Suicide Bomber Attack Near Funeral, ISIS Believed to be Involved

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

By Associated Press. BAGHDAD – A government official says the death toll in a suicide bombing at a funeral north of Baghdad is now 15.

An Interior Ministry spokesman says the bomber blew himself up inside a funeral tent in a farming area outside the mainly Sunni town of Taji, about 12 miles north of Baghdad. He said another 26 mourners were wounded in the attack. (Read more about the suicide bomber attack HERE)

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Nearly 200 Fighters Executed by ISIS For Trying to Return Home

By Ben Tufft. Isis has executed at least 120 of its own militants in the past three months, the majority of whom were foreign fighters trying to return home, according to a Syrian monitoring group.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that the brutal militant group killed the jihadists – most of whom were foreign fighters – for trying to flee the territory adding that the true number could be even higher.

Rami Abdurrahman, the director of the group, told The Independent: “We can confirm that 120 fighters have been killed by Isis, but from our sources on the ground we believe that over 200 have actually been killed.”

Of the 120 militants confirmed executed for “exceeding the limits in religion”, 116 are believed to be foreign fighters who wanted to return home. (Read more from this story HERE)
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Taliban Claims America ‘Defeated’ in Afghanistan

By Geoffrey Norman. Reuters is reporting that:

Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan on Monday declared the “defeat” of the U.S. and its allies in the 13-year-old war, a day after the coalition officially marked the end of its combat mission.

Meanwhile, as the AP reports:

Thousands of Afghans are pouring into makeshift camps in the capital where they face a harsh winter as the Taliban return to areas once cleared by foreign forces, who this week are marking the end of their combat mission. (Read more from this story HERE)

Another Mystery Airline Disappearance; Search Continues for Missing Airbus A320 Carrying 162

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Asia MournersBy Bart Jansen and John Bacon. Southeast Asia was mourning its third airline catastrophe of the year Sunday after an AirAsia jet with 162 people aboard vanished in violent weather and was believed to be at the bottom of an Indonesian sea.

The fate of Flight 8501 remained a mystery almost a full day after it vanished. . .

The Airbus A320 was bound for Singapore from Surabaya, Indonesia, when it lost contact with air-traffic control Sunday at about 7:24a.m. Singapore time, the airline said.

“We have no idea at the moment what went wrong,” said Tony Fernandes, CEO of the regional, low-cost carrier. “Let’s not speculate at the moment”. . .

The tragedy marks the third commercial air disaster involving airlines in the region this year. Mystery still shrouds Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared without a trace en route to Beijing on March 8 with 239 people aboard. On July 17, another Malaysia Airlines flight was shot down over rebel-controlled eastern Ukraine while on a flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, killing all 298 people on board. (Read more about this mystery airline disappearance HERE)
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Anek Ferry BurningHundreds of passengers endure freezing 24 hours on burning ferry in Adriatic

By Barbie Nadeau. Hundreds of desperate passengers are enduring freezing conditions on a stricken ferry that has been burning in the Adriatic Sea for 24 hours.

Helicopters with night vision equipment have been working through the night to pull them off, one by one.

On Monday morning, the Italian Navy announced that 265 people had beenAnek Ferry Rescue rescued from the Norman Atlantic, which was traveling between the Greek port of Igoumenitsa and the Italian port of Ancona when fire broke out deep in the parking bay.

Authorities said 213 remained on board, including the captain, who was helping to coordinate the rescues.

After waiting hours in rough conditions, one Greek man told Italian state broadcaster RAI TV that passengers were “dying of cold and suffocating from the smoke,” and that their feet were “burning” from the heat of the flames. (Read more from this story HERE)

In US-Cuba Prisoner Swap, Mystery Surrounds the Unnamed 53

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prisonerCuba’s most prominent dissidents say they have been kept in the dark by U.S. officials over a list of 53 political prisoners who will be released from jail as part of a deal to end decades of hostility between the United States and Cuba.

For years, dissident leaders have told the United States which opponents of Cuba’s communist government were being jailed or harassed, but they say they were not consulted when the list of prisoners to be freed was drawn up or even told who is on it.

The lack of information has stoked concern and frustration among the dissidents, who worry that the secret list is flawed and that genuine political prisoners who should be on it will be left to languish.

“We’re concerned because we don’t agree with the silence, because we have a right to know who they are. Who are they?” said Berta Soler, leader of the Ladies in White dissident group, which marches in Havana on Sundays to demand the release of prisoners.

“There are not just 53 political prisoners, there are more, and we are concerned that the U.S. list might have common criminals on it,” she told Reuters in Havana. (Read more on the US-Cuba prisoner swap HERE)

New Islamic Terrorist Tactic: Little Girl Suicide Bombers

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Photo Credit: The Guardian

Photo Credit: The Guardian

By Nicholas Kurch. The Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram has ramped up attacks and is now using female children to carry out their mission to create an Islamic state in the region. One 13-year-old girl says she was given to Boko Haram by her father and was told, along with two other girls, to attack a textile factory in Kano, Nigeria’s second largest city.

“When I was told I would have to die to enter paradise, that I would have to explode a bomb and die, I said I cannot do it,” the 13-year-old girl said.

Two of the girls detonated their suicide-vests, killing 4 and injuring the girl. When it was the girl’s turn, she could not go through with the attack and turned herself in to police.

“I said no. I said I would not detonate,” the girl said.

The young girl said her father, who at the time of this writing is still at large, joined Boko Haram and gave her daughter to the organization to be used as the leaders saw fit. (Read more about Islam’s girl suicide bombers HERE)

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Al-Qaida Calls For ‘Lone Wolf’ Attacks On Airliners

By Katie Frates. The article says the purpose of the attacks is to “crush the enemy’s economy,” and describes a lone wolf as “hard to uncover, because none knows him but Allah. He has no relationship with any group or any individuals.”

The terrorist organization identified American Airlines, United, Delta, British Airways, easyJet and Air France as the airlines to attack, Daily Mail reports. It also targeted Bill Gates and former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, although it describes Bernanke as the current chairman, even though he stepped down in February.

The magazine, published by Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, urges readers to take inspiration from Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the “underpants bomber” who attempted in 2009 to blow up a plane on Christmas. The attack failed when the bomb did not fully detonate, and he is now serving a life sentence in the U.S. It also praises Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a suspect in the Boston Marathon Bombing in 2013 that killed three and injured over 200. (Read more from this story HERE)

Young Boy Escapes ISIS by Becoming a Suicide Bomber

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ISIS BeheadingBy Nicholas Kurch. Fourteen-year-old Usaid Barho of Syria was just like any other kid: He loved playing sports, listening to music and wanted to one day become a doctor.

Then he was thrust into the world of ISIS, who pressured him to become a member by using his Islamic faith. When he realized that ISIS was not for him, he escaped the terror group the only way he knew how.

He volunteered himself to become a suicide bomber.

Rather than killing himself and many others at a mosque in Baghdad, Barho immediately surrendered himself to authorities. The bomb-vest was disarmed and the boy was taken into custody:

“’If I were a fighter and tried to surrender to security forces they might kill me, with my gun in my hand,’ he said explaining how he used the opportunity as a suicide bomber to escape ISIS.” (Read more about how the young boy escapes ISIS HERE)

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Nearly 2,000 Executed by ISIS Since June

By Newsmax. Islamic State group jihadists have murdered nearly 2,000 people in Syria — half of them from an important Sunni tribe — since announcing their “caliphate” in June, a monitoring group said Sunday.

“The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has documented the execution by the Islamic State of 1,878 people in Syria between June 28 when it announced its ‘caliphate’ and December 27,” the group said in a statement. . .

It said the victims were shot dead, beheaded or stoned to death in the provinces of Aleppo, Deir Ezzor, Hama, Homs, Hasakeh and Raqa.

Of those killed, 1,175 were civilians who included four children and eight women.

The dead included 930 members of the Shaitat tribe which rose up against IS in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor in the summer. (Read more from this story HERE)

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ISIS Goes to Twitter to Ask how Fighter Pilot Should be Killed

By Justen Charters. Following the capture of Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasba by ISIS terrorists, the Islamic State and its followers have taken to Twitter to show the world that depravity is just a game to them.

While ISIS is infamous for beheading its captives, some of their suggestions on what to do with al-Kasaba are even more barbaric than beheading. According to Voactiv:

ISIS supporters are having the morbid debate predominantly on Twitter, using the hashtag “Suggest a Way to Kill the Jordanian Pilot Pig”. With over a thousand retweets, the hashtag is gaining popularity.

One terrorist recommends to use a bulldozer to run over al-Kasaba. (Read more from this story HERE)

Obama Admin. Spends Christmas Helping Islamists Get Off Terror List

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Muslim BillboardsBy Patrick Howley. The Obama administration spent Christmas week trying to get two Islamist organizations off a foreign country’s terror list.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim American Society are both listed as Islamist organizations by the Islamist Money In Politics database, which tracks copious political spending by figures linked to the groups. The Muslim American Society was founded as an American-based Muslim Brotherhood front group.

CAIR and MAS representatives met with “senior U.S. government officials” just days before Christmas to discuss the groups’ inclusion on the United Arab Emirates’ official list of terrorist organizations.

Read more about how the Obama Administration was helping Islamists with their terror problems HERE.
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Bachmann: Obama Has Embraced “Islamic Jihad” at Every Turn

By David McCabe. Outgoing Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) says President Obama has embraced the “agenda of Islamic jihad” at every turn.

“I have been very surprised, to answer your question, to see the president of the United States, at every turn, cut the legs off of our ally Israel, and in fact embrace and lift up the agenda of Islamic jihad,” she said in an interview released Wednesday with “Washington Watch,” a radio show produced by the socially conservative Family Research Council.

Bachmann criticized the president for writing to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to encourage a deal on Tehran’s nuclear program.

“This really is a spiritual battle that we’re dealing with,” she added. “And while the president continues to say that this is not about the religion of Islam, I beg to differ.” Read more from this story HERE.

North Korean Internet "Erased From the Global Map"; US Attack Suspected

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Photo credit: kalleboo

Photo credit: kalleboo

By Dana Ford. North Korea’s Internet was back up Tuesday after a more than nine-hour outage, according to Dyn Research, a company that monitors Internet performance.

The disruption came amid an escalating war of words between the United States and North Korea over a massive cyberattack on Sony Pictures.

“Usually there are isolated blips, not continuous connectivity problems. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are absorbing some sort of attack presently,” Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research, said when the Internet was down.

Matthew Prince, president of CloudFlare, a performance and security company, described the disruption as if “all the routes to get to North Korea just disappeared.

“It’s as if North Korea got erased from the global map of the Internet,” he said.

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Canadians Fight Back Against North Korea, Plan ‘The Interview’ Showings

By Natalie Johnson. Sony Pictures’ controversial cancellation of a new movie, “The Interview,” following North Korean terrorist threats has inspired planned independent screenings in Toronto and Montreal.

Taylor Scollon’s Toronto Facebook event “The Interview Screening/Suck It, Kim Jong Un/Liberty in North Korea Fundraiser” launched Dec. 19 and has already garnered 4,400 “attending” responses.

“The North Korean regime maintains power through fear, and I think it’s troubling that they are (successfully at this point) using fear to suppress criticism and satire, even outside their borders,” Scollon told Mashable.

He added that the movie’s cancellation is a “good opportunity to raise awareness about the ongoing plight of the North Korean people.” Read more from this story HERE.

Watch a Green Comet Streak Across the Sky for Christmas

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green cometDiscovered only this past August, comet Lovejoy (C/2014 Q2) is now quickly brightening to naked-eye visibility as it moves from the deep southern sky into prime viewing location for observers throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The comet is already putting on a Christmas show, glowing green thanks to molecules that glow when hit by the sun’s solar wind.

This icy visitor to the inner solar system was first spotted by its namesake, Terry Lovejoy, an Australian astronomer using a common backyard telescope with only an eight-inch mirror. He spotted the comet while it was still a very faint 15th magnitude.

The comet wasn’t predicted to become visible with the unaided eye until late January or February 2015. But comets can be unpredictable, with chaotic surface activity as they heat up and melt while nearing the sun during orbit. Since summer, the comet’s brightness has shot up by hundreds of times.

In fact, some observers in the Southern Hemisphere are reporting that it has brightened to magnitude 6, meaning that it has technically reached naked-eye levels already. It’s now an easy target to find with binoculars, showing up as a distinct hazy ball.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Preacher Who Brought Down a Dictator

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Romanian Pastor[H]ow many of us know the story of Laszlo Tokes, a Protestant pastor who in December 1989 stood up to the Romanian communist despot Nicolae Ceausescu and sparked a people’s revolution that freed Romania from a tyranny the equal of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin?

In the spring of 1989, while other Soviet satellites were challenging their communist leaders, Romania remained in the iron grip of the totalitarian Ceausescu regime. Few dared to speak out against “President” Ceausescu and his Stalinist secret police, the Securitate.

A notable exception was 37-year-old Laszlo Tokes, the assistant pastor of the Hungarian Reformed Church in the Transylvanian town of Timisoara. The theme of his sermons was simple but arresting: “We do not have to support the dictatorship and the dictator Ceausescu.” No one had dared utter such a public challenge.

Ordered to stop preaching, Tokes refused. Directed to leave the apartment in which he and his family were living and move to a distant isolated town, he refused. In November, attackers armed with knives broke into his church apartment, but Tokes and friends fought them off. In mid-December when an eviction order was issued, members of Tokes’s congregation began a vigil outside his lodging, and a human chain formed around the block. . .

Two days later, on direct orders from Ceausescu, communist troops fired on a large crowd gathered in the town center of Timisoara, killing hundreds and perhaps thousands of innocents. This cowardly bloody act was the catalyst for a spontaneous people’s revolt that quickly spread across the country and to the capital city of Bucharest.

Read more about how this preacher brought down a dictator HERE.

North Korea Blames US For Internet Outage, Calls Obama a "Monkey Inhabiting a Tropical Rainforest"

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NKoreaLeaderBy FoxNews.com. North Korea blames the U.S. for the country’s internet shutdown amid allegations of the country hacking Sony Pictures as retaliation for releasing a movie featuring the assassination of the Kim Jong-un.

The country’s National Defense Commission also hurled a racial insult toward President Obama calling him a “monkey inhabiting a tropical forest.”

The regime has vehemently denied any involvement in the cyberattack on Sony, but has expressed its displeasure of the movie.

It is not the first time North Korea has hurled insults toward Washington. Earlier this year, the North called U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry a wolf with a “hideous” lantern jaw and then called South Korean President Park Guen-hye a prostitute. (Read more about how North Korea blames US HERE)
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FBI’s Claim that North Korea Hacked Sony Faces Criticism

By Judson Berger. It’s been a week since the U.S. government blamed North Korea for the cyber-attack against Sony Pictures Entertainment — and many security experts still aren’t convinced Kim Jong-un is the culprit.

The FBI’s announcement, rather than settling the debate, has only fueled widespread speculation over the source of the attack.

Skeptics claim the evidence the FBI cited is flimsy and inconclusive. They question whether Pyongyang really had the motive, or the ability, to scramble Sony’s systems.

And they’re pushing a range of alternative theories.

Could it have been a disgruntled former Sony employee? Another, more technologically savvy, foreign government? A private band of hackers? (Read more from this story HERE)
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Some Speculate that North Korean Hackers are Behind Fatal Accident at South Korean Nuclear Plant

By John Hayward. South Korea’s government-run hydroelectric and nuclear power company was threatened by an enigmatic group of hackers last week, at the same time the North Korean government was threatening to attack the United States and its allies for daring to suggest that Kim Jong Un’s regime might be behind the attack on Sony Pictures. South Korea puts up with a steady stream of mischief from hackers who profess varying degrees of separation from the North Korean government, but this latest threat was taken very seriously.

The mysterious attackers stole and published blueprints of South Korean nuclear reactors and personal data on plant employees, along with some ominous technical data related to accidental radiation exposure, and suggested something bad would happen if at least three of the country’s 23 reactors were not shut down by Christmas Day. As the UK Independent reported, anti-nuke radicals in Hawaii claimed responsibility for the data leak, but their culpability was not firmly established. Students of the First Cyber War should by now be familiar with the shadow dances of deniability and separation conducted by hostile regimes, and the converse possibility that the work of independent digital vandals could be mistakenly attributed to foreign powers with aligned interests… especially if said foreign powers make a point of applauding when something goes kablooey. Nobody’s wearing a uniform or marching under a flag in this new brand of warfare.

The South Korean government took the threat seriously enough to conduct emergency drills and step up cybersecurity efforts. Emergency teams were put on standby alert through New Year’s Day. . .

Today brings word that a fatal accident has occurred at the site of a nuclear plant under construction in the southeastern city of Ulsan. (Read more from this story HERE)
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The Anti-North Korean film The Interview hit with hundreds of thousands of pirated downloads on Christmas

By Daniel Nussbaum. The Interview is a hit with pirates. The now-infamous Sony Pictures comedy has already been illegally downloaded over 750,000 times in its first 20 hours of release, file-sharing news website TorrentFreak told Breitbart News Thursday morning.

The film began popping up on illegal downloading sites about an hour after its 1 pm Eastern release on YouTube, XBox, Google Play, and other online avenues on Christmas Day. However, only U.S. residents could watch the film through those online outlets, leaving many international users out of luck.

That’s where the pirating comes in. Many commenters on the torrent’s download page indicated that they would have paid to see the film, had they been given the opportunity.

“I want to pay to see it,” wrote one commenter. “But as I’m not in the US, I can’t pay to see it or see it from where I live. It’s not even out in the cinemas where I live and probably will not be. So torrent is the only way I can see it.”

Even the torrent site The Pirate Bay, considered the largest in the world, included a link to the film on the top left corner of its site, despite the site having been down for weeks after a raid by Swedish police crippled its servers. (Read more from this story HERE)