Sen. Rand Paul has announced he is running for President.

A quote from his speech:

“I say the phone records of law-abiding citizens are none of their damn business,” Paul said of government officials.

His banner read:

“Defeat the Washington machine. Unleash the American dream.”

Any takers here?

The alternates in the Boston Marathon Bombing trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were disclosed today after closing arguments. The 12 jurors deciding his fate include 7 women and 5 men.

In closings today, the Government said Jahar and Tamerlan were partners and Jahar wanted to punish America. Reporter Jim Armstrong of WBZ in Boston has a lot of quotes from both side's closings on his twitter feed here.

Judy Clarke agreed Jahar committed the bombings, but focused on the different roles of the brothers. [More...]

Jury Closing Arguments are in Tsarnaev today.

I'll be in court most of the day.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

#Shami Witness, aka Mehdi Masroor Biswas, was denied bail today by a Special Terrorism Court in Bangladore. The court also granted police another 6 months to file charges. The request was made a month ago.

Shami Witness, the prolific tweeter and disseminator of ISIS news, with 17,000 followers on Twitter, was arrested in December. Four months later, formal charges have yet to be filed and the court just got around to hearing his application for bail. [More...]

President Obama just re-tweeted this out. I like it. The Obamas' personalities have really grown on me during the past 7 years. In 2008, I thought they were too stiff and formal and difficult to read. Now they seem much more comfortable with themselves and they are enjoyable to watch.

Tikrit is in shambles following it's "liberation" from ISIS. The U.S. and Iraq are now investigating incidents of rampant looting, burning of Sunni homes and businesses, summary executions and and beheadings of Sunni and ISIS captives by the self-proclaimed victors, the Iran-backed Shi'ite militias and the Iraqi military.

American and Iraqi officials called for investigations on Friday into reports that Iraqi security forces were summarily executing captives and looting property in Tikrit, and warned that such abuses could undermine the international effort to defeat the Sunni extremists of Islamic State.

[More...]

Happy Passover everyone.

And for tomorrow, Happy Easter!

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

Looks like Hillary Clinton will be running for President. According to the New York Times, she has leased two floors of office space for her campaign headquarters in Brooklyn.

Hillary Rodham Clinton has leased two floors of office space at 1 Pierrepont Plaza in Brooklyn for her presidential campaign headquarters, according to a person familiar with the deal.

She is expected to announce her decision to run within days. Here's a detailed list of her f her 2008 campaign headquarters and staff.

In January, I wrote about Nicholas Langan, a 24 year old painter and Australian citizen who went to Bali for a surfing holiday and got arrested for smoking a joint on the beach after dinner. Total amount of pot recovered: Less than 1 gram (about as much as in a packet of Splenda.)

The prosecutor yesterday finalized the charges against Langan, and as anticipated, is asking for a 12 year sentence. (The penalty for simple drug possession in Bali (as opposed to trafficking for which the death penalty is authorized) is 4 to 12 years in prison. (Using drugs carries an additional 5 year penalty.)

Langan, who has been held in a police jail pending the filing of formal charges, will now be moved to Kerobokan, the island's hellhole prison, filled with local murderers, rapists and thieves, in addition to foreign drug offenders. [More...]

Two women from Queens have been charged with planning to bomb some unspecified target. The news articles don't really tell the whole story. Here is the 19 page Affidavit in support of the Complaint.

They began studying how to make a bomb with an FBI agent in tow in an undercover capacity. He began meeting with one of them in 2013, and then with both of them in 2014, when the women were roommates. He met with them repeatedly, took them to Home Depot to get ingredients that could be useful in a bomb, printed them out copies of bomb making articles from AQAP's Inspire Magazine, as well as a copy of the Anarchist's Cookbook, and spent hours with them as they "studied" the materials.

The women told the agent they didn't know that they ever would use this knowledge, they just wanted to be prepared because the U.S. was at war with Muslims, and if it became time to set off a bomb, they didn't want it to fail to go off, as had happened to the Times Square bomber. Nor did they want to be suicide bombers. Nor were they in any hurry. [More...]

ISIS has taken over the Yarmuk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus, Syria. They battled rebel group Aknaf Bait al-Maqdi.

Al Nusra is now in control of Idlib. Will they rule with as heavy a hand and sword as ISIS? Al Nusra fights along with rebel groups, but it is not a rebel group. It's an Al Qaida affiliate, equally as desirous as ISIS of implementing a Caliphate (just not al Baghdadi) and its version of Sharia law.

Not everyone agrees that Iraq has retaken Tikrit. ISIS has imposed a blackout on Twitter among its supporters so as not to disclose the location of its fighters. They still hold some critical parts of Tikrit.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

If you're in one of these 15 cities, you can see the Rolling Stones in concert this summer. Tickets for all U.S. shows go on sale Monday April 13.

If, like me, you aren't in one of those cities, you know what they say: [More...]