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Senator Lindsay Graham opened the evidence session of the Senate Appropriations Committee which hosted U2 singer Bono yesterday by telling the room that you don’t win wars against terrorists by killing them, or “dropping bombs on their head” but rather, by spending U.S. tax payer cash attempting to keep migrants un-radicalised. He said that non governmental organisations and charities in the Middle East and North Africa “can do just as much good as any battalion of soldiers”.

UPSTATE SOCIAL CONSERVATIVE CITES IMMIGRATION ISSUE Michelle Wiles – one of the Palmetto State’s most influential conservative activists – is leaving the South Carolina leadership team of Ted Cruz and joining the campaign of Donald Trump, sources close to both campaigns told us this week. The Upstate social conservative – widely known and respected in evangelical circles – had been one of Cruz’s most articulate, well-connected South Carolina supporters. Now her support will go to “The Donald.” If this scenario sounds familiar, it should … This isn’t the first time an influential female Cruz supporter has gone over to Trump’s...

The feds warned that “a group of malicious cyber actors,” whom security experts believe to be the government-sponsored hacking group known as APT6, “have compromised and stolen sensitive information from various government and commercial networks” since at least 2011, according to an FBI alert obtained by Motherboard. The alert, which is also available online, shows that foreign government hackers are still successfully hacking and stealing data from US government’s servers, their activities going unnoticed for years. This comes months after the US government revealed that a group of hackers, widely believed to be working for the Chinese government, had for...

Ted Cruz's and Marco Rubio's supporters have teamed up in Arkansas to pack the state delegation with individuals who'll turn against Donald Trump in a contested convention. Since Rubio ended his presidential bid March 15, his network of party insiders has lined up behind Cruz to win delegates who'd vote for the Texas senator once they're no longer bound to Trump in a floor fight. Trump won Arkansas' GOP primary March 1 with 32.8 percent of the vote compared to Cruz's 30.5 percent and Rubio's 24.9 percent. But Cruz's canny operatives, with Rubio riding shotgun, is likely to thwart Trump...

In the race for the Republican nomination, Donald Trump would seem to be in the catbird seat. He has won the most states, the most delegates and the most votes – by nearly 2 million. He has brought out the largest crowds and is poised for huge wins in the largest states of the East, New York and Pennsylvania. Yet, there is a growing probability that the backroom boys will steal the nomination from him at a brokered convention in Cleveland. Over the weekend, Colorado awarded all 34 delegates to Ted Cruz. The fix had been in since August, when...

GAFFNEY, SC (WSPA) — A crowd of people rushed into a Gaffney Waffle House, Thursday morning, unleashing a violent attack on a teenage woman inside. It was all captured on video.Frame by frame, investigators with the Gaffney Police Department watched as attackers dragged the teen, later hitting her many times in the face.The video was recorded by people in the group. Someone posted it on social media, bragging about the assault.(snip)In the video, you can see many people fighting. At one point, someone even starts spraying mace.“The next thing you know, a whole bunch of people just start jumping in...

Nikki Haley is the best (and perhaps only) choice in this scenario for many reasons. First, unlike with Trump, there is no doubt that Haley is an ardent conservative. She has fought Democrats, both in her state and nationally. Second, she is a governor of an important red state. Third, and perhaps most importantly, she's energetic, passionate, and unafraid to pick a fight, which is something Republicans have lacked since Ronald Reagan left office. The added bonus, of course, is that Haley is a woman and an ethnic minority, being of Indian descent. . . The Republican National Convention is...

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said a bill that's winding through the legislature to limit transgenders to public restrooms that correspond to their birth genders is not needed – that she hasn't fielded any complaints that would require such legislative steps. "I don't believe it's necessary," she said, during a press conference reported on by the State. "There's not one instance that I'm aware of." Haley went on, the State reported: "When we look at our situation, we're not hearing of anybody's religious liberties that are being violated, and we're again not hearing any citizens that are being violated in...

Sen. Marco Rubio has fought to take the delegates he won to the Republican National Convention in July, leaving him in a position to be a power broker or even, if everything falls into place, to make another run at the top of the party’s presidential ticket. Under current rules, he doesn’t qualify to be considered for the presidential nomination — only Donald Trump has clearly met the threshold so far — but if the party starts looking beyond the billionaire businessman, Mr. Rubio could be in line. “You can see absolutely how it could play out,” said Chris Bravacos,...

Crunch time Understand the players here. The State Department is run by John Kerry, and has been engaged for months now in a foot-dragging exercise of “reviewing” and releasing (only because a court ordered them to) the Hillary Clinton e-mails they absolutely had to - withholding, of course, those containing top secret information that Hillary still tries to say do not exist. The State Department would like nothing more than to bury this whole thing and pretend it was all a big nothingburger in the first place. The FBI is run by James Comey, who was first appointed by George...

Former defense secretary Robert Gates laughed in an excerpted interview Friday while recalling the Obama administration’s inability to understand its military options during the 2011 Libya crisis. Special Report host Bret Baier interviewed Gates as part of a special airing Friday night called Rising Threats, Shrinking Military. Gates, a holdover from the George W. Bush administration who served under Obama from 2009 to 2011, sharply criticized aspects of the Obama White House’s foreign policy in his 2014 memoir Duty. He became particularly upset when he discovered that White House staff members were “talking about military options with the president without...

Three brawling babes in bikinis were collared in South Carolina for a riverside beach fight. Arlinda Craft, 18; Anns Leigh Hill, 19 and Megan Williams, 20, were charged with second-degree assault and battery by a mob after they allegedly beat a female victim on a Columbia river beach, according to police. The tussling trio took issue with the victim over previous problems and finally confronted her on March 15 when she was lounging near the Saluda River with a coworker, according to WIS-TV.

An ad created by the super PAC supporting John Kasich has adopted Donald Trump’s nickname for rival Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX): “Lyin’ Ted.” New Day Independent Media Committee’s video ad begins, “Many just call him Lyin’ Ted,” as a narrator proceeds to list Cruz’s alleged “lies.” “Lied about Ben Carson to steal a win in Iowa; lied about being the best for the GOP when polls show he can’t even beat Hillary Clinton; his TV ad about John Kasich lied. Stations had to pull it off the air.”“If Ted Cruz’s mouth is moving, he’s lying,” the ad continues.

So that’s why Cruz won’t give a straight answer when he’s asked if he’ll break his pledge over Trump insulting his wife. It’s not about proving he’s a “man of his word.” It’s because, as usual, he’s well-versed in the rules and Trump isn’t.Hard to overstate what a big deal this would be if the challenge prevailed and Trump lost these delegates. By winning statewide and in every congressional district, Trump turned South Carolina into his fourth-biggest delegate haul of the campaign to date. He netted 50 there. If he lost those, his odds of getting to 1,237 on...

MSNBC might have to build a deeper tank . . . so that Cokie Roberts can dive into it for Hillary. On today's Morning Joe, Roberts of NPR complained about the resources the FBI is devoting to the investigation of Hillary Clinton's misuse of email. Carped Cokie: "Don't they have other problems? There's no crime in the country they should be worrying about?" Roberts' timing could hardly have been worse. Just moments before, Joe Scarborough pointed out that last week it was revealed that 22 of the emails on Hillary's server "were so sensitive that the state department said releasing...

Hillary Clinton’s email problems began in her first days as secretary of state. She insisted on using her personal BlackBerry for all her email communications, but she wasn’t allowed to take the device into her seventh-floor suite of offices, a secure space known as Mahogany Row. For Clinton, this was frustrating. As a political heavyweight and chief of the nation’s diplomatic corps, she needed to manage a torrent of email to stay connected to colleagues, friends and supporters. She hated having to put her BlackBerry into a lockbox before going into her own office. Her aides and senior officials pushed...

AK (100% reporting) Bernie = 80.7% Shrillary = 19.3% WA (93% reporting) Bernie = 72.3% Shrillary = 27.5% HI (0% reporting) So in Alaska and Washington State, just a total smackdown of Shrillary Clinton in those contests. Hawaii will not report for a few more hours but is generally expected to go the same way. So it appears that Bernie will win the trifecta of Democrat contests this weekend. So what does it all mean? It means that Bernie's faint hopes stay alive as the next major contest looms in Wisconsin - also where Bernie is expected to do well....

Today was Western Saturday for the Democrats while the GOP hopefuls had the day free to continue working the refs in Wisconsin. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders did battle again in Washington state, Alaska and Hawaii. All three of them are caucus states, a format which has given Hillary some trouble in the past and would prove poisonous to her once again this weekend. (One interesting note is that the only place where Clinton did any paid television advertising was in the Aloha State.) The results began coming in relatively early and Bernie’s streak in caucus states only expanded. Sanders...

his is a live televised report; no story. In Alaska, Sanders is up by 79% to Hillary's 21% with over 38% of the vote in, and CNN has called it for Sanders. In Washington, Sanders is up by 74% to 26% for Hillary with over 14% of the vote in.

Think Hillary Clinton has a lock on Hawaii’s presidential preference poll this coming Saturday? Maybe not. Two enthusiastic Honolulu receptions on Sunday for the wife of Clinton’s chief opponent, Bernie Sanders, suggests that supporters of the Vermont senator believe the Democratic primary process is far from over, despite the substantial delegate lead for the former secretary of state. Jane Sanders flew into town to meet privately with about two dozen veterans at Tommy Kakesako Hall on Nimitz Highway, an event well covered by local media.