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'The Afghan president has ordered US special forces to leave Wardak province within two weeks over allegations of disappearances and torture. The measures were being taken due to the actions of Afghans considered to be part of US special forces, said a spokesman for Hamid Karzai. The strategically significant, central province of Wardak has been the recent focus of counter-insurgency operations. A US spokesman said it took all allegations of misconduct seriously.'

On the production floor of Beretta USA sits a hulking new barrel-making machine ready to churn out the next object of obsession in America’s love-hate relationship with guns: a civilian version of a machine gun designed for special operations forces and popularized in the video game Call of Duty. Beretta, the nearly 500-year-old family-owned company that made one of James Bond’s firearms, has already invested more than $1 million in the machine and has planned to expand its plant further in Prince George’s County to ramp up production. But under an assault-weapons ban that advanced late last week in the...

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard said Saturday that it had captured a foreign unmanned aircraft during a military exercise in southern Iran. Gen. Hamid Sarkheili, a spokesman for the military exercise, said the Guard’s electronic warfare unit spotted signals indicating that foreign drones were trying to enter Iranian airspace. Sarkheili said Guard experts took control of one drone’s navigation system and brought it down near the city of Sirjan where the military drills began on Saturday. “While probing signals in the area, we spotted foreign and enemy drones which attempted to enter the area of the war game,”...

When a domestic cat came face to face with a crocodile it seemed the feline was about to meet a grisly end. The hapless ginger and white cat found its way into the crocodile enclosure at a zoo in Jaipur, India, As one reptile glided up to the animal at the water's edge onlookers tried unsuccessfully to scare the moggy away. But if the crocodile thought feeding time had come early and the cat would be its helpless victim, it had underestimated the fearsome feline.

As press secretary to President Obama, Robert Gibbs was often in the obfuscation business. Now that he's been freed from that role and become a news analyst—albeit at MSNBC—Gibbs has become considerably more candid. Readers will recall, for example, that he described Chuck Hagel as "unimpressive and unprepared" at his Senate confirmation hearing. Today, Gibbs took that frankness a significant step further. On Up With Chris Hayes, Gibbs stated that as press secretary, he had been ordered not to acknowledge the existence of the drone program. View the video here.

Good men with guns, and Bad men with guns, same Guns different Men. The Outlaw is in the Drop Zone!

The major objection most Republicans have to the coming sequestration budget cuts is that the cuts will fall disproportionately on the Department of Defense. That’s true; defense spending is about one-fifth of the federal budget but will take about half of the sequester cuts. But even for the Pentagon, the cuts are only to the rate of growth for the defense budget in coming years. They are not actual cuts that make spending decline. In a February publication, “The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2013 to 2023,” the Congressional Budget Office (summary here, full report here) outlines the increases...

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How Long Can U.S. Economy’s Sweet Spot Last This Time? Economics / US EconomyFebruary 23, 2013 - 07:50 PM GMT By: Sy Harding Until recently, the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis and meltdown has been in stealth mode all the way, much of the country either unaware of the progress - or in denial that it was happening. That’s even been true of investors, whose success depends so much on being able to separate the facts and reality from the static and noise. Statistics measuring money flow in and out of mutual funds show that many investors followed their...

Bloomberg’s Josh Barro criticizes the James Madison Institute’s poll showing that 65 percent of Florida voters oppose implementing ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion. Barrow is mostly wrong. But even when he’s right, he’s still wrong. Disclosure: I helped JMI formulate their poll questions. Barro complains that JMI conducted a “push poll.” His first complaint is:

Employers in the U.S. may soon have to hire more workers with criminal backgrounds under new equality guidelines issued by the federal government. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s guidelines warn companies against rejecting minority applicants who have committed a felony or other offense, recommending that those companies eliminate policies which ‘exclude people from employment based on a criminal record.’ According to the EEOC, civil rights laws already prohibit employers from selectively hiring job applicants who are of different ethnic backgrounds but have matching criminal histories. The latest update from the EEOC was issued out of concern that employers might disproportionally...

The federal income tax is a bad joke and it needs to be abolished. All over the nation, hard working American families are being absolutely crushed by oppressive levels of taxation, and our politicians are constantly coming up with new ways to extract money from all of us every single year. Meanwhile, many ultra-wealthy Americans and many of the most profitable corporations in the country pay little to nothing in taxes. In fact, as you will see below, there are dozens of very prominent corporations that make billions of dollars in profits and yet don't pay a dime in...

A number of African-American leaders joined together Friday to challenge the gun control proposals currently being considered on Capitol Hill, claiming gun control laws are inherently racist. “There’s a direct correlation between gun control and black people control,” Stacy Swimp, president and CFO of the Frederick Douglass Society, said at the event at the press conference sponsored by the Center for Urban Renewal and Education (C.U.R.E). Swimp compared the call for universal background checks for gun purchase to the time when blacks were required to register with the government. “The first gun laws were put into place to register black...

What government spends the most on health care? Is it Canada or the United Kingdom, which are famous (or, if these stories are any indication, infamous would be a better description) for single-payer healthcare systems? Is it Sweden, the home of the cradle-to-grave welfare state? Or France, the land of the world’s most statist people? How about Italy or Greece, nations that have spent themselves into fiscal crisis? Nope, nope, nope, and nope. The United States spends more money, on a per-capita basis, than any of those countries. Here’s a chart from a Forbes analysis prepared by Doug Holtz-Eakin and...

Last week, I sat through four excruciating hours of legislative hearings before the Ways and Means Committee of MarylandÂ’s House of Delegates. I was waiting to testify on behalf of Citizens in Charge against House Bill 493. For the 20 years before last November, not a single citizen-initiated referendum made it to the Maryland ballot. Why? The state boasts the countryÂ’s most draconian rules for verifying petition signatures. An attorney running his own petition effort had his signature disallowed because he did not sign one of his two middle names or write the initial. Most states use the standard of...

In its wisdom -- and yes, I am being ironic -- the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco issued a ruling Tuesday that revives a California inmate lawsuit to force the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to hire a paid, full-time Wiccan chaplain. Oddly, the three-judge panel found that the complaint "did not contain sufficient facts to support a cognizable legal theory under the First Amendment." Nonetheless, the court overturned a federal judge's 2011 dismissal of the lawsuit. It's enough to make you wonder whether Samantha twitched her nose and cast a spell on the...

The White House is preparing to cede more ground to Senate Republican foes and hand over documents related to the Benghazi attacks to try to secure the confirmation of John Brennan to run the CIA, POLITICO has confirmed. After releasing official timelines, an investigation and sending Cabinet officials up to Capitol Hill for hearings, now the Obama administration has agreed to surrender email messages between top national security officials that discuss how to describe the Sept. 11 attack, a Senate aide confirmed Friday evening.

A stunning press release by Obama eligibility challenger, Attorney Orly Taitz is revealing “…clerks of the Supreme Court NEVER forwarded to five out of the nine justices one single page of pleadings nor the Supplemental Brief” so they could review details prior to last Friday’s (Feb. 15, 2013) conference! Her case, Noonan v. Bowen, (CA Secretary of State) seeks relief in the form of a stay of election results of the Presidential election of Barack Hussein Obama because of his lack of citizenship, problematic Birth Certificate posted on the internet, plus non verifiable Social Security and Selective Service records and...

HAPPILY EVER AFTER—Cardinal Dolan congratulates Curtis and Wilhelmina Jones, one of many couples from the archdiocese honored on World Marriage Day, Feb. 11, at a reception after a Mass the cardinal celebrated at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The Joneses, who attend Mass at Resurrection Chapel of St. Charles Borromeo parish in Harlem, will mark their 70th anniversary April 21. At left, they show the cardinal their marriage certificate. Parents of six, the Joneses have 11 grandchildren, 15 great-grandchildren and one great-great grandson. A cigarette and a lollipop, not an arrow, were all Cupid needed to strike up the courtship of...

An Army veteran in New York is facing up to seven years in prison for possessing five empty 30-round ammunition magazines. Nate Haddad told WGRZ-TV he was parked on a road last month waiting to meet someone interested in buying them off him when police approached. According to the station, the magazines were for an AR-15 rifle, the same type of weapon Haddad once carried in combat. Magazines over 10 rounds have been illegal in New York since 1994, unless they were manufactured before the law went into effect. Haddad says he thought his were legal, until he found out...