In this day and age, is this requirement to become President of the United States necessary? What does it protect? Why is it so important?

Discuss.

P.S: No, this is not an invitation for certain members to claim Obama was born in Kenya.

Go read them here

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Urfa, Turkey (CNN) — The petite 25-year-old tentatively opens the door to the hotel room where we've agreed to meet. Her face is covered, but her body language betrays her anxiety.

She slowly lifts her niqab, revealing her young, heart-shaped face. Her large brown eyes, filled with guilt and turmoil, are delicately made up under perfectly sculpted brows.

She calls herself 'Khadija.' It's not her real name, because she's a marked woman. Once a member of a fearsome, female ISIS brigade, she's a recent defector, disillusioned by the group's brutality.

Her interview with CNN is the first time she has ever told anyone her story.

Growing up in Syria, Khadija's family ensured she got an education. She earned her college degree and began teaching elementary school. Khadija describes her family and upbringing as "not overly conservative."

When the Syrian uprising began more than three and a half years ago, Khadija joined the masses who began peaceful protests against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

"We'd go out and demonstrate. The security services would chase us. We'd write on walls, have different outfits to change into," she said. "Those days were great."

But it was when the Syrian uprising spiraled into chaos and violence that she said she began to lose her soul, her humanity.

"Everything around us was chaos," she said, her words tumbling out. "Free Syrian Army, the regime, barrel bombs, strikes, the wounded, clinics, blood — you want to tear yourself away, to find something to run to.

"My problem was I ran away to something uglier."

Gradual induction

She found herself drawn to the eloquence of a Tunisian whom she met online. Taken with his manners, she grew to trust him over time and he gradually lured her into the Islamic State, she said. He assured her that the group was not what people thought, that it was not a terrorist organization.

"He would say, 'We are going to properly implement Islam. Right now we are in a state of war, a phase where we need to control the country, so we have to be harsh.'"

He told her he was coming to the Syrian city of Raqqa, that they could even get married.

"I got in touch with my cousin, and she said, 'You can come join us in the Khansa'a Brigade. She was living in Raqqa with her husband who was with the Islamic State," Khadija said. The brigade is the feared, all-female police for ISIS.

Khadija convinced her family to move to Raqqa, saying it would be easier to register her younger siblings in school, and that they would have the support of relatives.

With her cousin to open the doors, Khadija was welcomed into the feared Khansa'a brigade.

The Khansa'a Brigade is made up of around 25 to 30 women and is tasked with patrolling the streets of Raqqa to ensure that women adhere to proper clothing as outlined by the Islamic State.

Beaded or slightly form-fitting abayas are banned. Women are not allowed to show their eyes.

Those who broke the laws are lashed.

The lashings to the women who broke ISIS rules were carried out by Umm Hamza.

When Khadija first saw Umm Hamza, she was terrified.

"She's not a normal female. She's huge, she has an AK, a pistol, a whip, a dagger and she wears the niqab," Khadija said.

Brigade commander Umm Rayan sensed Khadija's fear "and she got close to me and said a sentence I won't forget. She said, 'We are harsh with the infidels, but merciful among ourselves.'"

Khadija was trained to clean, dismantle, and fire a weapon. She was paid $200 a month and received food rations.

Her family sensed Khadija was slipping away, but were helpless to stop it. Her mother tried to warn her.

"She would always say to me, 'Wake up, take care of yourself. You are walking, but you don't know where you are going.'"

Second thoughts

Initally, Khadija did not pay attention to her mother's warnings, seduced by the sense of power. But eventually, she started questioning herself and the principles of the Islamic State.

"At the start, I was happy with my job. I felt that I had authority in the streets. But then I started to get scared, scared of my situation. I even started to be afraid of myself."

She started thinking: "I am not like this. I have a degree in education. I shouldn't be like this. What happened to me? What happened in my mind that brought me here?"

And her image of ISIS began to crumble.

Burned into her mind is an image she saw online of a 16-year-old boy who was crucified for rape. She questioned her inclusion in a group capable of such violence.

"The worst thing I saw was a man getting his head hacked off in front of me," she said.

Violence against women

Even more personally, she witnessed ISIS' brand of violence reserved for women. The brigade shared its building with a man who specialized in marriage for ISIS fighters.

"He was one of the worst people," she said of the man tasked with finding wives for both local and foreign fighters.

"The foreign fighters are very brutal with women, even the ones they marry," she said. "There were cases where the wife had to be taken to the emergency ward because of the violence, the sexual violence."

Khadija saw a future she did not want.

With her commander pressuring her to submit to marriage, Khadija decided she needed to leave the brigade.

"So it was at this point, I said enough. After all that I had already seen and all the times I stayed silent, telling myself, 'We're at war, then it will all be rectified.'

"But after this, I decided no, I have to leave."

Khadija left just days before the coalition airstrikes, but her family remains in Syria.

She was smuggled across the border to Turkey.

Life after ISIS

Khadija still wears the niqab, not just to conceal her identity but also because she's struggling to adapt back to life outside the Islamic State.

Regretful of her immersion in radical Islam, she is wary of another sudden change.

"It has to be gradual, so that I don't become someone else. I am afraid of becoming someone else. Someone who swings, as a reaction in the other direction, after I was so entrenched in religion, that I reject religion completely," she said.

Towards the end of our interview, speaking about how ISIS could have gotten a foothold in parts of Syrian society, she has a personal moment.

"How did we allow them to come in? How did we allow them to rule us? There is a weakness in us."

Khadija spoke to us because she said she wants people, especially women, to know the truth about ISIS.

"I don't want anyone else to be duped by them. Too many girls think they are the right Islam," she said.

She desperately wants to be the girl she was before falling under the spell of ISIS — "a girl who is merry, who loves life and laughter... who loves to travel, to draw, to walk in the street with her headphones listening to music without caring what anyone thinks," she said.

"I want to be like that again."

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A new video released Friday afternoon purports to show British hostage Alan Henning beheaded by an ISIS militant.

The video begins with a clip from Russia Today on the British parliament’s decision to approve airstrikes on ISIS and cuts to Henning kneeling in a desert with a militant known as “Jihadi John.” He addresses the camera, “Hi, I’m Alan Henning. Because of our Parliament’s decision to attack the Islamic State, I as a member of the British public will now pay the price for that decision.”

Henning was an aid worker who was captured while working for a Muslim NGO.

At the end of the video, the ISIS member displays another hostage, former U.S. soldier Peter Kassig, and threatens that he will be the next victim.

The video is titled “Another Message to America and its Allies” and is more graphic than previous videos showing the militant group’s execution of American and British hostages.

The American hostage, Kassig is a a former Army Ranger turned Syrian refugee aid worker. He founded his own relief organization, Special Emergency Response and Assistance, or SERA, in 2011. According to the organization’s website, SERA is “focused on providing acute logistical support and assistance in areas too difficult for other humanitarian organizations to effectively operate. Typically, this means conflict zones.” The website indicates that the group’s operations have ceased due to the security situation in Syria.

More bad publicity for the NFL

Tom Gannam/AP

A Dallas Cowboys special teams player has been accused of sexually assaulting a woman at the team’s hotel in Texas on Sept. 20 — and he was allowed to play the next day.

The alleged attack came just a day after NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s awkward news conference during which he promised to get tough on players accused of violent crime.

Police in Grapevine, Tex., told the Daily News that C.J. Spillman, 28, is “involved” in the investigation of a sexual assault that allegedly took place at the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center, the Cowboys’ official hotel since 2009.

“We have a sexual assault report we are investigating at this time, and it does involve C.J. Spillman,” said Sgt. Robert Eberling, a police spokesman. “He is involved in the investigation. We are looking into the matter.”

The NFL has been under heavy fire for several weeks for the tepid discipline it meted out to players accused of domestic violence, child abuse and other violent acts, prompting the National Organization for Women and other groups to call for Goodell to resign.

Goodell acknowledged the NFL had screwed up during a news conference in New York on Sept. 19 and promised the league would learn from those mistakes and get things right.

“The same mistakes can never be repeated,” Goodell promised. “We will get our house in order first. We will do more.”



Civil rights attorney Gloria Allred sent a letter to the commissioner on Friday, a week after Goodell’s uneasy news conference, saying she represents a woman who filed a police report alleging an NFL player had raped her.

The alleged perpetrator, accompanied by a team official, met with police on Sept. 20, Allred said in the letter.

“Thereafter, the accused was then allowed by his team to play the following day,” the letter added. “We have asked the NFL whether or not this alleged rape was reported to them and if they approved this accused individual’s playing in the game notwithstanding the allegations that had been made against him.”

In her news conference Monday, Allred revealed her client underwent a rape kit examination and provided other evidence. Allred said her client was told the player was contacted by police and appeared at a station with a representative of his team, and then played the next day, Sept. 21.

Allred declined to discuss the Spillman investigation Wednesday, but she did respond to a request made earlier this week by the NFL’s top lawyer, Jeffrey Pash, to interview the alleged victim.

“In considering whether our client will or will not be agreeable to meeting with your representative, we would like to be assured that the NFL is acting in good faith and that it is conducting an investigation which encompasses not only the rape allegations but also why the player and the team involved did not report these matters immediately to the NFL as required by your NFL Personal Conduct Policy,” Allred wrote.

 The NFL has been under fire since the season began last month after TMZ posted a video of Baltimore Ravens star Ray Rice hitting his then-fiancée in an Atlantic City casino elevator in February. Goodell took heat for initially only giving Rice a two-game suspension. Once the tape surfaced, the commissioner suspended Rice indefinitely and the Ravens terminated his contract.

Then Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson was arrested on child abuse charges stemming from him whipping his 4-year-old son with a tree branch. The Vikings, who deactivated Peterson for one game, had planned to play the 2012 league MVP on the following Sunday, but flip-flopped when sponsors threatened to bail.

Goodell acknowledged the league had fumbled after sponsors — including Anheuser-Busch — expressed concern about how the NFL handled allegations of domestic violence, sexual assault and child abuse.

Yay for more problems in the good old American Men's Club.

Just curious - I'm going to give a list in quotes of several regions/countries of the world, and I'd just like your opinion on them. Economically, politically, where they stand in the world, what they do right/wrong. Anything.

South America, namely Brazil, Argentina, and Chile.

Mexico

India

Australia

Eastern Europe

South Africa

Iran

Cuba

For reference to those who do not know, there is currently an ongoing protests by students in a Denver suburb of Colorado. Basically, a bunch of AP US History students have stopped going to class to protest a new proposal for curriculum in the class:

The protests are aimed at new JeffCo School Board member Julie Williams’ proposal, which states, in part: “Materials should promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free enterprise system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights. Materials should not encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law. Instructional materials should present positive aspects of the United States and its heritage.”

Essentially: Teach kids that America is great, write out stuff that would say otherwise.

So, thoughts? Support the kids? Think it's an overreaction? To read more about it, click Here

Story

ALGIERS, Algeria (AP) — An Algerian splinter group from al-Qaida has beheaded a French hostage over France's airstrikes on the Islamic State group, in a sign of the possible widening of the crisis in Iraq and Syria to the rest of the region.

The killing of Herve Gourdel, a mountaineer who was kidnapped while hiking in Algeria, was a "cowardly assassination," a visibly upset French President Francois Hollande said Wednesday, but he vowed to continue the military operation.

"Herve Gourdel is dead because he is the representative of a people — ours — that defends human dignity against barbarity," Hollande said on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York. "France will never cede to terrorism because it is our duty, and, more than that, because it is our honor."

On Friday, France joined the U.S. in conducting airstrikes on the Islamic State group in Iraq. Two days later, the Islamic State group called on Muslims to attack foreign targets, and the response in Algeria raised the specter of attacks on Westerners elsewhere.

Gourdel, a 55-year-old mountaineering guide from Nice, was seized Sunday night while hiking in the Djura Djura mountains of northern Algeria. His Algerian companions were released.

A group calling itself Jund al-Khilafah, or "Soldiers of the Caliphate," split from al-Qaida and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group two weeks ago. It seized Gourdel in response to the call to kill the "spiteful and filthy French." It gave France 24 hours to end its air campaign.

A video posted online showed masked gunmen standing over a kneeling Gourdel. They pledged their allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and said they were fighting his enemies. The video showed the captive pushed to the ground and blindfolded before he was beheaded.

The videos from the group were similar to those from the Islamic State group, which killed two American journalists and a British aid worker in recent weeks.

"It is not the first time France has been affected by terrorist acts," Hollande told an unusual session of the U.N. Security Council chaired by President Barack Obama. "And we have never given in. Every time, we come out of these things more robust, with greater solidarity."

Obama, speaking at the same meeting, said people around the world had been "horrified by another brutal murder."

"These terrorists believe our countries will be unable to stop them. The safety of our citizens demands that we do," Obama said at the meeting, which was aimed at combating the threat posed by foreign fighters joining extremist groups.

The Algerian government called the killing of Gourdel "an odious and abject act committed by a group of criminals."

Gourdel, an avid photographer, had expressed excitement on his Facebook page about his planned camping trip in the remote mountainous region. The area, which is riddled with steep valleys and deep caves, is also one of the last strongholds of the Islamist extremists in northern Algeria that have been fighting the government since the 1990s.

The Algerian government statement said that since the kidnapping, authorities had been working to try to free him. It said it was determined "to pursue its fight against terrorism in all its forms, while guaranteeing the protection and security of all foreign nationals on its territory."

The Islamic State group claims leadership of all Muslims and has been hoping to incite additional attacks against foreigners around the world.

"That was the Islamic State's intention, for there to be more events like this," said analyst Geoff Porter of North Africa Risk Consulting. "If there were to be any similar copycat instances, I don't think they would transpire in Algeria, they are more likely to occur either in Tunisia or Morocco — it's certainly a more target-rich environment."

Thousands of Tunisians and Moroccans have joined the Islamic State to fight in Syria and Iraq, and there are fears they will carry out attacks in their home countries upon their return.

The killing of a hostage actually represents a departure for radical Islamic groups in Algeria, which in the past decade have made millions from ransoms. France is also known for paying ransoms, although some hostages have been killed by their captors.

Islamic extremists have long singled out France as a special target for multiple reasons: the French military campaign against al-Qaida-linked militants in Mali, the French involvement in the NATO force in Afghanistan, and French laws banning the Muslim face veil and headscarves in public.

Hours after French warplanes struck targets Friday in Iraq, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told the U.N. Security Council: "We are facing throat-cutters. They rape, crucify and decapitate. They use cruelty as a means of propaganda. Their aim is to erase borders and to eradicate the rule of law and civil society."

Nearly 1,000 French radicals have joined or are trying to join the Islamic State group in Syria and in Iraq — more than the number of fighters from any other Western country. French authorities are particularly concerned they will return home and stage attacks. Security has been boosted around the country.

The Algerian military has never been able to eliminate the vestiges of the once-powerful al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb hiding out in the same terrain where Algerians fought French colonizers in the 1950s. The extremists usually left civilians alone and clashed only occasionally with army patrols.

Gourdel's killing may push the military to take care of these groups once and for all. It has sent thousands of troops and helicopters into the mountains.

Hollande praised Gourdel as a man devoted to mountain climbing who "thought he would be able to pursue his passion."

According to a presidential aide, Hollande has spoken with Gourdel's family, and his hometown in southern France planned a vigil Thursday at the mountaineering office where he worked.

Image for reference.


Discuss. Should the US drinking age be lowered? Raised? Kept at 21?

Found this to be an Interesting Article

ANKARA, Turkey — Having spent most of his youth as a drug addict in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Turkey’s capital, Can did not think he had much to lose when he was smuggled into Syria with 10 of his childhood friends to join the world’s most extreme jihadist group.

After 15 days at a training camp in the Syrian city of Raqqa, the de facto headquarters of the group, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the 27-year-old Can was assigned to a fighting unit. He said he shot two men and participated in a public execution. It was only after he buried a man alive that he was told he had become a full ISIS fighter.

“When you fight over there, it’s like being in a trance,” said Can, who asked to be referred to only by his middle name for fear of reprisal. “Everyone shouts, ‘God is the greatest,’ which gives you divine strength to kill the enemy without being fazed by blood or splattered guts,” he said.

Hundreds of foreign fighters, including some from Europe and the United States, have joined the ranks of ISIS in its self-proclaimed caliphate that sweeps over vast territories of Iraq and Syria. But one of the biggest source of recruits is neighboring Turkey, a NATO member with an undercurrent of Islamist discontent.

As many as 1,000 Turks have joined ISIS, according to Turkish news media reports and government officials here. Recruits cite the group’s ideological appeal to disaffected youths as well as the money it pays fighters from its flush coffers. The C.I.A. estimated last week that the group had from 20,000 to 31,500 fighters in Iraq and Syria.

The United States has put heavy pressure on Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to better police Turkey’s 560-mile-long border with Syria. Washington wants Turkey to stanch the flow of foreign fighters and to stop ISIS from exporting the oil it produces on territory it holds in Syria and Iraq.

So far, Mr. Erdogan has resisted pleas to take aggressive steps against the group, citing the fate of 49 Turkish hostages ISIS has held since militants took over Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, in June. Turkey declined to sign a communiqué last Thursday that committed a number of regional states to take “appropriate” new measures to counter ISIS, frustrating American officials.

For years, Turkey has striven to set an example of Islamic democracy in the Middle East through its “zero problems with neighbors” prescription, the guiding principle of Ahmet Davutoglu, who recently became Turkey’s prime minister after serving for years as foreign minister. But miscalculations have left the country isolated and vulnerable in a region now plagued by war.

Turkey has been criticized at home and abroad for an open border policy in the early days of the Syrian uprising. Critics say that policy was crucial to the rise of ISIS. Turkey had bet that rebel forces would quickly topple the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, but as the war evolved, the extremists have benefited from the chaos.

Turkish fighters recruited by ISIS say they identify more with the extreme form of Islamic governance practiced by ISIS than with the rule of the Turkish governing party, which has its roots in a more moderate form of Islam.

Hacibayram, a ramshackle neighborhood in the heart of Ankara’s tourist district, has morphed into an ISIS recruitment hub over the past year. Locals say up to 100 residents have gone to fight for the group in Syria.

“It began when a stranger with a long, coarse beard started showing up in the neighborhood,” recalled Arif Akbas, the neighborhood’s elected headman of 30 years, who oversees local affairs. “The next thing we knew, all the drug addicts started going to the mosque.”

One of the first men to join ISIS from the neighborhood was Ozguzhan Gozlemcioglu, known to his ISIS counterparts as Muhammad Salef. In three years, he has risen to the status of a regional commander in Raqqa, and locals say he frequently travels in and out of Ankara, each time making sure to take back new recruits with him.

Mehmet Arabaci, a Hacibayram resident who assists with distributing government aid to the poor, said younger members of the local community found online pictures of Mr. Gozlemcioglu with weapons on the field and immediately took interest. Children have started to spend more time online since the municipality knocked down the only school in the area last year as part of an aggressive urban renewal project.

“There are now seven mosques in the vicinity, but not one school,” Mr. Arabaci said. “The lives of children here are so vacant that they find any excuse to be sucked into action.”

Playing in the rubble of a demolished building on a recent hot day here, two young boys staged a fight with toy guns.

When a young Syrian girl walked past them, they pounced on her, knocking her to the floor and pushing their toy rifles against her head. “I’m going to kill you, whore,” one of the boys shouted before launching into sound effects that imitated a machine gun.

The other boy quickly lost interest and walked away. “Toys are so boring,” he said. “I have real guns upstairs.”

The boy’s father, who owns a nearby market, said he fully supported ISIS’s vision for Islamic governance and hoped to send the boy and his other sons to Raqqa when they are older.

“The diluted form of Islam practiced in Turkey is an insult to the religion,” he said giving only his initials, T.C., to protect his identity. “In the Islamic State you lead a life of discipline as dictated by God, and then you are rewarded. Children there have parks and swimming pools. Here, my children play in the dirt.”

But when Can returned from Raqqa after three months with two of the original 10 friends he had left with, he was full of regret.

“ISIS is brutal,” he said. “They interpret the Quran for their own gains. God never ordered Muslims to kill Muslims.”

Still, he said many were drawn to the group for financial reasons, as it appealed to disadvantaged youth in less prosperous parts of Turkey. “When you fight, they offer $150 a day. Then everything else is free,” he said. “Even the shopkeepers give you free products out of fear.”

ISIS recruitment in Hacibayram caught the news media’s attention in June when a local 14-year-old recruit came back to the neighborhood after he was wounded in a shelling attack in Raqqa. The boy’s father, Yusuf, said that the government had made no formal inquiry into the episode and that members of the local community had started to condemn what they saw as inaction by the authorities.

“There are clearly recruitment centers being set up in Ankara and elsewhere in Turkey, but the government doesn’t seem to care,” said Aaron Stein, a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank. “It seems their hatred for Bashar al-Assad and their overly nuanced view of what radical Islam is has led to a very short- and narrow-sighted policy that has serious implications.”

The Interior Ministry and National Police Department did not respond to requests for comment.

On a recent afternoon in Ankara, Mr. Erdogan and Mr. Davutoglu came to pray at the historic Haci Bayram Veli Mosque, just over 100 yards away from an underground mosque used by a radical Salafi sect known to oversee ISIS recruits.

When news of their visit reached the neighborhood, several residents scurried down the steep hill hoping to catch an opportunity to raise the issue.

At the same time, a 10-year-old boy lingered in his family’s shop, laughing at the crowd rushing to get a glimpse of the two leaders. He had just listened to a long lecture from his father celebrating ISIS’ recent beheading of James Foley, an American journalist. “He was an agent and deserved to die,” the man told his son, half-smirking through his thick beard.

To which the boy replied, “Journalists, infidels of this country; we’ll kill them all.”

Tl;Dr: ISIS is recruiting a steady amount of recruits, and whole families, from various areas around Turkey - including Ankara. Thanks to their open border, it's easy to do so. Turkish leaders deny this is happening.

Well then. That sucks

Figure I'd just share in case anyone here lives in Ohio.

Yeah, that's apparently going on.

Don't expect it to get anywhere, but the Senate is voting on a 28th Amendment to limit the amount people and corporations can donate to political campaigns - a way to go against the SCOTUS ruling in Citizens United vs FEC.

So, in honor of that vote, do you support a limit on the amount one person or group can donate? Should people and corporations be able to donate whatever they want to a campaign? Does that essentially buy an election?

If America lost the Revolution?