Firearms sellers are doing a booming business providing pistols to women, but only the affluent can afford the weapons. Mohammed Sawaf / AFP
BAGHDAD // Each night before she goes to sleep, Umm Shekar checks to make sure her pistol is loaded and tucks it beneath her mattress.
Increasingly worried about being robbed by criminal gangs or insurgents, the mother of six bought the weapon so she could defend herself and her family.
Her husband, a clothes importer-exporter, spends much of his time outside of Iraq, adding to her sense of vulnerability.
"Even when the situation was at its worst [in 2007], I never thought to have a gun. It's not something I ever needed," she said. "Now I do. Now we have hired a security guard for the house and I have my pistol."
She decided to buy the weapon after a series of deadly robberies during the last two months in her Baghdad neighborhood. A close friend to Umm Shekar, a young mother, was killed, shot dead in her home at night.
"There was a police post right outside their house but still the robbers got in," Umm Shekar, aged in her mid-30s, said. "That proves we cannot trust the security services to do their job. If you want to be safe, you must depend upon yourself."
Simply hiring an armed guard was not enough to put her mind at rest because, she said, people you pay to protect you can easily be paid to betray you.
This article is a re-post and can be found at Right Side News
"If Islam is a great peaceful religion, why is the press in spin over Obama's faith question? Let's not focus on what we think, but rather what we know about Barack Hussein Obama.
According to recent polls, 18% of American citizens now "wrongly" believe that Barack Hussein Obama is Muslim, not Christian, up from 11% only five months ago. The U.S. press is in major damage control mode over these polls, referring to these folks as idiots for their opinion of the current White House resident.
Mr. Obama's only known connection to Christianity is his twenty-year membership in the Rev. Wright's Black Liberation church. There are no YouTube videos of Rev. Wright preaching Christianity, although there are plenty in which Wright is preaching Black Liberation and the Black Nationalist dogma shared by ACORN, the Black Panthers and Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, all of whom were at home in Rev. Wright's pew.
You may have heard the one about 51-year-old Maria Gabriella Perez, the owner of a Beverly Hills beauty salon, who was arrested by federal authorities this week for allegedly stealing credit card information from Jennifer Anniston, Anne Hathaway and Liv Tyler among others. Perez, it seems, racked up $280,000in fraudulent charges in a year.
Several years ago my son and I were the victims of a scam perpetrated by a bad guy who lived in Arizona. In total, we lost about $15,000 in cash and collectibles, far less than the hundreds of thousands of dollars lost by some of his other victims, who were located across the globe.
Needless to say I was furious and more than a little embarrassed and I wanted to get even. Of course, this guy didn't use any of his real information. But, hey, I'm an investigative reporter, so I did a little (OK a lot) of investigative work and finally tracked him down. Ultimately I turned Phoenix authorities on to him. Actually, they were already looking for him, but I like to think I had a hand in putting him behind bars. He was ultimately arrested and is set for trial soon. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
Anyway, all this got me to thinking about all the scams that people have fallen prey to over the years. So, for your reading pleasure, here are seven of my favorites, in no particular order. Oh, and it goes without saying, "Don't try any of these at home." [Why Old People Make Good Scam Targets]
When you do a Google Maps or Google Earth fly over of residential neighborhoods, it is pretty easy to spot who has a pool and who doesn't.
In fact, if you look closely,you can even seepeopleenjoying themselvesby their pools. This has been the case pretty much since Google bought Keyhole Technologies (the product that would become Google Earth) in 2004.
One of about every 12 babies born in the United States in 2008 was the offspring of unauthorized immigrants, a Pew Hispanic Center study released Wednesday concluded.
According to the study, an estimated 340,000 of the 4.3 million babies born in this country that year had parents who were in the United States without legal documentation.
The 14th Amendment to the Constitution stipulates that those children automatically become U.S. citizens, but some members of Congress are pushing to change that provision. That effort -- rooted in the debate over illegal immigration, particularly of people from Mexico -- has created some controversy.
"This has got a lot of attention in the past weeks," said Jeffrey S. Passel, the study's author. "The idea was just to put a number on it."
This is an astounding video from the Persian Gulf War in which there was a supposed air raid in Saudi Arabia. Watch the fake news coverage and the reaction from the war correspondent, Charles Jaco. As the video continues it shows that all was done in a studio.
You can hear Charles Jaco say he is going out for a burger and he is starting to get bothered by all of this.
Unless these videos were pieced together and it was just a comedy routine, this is a good example how wars are managed and staged for public consumption.
But it is not only wars, but nearly all government and corporate activities are presented as propaganda and conditioning. The managed media is merely the tool that helps spread the lies.
Cybersecurity Lie Exposed: Power Plants Are Not Connected To The Internet Primary justification behind internet takeover bill that would hand Obama power to shut down world wide web is completely fraudulent
Senator Joe Lieberman's draconian Internet takeover legislation, the 197-page Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, is being promoted as a vital tool to protect vulnerable infrastructure hubs from terrorist attacks, but as a recent Wall Street Journal report makes clear, large industrial power and water plants are not even connected to the public Internet.
However, the primary purpose of cybersecurity and Lieberman's legislation is to combat a problem that doesn't exist.
As a recent Wired News article highlighted, power grid and drinking water systems, "Are rarely connected directly to the public internet. And that makes gaining access to grid-controlling networks a challenge for all but the most dedicated, motivated and skilled - nation-states, in other words."
Iran has dug mass graves in which to bury US troops if America attacks the country, a former commander of the elite Revolutionary Guard has said.
The digging of the graves appears to be a show of bravado after the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said last week that the US military had a contingency plan to attack Iran, although he thought a military strike was probably a bad idea.
Snopes receives funding from an undisclosed source. The source is undisclosed because Snopes refuses to disclose that source. The Democratic Alliance, a funding channel for uber-Leftist (Marxist) Billionaires (George Soros etc.), direct funds to an "Internet Propaganda Arm" pushing these views. The Democratic Alliance has been reported to instruct Fundees to not disclose their funding source.
For the past few years www.snopes.com has positioned itself, or others have labeled it, as the 'tell-all final word' on any comment, claim and email. But for several years people tried to find out who exactly was behind snopes.com. It is run by a husband and wife team - that's right, no big office of investigators and researchers, no team of lawyers. It's just a mom-and-pop operation that began as a hobby. David and Barbara Mikkelson in the San Fernando Valley of California started the website about 13 years ago and they have no formal background or experience in investigative research.
The reason for the questions - or skepticisms - is a result of snopes.com claiming to have the bottom line facts to certain questions or issue when in fact they have been proven wrong. Also, there were criticisms the Mikkelsons were not really investigating and getting to the 'true' bottom of various issues.
Twenty years ago, the Middle East was an entirely different entity from the area of today. No U.S. troops were stationed in Arab countries. Iraq and Iran had just finished a bloody eight-year war. Iraq was rebuilding its economy and the nation had a bright future. Then, on August 2, 1990, Iraqi troops crossed the border of Kuwait. The Kuwaitis, in collaboration with the U.S. and their silent partners, Israel, began a propaganda campaign that surpassed those of any in recent history.
Iraq had a legitimate gripe with Kuwait and thought the Kuwaitis would sit down at the bargaining table if Iraqi troops crossed the border. Iraq was wrong. Kuwait and the US had begun to plan the destruction of Iraq in 1987 and now was the chance the U.S. was awaiting to control the Arab world with troops on the ground. Shortly after the August 2 intrusion of Iraqi troops, Saudi Arabia became a launching pad for the US military in the Arab world.
Soon, it will be the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the end for the country of Iraq. Let's go back to those days and also look at the preposterous events that followed that doomed Iraq's fate.
When the first bomb fell on Iraq at 2:00 a.m. on January 17, 1991, the United States began the military implementation of years of deceit and dirty tricks to attain a permanent foothold in the Middle East. George Bush I enlisted, coerced and paid 27 other nations to help massacre Iraq, depriving these newly-won allies of any ethical high ground.
If you look at some of the countries involved in the anti-Iraq coalition, you will see that they varied greatly in their reasons for becoming involved in the slaughter. Few came on board because they considered it the right thing to do. As with the "alliance of the willing" that participated in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, many of the "allies" of the 1991 campaign participated only to receive a payday from Washington.
