Australian Couple Travels Through Asia To ‘Break Stigma’ Of Countries Getting A ‘Bad Rap.’ They’re Reportedly In Jail In Iran.

By Hank Berrien

An Australian couple traveling through Asia who wanted to “break the stigma around travelling to countries which get a bad wrap [sic] in the media,” reportedly found out the hard way that some countries may well deserve the reputation they have: the couple was reportedly arrested 10 weeks ago in Iran.

Jolie King, who has dual U.K. and Australian nationality, and Mark Firkin, have over 20,000 followers on Instagram and YouTube, where they document their travels. According to the BBC, the couple was traveling through Asia to Great Britain, starting in 2017. The pair had a drone they used to take footage of the dozen countries through which they were passing.

According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, that drone landed them behind bars in Iran 10 weeks ago. “The pair has been held as prisoners for about 10 weeks after being arrested for reportedly flying a drone without a permit,” ABC reports.

The BBC reports that the couple is “believed to be being held in Tehran’s Evin prison.”

Another British-Australian woman, reportedly a University of Cambridge-educated scholar, has been jailed for 10 years in Iran, according to the BBC.

Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne said she spoke to the Iranian government about all three people last week. “Since they were detained, the Australian Government has been pressing the Iranian Government for their release,” said Payne. “I have communicated with my Iranian counterpart, Foreign Minister Zarif, many times about these cases, including through face-to-face face meetings. We met as recently as last week.”

“Our biggest motivation … is to hopefully inspire anyone wanting to travel, and also try to break the stigma around travelling to countries which get a bad wrap [sic] in the media,” King and Firkin had written about their travels.

In July, Australia announced that it would join the U.S. and the U.K. as they monitored the Strait of Hormuz. Reported Iranian provocations involving other nations’ ships have been rampant near the Strait in recent months.

The BBC reported that U.K. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab met the Iranian ambassador and “raised serious concerns about the number of dual national citizens detained by Iran and their conditions of detention,” according to the Foreign Office.

The story of King and Firkin bears similarities to another story reported by The Daily Wire in August 2018 in which a “young American couple who took a year-long bike trip around the world, believing that evil was a make-believe concept, took a fatal route in Tajikistan near the Afghan border, where alleged ISIS terrorists stabbed them to death. Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, 29, quit their jobs last year in order to make their trip.”

Austin had written:

You watch the news and you read the papers and you’re led to believe that the world is a big, scary place. People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil. People are axe murderers and monsters and worse.

I don’t buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own—it’s easier to dismiss an opinion as abhorrent than strive to understand it. Badness exists, sure, but even that’s quite rare. By and large, humans are kind. Self-interested sometimes, myopic sometimes, but kind. Generous and wonderful and kind. No greater revelation has come from our journey than this.

In June 2019, the man who was the alleged ringleader in the attack on Austin and Geohegan was asked if he interacted with the tourists at the gas station they stopped at just prior to the attack, Hussein Abdusamadov replied,“Yes. I talked to them. I asked them where they were from. I asked them what nationalities they were and they told me they were Americans … They said they were Americans and laughed.” He concluded, “Americans had to be killed.”

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Democrats’ Latest Bright Idea 😂

Mark Dice

Published on Sep 12, 2019

I think I’m going to chick- fil-a and walk in and say hey guys

September 12, 2019 0

MCDONALDS TO REPLACE MORE HUMAN EMPLOYEES WITH DRIVE-THRU AI

How’s that $15 an hour looking now?

McDonalds is set to replace more human employees with automated technology after the company announced that it intends to use a new AI program to take drive-thru orders.

The food chain has acquired Mountain View-based voice tech startup Apprente in order to “alleviate pressure on restaurant employees.”

More like alleviate them of their jobs.

The technology can handle “complex, multilingual, multi-accent and multi-item conversational ordering,” allowing for “faster, simpler and more accurate order taking,” according to reports.

“McDonald’s plans to roll out self-service kiosks across all US restaurant locations by 2020 – reducing the need to employ as many human cashiers,” reports Zero Hedge.

How’s that $15 dollars an hour paycheck working out for you now?

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US Attorney Recommends CRIMINAL CHARGES Against Andrew McCabe – DOJ Rejects His Last Minute Appeal

by Cristina Laila September 12, 2019

US Attorney Jessie Liu has recommended charging former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

The potential charges against McCabe are related to his false statements to feds in the FBI’s investigation into Hilary Clinton.

Via Mark Meadows–

Fox News reported:

U.S. Attorney Jessie Liu has recommended moving forward with charges against Andrew McCabe, Fox News has learned, as the Justice Department rejects a last-ditch appeal from the former top FBI official.

McCabe — the former deputy and acting director of the FBI — appealed the decision of the U.S. attorney for Washington all the way up to Jeffrey Rosen, the deputy attorney general, but he rejected that request, according to a person familiar with the situation.

A source close to McCabe’s legal team said they received an email from the Department of Justice which said, “The Department rejected your appeal of the United States Attorney’s Office’s decision in this matter. Any further inquiries should be directed to the United States Attorney’s Office.”

Comey confidant Benjamin Wittes said in a Lawfare blog post a couple weeks ago that he expected former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to be indicted any day now.

Wittes wrote in a blog post that he was “shocked” to find out federal prosecutors were in the final stages of deciding whether to indict McCabe on charges he lied to federal investigators, referring to the New York Times bombshell released a couple weeks ago.

The potential indictment of McCabe stems from the Inspector General’s findings that the FBI official lied to federal investigators.

McCabe was criminally referred to the US Attorneys office for prosecution in the Spring of 2018 and they are finally getting around to (maybe) indicting him.

The process has been dragged out because of internal deliberations and the case is taking so long that the term expired for the grand jury evidence. One of the lead prosecutors on the case has since left the DOJ out of frustration, according to the NYT.

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Some airplanes did something?! New York Times article ‘de-terrorizes’ 9/11 attacks

On the anniversary of the most devastating terrorist attack on US soil, a story by the New York Times suggested that “airplanes” brought down the twin towers. The seeming shift of responsibility did not sit well with readers.

“18 years have passed since airplanes took aim and brought down the World Trade Center,” read a tweet from the New York Times on Wednesday. “Today families will once again gather and grieve at the site where more than 2000 people died.” Inside an accompanying article, the same bizarre sentence was repeated.

Though technological dystopia was all the rage in 2001, what with the success of ‘The Matrix’ two years earlier and the passing of Y2K after that, the 9/11 attacks were not carried out by sentient airplanes, but by terrorist hijackers. Enraged readers made sure the NYT knew that, slating the newspaper for omitting the terms ‘Islamic terrorists’ or even the less-loaded ‘Al Qaeda’ from its story.

The Times later deleted the tweet and amended its story, which, this time around, read: “Eighteen years have passed since terrorists commandeered airplanes to take aim at the World Trade Center and bring them down.” Responsibility was placed squarely with Al Qaeda in the updated article.

But why the strange phrasing in the first place? The Times did not report the recent mass shootings in Texas as the work of a disembodied AR-15. Nor does the paper attribute President Donald Trump’s executive orders to levitating pens, or climate change to fossil fuels deciding to burn themselves.

To some observers, the watered-down description of the attacks was an effort to… not offend anybody, including ordinary Muslims who risk guilt-by-association for sharing their religious beliefs with the perpetrators. “Some airplanes did something,” jibed one commenter, comparing the Times’ coverage to a much-maligned soundbite from Democratic Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar earlier this year, in which Omar summarized the attacks as “some people did something.”

To be fair, radical Islamic terrorists aren’t alone in having their deeds sanitized by the New York Times in recent days. The paper marked the 43rd anniversary of Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong’s passing on Monday with a tweet describing how Chairman Mao “began as an obscure peasant” and “died one of history’s great revolutionary figures.”

After a similar backlash, the tweet was deleted, with the paper apologizing for not providing “critical historical context;” namely the famines that occurred on Mao’s watch and his role in the 1966-1976 ‘Cultural Revolution,’ events that left tens of millions of Chinese citizens dead.

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‘SAVE THE TREES, KILL THE CHILDREN’: AUSTIN, TEXAS CITY COUNCIL GIVES $150,000 TO FUND ABORTIONS

Measure will invariably lead to deaths of more unborn babies

SEPTEMBER 11, 2019

The Austin, Texas, city council this week passed a measure giving $150,000 of taxpayer money to fund abortions.

On Tuesday, the council announced a budget package allocating the cash to the city’s Public Health Department, which in turn will distribute the money to groups helping poor women secure abortions.

“Pro-choice” Austin City Councilman Greg Casar praised the bill for increasing “access to abortion,” a move that will invariably lead to the death of unborn babies.

“Every day the anti-abortion elements in Texas, in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, wake up and think, ‘How can we restrict access to abortion today,’” Casar told NBC. “That makes it our job, every day, to work to expand access to abortion and health care and other basic services related to abortion.”

Texas pro-life groups, however, lamented the fact the city passes resolutions to protect the environment and not the unborn.

“It is appalling the city of Austin doubled-down on its policies to ‘save the trees, kill the children,’” said Nicole Hudgins with the pro-life group Texas Values. “This budget amendment is a political stunt attempting to circumvent the law. If the city really wants to help women, they should lower their taxes and stop killing innocent children.”

LifeNews.com’s Micaiah Bilger notes Texas Gov. Greg Abbott passed a resolution this year preventing local governments from funding organizations which perform abortions, however, the city’s new measure appears to be an attempt to skirt that law by instead giving the money to groups that assist women in obtaining abortions.

Bilger writes the money could in effect fund late-term abortions by paying for women to travel to states where the practice is legal.

Pro-life group Texas Right to Life labeled the council’s measure “grotesque news.”

“This grotesque news is another example of the abortion industry exploiting taxpayers to profit off vulnerable women and kill preborn children,” they wrote.

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OCASIO-CORTEZ: REPUBLICAN PARTY IS ‘SCARED’ OF US ‘BECAUSE THEY KNOW HOW POWERFUL’ WE ARE

“They know how powerful we are more than sometimes our own – frankly I think – our own party does.”

Breitbart – SEPTEMBER 12, 2019

The far-left members of the “Squad” – Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) – participated in an NAACP forum Wednesday evening and declared that members of the Republican Party are “scared” of them “because they know how powerful” they are.

The Squad is HERE!! 🙌🏽💗 #NAACP #WhenWeFightWeWin #RyeRollToThePolls @Ilhan @AyannaPressley @RepRashida @AOC pic.twitter.com/BiaiP6skza

— A N G E L A | R Y E (@angela_rye) September 11, 2019

Ocasio-Cortez talked about her background as a waitress and told the moderator, Angela Rye, that she does not “shy away” from her background of working in restaurants because it prepared her for her current job as a congresswoman.

“Nothing will give you the ferocity of advocacy like having that kind of experience,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

“No one can tell me about things like sexual harassment. No one can tell me things like working for tips on a wage that is less than the minimum wage. No one can tell me about taking the subway at 3 o’clock in the morning home from a night shift,” she said, claiming that “no one else has those experiences on the other side of the aisle.”

“Very few people have those experiences, and by the way, when they do, like John Boehner, they’re lauded for it. They’re like, ‘That’s a guy I could have a beer with,’ but with me, it’s like, so–” she continued with a gesture.

The freshman lawmaker added that the Republican Party is “scared” of the “Squad.”

“It’s because they’re scared because sometimes I think that the Republican Party recognizes our power more than we do sometimes,” she said.

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House Judiciary Committee Passes Resolution on Impeachment Inquiry Rules

By Joshua Caplan

The House Judiciary Committee on Thursday approved a resolution which defines the scope of a potential impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump.

The party-line 24-17 vote occurred after two hours of debate between Democrats and Republicans about the so-called inquiry’s parameters.

House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) tried to clear up any misconceptions as the committee approved guidelines for impeachment hearings on President Trump. Some of Nadler’s fellow Democrats — including House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) — have stumbled over how to explain what they’re doing.

“Some call this process an impeachment inquiry. Some call it an impeachment investigation. There is no legal difference between these terms, and I no longer care to argue about the nomenclature,” Nadler said as he opened the meeting. “But let me clear up any remaining doubt: The conduct under investigation poses a threat to our democracy. We have an obligation to respond to this threat. And we are doing so.”

Republicans disagree with Nadler and they argue that the House has never voted to open an official inquiry. Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA), the top Republican on the committee, said the committee “has become a giant Instagram filter … it’s put in there to look like something, but it’s really not.”

Collins said Democrats are trying to have it both ways.

“My colleagues know very well they don’t have the votes to authorize impeachment proceedings on the House floor, but they want to impeach the president anyway,” Collins said. “So, they are pretending to initiate impeachment.”

Impeachment has divided Democrats who control the House. Democrats on Nadler’s committee, including some of the most liberal members of the House, have been eager to move forward with the process. But moderates, mostly first-term lawmakers who handed their party the majority in the 2018 election, are concerned about the committee’s drumbeat on impeachment and the attention that comes with that continued action.

With regard to impeachment, the biggest elephant in the room is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who has long opposed Congress taking the lead on ousting the president. Instead, Pelosi has insisted that committees continue their investigations into President Trump and his associates in search of possible wrongdoings. Earlier this week, the speaker dismissed concerns that Nadler’s recent maneuvers exhibit how she’s losing control over her caucus. “I think you should characterize it [the resolution] for what it is,” Pelosi told Fox News. “It’s a continuation of what we have been doing. You know, we all work together on these things”

Not only is Pelosi unwilling to move the ball forward on impeachment, but the speaker also believes the American people do not want to see lawmakers take up the matter at this time.

“The public isn’t there on impeachment. It’s your voice and constituency, but give me the leverage I need to make sure that we’re ready and it is as strong as it can be,” Pelosi said during a caucus-wide conference call last month.

“The equities we have to weigh are our responsibility to protect and defend the Constitution and to be unifying and not dividing. But if and when we act, people will know he gave us no choice,” she added.

Meanwhile, President Trump took to Twitter following the vote to seemingly underline the political motivations behind an impeachment inquiry and quoted Rep. Al Green (D-TX), who introduced articles of impeachment in June.

““We can’t beat him, so lets impeach him!” Democrat Rep. Al Green,” the president recounted the lawmaker proposing earlier this year.

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