Tuesday Links

Now that I'm back from my latest swing into Pennsylvania, here are some things in the news:

From The Washington Times, the Indiana Supreme Court takes up a case in which police found an alleged murder weapon after eavesdropping on a conversation between a defendant and his lawyer.

From The Washington Free Beacon, on the same day they receive the Service Dog of the Year award, a Marine and his service dog are denied a seat on an American Airlines flight.

From Bloomberg View, the man picked by the president to build the war effort against ISIS will be stepping down.

From The Telegraph, a division of Syrian rebels trained by the United States surrenders to an Al Qaeda affiliate upon re-entering their country.

From Politico, presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) calls for a raise in the minimum wage for federal contract workers.

From Fox News, Israeli archaeologists may have found the Tomb of the Maccabees.

From McClatchyDC, presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and  host Stephen Colbert discuss Ronald Reagan on The Late Show.

From The Local DE, German intelligence warns about the increasing numbers of Salafists in their country.

From Yahoo News, German police raid a mosque and search homes looking for ISIS recruiters.  (via Gateway Pundit)

From Herald Scotland, the "jihadi bride", who left Scotland to marry an Islamic fighter in Syria, has a low opinion of the Syrians migrating in the opposite direction.

From National Review, many of those "Syrian refugees" are neither.

From WTVR, the son of a former Virginia state senator kills himself on Interstate 95, after allegedly killing a man and abducting a woman.

From Frontpage Mag, Pope Francis, who arrives today in the United States, seems to have forgotten the oppressed people of the country from which he departs.

From Bizpac Review, presidential candidate Carly Fiorina (R) disagrees with Ben Carson (R) and Donald Trump (R) about having a Muslim president, and sings about her dog.

From the Daily Mail, noted clock-maker Ahmed Mohamed and his siblings have all been pulled from their schools.

From WUIS, the Department of Interior has decided that the greater sage grouse does not need Endangered Species Act protection.

And from Wired, problems with geothermal energy wells may be solved by injecting SiO₂ balls coated with DNA.

The Wanamaker, Kempton & Southern Railroad

Established in 1963, the Wanamaker, Kempton & Southern Railroad is a scenic railroad in eastern Pennsylvania that runs between the two towns after which it was named.  Its trains run on a section of track that was originally part of the Berks County Railroad, which ran from Slatington to Reading.  Unfortunately, the BCRR went bankrupt in 1874, the year in which its construction was completed.  Its tracks were then incorporated into the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, which operated the line as far north as Wanamaker until 1962, before selling 4.2 miles of track to WK&S and otherwise scrapping most of the line.  Train rides on the WK&S leave from the station at Kempton, shown here, and travel three miles north to Wanamaker, before returning.

Parked near the Kempton station are the WK&S locomotive no. 65 and a Lehigh & New England diesel.

Just behind the two locomotives shown above is the WK&S no. 2.

Two Reading coaches and a caboose occupy a sidetrack.  The above-mentioned Philadelphia & Reading was eventually renamed the Reading Company.

A remodeled coach, a Chesapeake & Ohio refrigerated boxcar, and a Lehigh & New England caboose occupy another sidetrack.  The coach houses a large display of HO-scale model railroads.

After the ride was over, the WK&S no. 7258 pulled around the train to reconnect to its north end.

A conductor guides no. 7258 as it connects to the north end of the train, which is an old Reading caboose.

Saudi Ambassador To Head UN Human Rights Panel

A representative from Saudi Arabia, a county whose record on human rights can be charitably described as dubious, has been appointed to the United Nations Human Rights Council.  Faisal bin Hassan Trad, the Saudi Ambassador to the U.N. at Geneva, has been chosen to head a five-person advisory panel.  As would be expected, the appointment has generated some controversy.

Read the story at Sputnik International, Arutz Sheva, The Independent and the International Business Times.  Meanwhile, a Saudi court has upheld the sentence of death by crucifixion for a man accused of "illegal protests and firearm offenses", which allegedly took place when he was 17.

Migrants Leave Loads Of Trash

Freedom Outpost has a story about the invasion of migration into Europe by Syrian "refugees" that I would say falls into the "ugly truth" category.  A small excerpt:

It is not what the refugees used on their journey, but what they left behind unused - discarded Red Cross packaged water, crates of peaches, untouched packaged food, unopened baby diapers, brand new strollers, car seats, toys, and other necessities for someone traveling with a baby. Since these items were left behind, it is obvious that there were no babies among them.

It may seem normal to have some sympathy for refugees, but the blatant disrespect for the places they've entered and traveled through renders sympathy just about impossible.  Read the full story, and take a good look at the pictures.

House Votes To Freeze Planned Parenthood Funding

The U.S. House of Representatives has voted 241-187, mostly along party lines, to freeze funding for Planned Parenthood for a year.  The freeze would last for a year, so Congress can investigate accusations against the organization.

Read more at The Hill, LifeNews, the Washington Examiner, The Washington Post and ABC News.

The Illegal Alien Crime Wave

The federal government does a pretty job on tracking the race and ethnicity of people who commit crimes, but there's one demographic group in the United States for whom the statistics can be hard to find.  From Fox News:

The federal government can tell you how many "Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islanders" stole a car, the precise number of "American Indian or Alaska Natives" who were arrested for vagrancy or how many whites were busted for counterfeiting in any given year. But the government agencies that crunch crime numbers are utterly unable -- or unwilling -- to pinpoint for the public how many illegal immigrants are arrested within U.S. borders each year.

Every once in a while, we hear the argument about immigrants being generally more law-abiding than native-born citizens.  That might be true for the immigrants who come here legally, but the numbers show a very different story for illegal aliens.  It makes perfect sense that a person willing to commit a crime by wrongly entering this country doesn't have too many qualms about committing other crimes after getting in.  As for those who become illegal aliens by willingly overstaying their visas, their respect for American law doesn't seem to be all that great, either.  If an immigrant wants to come to America to live a better life, the term "better life" should be defined to include obeying American law.  If that seems unfair, I should point out that obeying American law is precisely what we American citizens generally expect of each other.

But enough of my $0.02, read the full story.

Tuesday Links

Today on the Ides of September, here's a bit of what's going on:

From Fox News, an instructor at Delta State University in Mississippi, suspected to killing two people, has committed suicide.

From The Jerusalem Post, Iran's nuclear deal is expected to have an effect on the country's elections.

From Reuters, and speaking of nukes, North Korea says that its main nuclear facility is operational.

From The Times Of Israel, Hamas calls recent Israeli actions on the Temple Mount a "declaration of war".

From the Mirror, a 15-year-old British girl killed her mother after viewing online ISIS videos.

From the Express, the Lebanese education minister tells U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron that thousands of ISIS fighters are among the Syrian refugees.

From National Review, Europe rediscovers the concept that good fences make good neighbors.

From The Hill, college students don't need to be "coddled", says.......President Obama?  (via HotAir)

From CBS Chicago, a man is charged with murder for a stabbing that resulting from an argument over a cell phone.

From the Tyler Morning Telegraph, a pastor calms down an armed man who had entered his church.  (via The Blaze)

From CNN, a large object has been found floating in the Indian Ocean near Reunion.

From LifeNews, another video of Planned Parenthood discussing the sale of aborted baby parts.

From Wired, Etsy will start helping artisans to find manufacturers.

From CNET, Wilson unveils the smart basketball.

From the Chicago Tribune, in a development that can only be called "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious", Disney is looking to make a new Mary Poppins movie.

And from the New York Post, you can now donate to political candidates and advocacy groups by using Twitter.

Music Break - Some Live Versions

It's certainly about time I made a musical post.  I may have included a few live performances in previous Music Breaks, but this time, I've decided to make live versions the post's theme, so to speak.  Live performances can sometimes have their drawbacks.  Bands might play their songs too fast, the singer can't quite reach the high notes he sang in the studio, or the instruments and sound effects recorded in the studio become difficult to recreate on stage.  Even facing these potential problems, I think I've found a few live performances that do the respective studio versions justice, or at least are enjoyable in their own right.

The Eagles have often incorporated their members' solo songs into their concerts.  Don Henley, officially their drummer, plays guitar in this live version of Dirty Laundry, which appears on his first solo album I Can't Stand Still, released in 1982.  The latter part of the song features consecutive guitar solos by Glenn Frey, Stueart Smith (a sideman hired to replace former member Don Felder) and Joe Walsh.  At this time and at present, the official Eagles are Frey, Henley, Walsh and bassist Timothy B. Schmitt.

Highly Paid CEO Blasts High CEO Pay

Republican presidential candidate and multi-billionaire Donald Trump, on the CBS show Face The Nation, called the salaries paid to corporate CEO's a "complete joke" and a "disgrace".  Considering that, according to Wiki, he is the CEO of The Trump Organization and two other entities and draws a salary of $250 million, Trump appears to be an example of the very problem he complains about.  (As far as I can tell, Wiki does not specify how much of the indicated salary comes from each respective source.)

To paraphrase Mark Twain:  Suppose you are a politician.  Suppose you are a hypocrite.  But I repeat myself.

Read more at Fortune, Reuters, CBS News and Politico.

ISIS Terrorist Reportedly Arrested In Germany

According to The New Observer,

An ISIS terrorist posing as an “asylum seeker” has been arrested by German police in a “refugee” center in Stuttgart, and German customs officers have seized boxes containing Syrian passports being smuggled into Europe.

The alleged terrorist is a 21-year-old man from Morocco.  Meanwhile in Bulgaria, police seized 10,000 fake Syrian passports.

Read the full story.