Freedom of Press Across the World, “Dramatically Worse,” US Slips Further Behind

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The non-profit organization Reporters Without Borders, devoted to supporting journalists worldwide, published its annual index this month. In six continents, the conditions for free media in 2014 became not just worse, but “dramatically worse,” according to the group’s “2015 World Press Freedom Index”. . .

In two-thirds of the 180 surveyed countries the indicators for press freedom have declined. Violations against freedom of information rose by 8 percent (to a total of 3,719) compared to 2014 and by almost 10 percent compared to 2013. For a number of countries, no data is available at all, being closed to any independent journalistic activity.

Not surprisingly, there is a strong correlation between media freedom, political freedoms and economic freedom. In countries where individuals are able to exercise their freedom to create economic activity, according to The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, the media also tend to function as watchdogs of government activity. In both categories, the majority of countries in the top are western democracies.

Totalitarian and Communist states rank much further down, and at the bottom of the information list are “black holes,” where independent information simply does not exist. Countries in this segment are from regions such as North Africa and the Middle East controlled by non-state terrorist groups like ISIS or Boko Haram.

The United States disappointingly ranks 46th, having declined three places in 2014. This is due to the Obama administration’s heavy handed approach to certain journalists, including the New York Times’ James Risen, who came under pressure to reveal his sources.(Read more about the freedom of press across the world HERE)

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UN Investigating Horrific Claims That ISIS is Stealing and Selling Organs

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By Ray Sanchez. The United Nations is looking into claims that ISIS — already considered the wealthiest terrorist group on record — may be harvesting organs from slain civilians and gaining financial benefits by trafficking the body parts, officials said Wednesday.

But Britain’s ambassador to the U.N., Mark Lyall Grant, said the issue has not been officially discussed. Grant said there was no proof or evidence of the claim made by Iraq’s ambassador to the United Nations.

The Iraqi ambassador, Mohamed Alhakim, on Tuesday urged the Security Council to investigate the deaths of 12 doctors in Mosul, Iraq. He said they were killed after refusing to remove organs from bodies.

“Some of the bodies we found are mutilated … that means some parts are missing,” he told reporters, adding that there were openings in the back of the bodies where the kidneys would be located.

“This is clearly something bigger than we think,” Alhakim said. (Read more from, “ISIS is Stealing and Selling Organs” HERE)

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How ISIS Makes (and Takes) Money

By Ashley Fantz. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has crude, stomach-turning tactics when it comes to dealing with its enemy, but experts say that its moneymaking methods are highly sophisticated, especially for such a new terror group.

Here’s a look at how ISIS has made (and taken) millions . . .

ISIS makes between $1 million and $2 million each day from oil sales, numerous sources tell CNN. The oil comes mostly from refineries and wells that ISIS controls in northern Iraq and northern Syria.

The militants smuggle oil into southern Turkey, for example, and sell it to people who desperately need it just to carry on some semblance of everyday life.

The United States-led coalition fighting ISIS has repeatedly targeted ISIS oil assets in an effort to, in part, damage this arm of the group’s financial system. (Read more from this story HERE)

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Iraqi Christian Men Join the Fight Against ISIS and Here’s Why

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Photo Credit: Daily Signal By Josh Siegel. Athra Kado had never shot a gun before, let alone seen a battlefield.

Until recently Kado, 25, spent his young career in a classroom, teaching high school students how to speak Syriac, his native language.

But Kado is one of hundreds of Assyrian Christian men—many with no military experience—taking up arms to protect their towns from ISIS terrorists who invaded this part of Iraq early last year.

“If we don’t have land to live, what’s the purpose of teaching a language?” Kado tells The Daily Signal in a Skype interview from a former U.S. military facility outside the city of Kirkuk, where he is finishing up a training camp with 500 or so amateur fighters.

Recruits to the new Christian militia, or battalion, say their villages and families were abandoned by Iraqi government and peshmerga forces last summer, letting the terrorists seize control. (Read more about the Iraqi Christian men joining the fight against ISIS HERE)

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Army Veteran Joins the Fight Against ISIS in Iraq

By Newsmax. Saint Michael, the archangel of battle, is tattooed across the back of a U.S. army veteran who recently returned to Iraq and joined a Christian militia fighting Islamic State in what he sees as a biblical war between good and evil.

Brett, 28, carries the same thumb-worn pocket Bible he did whilst deployed to Iraq in 2006 – a picture of the Virgin Mary tucked inside its pages and his favourite verses highlighted.

“It’s very different,” he said, asked how the experiences compared. “Here I’m fighting for a people and for a faith, and the enemy is much bigger and more brutal.”

Thousands of foreigners have flocked to Iraq and Syria in the past two years, mostly to join Islamic State, but a handful of idealistic Westerners are enlisting as well, citing frustration their governments are not doing more to combat the ultra-radical Islamists or prevent the suffering of innocents.

The militia they joined is called Dwekh Nawsha – meaning self-sacrifice in the ancient Aramaic language spoken by Christ and still used by Assyrian Christians, who consider themselves the indigenous people of Iraq. (Read more from this story HERE)

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Despite ISIS Forcing Her Out of Her Home, Young Girl Asks God to Forgive the ISIS Militants

By Samuel Smith. Even though her village was seized by the Islamic State and she’s now living a rough life in an unfinished mall in Kurdish-protected Northern Iraq, a displaced Christian refugee child is asking God to “forgive” the ISIS militants.

After ISIS seized most of the Mosul region of Iraq last June, over 400 mostly Christian displaced Iraqi families from the villages of Qaraqosh, Bartella and Kharamles descended upon the Kurdish capital of Erbil to live in a half-built mall in the in the Christian neighborhood of Ainkawa.

As the families had picked up and fled their villages in a hurry before the ISIS militants reached their towns, the families could only afford to bring bare necessities and are now living in the mall without much more than the mattresses, blankets and other handouts they receive from humanitarian organizations.

A correspondent with the Arabic Christian television network SAT-7’s “Kids” program interviewed children living in the Ainkawa Mall’s refugee camp and asked them what they missed the most about their lives back home.

In talking with the reporter and camera crew, a little girl named Myriam, from Qaraqosh, assured that although her life has changed drastically in the last year and her family’s future remains uncertain, God continues to provide for her and her family. (Read more from this story HERE)

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Vicar of Baghdad Warns Westerners: Don’t Join Christian Militia Against ISIS, Christians Are ‘Hopeless at Fighting’

By Leonardo Blair. Concerned about reports that some idealistic Christian sympathizers have been moving to Iraq and Syria to join the fight against ISIS, the Vicar of Baghdad, Rev. Canon Andrew White, warned against the trend this week because, he said, the Christian militia fighting against ISIS in Iraq is “hopeless at fighting.”

Recounting a conversation he had with one of his Iraqi Christian guards to Christian Today while on a fundraising mission in Tennessee, White explained that the Christian fighters are “universally hopeless at fighting, let alone fighting ISIS.”

“I said to him (Iraqi Christian guard), ‘What would you do if ISIS were coming toward us?’ He said, ‘I would rip off my uniform and run.’ So I said, ‘Why do you do this job?’ He said, ‘I do it because I need the money,'” said White.

“Christians are no good at being soldiers. If going to join the new militia makes them feel good, great. But it will achieve absolutely nothing. We are dealing with an evil, evil regime as we saw in Libya with the beheadings of the Coptic Christians. There is very little that any Iraqi Christian or British Christian can do to help. The best thing they can do is stay at home,” he added. (Read more from this story HERE)

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Fools Trust the Obama Administration, While Experts Correctly Fear Rising Threats From Russia and Iran

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New York- February 18, 2015. Informed foreign policy and economic experts rightly fear one gathering threat today even more than genocidal attacks by the purported Islamic State and its shadowy network of affiliates–Russia could soon provide military and diplomatic cover to Iran as that nation contrives to topple the monarchy in Saudi Arabia, and subsequently extends control by force over other energy-rich Arab kingdoms, including United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain.

Russia and Iran each have far longer histories as independent nations than America does–over many centuries, they have been enemies, rivals, and friends. In recent months, and particularly since 2008, ties among Russia and Iran have strengthened for defensive reasons, to blunt pressures emanating from the United States and from the European Union.

Going forward, Russia’s potentially muscular protection for Iran (whose Muslim population chiefly are Shia) is particularly irksome for Saudi Arabia, where a majority of the populace is Sunni–no series of workshops or teach-ins will soon reconcile this doctrinal schism.

Worse, given Iran’s demonstrated propensity to meddle throughout the Middle East since 1979, Russia’s growing support for Iran may accelerate attempts by Iran to de-stabilize the energy-laden, eastern province of Saudi Arabia, where a substantial proportion of the population is Shia.

Given recent events in Yemen, where Iranian-backed Houthi rebels quickly seized control over large portions of a country touted as a success story and strong ally by the Obama Administration as recently as last September, Saudi officials watch Russia’s engagement with Iran, America’s retreat from the Middle East, and America’s fomenting of regime change since 2008 everywhere except Iran with profound concern. (Read more from “Fools Trust the Obama Administration, While Experts Correctly Fear Rising Threats From Russia and Iran” HERE)

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BREAKING: ISIS Savages Just Burned 45 To Death As Obama Pursues ‘Strategic Patience’

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Only a few miles from an Iraqi air base where hundreds of U.S. Marines are stationed — and only two weeks after they publicly burned to death a caged Jordanian pilot — ISIS militants have reportedly killed 45 people in the western Iraqi town of al-Baghdadi. The victims are said to have met their deaths by being burned alive.

Fox News reports that some of the dead in the latest mass atrocity committed by Islamic State barbarians are believed to have been members of security forces battling ISIS for control of the town.

Details of the slaughter by fire are still sketchy, though no U.S. personnel are said to have been killed. According to Fox News,

The reports come days after ISIS released a video purportedly showing the beheadings of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians along a beach in Libya, sparking an international outcry, including commendation from Pope Francis, who called the killings “barbaric.”

Read more from “ISIS Savages Burn Dozens” HERE.

Reverend Graham: ‘Imagine the Outcry if 21 Muslims Had Been Beheaded By Christians’

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By Michael W. Chapman. The Islamic State beheaded 21 Egyptian Christians over the weekend, propping the severed heads on the victims’ backs, a barbaric slaughter that led Reverend Franklin Graham to ask, “Can you imagine the outcry if 21 Muslims had been beheaded by Christians?”

“Where is the universal condemnation by Muslim leaders around the world?” he asked.

The brutal killing of the 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians, who had been abducted in Libya by members of the Islamic State, was videotaped and the entire death film was posted online on Sunday, Feb. 15. It is entitled, “A Message Signed With Blood, To The Nation of the Cross.” (Read more on what Reverend Graham said HERE)

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Beheading of 21 Christians Brings ISIS to the Doorstep of Europe

By Lizzie Dearden. The beheading of 21 Coptic Christians on a beach in Libya has brought Isis to the doorstep of Europe.

The mass murder, which provoked a volley of Egyptian air strikes on the group’s Libyan stronghold of Derna, realised long-held fears of militants reaching the Mediterranean coast.

Isis started in Iraq and now controls swathes of adjoining Syria, including along the Turkish border, as part of its so-called Islamic State.

Its ideology has spread much further, with pledges of allegiance from terrorist groups in Egypt, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Yemen and now Libya.

Days before Isis released its gory video depicting the Egyptians’ beheadings, Libya’s former Prime Minister warned that the group would soon reach the Mediterranean and even Europe if order was not restored in the country. (Read more from this story HERE)

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China’s Secret Plan to Topple the US as the World’s Superpower

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In 1995, Michael Pillsbury, an expert on China who has worked with every US president since Nixon and has, he writes, “arguably had more access to China’s military and intelligence establishment than any other Westerner,” was reading an article written by “three of China’s preeminent military experts” about “new technologies that would contribute to the defeat of the United States.”

The article described goals including “electromagnetic combat superiority” that would allow for “naval victory,” and “tactical laser weapons” that would “be used first in anti-missile defense systems.” They also discussed jamming and destroying radar and various communications systems, and the use of computer viruses. It was in this article that Pillsbury first saw the term “Assassin’s Mace,” which refers to a weapon from Chinese folklore that guarantees a small combatant victory over a larger, more powerful opponent . . .

“In the military context,” he writes, “Assassin’s Mace refers to a set of asymmetric weapons that allow an inferior power to defeat a seemingly superior adversary by striking at an enemy’s weakest point.””

At first, Pillsbury writes, he considered these statements aspirational. But as US intelligence analysts translated documents over time, he came to see otherwise. The Assassin’s Mace, he came to believe, was part of a cunning and much broader strategy, a 100-year-long effort to overtake the US as the world’s superpower.

The point of Assassin’s Mace — which, Pillsbury learned, the Chinese were already spending billions of dollars to develop — was to “make a generational leap in military capabilities that can trump the conventional forces of Western powers,” but to do so incrementally, so that by the time they achieved their goal, it would be too late for the US to respond to, much less reverse. (Read more about the secret plan HERE)

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“A Message Signed With Blood to the Nation of the Cross”: US Condemns Another Horrific ISIS Video

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By Hasani Gittens and M. Alex Johnson. The U.S. condemned the videotaped beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians kidnapped in Libya, explicitly blaming ISIS-affiliated terrorists Sunday for the “wanton killing of innocents.”

The Egyptians, dressed in orange jump suits, were beheaded after being forced down on the ground on a beach. An early caption in the video says the location is “Wilayat Tarabulus by the Mediterranean Sea,” which suggests that it was filmed near Tripoli.

Each of the victims, who are all male, is paired with a masked, knife-wielding terrorist and, after a brief statement by the ISIS leader, they are all beheaded.

The video is called “A Message signed with blood to the nation of the cross” and was released by the group’s Al-Hayat Media Center, according to Flashpoint Intelligence, a global security firm and NBC News consultant. (Read more about the horrific ISIS video HERE)

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ISIS Seizes Iraqi Town 5 Miles From Marine Base

By Fox News. Islamic State has reportedly seized al-Baghdadi, in Iraq’s Anbar Province, 5 miles from an air base staffed by U.S. Marines, as the terror group continues its push beyond its bases in Syria and Iraq in an attempt to establish militant affiliates in other countries.

Hundreds of Islamic State fighters reportedly captured most of al-Baghdadi, which is 55 miles from the capital Ramadi, on Thursday.

On Friday, Iraqi soldiers had retaken several government buildings, but the soldiers withdrew early Saturday, handing the town back to the militants, The New York Times reported, citing local security officials.

One local Iraqi official told Reuters that, “Ninety percent of al-Baghdadi district has fallen under the control of the insurgents.”

Militants attacked the town of al-Baghdadi from two directions before advancing inward, Reuters reported. (Read more about the town ISIS seizes HERE)

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ISIS’ Christian Victims Speak Out With An Urgent Message On How They’re Being Targeted For Extinction

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Photo Credit: IJReview By Justen Charters. Following ISIS’ invasion of Iraq, Christians, Yezidis and other minorities were chased from their homes, murdered, enslaved, or displaced.

Sadly, there isn’t a lot being done to help prevent more marginalized sects from becoming victims of the Islamic State’s massacres.

Disturbed by the reports of ISIS trying to snuff out the flames of Christianity in Iraq, former Congressman Frank R. Wolf co-founded the 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative. The Wilberforce vision states:

There has never been a greater need both in history and scope. The rise of ISIS, the declining freedom of speech and communication globally, and the sheer number of religious prisoners around the world pose a critical threat to all of humanity. 21st Century Wilberforce wants to awaken the church to these atrocities and stir Christians and other religious groups to action.

Wilberforce is taking action to bring to light the importance of stopping Iraq’s minorities from being targeted for extinction. (Read more about the ISIS’ victims who are being targeted for extinction HERE)

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ISIS: Smoking Will Kill You, One Way or Another

By Nabih Bulos. Beheadings have become commonplace in the territories held by the militant Islamic State, but the severed head reportedly found last month in the eastern Syrian city of Al-Mayadeen was nevertheless unusual.

It had a cigarette placed between its lips.

“This is not permissible, Sheikh,” someone had scrawled in Arabic on the decapitated corpse lying nearby, according to an account from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a pro-opposition monitoring group. The body and head belonged to an Islamic State official, a deputy police chief.

From consuming alcohol to cursing, vices of all types are frowned upon by Islamic State . . .

Shortly after the group’s takeover of large swaths of Deir Elzur province in eastern Syria, Islamic State began to close tobacco shops and shutter the ubiquitous water-pipe cafes. (Read more from this story HERE)

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Prince Charles Makes Devastating Statement About Islam, Causing Outrage From Muslims

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Photo Credit: Daily Mail Prince Charles risked provoking a new political and religious storm yesterday when he said Muslims living in the UK should follow British values.

In a staunch defence of Britain’s ‘Christian standpoint,’ he denounced the radicalisation of young Britons by Islamic fanatics and said they should show more respect to ‘the values we hold dear’.

People who had ‘come here, were born here or go to school here’ should ‘abide by our values,’ he said. His comments were made as he started a six-day tour of the Middle East, seen as another stage in assuming more of the Queen’s international duties.

It is a clear response to critics who say he should not meddle in sensitive political matters. The Prince will also challenge Arab leaders head-on during the trip.

The Mail on Sunday can disclose that he is to tell new Saudi king Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud to his face that he should stop the 1,000 lashes handed down as punishment to Saudi blogger Raif Badawi for comments which the regime claimed were critical of Islam. (Read more about the statement about Islam HERE)

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