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Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley sent a letter on Friday to DHS Sec. Jeh Johnson questioning whether the suspected killer of Mirjana Puhar, a former contestant on “America’s Next Top Model,” was an illegal immigrant who applied for amnesty under President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Emmanuel Jesus Rangel-Hernandez, a 19-year-old reputed gang member, was charged with first-degree murder in the death of Puhar, also 19, and three others in Charlotte, North Carolina earlier this week.

Harf condemns Congress address 'fantasy world,' dismisses 'scary hypotheticals' - like an Iranian nuclear arsenal in weeks. Calling Netanyahu's talk of a better deal "hypothetical" and "rhetoric," she added "anyone who tells you there’s a magic formula that they have in their head that we don’t have is just not looking at the situation realistically." "We need to be very clear about what we’re trying to achieve and what the alternatives look like, not in a fantasy world, not in a world without specifics, but in the real world. And that’s what we’re doing," she claimed Harf was asked about...

The U.S. State Department hunkered into defense mode after Benjamin Netanyahu’s congressional speech, saying in an early Wednesday statement that the Israeli prime minister misrepresented one of his claims that painted Secretary John Kerry in a poor light. Jen Psaki, spokeswoman for the State Department, referred to the website FactCheck.org to make her point that Netanyahu’s remarks about Iran going nuclear actually “misrepresented what Kerry had said’ during the secretary’s House Foreign Affairs Committee testimony on Feb. 25, Fox News reported. In his speech, Netanyahu said Kerry told Congress Iran could “legitimately possess” up to 190,000 centrifuges used to enrich...

Kinder Morgan (KMI -0.6%) wants to drill through Burnaby Mountain in British Columbia to reach an oil-loading ship terminal, but WSJ reports that it is facing more challenges than the mountain itself, as it also is battling resistance from Vancouver officials and protestors opposed to fossil fuel development. Burnaby Mountain has become a symbolic battlefield in a much larger debate about energy resources in North America, opponents and supporters of the pipeline plan say. Canadian oil producers are counting on KMI’s $4.3B proposal to triple the capacity of the existing Trans Mountain pipeline, which connects Alberta’s oil sands to a...

HOW I’ve laughed. The howling pack of journalists trying to destroy Tony Abbott may have left him stronger. There are many reasons why the Prime Minister is making a stunning recovery in some polls. ..... And it’s working. First came a Newspoll showing Abbott more than halving Labor’s lead. Then came Monday’s IPSOS poll that (exaggeratedly) claimed the Liberals were now only a whisker behind, 49 per cent to 51. But there is one factor in Abbott’s recovery that media hasn’t yet admitted: Abbott’s media haters finally went too far and made him an underdog. They made it too obvious...

Ireland is considered to be one of the least friendly places for Muslims to visit, according to the Global Muslim Travel Index, which has just been published.

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Key Senate Democrats led by Minority Leader Harry Reid announced their opposition Wednesday to fast action on a bill giving Congress final say on any nuclear deal with Iran. The development appeared likely to upend GOP plans to move swiftly on the bill following Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Tuesday speech to Congress in which he railed against the emerging agreement. "I think we are better off on things relating to the Iran deal to wait until we see if there can be something negotiated," Reid said in an interview with The Associated Press. "And if there is something negotiated...

For the past few days, Iraqi military forces and Shiite militias have been fighting to encircle the Iraqi city of Tikrit in a bid to drive out ISIS forces. But in contrast to other recent offensives, they are supported not by U.S. airstrikes but by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. According to some reports, Qassem Soleimani, the mysterious commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ international operations, is on the ground coordinating the attack. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is backtracking on its recent surprise announcement of a U.S.-supported Iraqi and Kurdish offensive to retake Mosul this spring. After Iraqi officials expressed irritation at...

When President Obama announced his sweeping unilateral executive action on immigration last November, administration officials stressed that the new edict would not take effect immediately. One part of the president's action — changes to DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, to extend the period in which illegal immigrants are protected from deportation to three years from its present two years, and also to extend work permits for the same time — was scheduled to go into effect Feb. 18, 2015, three months after the president's announcement. The other part of the president's action — the newly-created DAPA, or Deferred...

Britain’s advertising watchdog has banned an Israeli government tourism advert for suggesting that the Old City of Jerusalem was part of Israel, AFP reported. The newspaper brochure showed a panorama of the walled Old City with the text “Israel has it all”, and was ruled misleading by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), which said it implied the UNESCO World Heritage Site was part of Israel. The international community regards the Old City as “occupied Palestinian territory” and has never recognized Israel’s annexation of parts of Jerusalem it liberated during the Six Day War. Following a complaint, the ASA ruled the...

MONTREUX, Switzerland - Simply demanding Iran's capitulation is no way to get a nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Wednesday as he wrapped up three days of talks with a veiled dig at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Kerry said he and Iranian counterpart Mohammad Jawad Zarif made some progress in their negotiations in the Swiss lakeside town of Montreux and would resume them on March 15. Kerry aides said many obstacles remained before a late March deadline for an outline accord between Iran and six world powers. "There are still significant...

The ISIS terror group is planning to take over Libya and use it as a gateway to wage war across almost all of southern Europe, the London Telegraph reported. A document written by an Islamic State (ISIS) operative in Libya says that the group plans to flood Libya with fighters from Iraq and Syria, and have them sail across the Mediterranean Sea pretending to be refugees on human trafficking vessels. They would then target European cities and try to stage attacks on maritime shipping, according to the Quilliam Foundation, a British anti-radicalization group which said it had seen the document....

More than a dozen Islamic State fighters from Iraq and Syria -- some with direct ties to the group's leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi -- are now in Libya working on behalf of the terror group, according to U.S. and European sources. And the U.S. has no authority to take them out. The fighters are in addition to dozens of ISIS sympathizers in the country. The situation is raising fresh security concerns, as the U.S. and its allies struggle to keep tabs on the many arms of the ever-expanding ISIS network. One source, who is not authorized to speak on the...

Fighters of the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) took over at least two oilfields in Libya and attacked another on Tuesday, according to oil and government sources. Mashallah al-Zewi, the oil minister in the Tripoli-based government said ISIS attacked the Dhahra oilfield, before retreating. He told AP on Wednesday that the militants swept down from the central city of Sirte and attacked Dhahra oil field to the south, trading fire with guards and blowing up residential and administrative buildings before eventually retreating. Colonel Ali al-Hassi, a spokesman for Libyan oil industry security told the BBC said the...

The Iraqi Security Forces, supported by several Iranian-backed Shiite militias and Sunni tribal fighters, have launched an offensive to retake Tikrit from the Islamic State, which has held the central Iraqi city since June 2014. Massive columns of Shiite militas, including some groups that are listed by the US as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, have been leading the fight in Tikrit. The operation, which involves more than thirty thousand Iraqi security personnel and militia forces, started on the morning of March 2. According to Al Jazeera, Iraqi forces and allied militias attacked the city from three sides while Iraqi aviation launched...

File this report from The Daily Star of Lebanon under the category of “Yay … I Guess,” or perhaps “Two and a Half Cheers.” It’s good news that Islamic State (ISIS) forces have been pushed out of over 20 Syrian villages. The bad news is that Bashar al-Assad’s regime did most of the pushing, with an assist from Kurdish militia units. The head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which does not approve of most of what it observes the Assad regime doing, said that “after three days of clashes, regime forces bolstered by fighters from Arab tribes had...

A speech by Zionist Union alliance head and Israeli opposition leader Isaac Herzog was cut off in the middle of a broadcast on Israel’s Channel 2 television network due to concern that Herzog’s remarks constituted elections propaganda. “There’s no doubt Prime Minister Netanyahu speaks well, but let’s admit the truth: the speech we heard, impressive as it might have been, did not stop the Iranian nuclear program,” Herzog said on the Tuesday night broadcast regarding Netanyahu’s address to Congress, according to Israel Hayom. “It also won’t affect the deal being put together, either in terms of content or timetable. The...

The new leader of America's military admitted it was a "mistake" for an officer to have "blurted out" plans for an Iraqi-led ground offensive in Mosul during a recent media briefing. That highly unusual briefing, in which an officer revealed the U.S. wanted the Iraqis to launch the offensive to retake Mosul from the Islamic State in April or May, raised concerns over the level of detail provided -- and also was criticized as giving inaccurate information.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu left a partisan Congress roiling in the wake of his controversial speech on Tuesday, with Republicans and Democrats largely split on how the dramatic address was received. Progressive Democrats slammed the Israeli leader's address and Republicans felt vindicated and emboldened by a speech that brought nearly every member of Congress to their feet and drew whoops of approval from a packed gallery. Netanyahu sought to rally members of Congress and public opinion against the pending Iran nuclear deal under negotiation, but his hawkish rhetoric and break from diplomatic protocol rankled some Democrats. Others, though, suggested...