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February 2018

Republican Senators Grassley and Graham sent a request for clarification to former Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice last week. In the request, the Senators posed 12 questions, all centered around one email Rice sent to herself on inauguration day, in the final moments of her tenure in the White House. The committee came across the email during their ongoing investigation into the FBI/Steele Dossier cluster.

Vice President Mike Pence told The Washington Post on his way home from the Olympics that the U.S. is ready to open talks with North Korea after a discussion with South Korean President Moon Jae-in:
The frame for the still-nascent diplomatic path forward is this: The United States and its allies will not stop imposing steep and escalating costs on the Kim Jong Un regime until it takes clear steps toward denuclearization. But the Trump administration is now willing to sit down and talk with the regime while that pressure campaign is ongoing.

Donald Trump, Jr.'s wife Vanessa is at a New York City hospital after she opened an envelope with white powder. From ABC7NY:
The letter was addressed to Donald Trump Jr. and sent to the couple's apartment on East 54th Street in Manhattan. His wife, Vanessa, opened the letter just after 10 a.m. She and two other people were decontaminated by firefighters at the scene and taken to a nearby hospital for evaluation.

President Donald Trump has rolled out the budget for 2019, written by budget director Mick Mulvaney. While it demands cuts to federal spending, it avoids balancing the budget within 10 years. Infrastructure received the main point of the budget for $1.5 trillion and cutting red tape. Trump tweeted out that after the country spent $7 trillion in the Middle East, it's time to start investing in America.

California is facing a new immigration crisis, this time in the form of large, swamp-dwelling rodents called nutria. Golden State officials are actually asking for help to deal with this unwanted population.
Wildlife officials are asking California residents to report any sightings of nutria — an invasive rodent that eats so much aquatic vegetation that it threatens wetlands and marshes.

Imad Mughniyeh (also spelled Mughniyah) was the most deadly, notorious and elusive Hezbollah terrorist, responsible for killing more Americans in terror attacks than anyone else prior to 9/11. Mughniyeh was behind just about every Hezbollah terror attack. His terror credits included the 1983 Beirut Marine and Embassy bombings, the capture and torture death of CIA station chief William Francis Buckley, the kidnappings of Terry Anderson and Terry Waite, and 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847, and death of U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem, who was beaten mercilessly until being dumped onto the tarmac.

More details are emerging about the Iranian drone launched from central Syria that was brought down over Israeli territory, and the resulting Israeli attack on the Iranian base near Palmyra that launched and controlled the drone. In that attack on the Iranian base, an Israeli F-16 was brought down, though the precise circumstances are not yet clear based on public information. Differing news accounts have the F-16 hit by shrapnel, or alternatively being ditched when the pilots realize a Russian-made surface-to-air missile (SAM) had locked on to the plane.

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) is an international media-monitoring organization that was founded back in 1982 to promote more accurate, balanced, and complete coverage of Israel and the Middle East. In addition to its many blogs and longform articles which expose an astonishing amount of errors and omissions, CAMERA also produces original research that evaluates how this skewed information on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is filtered into educational programming in various settings, such as in U.S. college campuses, the K-12 educational system, and in churches.

Our collective personification of animals has done far more harm than good. It began by pretending pets veritable children (they're not) and now, Reuters is seriously considering a "glass ceiling" for female dogs at the Westminster Dog Show.