That is a shame about the folks in CA not being able to protect themselves.
Yet another thing for me to be thankful for, I live in a ‘shall issue’ state.
Snips: On the eve of President Barack Hussein Obama’s announcement of troop levels in Afghanistan next week, his enemy Mullah Mohammed Omar has thrown down the gauntlet. In a major message to mark the Muslim holiday of Eid al Adha this week, the commander of the Afghan Taliban addressed “the rulers of the White House” about their plans to increase troop numbers in Afghanistan and to pursue “illogical strategies” that he promises will only lead to “bitterness and pain.” ............. tells Obama that he and the Afghan people are experts in defeating empires, having destroyed the English and Russian empires before the invasion of the “imperialistic American crusaders.” In short, Omar welcomes the coming fight with a larger NATO army, and he lays down in this message his no-compromise strategy for victory.
At the end of the message, he appeals to the entire Islamic community to join in the jihad against America.
Imam's emails to Ft. Hood suspect tame compared with online rhetoric
Snips: E-mails between a U.S. Army officer and a radical Muslim cleric did not worry anti-terrorism investigators, they said, because nothing in the correspondence presaged violence. But elsewhere on the Internet, the imam was urging people to kill soldiers and others.
After accused Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan started e-mailing in December, the cleric increased the pace of his fundamentalist rhetoric on the Web, a Dallas Morning News investigation found.
But the Muslim cleric didn't need to give specific direction by e-mail. His exhortations about killing – soldiers, innocent women and children, blasphemers, even oneself – were readily available until his online site went dead a few days after the Fort Hood shootings. The News found al-Awlaki's speeches and blogs by combing through Web archives and reviewing online recordings and transcripts.
Program that trusts in truckers attracts drug smugglers
Snips: A U.S. program that offers trusted trucking companies speedy passage across American borders has begun attracting just the sort of customers who place a premium on avoiding inspections: Mexican drug smugglers. Most trucks in the program pause at the border for just 20 seconds before entering the United States. Nine out of 10 of them do so without anyone looking at their cargo.
The government keeps the list of participants secret, citing national security and trade secrets. But some of the 9,500 companies who are part of the system advertise their membership to drum up business, making them targets for smugglers, who can then threaten drivers or offer them bribes.
More than half of U.S. imports now come from companies in the program, called the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism, or C-TPAT. Mexican trucking companies make up only 6 percent of global membership in the system, but they accounted for half of its 71 security violations during the past two years.
In a 24-hour period in April, customs officers in Laredo found three tons of marijuana in trucks carrying auto parts across two bridges. Five days after that, agents in El Paso, Texas, found more than four tons of marijuana in a tractor-trailer hauling auto parts. Stephen Flynn, senior fellow for Counterterrorism and National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said truckers do not feel safe rejecting bribes, no matter what agreements their companies have made with the U.S. government. “The basic vulnerability for a truck driver remains the ‘plata or plomo’ dilemma,” Flynn said, using Spanish shorthand for taking a bribe or a bullet.