, drawing criticism in Lebanon which remains in a formal state of war with its southern neighbor Israel.
"We presented our point of view ... about the negative repercussions of this visit," Ibrahim Amin al-Sayyed, head of Hezbollah's political council, told reporters after meeting Rai at the patriarch's offices in the hills overlooking Beirut.
"We hope that these considerations are taken into account."
Al-Rai’s visit is the subject of great controversy in his native Lebanon, and parts of the media have spoken out vehemently against his visit to Israel, which is still technically in a state of war with Lebanon.
China's maritime push rattles a region
Bangkok: When Chinese tugboats edged a structure as high as a 40-storey building and big as a football field into the South China Sea in early April, Beijing’s neighbours never foresaw that it would soon trigger a chain reaction in one of the world’s most complex and intractable maritime disputes.
China knew, however, that it was a provocative act and sent a convoy of 80 ships - seven of them warships from the Chinese navy - with the new US$1 billion deep sea drilling rig built by the country’s state-run oil industry.
An unknown number of Chinese planes also kept watch overhead as the structure called HD-981 crawled through the disputed waters of the South China Sea, reaching a speck of land claimed by both China and Vietnam around May 1, and there it has remained since, 80 kilometres inside Vietnam’s Exclusive Economic Zone.
Meriam Ibrahim, whose father was Muslim but mother was an Orthodox Christian from Ethiopia, was convicted of “apostasy” on Sunday and given four days to repent and escape death, said lawyer Al-Shareef Ali al-Shareef Mohammed.
The 26 year old, who is eight months pregnant, was sentenced after that grace period expired, Mohammed said.
Amnesty International immediately condemned the sentence, calling it “abhorrent.” The U.S. State Department said it was “deeply disturbed” by the sentencing and called on the government to respect the right to freedom of religion.
Mohammed, the lawyer, called the conviction rushed and legally flawed since the judge refused to hear key defence witnesses and ignored constitutional provisions on freedom of worship and equality among citizens.
Ibrahim and Wani married in a formal church ceremony in 2011 and have a son, 18-month-old Martin, who is with her in jail. The couple runs several businesses, including a farm, south of Khartoum.
Sudan’s penal code criminalizes the conversion of Muslims into other religions, which is punishable by death.
As in many Muslim nations, Muslim women in Sudan are prohibited from marrying non-Muslims, though Muslim men can marry outside their faith. By law, children must follow their father’s religion.
Sudan introduced Islamic Shariah laws in the early 1980s under the rule of autocrat Jaafar Nimeiri, a move that contributed to the resumption of an insurgency in the mostly animist and Christian south of Sudan. An earlier round of civil war lasted 17 years and ended in 1972. The south seceded in 2011 to become the world’s newest nation, South Sudan.
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"It's time President Obama personally answer for the horrific conditions and abuses occurring at our veterans facilities," House GOP Leader Eric Cantor said in a statement, after VA Secretary Eric Shinseki testified Thursday before a Senate committee.
Lawmakers at that hearing were visibly frustrated over the state of
the VA, and the succession of reports that VA workers may have
manipulated records to make it seem like veterans were being treated in a
timely fashion, when they were not. Further, they voiced concerns that
the department is waiting for the results of investigations that may not
conclude for weeks, or even months.
The White House has dispatched deputy White House chief of staff Rob Nabors to review VA health care procedures and policies. But critics, including Cantor, say it's time for Obama to get personally involved.
The VA scandal is just one of many facing the Obama administration -- including the botched rollout of the health care law, the response to the Benghazi terror attacks and the IRS targeting of conservative groups -- and Republicans voiced concern that the White House would handle this controversy like the others.
For Holder and for President Barack Obama, sentencing reform has become a critical, second-term legacy item, as they aim to bend the arc of incarceration policy away from a federal system well practiced at imprisoning drug offenders for as long as possible. But those efforts are colliding with institutional resistance from law enforcement officials with a single-minded focus and, perhaps, turf to defend.
The high-level shift toward easing punishment for drug offenders, backed by public opinion, raises the question of whether any DEA chief who could win the support of rank and file agents would be willing to carry out White House reforms. So far, Leonhart appears uninterested, at best.
She publicly distanced herself from Obama's remarks about marijuana's relative harmlessness. She griped about the Justice Department's failure to try to block marijuana legalization in Colorado and Washington state. She clings to a comically outdated view of drugs, refusing to acknowledge a difference between pot and crack cocaine. And this week, her agency picked a fight with Kentucky over the state's purchase of industrial hemp seeds to begin a newly legalized agricultural test.
For now, it's sentencing reform that raises the biggest questions. Leonhart's remarks before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month about mandatory minimum sentences caused people in top echelons of the Justice Department to ask whether she was on board with her bosses on sentencing reform, sources familiar with the tensions told The Huffington Post.
Iranian Naval Commander Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi, a member of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), said that Iran is constantly training and preparing for a clash with the United States, according to a recounting of his remarks provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).
Fadavi revealed that Iran “compensates for its technological
inferiority to the United States with a strategy of asymmetrical
warfare, including suicide attacks and the use of speedboat and its
missile capability,” according to MEMRI.
Additionally, Fadavi revealed that on “at least” three occasions senior U.S. officials have contacted Iran to establish a telephone hot line like the one used between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War era.
Fadavi’s military threats come amid a massive military buildup by Iran, which claims to have duplicated and armed a downed U.S. drone and to have developed advanced ballistic missiles that could be capable of carrying a nuclear payload.
During a Thursday press conference, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said flatly that he won't vote for Boggs, given the nominee's strong record as a social conservative. Reid had suggested on Wednesday that he was leaning no, but he couldn't have been more clear on Thursday.
"I'm going to oppose him," Reid said. "He's a person who, in my opinion, is out of the mainstream and I don't think deserves to be a federal judge."
Boggs, who is up for a lifetime post on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, has come under fire for votes he took during his time as a Georgia state legislator. Among other things, he voted to pass a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, to keep the Confederate insignia on the state flag and to pass a measure that would have required doctors who performed abortions to post online their names and the number of abortions they performed.
Asked if he would let Boggs receive a floor vote if he makes it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee -- something that is by no means a done deal -- Reid said only, "We'll see."
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said he too has "real concerns" about Boggs and "several things" raise red flags. He singled out Boggs' Confederate flag vote and said he wasn't satisfied with Boggs' responses on that front during his confirmation hearing before the Judiciary Committee, of which Durbin is a member.
"His answers really were not very good," Durbin told The Huffington Post, adding that he thinks Boggs' positions on abortion are "extreme."
"We respected the rules as they existed," he said during his testimony at the procedure and House affairs committee Thursday.
The committee was convened to question the NDP leader over controversial allegations that the party used House of Commons funds for partisan activities.
At issue are the satellite offices the NDP set up outside Ottawa that housed political staffers whose salaries were being paid by taxpayers. The now-shuttered offices were set up in Montreal and Toronto, with another about to open in Saskatchewan.
"Our parliamentary staff does parliamentary work. Our party staff does party work," Mulcair said in addressing the concern that staff would be mixing parliamentary and party duties.
He referred to the lease of the Montreal satellite office, saying it includes an annex "where you can clearly see the three closed offices that were for the three party workers — they had separate spaces closed off — and the rest of the space was shared."
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SANA says Friday's attack also wounded 17 people in the city's northern neighborhood of Achrafieh.
It said the shells also damaged two houses in the area.
The attack came a day after similar shelling on the neighborhood killed three people and wounded 20.
Rocket attacks are common on residential neighborhood around Syria. The rockets can be wildly inaccurate.
Activists say Syria's 3-year-old conflict has killed more than 150,000 people. More than 2.5 million people have fled Syria to neighboring countries, while millions more are displaced within it.
UK's William Hague attacks Assad's Syria elections plan
Presidential elections in Syria will be a "parody of democracy", UK Foreign Secretary William Hague has said.
Mr Hague said Syria's government had an "utter disregard" for
life, and President Bashar al-Assad decision to call an election for 3
June "disgusted" the international community.The foreign secretary also announced the Syrian opposition would have its diplomatic status in the UK upgraded.
Syria's three-year conflict has left some 150,000 people dead.
The UK is continuing to push for President Assad to stand down, but he has sought a third seven-year term in the elections.
'Illegitimate' Mr Hague hosted a meeting of the The Friends of Syria group - made up of Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the UK and the US - in London.
Afterwards, he said: "We are of course united in our disgust and anger at what's happening in Syria and the ruthless utter disregard for human life."
The group agreed a short communique criticising the decision to hold an election at a time when millions of people were displaced and the bloodshed was continuing.
Mr Hague called on the whole international community to "reject these illegitimate elections", saying: "We've also agreed unanimously to take further steps to... do everything we can to hold the Assad regime accountable for the terror it is perpetrating."
He promised the UK government would increase its humanitarian efforts, with £30m of extra funding.
Iran nuclear talks run into snags
VIENNA – Talks between Iran and six world powers hit a major snag Friday over the future size of a nuclear program that Tehran says it needs to expand to fuel atomic reactors, but which the U.S. fears could be used to make nuclear weapons.The disagreement had been looming in the background since talks began Feb. 18 on a comprehensive deal meant to constrain Iranian nuclear work that can make such arms in exchange for full sanctions relief on Tehran's economy. So negotiators had concentrated on less contentious components of a final deal in previous rounds.
Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqhchi told Iran's IRNA news agency the negotiations are moving "very slowly and with difficulty."
A Western official with detailed knowledge of the negotiations was more specific, telling The Associated Press the two sides were at loggerheads over enrichment.
Iran denies any interest in nuclear weapons, saying its enrichment program is meant only to make reactor fuel. But because the technology can also create weapons-grade uranium for warheads depending on the level of enrichment, Washington and its allies want strict constraints on its size and scope.
Kenya's Nairobi hit by twin blasts in Gikomba market
Two explosions have
struck the Gikomba market area of the Kenyan capital Nairobi, killing at
least 10 people and injuring scores, officials say.
It is not clear what caused the blasts but Kenya has been hit by a spate of attacks in recent years.They have mostly been blamed on the al-Shabab militant Islamist group from neighbouring Somalia.
Hundreds of British tourists have been evacuated from the coastal resort area of Mombasa amid warnings of an attack.
British tour companies have suspended flights to Mombasa, Kenya's second largest city.
High threat The Kenyan National Disaster Operation Centre said the first explosion occurred in a minibus, the second in the large open-air Gikomba market.
Police officials told the Reuters news agency they suspected the blast had been caused by an improvised explosive device.
Related Story: Eight dead, more than 70 wounded in Nairobi blasts
Ukraine's Steelworkers Force Pro-Russia Insurgents To Retreat In Eastern City
MARIUPOL, Ukraine (AP) — Local patrols by steelworkers have forced pro-Russia insurgents to retreat from the government buildings they had seized in a major city in eastern Ukraine, giving residents hope that a wave of anarchy was over.In a report Friday, the United Nations raised concern about the increasing human rights abuses in eastern Ukraine as armed groups took advantage of the breakdown in law and order.
Mariupol is the second-largest city in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region — one of two regions that declared independence Monday from the central government in Kiev. Citizen patrols began there earlier this week as Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine's richest man, urged steelworkers at his factories to help police restore order.
On Thursday, Akhmetov's company, Metinvest, agreed with steel plant directors, police and community leaders to help improve security in the city and get insurgents to vacate the buildings they had seized. A representative of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, which had declared independence, was also a party to the deal.
Metinvest has two steel plants Mariupol, a city of half a million people. The port and industrial center lies on the main road between Russia and Crimea, the peninsula annexed by Moscow in March. The city saw heavy fighting in the past weeks, including a shoot-out outside a police station that left one policeman and several insurgents dead. Without the city, Ukraine would lose a chunk of its coastline on the Sea of Azov, which links to the Black Sea.
Heavy fighting breaks out in Libya as troops storm militias in Benghazi
Attack leader, a retired general, says operation aims to clear the city of Islamist militias and restore Libya's dignity.
The heaviest fighting in Libya since the Arab spring revolution broke out in the eastern capital of Benghazi on Friday as forces led by a retired general attacked militias on the ground and with jets.Air strikes pounded militia bases at dawn and 6,000 troops converged on the city, storming a series of bases and checkpoints.
Eyewitnesses described a city in chaos, with jets streaking low over rooftops, tanks on the streets, heavy detonations and aggressive fighting.
"The fighting is close to my house," said one resident in the Hawari district. "Planes are going very low, there are explosions, there is fighting around the February 17 [militia] base."
But there were wildly different claims over whether the attacks have official sanction, with the government denouncing the offensive and the local army command saying it was monitoring the situation.
The attack is led by Khalifa Hiftar, a former commander of the 2011 uprising that deposed Muammar Gaddafi. Hitfar announced the operation was launched to clear Benghazi of Islamist militias and restore Libya's dignity.
Hiftar, who called on the army earlier this year to mount a coup against the government, appears to have the support of a significant proportion of Libya's armed forces. He insisted the operation was sanctioned by army commanders, saying: "All reserve forces are mobilised. If we fail today, the terrorists win."
But Libya's government insisted the operation had no official sanction, with the chief of the general staff, Abdul Salam Jadallah, branding Hiftar a criminal and ordering Benghazi's militias to fight back.
Air force planes struck the bases of the Rafalla al-Sahati and Ansar al-Sharia militias, the latter blamed by Washington for the attack two years ago on the US consulate that led to the death of ambassador Chris Stevens.
Hezbollah threatens Maronite patriarch with 'negative repercussions' ahead of Israel visit
BEIRUT - Hezbollah told the head of the Maronite church on Friday that his planned trip to Jerusalem to accompany Pope Francis would have "negative repercussions".
Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rai has said he will join the pope on his May 24-26 tour of the Holy Land, drawing criticism in Lebanon which remains in a formal state of war with its southern neighbor Israel.
"We presented our point of view ... about the negative repercussions of this visit," Ibrahim Amin al-Sayyed, head of Hezbollah's political council, told reporters after meeting Rai at the patriarch's offices in the hills overlooking Beirut.
"We hope that these considerations are taken into account."
Al-Rai’s visit is the subject of great controversy in his native Lebanon, and parts of the media have spoken out vehemently against his visit to Israel, which is still technically in a state of war with Lebanon.
China's maritime push rattles a region
Bangkok: When Chinese tugboats edged a structure as high as a 40-storey building and big as a football field into the South China Sea in early April, Beijing’s neighbours never foresaw that it would soon trigger a chain reaction in one of the world’s most complex and intractable maritime disputes.
China knew, however, that it was a provocative act and sent a convoy of 80 ships - seven of them warships from the Chinese navy - with the new US$1 billion deep sea drilling rig built by the country’s state-run oil industry.
An unknown number of Chinese planes also kept watch overhead as the structure called HD-981 crawled through the disputed waters of the South China Sea, reaching a speck of land claimed by both China and Vietnam around May 1, and there it has remained since, 80 kilometres inside Vietnam’s Exclusive Economic Zone.
Pregnant Sudanese woman sentenced to death for marriage to Christian, faith
A pregnant Sudanese woman who married a Christian man was sentenced to death after she refused to recant her Christian faith, her lawyer said.Meriam Ibrahim, whose father was Muslim but mother was an Orthodox Christian from Ethiopia, was convicted of “apostasy” on Sunday and given four days to repent and escape death, said lawyer Al-Shareef Ali al-Shareef Mohammed.
The 26 year old, who is eight months pregnant, was sentenced after that grace period expired, Mohammed said.
Amnesty International immediately condemned the sentence, calling it “abhorrent.” The U.S. State Department said it was “deeply disturbed” by the sentencing and called on the government to respect the right to freedom of religion.
Mohammed, the lawyer, called the conviction rushed and legally flawed since the judge refused to hear key defence witnesses and ignored constitutional provisions on freedom of worship and equality among citizens.
Ibrahim and Wani married in a formal church ceremony in 2011 and have a son, 18-month-old Martin, who is with her in jail. The couple runs several businesses, including a farm, south of Khartoum.
Sudan’s penal code criminalizes the conversion of Muslims into other religions, which is punishable by death.
As in many Muslim nations, Muslim women in Sudan are prohibited from marrying non-Muslims, though Muslim men can marry outside their faith. By law, children must follow their father’s religion.
Sudan introduced Islamic Shariah laws in the early 1980s under the rule of autocrat Jaafar Nimeiri, a move that contributed to the resumption of an insurgency in the mostly animist and Christian south of Sudan. An earlier round of civil war lasted 17 years and ended in 1972. The south seceded in 2011 to become the world’s newest nation, South Sudan.
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Obama feels heat over VA scandal
Republicans are putting the heat on President Obama over the scandal at the Department of Veterans Affairs over allegedly fatal health care delays, saying he can no longer float above the ever-widening controversy."It's time President Obama personally answer for the horrific conditions and abuses occurring at our veterans facilities," House GOP Leader Eric Cantor said in a statement, after VA Secretary Eric Shinseki testified Thursday before a Senate committee.
The White House has dispatched deputy White House chief of staff Rob Nabors to review VA health care procedures and policies. But critics, including Cantor, say it's time for Obama to get personally involved.
The VA scandal is just one of many facing the Obama administration -- including the botched rollout of the health care law, the response to the Benghazi terror attacks and the IRS targeting of conservative groups -- and Republicans voiced concern that the White House would handle this controversy like the others.
DEA Chief Dials Back Drug War Bluster After Talk With Holder
WASHINGTON -- Drug Enforcement Administrator Michele Leonhart and her boss, Attorney General Eric Holder, appear locked in a bureaucratic staring match over the Obama administration's attempt to reform the way the federal government approaches criminal justice and punishment.For Holder and for President Barack Obama, sentencing reform has become a critical, second-term legacy item, as they aim to bend the arc of incarceration policy away from a federal system well practiced at imprisoning drug offenders for as long as possible. But those efforts are colliding with institutional resistance from law enforcement officials with a single-minded focus and, perhaps, turf to defend.
The high-level shift toward easing punishment for drug offenders, backed by public opinion, raises the question of whether any DEA chief who could win the support of rank and file agents would be willing to carry out White House reforms. So far, Leonhart appears uninterested, at best.
She publicly distanced herself from Obama's remarks about marijuana's relative harmlessness. She griped about the Justice Department's failure to try to block marijuana legalization in Colorado and Washington state. She clings to a comically outdated view of drugs, refusing to acknowledge a difference between pot and crack cocaine. And this week, her agency picked a fight with Kentucky over the state's purchase of industrial hemp seeds to begin a newly legalized agricultural test.
For now, it's sentencing reform that raises the biggest questions. Leonhart's remarks before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month about mandatory minimum sentences caused people in top echelons of the Justice Department to ask whether she was on board with her bosses on sentencing reform, sources familiar with the tensions told The Huffington Post.
Iran threatens US Navy with ‘suicide missions’
A top Iranian naval commander said that he is prepared to order suicide attacks, drone strikes, and missile technology to “destroy the U.S. Navy” in any upcoming confrontation, according to an interview printed in Iran’s state-run media.Iranian Naval Commander Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi, a member of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), said that Iran is constantly training and preparing for a clash with the United States, according to a recounting of his remarks provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).
Additionally, Fadavi revealed that on “at least” three occasions senior U.S. officials have contacted Iran to establish a telephone hot line like the one used between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War era.
Fadavi’s military threats come amid a massive military buildup by Iran, which claims to have duplicated and armed a downed U.S. drone and to have developed advanced ballistic missiles that could be capable of carrying a nuclear payload.
All Senate Democratic Leaders Signal Opposition To Obama Nominee Michael Boggs
WASHINGTON -- All four Senate Democratic leaders have now signaled that either they will vote against President Barack Obama's embattled judicial nominee Michael Boggs or they have serious concerns with him.During a Thursday press conference, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said flatly that he won't vote for Boggs, given the nominee's strong record as a social conservative. Reid had suggested on Wednesday that he was leaning no, but he couldn't have been more clear on Thursday.
"I'm going to oppose him," Reid said. "He's a person who, in my opinion, is out of the mainstream and I don't think deserves to be a federal judge."
Boggs, who is up for a lifetime post on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, has come under fire for votes he took during his time as a Georgia state legislator. Among other things, he voted to pass a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, to keep the Confederate insignia on the state flag and to pass a measure that would have required doctors who performed abortions to post online their names and the number of abortions they performed.
Asked if he would let Boggs receive a floor vote if he makes it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee -- something that is by no means a done deal -- Reid said only, "We'll see."
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said he too has "real concerns" about Boggs and "several things" raise red flags. He singled out Boggs' Confederate flag vote and said he wasn't satisfied with Boggs' responses on that front during his confirmation hearing before the Judiciary Committee, of which Durbin is a member.
"His answers really were not very good," Durbin told The Huffington Post, adding that he thinks Boggs' positions on abortion are "extreme."
NDP Satellite Offices: Tom Mulcair Maintains Party Followed Rules
New Democrat Leader Tom Mulcair is reiterating his party's position that the "satellite" offices set up outside of Ottawa were done transparently."We respected the rules as they existed," he said during his testimony at the procedure and House affairs committee Thursday.
The committee was convened to question the NDP leader over controversial allegations that the party used House of Commons funds for partisan activities.
At issue are the satellite offices the NDP set up outside Ottawa that housed political staffers whose salaries were being paid by taxpayers. The now-shuttered offices were set up in Montreal and Toronto, with another about to open in Saskatchewan.
"Our parliamentary staff does parliamentary work. Our party staff does party work," Mulcair said in addressing the concern that staff would be mixing parliamentary and party duties.
He referred to the lease of the Montreal satellite office, saying it includes an annex "where you can clearly see the three closed offices that were for the three party workers — they had separate spaces closed off — and the rest of the space was shared."
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