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To: steve harris who wrote (690702)	12/30/2012 10:03:02 PM
From: joseffy	1 Recommendation Respond to of 1578495

Explosion at Coptic church in Misrata kills one By Maha Ellawati. Benghazi, 30 December: libyaherald.com An explosion near the Coptic Orthodox Church in Misrata late yesterday evening killed one Egyptian man and left another three injured. The explosion, reported to have been caused by a bomb, targeted a services building connected to the church in the city of Misrata, killing the Egyptian national and wounding three others at the same time. News broke this morning when the Egyptian embassy in Tripoli received a call from Bishop Timotheus Bishara Adla, head of the church in the Libyan captital, informing them that the church building in Misrata had been targeted by an explosion, Foreign Ministry spokesman Amru Rushdi said today. Egypt’s chargé d’affaires in Libya, Hatim Abdel Qader, immediately contacted the Father Marcus Zaghloul, head of the church in Misrata, to check on the welfare of the other church members. The embassy’s consul in Misrata, Tariq Dahroug, also visited the church to inspect the damage. Staff at the Egyptian embassy in Tripoli have contacted the Interior and Foreign Ministries to hold urgent discussions about improving security arrangements around Coptic churches in Libya. At the moment, it is not known who targeted the church or why they carried out the attack in Misrata yesterday.

To: steve harris who wrote (690702)	12/30/2012 10:36:25 PM
From: joseffy	1 Recommendation Respond to of 1578495

Deadly legacy of "Fast and Furious" lives on The U.S. government's botched "Fast and Furious" gunwalking operation is leaving a deadly legacy in Mexico, where weapons related to the operation continue to show up at crime scenes. A Boarder Patrol truck sits along the boarder fence between the United States and Mexico. The "Fast and Furious" gun walking operation was first uncovered following the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry who was gunned down by two men armed with at least two semi-automatics trafficked by "Fast and Furious" suspects. UPI /Art Foxall License photo Dec. 28, 2012 upi.com The U.S. government's botched "Fast and Furious" gunwalking operation is leaving a deadly legacy in Mexico where weapons related to the operation regularly show up at crime scenes. U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley said two guns linked to the operation were found last month after a gun battle between Sinaloa drug cartel members and the Mexican military. Grassley said one of the weapons was lost by federal agents during "Fast and Furious" and the other was originally purchased by George Gillett, who served as Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives field office in Phoenix during the "Fast and Furious" scandal. Grassley, who has asked Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz to investigate the findings, said firearms records suggest Gillett was the purchaser of the weapon. He said it is one of three such records in Gillett's name that list a non-residential address. "Using false home residences on Firearms Transaction Records is a felony," Grassley said. The other weapon was an AK-47 purchased in Arizona by Uriel Patino, who allegedly bought 730 guns illegally under the watch of federal agents. Gillett is still employed by the ATF, despite being recommended for disciplinary action. Grassley said a report by the inspector general called Gillett's supervision and judgment "seriously deficient." "Fast and Furious" was an ATF operation based in Phoenix that allowed gunwalking, in which federal law enforcement agents allowed suspected criminals to buy weapons, with the hopes they would eventually lead them to Mexican drug leaders. Some 2,000 weapons were lost under "Fast and Furious" and not one seizure was made, nor were any drug leaders arrested, officials said. The weapons are believed to still be moving back and forth across the U.S.-Mexican border and will likely show up at crime scenes for years, the Los Angeles Times reported. The Justice Department, which initially denied knowledge of the gunwalking operation when it was first uncovered following the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, has since acknowledged major systemic problems with it. "Fast and Furious" first came to light in January 2011 following the death of Terry, who was gunned down on Dec. 14, 2010, in Arizona by two men armed with at least two semi-automatics trafficked by "Fast and Furious" suspects. Several ATF agents contacted Grassley, who began investigating the case. "Fast and Furious" has its roots in the "Project Gunrunner" initiative by the ATF in 2006, during the Bush administration, to stop drug and gun trafficking between Mexico and the United States. Starting in 2009, ATF encouraged a select number of gun by Text-Enhance">dealers in the Phoenix area to sell weapons to suspicious customers, some of whom would pay for their purchases with large sums of cash. Federal agents asked the gun dealers to contact ATF with names of the purchasers and the serial numbers of the weapons. The goal, ATF officials said, was to see where the guns landed in Mexico. The Justice Department said the blame lay with officials in ATF's Phoenix office. Efforts to uncover the depth of the Justice Department's knowledge of the operation led to a U.S. House vote to hold by Text-Enhance">Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in contempt of Congress for withholding documents requested as part of a congressional investigation. A report issued in October by the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., specifically found fault with five senior Justice Department officials for failing to identify red flags indicating reckless tactics. A number of ATF employees were also recommended for discipline. William McMahon, who was in charge of field operations, has been fired and going into the new year, other ATF managers are expected to lose their jobs. Grassley, ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Justice Department officials "saw any number of warnings and some even had the gunwalking information right in front of them, yet nothing was done to stop it." Two years after his death, Terry's family has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against seven government employees, and a gun shop and its owner. McMahon and Gillett are among those named in the lawsuit. Gary Grindler, Holder's chief of staff, announced in December he was leaving the Justice Department. Grindler's conduct was criticized by the inspector general in its review of "Fast and Furious." "Gary Grindler was appropriately faulted by his Department's own inspector general for keeping information about a connection between the murder of a Border Patrol agent and a mishandled department operation away from the attorney general and the Department of Homeland Security," Issa said. "His departure from the Justice Department is warranted and long overdue." Issa said other figures in "Fast and Furious" are currently being evaluated for their conduct. "I expect more departures and discipline to come," he said. Read more: upi.com

To: steve harris who wrote (690702)	12/31/2012 12:03:57 AM
From: tejek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1578495

There are no gun control laws in this country. You have a 100% ban in your liberal bastion of Washington DC, how's that working out for you? Poppycock! Sheer poppycock! No gun control law is worth the paper its written on when it exists in the midst of an armory of guns. And that armory is called the US of A. 300 million guns, Harris! Thanks, wingers, for the memories.................. Remember Newtown!

To: steve harris who wrote (690702)	12/31/2012 12:12:31 AM
From: tejek	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1578495

How Many People Have Been Killed by Guns Since Newtown? Slate partners with @GunDeaths for an interactive, crowdsourced tally of the toll firearms have taken since Dec. 14. By Chris Kirk and Dan Kois Posted Sunday, Dec. 30, 2012, at 7:55 PM ET *Read more on Slate about gun control.* Since the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, we at *Slate* have been wondering how many people are dying from guns in America every day. That information is surprisingly hard to come by. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, for example, has a tally atop its website of “people shot in America.” That number, though, is an estimate, based on the number of gun injuries and deaths recorded by the CDC in 2008 and 2009, the most recent years for which statistics are available. It seems shocking that when guns are in the headlines every day, there’s no one attempting to create a real-time chronicle of the deaths attributable to guns in the United States. Well, someone is. Since this summer, the anonymous creator of the Twitter feed @GunDeaths has been doing his best to compile those statistics, tweeting every reported death he can find. He was inspired, he told us in a phone interview, by the Aurora, Colo., shootings and simply wanted to call daily attention to the toll that guns take. Now *Slate* is partnering with @GunDeaths to create this interactive feature, “Gun Deaths in America Since Newtown.” Deaths since Newtown: 321 [see charts} Of course, this data is incomplete. Not all reports get caught by @GunDeaths’ news alerts or his followers. Suicides, which are estimated to make up as much as 60 percent of gun deaths, typically go unreported. Nevertheless, we at Slate want to assemble this data as best we can. And the more people who are paying attention, the better the data will be. You can help us draw a more complete picture of gun violence in America. If you know about a gun death in your community that isn’t represented here, please tweet @GunDeaths with a citation, and he’ll add it to his feed. (If you’re not on Twitter, you can email slatedata@gmail.com.) His data feeds our interactive feature. And if you’d like to use this data yourself for your own projects, it’s open. You can download it here. slate.com