A persistent threat scenario against the U.S. has been foreign terrorist organizations—acting independently or in cooperation with violent transnational criminal organizations, and perhaps backed by anti-American regimes in the region—launching a terrorist attack from across our southern border. It is a scenario the Obama Administration has recognized but generally minimized. For example, the U.S. State Department’s 2010 Country Reports on Terrorism reported: The threat of a transnational terrorist attack remained low for most countries in the Western Hemisphere. There were no known operational cells of either al-Qa’ida- or Hizballah-related groups …
The “Occupy Wall Street” protests have been a thorn in the side of a number of lower-Manhattan businesses. But the U.S. congressman who represents the district where protestors have gathered has a blunt message for the area’s business owners: deal with it. “All of us have to live with expressions of democratic demonstrations or whatever,” Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) told the Washington Times’s Kerry Picket when asked about complaints from the area’s residents and business proprietors. “I think businesses are being damaged a hell of a lot more by our …
The missile defense budget has been on the chopping block ever since the Obama Administration took office. In 2009, President Obama proposed $1.6 billion in cuts compared to the prior year’s budget estimate. In 2010, the Administration proposed a modest increase in the missile defense budget for FY 2011 but only in comparison to the reduced level for FY 2010. This year’s missile defense budget request is still almost 2 percent in real dollars below what the Bush Administration requested for FY 2009. In short, the U.S. missile defense program …
Tomorrow, The Heritage Foundation will host a panel of experts for a very timely discussion on recent events in Burma and the proper responses to them. The distinguished panel will include Tom Malinowski, Washington director for Human Rights Watch; Aung Din, executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Burma; Jared Genser, founder and president of Freedom Now; and Walter Lohman, director of the Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation. For more information and details on how to RSVP, please click here. A flurry of activity has surrounded the reclusive …
Want proof that unions are doing everything they can to maintain their grip on power? Take a look at California, where Governor Jerry Brown (D) finished off the state’s legislative session with big gifts to Big Labor (after they campaigned heavily for Brown’s election) . The L.A. Times reports: When the dust settled on Gov. Jerry Brown’s first legislative session in nearly three decades, no group had won more than organized labor, which heralded its largest string of victories in nearly a decade. At the urging of the food workers’ union, Brown …
Today, a regional court in Kyiv has found Yuliya Tymoshenko, Ukraine’s former prime minister and leading opposition figure, guilty of “abuse of office” stemming from her role in the 2009 Ukraine–Russia gas deal. The sentence includes a seven-year prison term with an additional three-year prohibition to hold political office, as well as the stipulation that she must pay $190 million in compensation to Ukraine’s gas monopoly Naftogaz. Tymoshenko herself, her supporters, and even her critics—as well as European leaders and legal experts—view the prosecution and the sentence as a political …
Last week a federal appeals court heard arguments in an important religious freedom case known as Ward v. Wilbanks. The case illustrates how sexual orientation nondiscrimination policies can impose government burdens on religious and moral conscience and create serious civil society conflicts. Julea Ward was a student in the graduate counseling program at Eastern Michigan University. She claims that she was expelled from the program after she conscientiously objected to counseling a potential client seeking assistance regarding a homosexual relationship. According to Ward’s attorney: Rather than allow Julea to refer …
Yesterday, America learned that Iran conspired to launch a terrorist attack in Washington, D.C., with a planned assassination of the Saudi ambassador and bomb attacks on the Saudi and Israeli embassies. U.S. authorities disrupted the plot and have brought charges against the men who planned to carry out the attack, but the audacity of Iran’s actions highlights a disturbing truth: The Obama Administration has done far too little to deter state-sponsored terrorism, and it has utterly failed to confront the Iranian threat. Not one month ago, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stood before the …
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee meets Thursday to consider the most substantive postal reform plan under consideration in Congress. The debate in Washington triggered a spending spree from postal unions opposed to the reforms, including a national TV ad campaign launched last month. Now the Oversight Committee is striking back with its own video that explains the crisis and why the Postal Service needs to be fixed before taxpayers are left paying the bill. Mail volume has dropped by 46 billion pieces since its peak in 2006. As …
U.S. authorities announced today that they disrupted an Iranian plan to commit a “significant terrorist act in the United States,” making it the forty-second thwarted terrorist attack against the homeland. The federal government has filed criminal charges against two Iranians with conspiracy to murder the Saudi ambassador to Washington and conspiracy to commit an act of international terrorism, among other charges. In addition to the assassination of the Saudi ambassador, the men planned bomb attacks on the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington. It us no surprise that the indictment …
