A petition on whitehouse.gov calling for charges to be filed against the 47 senators who sent an open letter to the leaders of Iran, possibly in violation of the Logan Act, has collected more than 165,000 signatures in less than two days.

Because the petition exceeded 100,000 signatures within 30 days, the White House is required to respond.

The creator of this petition, known only by the initials C.H., alleges that the 47 senators “committed a treasonous offense when they decided to violate the Logan Act, a 1799 law which forbids unauthorized citizens from negotiating with foreign governments.”

The letter, which was published on Monday, warned Iranian leaders that any nuclear deal they sign with President Obama won’t last past his second term.

Jerome Barron, a professor of Constitutional Law at George Washington University, told ABC News in an interview that he finds the senators’ letter “disrespectful,” but he does not believe the senators have committed treason.

“They would make the argument the Logan Act doesn’t apply because they are one of the three branches of government and although the they don’t have the major role of foreign relations, they do, after all, as the senate, confirm treaties,” Barron said. “It’s true this is an executive agreement, but they [the Senate] have some role I suppose. I don’t think they’re in violation of the Logan Act.”

When asked about the potential violation of the Logan Act, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest highlighted the authority of the Department of Justice.

“For a determination like that, I'd refer you to the Department of Justice. It ultimately would be their responsibility to make that kind of determination,” Earnest said today in the White House briefing room. “I know that there's been a lot of speculation about this, but I'm not aware of any conversations about the Logan Act in its relation to this specific matter that have taken place here at the White House.”

And while Earnest redirected the inquiry about the potential Logan Act violation for now, the White House will have to make an official response to the petition.

Other petitions that have met the White House’s response threshold include legalizing marijuana, publishing the White House beer recipe and even deporting Justin Bieber back to Canada.

ABC News' Justin Fishel contributed to this report

Associated Press Videos
Students Hope Racist Video Sparks Change at OU

NORMAN, Okla. (AP) — A video of University of Oklahoma fraternity members engaging in a racist chant outraged and angered students across the campus, but its release also has sparked a dialogue that many students hope will lead to positive changes at the school.

Protests and rallies have been held every day on the campus in Norman since the release earlier this week of the video, which shows students participating in a chant that referenced lynching and indicates black students would never be admitted to OU's chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon. On Wednesday, a town hall-style forum on diversity sponsored by the black student group Unheard was planned on campus, and a student spokeswoman for the group said the incident appears to be serving as a catalyst for change.

"Just the students coming together has been a positive for me," said Alexis Hall, a 20-year-old junior from Houston. "I think this is sparking a university-wide movement of: 'Hey, we need to start making some changes. We're going to improve things and make it better for all of our students.'"

Among the group's grievances are low numbers of black faculty and administrators, poor retention rates among black students and a lack of programs aimed at supporting black students.

OU President David Boren booted the fraternity from campus and expelled two of its members for creating a hostile learning environment. He said that university officials already had been working with Unheard, which formed after the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, to address some of their concerns and that those efforts will continue.

"They met with me. They had some very positive suggestions," Boren said. He said their proposals included greater representation of black students at the university's orientation camp and on various committees, to ensure that "the whole range of diversity of our campus is represented."

OU Students March Against RacismPlay video

On Wednesday, Boren announced the creation of a new position — vice president for the university community. The person in that role, who has not yet been hired, will be responsible for overseeing diversity programs and will report directly to the president.

Also Wednesday, several groups of potential OU students toured the campus with their parents.

Mary Moore and her 16-year-old daughter, Maddi, said they considered backing out of their visit after the video surfaced but changed their minds, mostly because of the swift action taken by Boren.

"If they definitely didn't do anything about it, ... I probably wouldn't have come here," said Maddi Moore, a high school junior from Southlake, Texas, a Dallas suburb.

When the Christian student group Intervarsity set up a display on OU's campus two weeks ago to solicit feedback from students on race relations and other issues, response was tepid, said Rubin Samuel, a 22-year-old electrical engineering senior from Moore. The same display this week drew dozens of students, many of them eager to talk about race, diversity on campus and other issues surrounding the release of the video.

Okla. Frat Students Vacate House, Two ExpelledPlay video

"I think the way to move forward with something like this is to keep it in our conversations, not sweep it under the rug after a few weeks," said Samuel, who is Indian-American.

The involvement of at least two students from the Dallas area in the SAE racist video controversy prompted soul-searching in Texas, as well.

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings is a member of the board of trustees of Jesuit College Preparatory School, a Catholic school attended by one of the SAE chant leaders. He said he was "appalled" by the video.

"This is real, it's got to be dealt with, and we've got to be honest about it," Rawlings said.

At the University of Texas in Austin, the president of the local SAE issued a statement denying that his chapter had ever performed a similar chant. Luke Cone said he could "speak on the behalf of my fraternity brothers that we are all profoundly distressed" about the language in the video.

View gallery

University of Oklahoma students rally outside the now closed University of Oklahoma's Sigma Alph …

A Dallas-area advocacy group, the Next Generation Action Network, planned a protest at the family home of Parker Rice, who has since apologized for participating in the chant.

About 20 demonstrators marched up and down the street in front of the North Dallas home Wednesday evening, chanting, "Racism is taught," and, "Racism is a choice."

Rice issued an apology Tuesday, saying the incident was "a horrible mistake" and "a devastating lesson."

Meanwhile, the parents of another student seen in the video, Levi Pettit, released a statement saying Pettit had "made a horrible mistake, and will live with the consequences forever." Pettit also is from the Dallas area.

___

Associated Press reporter Jamie Stengle contributed to this report from Dallas.

• 

  By Gianluca Mezzofiore
  March 10, 2015 11:14 GMT

The Islamic State (Isis) has blown up a 10th century Chaldean Catholic church north of Mosul and bulldozed a nearby graveyard, according to sources.

Nineveh Yakou , Assyrian Archaeologist and Director of Cultural Heritage and Indigenous Affairs at A Demand for Action, exclusively told IBTimes UK that the Mar Gorgis or George (St George or Markourkas) monastery has been "wiped out" by IS militants.

The building, located on the Ba'werah neighbourhood on a hill north of Mosul on the other side of the Tigris river, was founded by the Assyrian Church of the East on the 10th century but rebuilt as a seminary by the Chaldean Catholic Church in 1846.

"The current monastery was built on an archeological site containing ancient Assyrian ruins. It was an important show of continuity from the Assyrian to our culture," Yakou said.

Iraqi Christians attend mass at Mar George Chaldean Church in Baghdad,Reuters

"Isis is wiping out the cultural heritage of Iraq. The monastery was classified as cultural heritage. It's a cultural and ethnic cleansing."

The report was confirmed by Dureid Hikmat Tobia, adviser for minorities of Ninawah province, in a report on Turkish Anadolou news agency.

The attack on the monastery came after IS militants reportedly bulldozed the 2,000-year-old city of Hatra and the Nimrudarchaeological site near Mosul.

Two weeks ago, the jihadist group published a video showing militants destroying artefacts in a Mosul museum and at the Nergal Gate to ancient Nineveh, taking a sledgehammer to artefacts.

The attacks on artefacts and antiquities in Iraq and Syria are carried out in the name of an iconoclastic and strict interpretation of Islamic law. IS draws inspiration from early Islamic history, rejects religious shrines and condemns Iraq's majority Shi'ite Muslims as heretics.

(International Business Times)

Are we on the verge of an unprecedented global currency crisis? On Tuesday, the euro briefly fell below $1.07 for the first time in almost a dozen years. And the U.S. dollar continues to surge against almost every other major global currency. The U.S. dollar index has now risen an astounding 23 percent in just the last eight months. That is the fastest pace that the U.S. dollar has risen since 1981. You might be tempted to think that a stronger U.S. dollar is good news, but it isn’t. A strong U.S. dollar hurts U.S. exports, thus harming our economy. In addition, a weak U.S. dollar has fueled tremendous expansion in emerging markets around the planet over the past decade or so. When the dollar becomes a lot stronger, it becomes much more difficult for those countries to borrow more money and repay old debts. In other words, the emerging market “boom” is about to become a bust. Not only that, it is important to keep in mind that global financial institutions bet a tremendous amount of money on currency movements. According to the Bank for International Settlements, 74 trillion dollars in derivatives are tied to the value of the U.S. dollar, the value of the euro and the value of other global currencies. When currency rates start flying around all over the place, you can rest assured that someone out there is losing an enormous amount of money. If this derivatives bubble ends up imploding, there won’t be enough money in the entire world to bail everyone out.

Do you remember what happened the last time the U.S. dollar went on a great run like this?

As you can see from the chart below, it was in mid-2008, and what followed was the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression…

A rapidly rising U.S. dollar is extremely deflationary for the overall global economy.

This is a huge red flag, and yet hardly anyone is talking about it.

Meanwhile, the euro continues to spiral into oblivion…

How many times have I said it? The euro is heading to all-time lows. It is going to go to parity with the U.S. dollar, and then it is eventually going to go below parity.

This is going to cause massive headaches in the financial world.

The Europeans are attempting to cure their economic problems by creating tremendous amounts of new money. It is the European version of quantitative easing, but it is having some very nasty side effects.

The markets are starting to realize that if the value of the U.S. dollar continues to surge, it is ultimately going to be very bad for stocks. In fact, the strength of the U.S. dollar is being cited as the primary reason for the Dow’s 332 point decline on Tuesday…

The Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 300 points to below the index’s 50-day moving average, wiping out gains for the year. The S&P 500 also closed in the red for the year and breached its 50-day moving average, which is an indicator of the market trend. Only the Nasdaq held onto gains of 2.61 percent for the year.

There’s “concern that energy and the strength in the dollar will somehow be negative for the equities,” said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at Wunderlich Securities. He noted that the speed of the dollar’s surge was the greatest market driver, amid mixed economic data and concerns about the Federal Reserve raising interest rates.

And as I noted above, when the U.S. dollar rises the things that we export to other nations become more expensive and that hurts our businesses.

This is so basic that even the White House understands it…

Despite reassurance from The Fed that a strengthening dollar is positive for US jobs, The White House has now issued a statement that a “strengthening USD is a headwind for US growth.”

But even more important, a surging U.S. dollar makes it more difficult for emerging markets all over the world to borrow new money and to repay old debts. This is especially true for nations that heavily rely on exporting commodities…

It becomes especially ugly for emerging market economies that produce commodities. Many emerging market countries rely on their natural resources for growth and haven’t yet developed more advanced industries. As the products of their principal industries decline in value, foreign investors remove available credit while their currency is declining against the U.S. dollar. They don’t just find it difficult to pay their debt – it is impossible.

It has been estimated that emerging markets have borrowed more than 3 trillion dollars since the last financial crisis.

But now the process that created the emerging markets “boom” is starting to go into reverse.

The global economy is fueled by cheap dollars. So if the U.S. dollar continues to rise, that is not going to be good news for anyone.

And of course the biggest potential threat of all is the 74 trillion dollar currency derivatives bubble which could end up bursting at any time.

The sophisticated computer algorithms that financial institutions use to trade currency derivatives are ultimately based on human assumptions. When currencies move very little and the waters are calm in global financial markets, those algorithms tend to work really, really well.

But when the unexpected happens, some of the largest financial firms in the world can implode seemingly overnight.

Just remember what happened to Lehman Brothers back in 2008. Unexpected events can cripple financial giants in just a matter of hours.

Today, there are five U.S. banks that each have more than 40 trillion dollars of total exposure to derivatives of all types. Those five banks are JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citibank and Morgan Stanley.

By transforming Wall Street into a gigantic casino, those banks have been able to make enormous amounts of money.

But they are constantly performing a high wire act. One of these days, their reckless gambling is going to come back to haunt them, and the entire global financial system is going to be severely harmed as a result.

As I have said so many times before, derivatives are going to be at the heart of the next great global financial crisis.

And thanks to the wild movement of global currencies in recent months, there are now more than 74 trillion dollars in currency derivatives at risk.

Anyone that cannot see trouble on the horizon at this point is being willingly blind.