Report Details Torture of ISIS Hostages Before Beheadings

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Photo Credit: APThe four hostages known to have been beheaded earlier this year by the Islamic State militant group in Syria suffered severe physical torture before their deaths, according to a published report.

The New York Times says that hostages were severely beaten, starved, underwent mock executions, and were even waterboarded by their captors. The paper reports that the American and British hostages, including beheaded journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning were singled out for the worst torture, largely because Washington and London have refused to pay the ransoms provided by other Western governments. The Times claims that the waterboarding was so dreaded by the hostages that their fellow prisoners were relieved if they came back from an encounter with their guards covered in blood.

“It was when there was no blood,” a former cellmate told the paper, “that we knew he had suffered something even worse.”

The Times report cites five former hostages, local residents who assisted the Westerners in the region prior to their capture, relatives of the captives and a former member of Islamic State, commonly known as ISIS.

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The Obama Administration Is Great at Talking Big–And Not Following Up

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Photo Credit: NewscomThe Obama administration has responded to the Ebola epidemic by talking big. It does that well. From the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti to Syria’s use of chemical weapons in 2013, the administration has made a lot of splashy responses. But making a splash isn’t the same as being serious.

Take the Haitian earthquake, which killed more than 300,000 people. The initial U.S. response, led by the Department of Defense, saved many lives, though analysis by the Rand Corp. found that our success was mostly due to luck: if different buildings had collapsed, the U.S. response would have been much more compromised. But the U.S. mission ended in June 2010.

That left the ongoing United Nations mission in charge. By late 2010, UN peacekeeping troops from Nepal had caused a cholera epidemic that has killed more than 8,000 people. In early 2010, Haiti seemed so important that it got a line in Obama’s State of the Union address. But by late 2012, the United States had disbursed less than a third of its promised aid. The administration ignored the UN’s failure and moved on.

In 2011, after an online video went viral, Obama deployed U.S. forces to Uganda to hunt down Joseph Kony, the murderous leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army. In March he reinforced that mission. It would be good to eliminate Kony’s small band of killers. But with neighboring South Sudan on the verge of genocide, Kony is little more than an infamous symbol in a region with far more serious problems.

The pattern is the same. A foreign problem makes the administration look bad, so it responds in a big way. But its efforts don’t focus on substance. They’re merely public relations.

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WATCH: Saturday Night Live Ridicules Obama and His Ebola Czar Ron Klain

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Out of sync with MSNBC, NBC’s Saturday Night Live opened last night with a skit in which “President Obama” acknowledged the ineptitude of his administration and “Ron Klain,” the Ebola Czar, conceded to a reporter that he has no medical expertise.

Picking up on poor Democratic prospects in the mid-term elections, the comedy show then had Klain warning “the Ebola virus actually flourishes in warmer climates,” so “if you live in a southern state, such as Louisiana, Arkansas, or Kentucky, you actually may want to avoid any large public spaces like, say, a polling booth.” An “exception, however, is that we believe Latinos in red states may actually have an immunity to Ebola.”

In the video excerpt above of portions of the skit which opened the October 25 show, President Obama asserted re Ebola…

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Early Voting Alters Campaigns' Strategies, Costs

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Photo Credit: AP / Michael BloodFor over 1 million Californians, the Nov. 4 election is over. That’s because they’ve already voted.

A growing throng of early voters in the nation’s most populous state — perhaps comprising half of all votes to be cast in California’s general election — has stretched Election Day into weeks. Candidates who wait until the end to close the deal with voters will be too late.

“The election is not a one-day event anymore. It’s a 30-day event,” said veteran Democratic strategist Bill Carrick, who is spearheading Kennedy clan member Bobby Shriver’s campaign for Los Angeles County supervisor.

The midterm elections are just over a week away and California is one of more than 30 states in which some form of advance voting is shaping the way campaigns must be conducted. In some rural areas of the state, 8 of every 10 ballots cast could come through the mail.

The strategy-shifting dynamics caused by early voting are coming into play in states such as Florida, where Republican Gov. Rick Scott faces a tough re-election challenge from Democrat Charlie Crist, and Iowa, where GOP Senate candidate Joni Ernst hopes to defeat Democratic Rep. Bruce Braley and pick up one of the six additional seats the party needs for a majority.

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Search for Accused Cop Killer in Pennsylvania Reportedly Turns Up More Blood

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Photo Credit: AP / Pennsylvania State PolicePolice reportedly are planning to examine blood found near a chicken coop Saturday to see if it belongs to a man who is suspected of ambushing a Pennsylvania State Police barracks and has eluded capture for more than six weeks.

The owner of the property in Barrett Township, where the blood was found, sent WNEP-TV photos of police collecting samples of the blood that turned up near the chicken coop and on a nearby walking trail.

Joyce Aleckna told the station investigators are going to test the samples in a lab to see if the blood belongs to 31-year-old survivalist Eric Frein, who is accused of opening fire outside the Blooming Grove state police barracks Sept. 12, killing a trooper and seriously wounding another.

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North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons: Will it Ever Use Them?

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Photo Credit: NK NewsThis week 20 years ago the Agreed Framework between the United States and North Korea was signed, which suspended Pyongyang’s nuclear program in exchange for aid from Washington.

This deal, however, would collapse in the early part of the next decade, and North Korea has since conducted three nuclear tests, making them a de facto nuclear state despite a lack of international recognition. On the 20th anniversary of the Agreed Framework, experts on the North’s nuclear program thus see little reason to celebrate.

In part 4 of an NK News specialist opinion survey, a panel of North Korea watchers surveyed by NK News largely consider the North’s third nuclear test, conducted in early 2013 against the wishes of its long-time ally China, the most significant event on this front in recent years. There have also been, however, suspicious developments at the Yongbyon reactor – whose cooling tower was destroyed after an agreement with Washington in 2008, but whose activities were evidently relaunched in 2013 following an announcement from Pyongyang.

However, North Korea watchers are convinced that the odds of a nuclear attack by the rogue state against its antagonists – Seoul, Tokyo and Washington – remains unlikely even if the North develops the ability to do so. The risk, they said, remains in the potential for miscalculation given the North’s tense relationship with those states, particularly Seoul.

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George P. Bush Says Dad 'Moving Forward' On 2016

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Photo Credit: JEFFREY COLLINS / APFormer Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is “moving forward” on a potential 2016 White House run and it appears more likely he will enter the Republican field, according to his son, who’s running for office in Texas.

George P. Bush told ABC’s “This Week” that his father is “still assessing” a presidential bid, but suggested it was more likely that he would seek the White House this time. The ex-governor declined to run for president in 2012 despite encouragement from Republicans.

“I think it’s more than likely that he’s giving this a serious thought and moving — and moving forward,” said the younger Bush, who is running for Texas land commissioner.

Asked if that meant it was “more than likely that he’ll run,” George P. Bush responded: “That he’ll run. If you had asked me a few years back … I would have said it was less likely.”

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Elon Musk Says ‘We Are Summoning the Demon’ with Artificial Intelligence

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Photo Credit: ReutersElon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and founder of SpaceX, said Friday that artificial intelligence is probably the biggest threat to humans.

Musk, who addressed MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics department’s Centennial Symposium for about an hour, mulled international oversight to “make sure we don’t do something very foolish,” The Washington Post reported.

He was not specific about any particular threat, but appeared to theorize out loud.

“With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon,” he said. “In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like yeah he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.”

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Evacuations Possible As Lava Continues To Flow From Hawaii Volcano

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Photo Credit: U.S. Geological Survey / APThe Puna region of Hawaii is under alert as lava continues to flow from the Kilauea volcano. The Associated Press reports:

Authorities on Sunday said lava flow on the Big Island of Hawaii had advanced about 250 yards since Saturday morning. The flow front had entered a cemetery and was about a half-mile from Pahoa Village Road, the town’s main street.

Residents in the flow path, in the mostly rural region of Puna, were told to complete all necessary preparations by Tuesday for a possible evacuation.

The lava flow now threatening Pahoa, the largest town in Puna, began in June.

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Worldwide Surge in 'Great' Earthquakes Seen in Past 10 Years

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Photo Credit: HARISH TYAGI / EPThe annual number of “great” earthquakes nearly tripled over the last decade, providing a reminder to Americans that unruptured faults like those in the northwest United States might be due for a Big One.

Between 2004 and 2014, 18 earthquakes with magnitudes of 8.0 or more rattled subduction zones around the globe. That’s an increase of 265 percent over the average rate of the previous century, which saw 71 great quakes, according to a report to the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America this week in Vancouver, British Columbia.

It’s clear that recent “great” earthquakes “triggered” related major quakes, says study author Thorne Lay, distinguished professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

“If we look at all earthquake magnitudes, the past 10 years is not unusual in terms of the rate of events; the rate increases are just seen for events with magnitudes larger than 7.5 or so,” he said. “This suggests that great events were ‘catching up’ on the plate boundary motions in several regions with fortuitous similar timing.”

And by fortuitous, Lay means that he thinks it’s just coincidence that all those big earthquakes happened over the last 10 years.

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