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Posted by Mike LaChance on January 05, 2016 13 Comments
The city of Baltimore reached a grim milestone in 2015 by racking up more homicides in one year than ever before. Kevin Rector reported at The Baltimore Sun:
Deadliest year in Baltimore history ends with 344 homicides Blood was shed in Baltimore at an unprecedented pace in 2015, with mostly young, black men shot to death in a near-daily crush of violence. On a per-capita basis, the year was the deadliest ever in the city. The year's tally of 344 homicides was second only to the record 353 in 1993, when Baltimore had about 100,000 more residents. The killings were on pace with recent years in the early months of 2015 but skyrocketed after the unrest and rioting of late April. In five of the next eight months, killings topped 30 or 40 a month.

LATEST NEWS

Posted by Miriam Elman on January 05, 2016 8 Comments
The fallout from the execution of prominent Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr in Saudi Arabia on Saturday will roil the Middle East region for some time to come. Below, I review the recent developments since our last posts (see here and here) and discuss some of the lessons to be learned from this latest episode in the unraveling of the Muslim Middle East.

Saudi Arabia Cuts Ties with Iran

As we reported, Saudi Arabia has broken diplomatic ties with Iran. On Sunday afternoon, the Saudi Foreign Minister, Adel al-Jubeir announced at a press conference that Iranian diplomats had 48 hours to leave the kingdom.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 04, 2016 8 Comments
The strains are showing throughout Europe from the current wave of migration from Muslim lands. The latest to bow to reality are Sweden and Denmark, which just implemented border controls. The Christian Science Monitor reports:
Denmark and Sweden tightened their borders on Monday in efforts to stem the flow of migrants entering Scandinavia from Germany. Just hours after Swedish rules went into effect requiring train passengers traveling from Denmark to show ID, the Danish government announced it had beefed up border controls with Germany as of noon Monday (1100 GMT, 6 a.m. EST). "We are introducing temporary border controls, but in a balanced way," Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen told reporters in Copenhagen, adding there would be no problem for "ordinary" Danes and Germans to cross the border.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on January 04, 2016 19 Comments
Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton may have shored up the Coast to Coast vote during an interview with New Hampshire's Conway Daily Sun.
she chatted with this reporter, who had asked her about UFOs in 2007 while working for the Cabinet Press in Milford, NH. She recalled that 2007 exchange with a smile and seemed to have fun discussing the topic. "Yes, I'm going to get to the bottom of it," said Clinton with enthusiasm. Back in 2007, Clinton had said that the No. 1 topic of freedom-of-information requests that her husband, former President Bill Clinton, received at his library was UFOs. Last year, Bill Clinton told late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel that he wouldn't be surprised if Earth is visited by aliens since so many planets out there may support life.

Posted by Jonathan Levin on January 04, 2016 0 Comments
CAMERA - the Committee for Accuracy in Middle-East Reporting in America - has released its Top Ten MidEast Media Mangles for 2015. There are some doozies, from all the usual sources: The New York Times, BBC, Washington Post, MSNBC, AP, The Guardian and Ha'aretz.  There's also the perennial phenomenon of media silence regarding Palestinian incitement that is the bedrock of the Israeli/Arab conflict.  In a first, Elle made the list as well (apparently terrorist chic is in style). CAMERA's full exposition is here, but in brief the top ten are:

1. Ignoring, absolving and questioning the spate of Palestinian knife terror attacks.

LEGAL INSURRECTION QUICK TAKES

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Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 04, 2016 12 Comments
January 7 is the one-year anniversary of the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris and, two days later, the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket. yemen al qaida charlie hebdo The cover for the anniversary issue of Charlie Hebdo has been released. The Guardian reports:
French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo will mark a year since an attack on its offices with a cover featuring a bearded man representing God with a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder, accompanied by the text: “One year on: the assassin is still out there.” One million copies of the special edition will be available on newsstands on Wednesday, with tens of thousands more to be sent overseas. It will mark a year since brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi burst into Charlie Hebdo’s offices in eastern Paris and killed 12 people, including eight of the magazine’s staff.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on January 04, 2016 48 Comments
Two Republican presidential candidates have spoken out against the Oregon standoff: Senators Cruz and Rubio. Aleister blogged about the precarious Oregon situation yesterday:
Protesters have taken over a small federal building in Oregon and some of them are armed. One of them is Ammon Bundy, son of rancher Cliven Bundy who was in the news last year for clashing with federal authorities over land use. The reason for the protest seems to be two-fold. The situation which set off the protest was the prosecution of a pair of father and son ranchers named Hammond. The Hammonds are not part of the protest however and are expected to surrender themselves to authorities Monday for separate charges. The second aspect of the protest is a grievance over the federal government taking over land that used to be owned by ranchers.
In an interview on Iowa radio station KBUR Monday, Sen. Rubio acknowledged the federal government has too much control over land in the western half of the country, but urged protestors to seek a lawful remedy:

Posted by David Gerstman on January 04, 2016 8 Comments
Two ongoing news stories that broke this past week show the Obama administration's contrasting styles towards America's top Middle East ally and a rogue nation that continues to flout international law. Obama and his top officials have no problem playing hardball with Israel, but become like Rex the dinosaur in Toy Story, who doesn't like confrontations, when dealing with  Iran. First, last Tuesday The Wall Street Journal (Google link) reported that the administration excluded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from the list of foreign leaders it would not spy on after Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA regularly spied on friendly heads of state. Quoting current and former U.S. officials the spying on Netanyahu was deemed by Obama to be a “compelling national security purpose.” Of course the reason for this was Netanyahu's objections to the Iran nuclear deal. The fear was that Netanyahu would leak sensitive information he had been told by the United States in order to torpedo the deal. (Israel insisted that the secret details that it learned came from spying on Iran.)

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on January 04, 2016 24 Comments
Calls for Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel, to resign have been increasing and include a call from Al Sharpton.  Amid rumors that Emanuel's office withheld the Laquan McDonald police video purposefully to boost his reelection chances, Illinois is now considering the possibility of a recall election. ABCNews reports:
Illinois state law currently addresses only the recall of a governor, a provision voters approved in 2010 after former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was arrested and impeached. Now, state Rep. La Shawn Ford, a Chicago Democrat, wants voters to also have the power to remove the mayor of the country's third-largest city. In light of the unrest in the city, Ford said, "It's clearly the right thing to have on the books." . . . .  Under Ford's proposal, two city aldermen would have to sign an affidavit agreeing with a recall petition and organizers must collect more than 88,000 signatures from registered voters in the city. At least 50 signatures must come from each of 50 wards.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 03, 2016 39 Comments
In an age when there is zero tolerance for Bill-Clinton-like behavior in the workplace or on campus, Hillary's participation in the war room against Bill's female sexual abuse accusers should be a legitimate issue. Because Hillary has made the (non-existent in fact) Republican War on Women a central focus of her campaign and justification for her candidacy, the Clinton sexual abuse legacy absolutely is and must be put in issue. I argued in early April 2015 that Republicans Job One was to Teach millennials about the real Hillary:
The reason Hillary is vulnerable on favorability is that the younger generation of voters don’t know the Hillary from the 1990s, the secretive control-freak of Hillarycare, the person who parlayed her husband’s political success into her own financial and law firm stardom, the Rose law firm record hider, the brutal White House bully of Travelgate, and so much more.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on January 03, 2016 34 Comments
Donald Trump has attracted a somewhat unorthodox foe -- Democratic presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders. Because the 2016 election cycle hasn't been bizarre enough, we now have a self-professed Democratic-socialist candidate actively attempting to woo supporters away from the Republican frontrunner during primary season.

Posted by Mike LaChance on January 03, 2016 36 Comments
Protesters have taken over a small federal building in Oregon and some of them are armed. One of them is Ammon Bundy, son of rancher Cliven Bundy who was in the news last year for clashing with federal authorities over land use. The reason for the protest seems to be two-fold. The situation which set off the protest was the prosecution of a pair of father and son ranchers named Hammond. The Hammonds are not part of the protest however and are expected to surrender themselves to authorities Monday for separate charges. The second aspect of the protest is a grievance over the federal government taking over land that used to be owned by ranchers.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 03, 2016 8 Comments
Israel has indicted the primary suspects in the firebombing in the village of Duma which killed baby Ali Dawabsha and his parents, and badly burned his brother. The Times of Israel reports:
Posecutors filed indictments Sunday against two Jewish suspects, 21-year old Amiram Ben-Uliel of Jerusalem and an unnamed minor, in a July terror attack that killed three members of a Palestinian family. On July 31, a firebomb attack on the home of the Dawabsha family in the West Bank village of Duma led to the immediate death of toddler Ali Saad Dawabsha. Parents Riham and Saad succumbed to their wounds in the hospital within weeks of the attack. Five-year-old Ahmed, Ali’s brother, remains hospitalized in Israel and faces a long rehabilitation.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 03, 2016 20 Comments
Here are my 10 favorites. It wasn't easy to slim down the list even to these ten. You choose which was the best. (Poll at bottom, open until Midnight Pacific Time, Monday night, January 4) (in chronological order)

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Cartoonist Killed
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