Authorities on Friday said they believe at least one pyrotechnic device prematurely detonated in its mortar during a Fourth of July celebration in Simi Valley on Thursday night, causing a chain reaction that tipped over other pyrotechnics and launched them into the crowd of spectators.Also at NBC News Los Angeles, "Fireworks company issues statement regarding Simi Valley show, 'deeply regrets that people were injured'."
The major fireworks malfunction at Rancho Santa Susana Community Park at 9:20 p.m. injured at least 28 people, who suffered minor to severe injuries. An estimated 8,000 to 10,000 people were gathered to watch the professional fireworks display.
Simi Valley police Cmdr. Blair Summey said that after the early detonation, a group of live canisters fell over like "dominoes." One or more of them fired into the crowd of spectators, the closest of whom were about 800 feet away.
"These things were coming through low. They were skipping along the ground," Summey said. "Some of these projectiles, they were exploding as they were coming out of the canisters."
NSA surveillance: protesters stage Restore the Fourth rallies across US: http://t.co/LRasJxKCsJ
— The Guardian (@guardian) July 5, 2013
Sorry to everyone I snarked at for asking me to change the photo & to @SarahPalinUSA, didn't know it was fake. Peter is updating it today.
— Ben Howe (@BenHowe) July 4, 2013
CAIRO—Egypt's military reclaimed its role as the country's dominant political force as it installed a new president and pressed for the arrests of Islamist leaders it had forced from power, deepening international concern for the stability and democratic future of the largest country in the Arab world.Continue reading.
A day after the army seized on antigovernment protests to overthrow President Mohammed Morsi, Egypt's first freely elected president, a dozen fighter jets buzzed downtown Cairo with trails of red, white and black smoke, the colors of the Egyptian flag.
As the military sounded a victorious chord, Mr. Morsi and some top Muslim Brotherhood allies were already in police custody and the Islamist organization was reviving its longtime role as an opposition force, organizing large-scale nationwide protests for Friday.
The military's sudden recalibration of political forces followed an outpouring of popular discontent with Mr. Morsi and the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party. An array of voices backed those protests, among them a contingent of re-emergent loyalists to Hosni Mubarak, who was ousted by a popular revolution—with military support—over two years ago.
Some of those former Mubarak loyalists have re-emerged to take new roles in the transition ahead, according to people close to discussions between the military and anti-Morsi activists.
That transition—and a new era of potential turmoil—kicked off on Thursday with the swearing-in of military-appointed president Adly Mansour, a judge who had been named head of the Supreme Constitutional Court on Monday. Mr. Mansour took two oaths on Thursday morning: The first made him chief justice and the second elevated him to the presidency. Mr. Mansour is to remain president until new elections are held, at an unspecified date, according to the military's transition plan. The military has also suspended Egypt's new constitution, which was drafted by the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Constituent Assembly and signed into law by Mr. Morsi in December, after a national referendum.
In a sign of this week's reversal of fortunes, Egypt's acting attorney general on Thursday issued arrest warrants for Muslim Brotherhood supreme leader Mohamed Badie and his deputy, Khairat al Shater, according to Mena, the state news agency. The two are wanted on charges of inciting the killing of eight protesters in front of the Brotherhood's headquarters in Cairo.
.@lamblock #Angels rally in ninth inning to defeat Cardinals http://t.co/YVcUAn7wzQ #Cardinals #MLB #Baseball #RallyMonkey
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) July 5, 2013
Fireworks earlier tonight after #Angels dramatic come-from-behind win. #4thofJuly pic.twitter.com/vmSiG4vGc0
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) July 5, 2013
You can take the slugger out of St. Louis — the Angels did, prying Albert Pujols from America's heartland with a 10-year, $240-million deal before the 2012 season — but you can't take St. Louis out of the slugger.More at the link.
Pujols keeps his home in St. Louis, his charitable foundation is based there, and though he's a year and a half removed from a Cardinals career in which he won three most-valuable-player awards and World Series titles in 2006 and 2011, his fingerprints are all over a team that has thrived in his absence.
"If you watch the Cardinals play, they really go about it right; they're very aggressive and they compete," said Tony La Russa, who managed Pujols for all 11 years in St. Louis. "For this generation of Cardinals, the most important player to help that transition from what they used to be to what they are now is Albert, because they learned how to play the game from him.
"He had such a strong mentoring relationship with the position players. Yadier Molina is like a brother to him. Albert had an effect on David Freese, Matt Holliday, Jon Jay. They wanted to work like Albert, compete like Albert, be a teammate like Albert."
This week, they want to beat Albert.
Pujols, 33, will be a Cardinals opponent for the first time Tuesday night when St. Louis, which fell one win short of the World Series in 2012 and is second in the National League Central with a 49-32 record this season, opens a three-game series at Angel Stadium.
"It's a little different because I'm usually rooting for them," said Pujols, who has been slowed by knee and foot injuries and is hitting .249 with 13 home runs and 49 runs batted in. "Now, I'm going to be rooting against them for three days."
PRINCETON, NJ -- As the United States celebrates Independence Day, most of its adult residents continue to say they are proud to be an American, including 57% who are extremely proud and 28% who are very proud. This high level of pride in being an American has varied only moderately over the past 12 years since the question was first asked, but has been lower since 2005 than it was in the years prior.Read the whole thing.
The latest results are from a June 1-4 Gallup survey. An additional 10% say they are moderately proud to be an American, leaving 3% who say they are "only a little proud" and 1% who say they are "not at all proud."
Conservative women get enough disrespect from Left. Think before you frag.
— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) July 3, 2013
Surprised to see a site I have long supported and promoted, cast aspersions onto my character. We get enough of that from MSM.
— Ben Howe (@BenHowe) July 4, 2013
These columns fought the Affordable Care Act from start to passage, and we'd now like to apologize to our readers. It turns out we weren't nearly critical enough. The law's implementation is turning into a fiasco for the ages, and this week's version is the lawless White House decision to delay the law's insurance mandate for businesses, though not for individuals.Continue reading.
The employer mandate is central to ObamaCare's claim of providing universal coverage. Companies with 50 or more "employee equivalents" must pay a $2,000 penalty per full-time employee if they don't provide government-approved health insurance. The provision was supposed to start in January, and delaying it is like Ford saying its electric car is ready to go, except the electric battery doesn't work.
But all of a sudden on Tuesday evening Mark Mazur—you know him as the deputy assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy—published a blog post canceling the insurance reporting rules and tax enforcement until 2015 as Washington began to evacuate for the long Independence Day weekend. Enjoy the holiday, mate.
White House fixer Valerie Jarrett tried to contain the fallout with a separate blog post promising that ObamaCare is otherwise "staying the course." That's true only if she's referring to the carelessness and improvisation that have defined the law so far.
Mr. Mazur cited the "complexity of the requirements" as the reason for the delay. He isn't talking about business confusion and uncertainty, as damaging as those are. This is probably an admission that Treasury's information technology isn't ready to process and cross-check paperwork across the 5.7 million businesses in America, especially the pass-through S-corps and partnerships that file under the individual tax code.
This is more than a typical government snafu. It relates directly to the design of the law, which was thoughtlessly written and rammed through Congress with instructions for the bureaucracy to figure it all out.
And, lo, over eight interim final rules, three final rules, 20 requests for comment, 21 proposed rules, one information collection request, two amendments to the interim final rules, six requests for information and one frequently-asked-questions document, the Administration has created an employer-mandate system that, for example, requires business to track and report every full-time employee's hours of service on a monthly basis.
Meanwhile, the law stipulates that a full-time workweek for the purposes of the mandate is 30 hours, when general business practice is at least 35. The result is that businesses have been scrambling to insulate themselves from higher labor costs by hiring part-time workers, or splitting shifts, or in some industries like fast food even sharing workers. Small firms trying to expand while avoiding the 50-worker trigger have come to be known as 49ers.
The delay will help these and other employers avoid immediately higher costs, which is why the main business lobbies endorsed it. But the decision will continue to dampen overall job creation because businesses know they'll still be whacked in a year. Businesses don't hire workers with the intention of sacking them later.
The Administration's media cheerleaders are nonetheless portraying this as a stroke of political genius to push all the pain past the 2014 elections. But if that's the goal, it is too clever by half. If Republicans have any sense, they will move immediately to delay the rest of the bill for at least a year too. They should start with the individual mandate to buy insurance or pay a tax.
ObamaCare has become a rolling "train wreck," in Senator Max Baucus's memorable phrase, and it gets worse the more of it the public sees. The employer mandate is terrible policy, as the law's critics said before it passed. Now the Administration is all but admitting it can't implement it properly, and the task for opponents is to press the concession and begin to delay the rest of the law and dismantle it piece by piece.Word.
Yesterday, seven men including illegal immigrants were arrested in West London as part of a series of immigration raids on properties where migrants were living in out-houses.RTWT.
On crime, the study found that some groups, such as failed asylum seekers who could not be sent home and jobless eastern Europeans, were ‘disproportionately involved in crimes like shoplifting and disorderly behaviour’.
However, it added that destitute Britons were also likely to be ‘disproportionately’ involved in these offences.
Police said it was clear that some migrants who entered the UK on a student visa were not actually studying and were instead working illegally.
WASHINGTON — When he wasn’t preaching against America, terror-linked imam Anwar al-Awlaki was frequently hiring $400-an-hour hookers at posh DC hotels, newly released FBI documents reveal.Keep reading.
Awlaki, who delivered radical sermons at a mosque near Washington and ultimately met his end in a 2011 US drone strike in Yemen, paid thousands of dollars for at least seven hooker romps, according to interviews the prostitutes gave FBI agents soon after doing their dirty work.
The seedy details — not exactly in keeping with Awlaki’s constant invocations of “God the Almighty” in his sermons — are outlined in hundreds of pages of FBI documents released yesterday through an information request filed by Judicial Watch.
In nearly every confrontation with Congress since the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the White House has fought restrictions proposed by legislators on the nearly $1.6 billion in annual U.S. aid to Egypt. Twice in two years, the White House and the State Department fought hard against the very sorts of conditions for aid that Obama claimed credit for this week. When President Mohamed Morsi used the power of his presidency to target his political opponents, senior administration officials declined to criticize him in public. Many close Egypt observers argue that the Obama administration’s treatment of Morsi has been in line with the longstanding U.S. policy of turning a blind eye to the human-rights abuses of his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak.Of course, we're long past the point of embracing radical Islamists in American politics, we now literally have top level Muslim Brotherhood infiltration in the Obama White House.
But don’t tell that to Obama. On Monday he said, “The way we make decisions about assistance to Egypt is based on are they in fact following rule of law and democratic procedures.” The president made these remarks in Tanzania, as millions of Egyptian street protesters demanded Morsi’s ouster.
Hillary Clinton, the secretary of State in his first term, described the Egypt aid process during a September 2011 visit to Cairo that took place after Mubarak’s resignation, but before the powerful Egyptian military acceded to the drafting of a new constitution and the free elections held in June 2012, when Morsi won office.
"We believe in aid to your military without any conditions, no conditionality,” Clinton said. "I’ve made that very clear. I was with the foreign minister, Mr. Amr, yesterday, and was very clear in saying that the Obama administration, and I personally am against that. I think it’s not appropriate."
(Secretary of State John Kerry spoke with Mohamed Kamel Amr on Tuesday, a day after the foreign minister announced his own resignation in response to the massive street protests and the military announcing a 48-hour ultimatum for the president to respond to those protests.)
In March 2012, Clinton waived restrictions passed by Congress on aid to Egypt “on the basis of America’s national-security interests.” That decision came in the midst of the Egyptian government’s crackdown on foreign NGOs, which included the raiding of the offices of several American organizations, including the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, and Freedom House....
Michele Dunne, the executive director of the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, says that since 2011, U.S. policy has reverted to a traditional pattern of cooperation with the host government, and now the administration is embarrassed and is trying to pretend it used its influence to pressure Morsi.
“Obama’s statement constitutes a revisionist history of what they have been doing over the past two years,” she says. “We have not exercised the kind of support for democratic progress that we should have. That’s why people still think to this day that the Obama administration is just fully in support of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
