This one was not unexpected.

Jamshid Muhtorov, a/k/a Abumumin Turkistony, a/k/a Abu Mumin, 35, of Aurora, Colorado, was arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport by members of the FBI’s Denver and Chicago Joint Terrorism Task Forces on a charge of providing and attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, the Department of Justice announced today. The arrest took place without incident. Muhtorov made his initial appearance in U.S. District Court in Chicago this yesterday morning.

Muhtorov’s arrest is the result of a long-term investigation conducted by the FBI’s Denver Joint Terrorism Task Force. The Chicago Joint Terrorism Task Force provided investigative support.

A 21 year-old Norwegian has been arrested for inciting terrorism and making threats against the authorities after admitting publishing a video on YouTube that called for the deaths of the country’s crown prince, prime minister and foreign minister.

As well as showing photographs of Crown Prince Haakon, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre with text urging Allah to “destroy them” with painful deaths, the video also promoted a protest in Oslo on Friday. ‘Demonstration: Norwegian troops out of Afghanistan’, however, only attracted a crowd of 40 – far short of the 500 to 700 people the Islamic organisers were expecting.

Ron Paul told the debate audience, “Now, you can’t argue. I’ve talked a long time about cutting off that credit from the Fed. I was trying to prevent this stuff. Also, I opposed the Community Reinvestment Act as well I had legislation in 10 years before the bust came to remove that line of credit to the Treasury [to Fannie and Freddie].” Indeed, Ron Paul predicted that Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were part of a housing bubble and would be the subjects for giant government bailouts and the excuse for a spiraling national debt in a February 2004 speech. “A taxpayer bailout of the GSEs would dwarf the savings-and-loan bailout of the early nineties and could run up the national debt to unmanageable levels.” Ron Paul had warned about Fannie and Freddie’s role in a growing “housing bubble” in each of the years 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005.

DoubleLine Capital LP’s Jeffrey Gundlach, manager of the top performing mortgage fund last year, is shunning “overpriced” Ginnie Mae securities, because investors underestimate the risk that the Federal Reserve and President Barack Obama will spur a homeowner refinancing wave.

“I’m astonished people are fighting the will of the U.S. government,” Gundlach, founder and chief investment officer of Los Angeles-based DoubleLine, said in a telephone interview. “Investors are being insufficiently compensated,” especially given the risk of higher prepayments.

Côte d’Ivoire is abandoning free health care for all after a brief experiment because of skyrocketing costs.

As of February, the free service would only be available to mothers and their children. Specifically, this will mean free care for deliveries and free treatment for diseases affecting children under six years old. Consultation fees would drop from 1,000 CFA francs to 650 francs CFA ($2-1.5).

South African mediator says rival Madagascar leaders “irresponsible”

Regional heavyweight South Africa says efforts to mediate a solution to Madagascar’s political crisis have been frustrated by the irresponsible behavior of the Indian Ocean island nation’s rival leaders.

South African deputy foreign minister Marius Fransman gave his blunt assessment before heading into a meeting Tuesday with factions from Madagascar, which has been in turmoil since President Marc Ravalomanana was toppled in 2009 in a coup led by Andry Rajoelina.

Who’s expected to pay?

... it’s probably too late for me. ... Save yourself.

Researchers have found that group settings can alter the expression of IQ in certain people. The researchers gathered test subjects with similar baseline IQ scores and then placed them in small group settings to see how their cognitive capacity would be affected by perceptions of their status in that group. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they were able to document the neural responses and found that women were more likely to experience negative changes.

President Obama has plunged American families $4 trillion deeper into debt. He has taken that money from the people who earned it — and their children — and given it to people whose mistakes created the economic crisis in the first place.

The big banks that plunged the world into financial crisis are bigger than ever. Government-backed mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which spurred banks to make those reckless loans, went untouched in the Wall Street reform bill and instead received over $180 billion in taxpayer bailouts. Auto companies so poorly run that they lost money on every car they sold were seized by the federal government, given billions of taxpayer dollars, and handed over to political cronies in the bargain. Green-energy company Solyndra was given $500 million of taxpayer money before it went bankrupt, not due to its technological innovativeness, but because it was politically connected to the Obama campaign.

After several largely ineffective programs to help troubled borrowers and after fruitless attempts at budging the hard-line conservator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, President Obama is proposing a brand new refinance program for borrowers who are current on their mortgages, regardless of who owns their loan; the catch is that this one has to go through Congress.

“I’m sending this Congress a plan that gives every responsible homeowner the chance to save about $3,000 a year on their mortgage, by refinancing at historically low interest rates. No more red tape. No more runaround from the banks,” the President announced in his State of the Union address.

These changes, sparked perhaps by 9/11, are nonetheless uncharacteristic of a free society.  In a free state, access to information is unrestricted, freedom of speech by individuals and the press is upheld, dissent is lawful, and the opinions and attitudes of citizens toward government and law enforcement do not spur investigations.  Further, surveillance and investigations are limited to planned or actual criminal activity, due process is honored, and unreasonable search and seizure by government agents is unacceptable absent probable cause.

Yet, since Obama assumed the presidency in 2009, he has sought and/or instituted policies that consolidate power at the federal level, restrict the availability of information, extend the boundaries of protected speech, expand monitoring of American society and increase law enforcement’s role.  Just as policies that place limitations on government oversight advance the cause of freedom, the opposite is true: policies that expand the role of government stifle liberty and invite repression.  A sampling of some proposed and/or established policies of the Obama administration indicates a troubling move toward a more restrictive, autocratic government.

Conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe and his colleagues at Project Veritas have done it again. This time their bombshell video shows election workers in New Hampshire giving out ballots in the names of dead voters at multiple voting precincts during the state’s recent primary election.

Of course, the response they got from New Hampshire’s Democrat Governor was an investigation of them—not the policies that prevent election volunteers from verifying the identity of voters.