Motorcycle Mob Slaughters Christian Village

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forestfiresSuspected Boko Haram militants, who arrived on motorcycles throwing bombs, raided a mostly Christian town in Nigeria’s northeast after nightfall on Saturday, residents and a military source said.

Residents said scores of people had been killed in the town of Shani, but a police source said they had been unable to verify the death toll as communications to the town had been largely cut off.

“They rode on motorcycles and were more than 30 men. They started throwing bombs into houses…then the Boko Haram fired shots at people fleeing,” resident Ishaya Brimah told Reuters by phone from a nearby village on Sunday.

“They set ablaze the police station, houses and a telecom mast…I saw people fleeing, some bodies on the ground.”

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Jordan’s King Abdullah: Battling ISIS Is ‘Our Third World War’ (+video)

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0 (8)Jordan’s King Abdullah believes battling the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and other terrorist groups is “our third world war.”

Speaking to “CBS This Morning,” Abdullah stated that ISIS is a Muslim problem that they need to take ownership of.

“We need to stand up and say what is right and what is wrong. This is no reflection of our religion. This is evil and all of us have got to make that decision,” Abdullah, who is in Washington to meet with President Barack Obama, said. “We have to stand up and say this is the line that is drawn in the sand and those that believe in right should stand on this side and those that don’t have to make a decision should stand on the other. It’s clearly a fight between good and evil. I think it’s a generational fight. As I said to President Putin, I think this is our third world war by other means.”

The United States, along with allies, have been bombing ISIS targets in both Syria and Iraq. The terror group has released several videos showing the beheadings of Americans and British journalists and aid workers.

Abdullah is calling for a “strategic holistic approach” to deal with ISIS.

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WH Fails to Mention Victims in Kenya Terror Attack Were Christians

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de4b8615-d196-486b-8cd1-78e56738c0d3“We extend our deepest condolences to the families and loved ones of the at least 38 individuals killed yesterday,” the White House said in a statement condemning the recent terrorist attacks in Kenya by the Islamist militant group al-Shabaab. “The United States will continue to support Kenya and our regional partners in combating terrorism and violent extremism and protecting human rights.”

The statement is missing one glaring detail, however: Those killed were mainly Christians who were singled out and separated from their fellow Muslim workers.

As a reminder of what happened:

Islamic militant group al-Shabaab has killed 36 non-Muslim quarry workers, mainly Christians, after separating them from Muslims at a camp in Kenya. The attack, 10 miles from the town of Mandera, was reportedly carried out in retaliation for the Kenyan army’s presence and anti-terror operations in Somalia.

“The militia separated the Muslims, then ordered the non-Muslims to lie down where they shot them on the head at close range,” said Hassan Duba, an elder at a nearby village, according to Reuters.

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Report: Al Qaeda Planning Five-Plane Terrorist 'Spectacular' For Christmas

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

Al Qaeda jihadists, possibly using plans organized by a Khorasan group bomb-maker, are planning what the Sunday Express called a Christmas “spectacular” in a report released by the British newspaper this week.

Citing anonymous sources including a “well-placed security insider,” the report suggests that European officials are preparing to enhance their security at airports to prevent what many see as an “almost inevitable” attempt at a terrorist attack by sleeper cells in the UK and elsewhere. One source working within the airport security industry told the paper that officials have “been waiting for the big one” and described the threat as “real and alive”: “We’ve been told that five planes are being targeted in a high profile hit before Christmas.”

As officials decide how to handle the threat, it is possible that multiple European flights may ban electronic devices and, possibly, all hand luggage, though such decisions have yet to be taken. Express cites one source as explaining that major European cities will likely be the targets, and those used to carry on the attacks may be members of sleeper cells that would not arouse suspicion. Targeting Europe rather than America seems a deliberate choice, said one source, because “the U.S has improved their security over the summer but we have not.”

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Gorbachev Accuses US of Stoking ‘New Cold War’

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Photo Credit: VASILY MAXIMOV / AFP

Photo Credit: VASILY MAXIMOV / AFP

Mikhail Gorbachev has claimed that American “triumphalism” is stoking a new Cold War and called for “avid militarists” to stop dragging Europe into conflict.

The former Soviet leader spoke out as Ukrainian forces and separatist rebels agreed to a partial ceasefire in the civil war in the east of the country, which has killed at least 4,300 people since a Moscow-backed uprising broke out in April.

Mr Gorbachev said there was still time to defuse the standoff between Moscow and the West, as he and his western counterparts had done during the Perestroika period.

“Now there are once again signs of a Cold War,” he said in an interview with Tass, the state-owned news agency. “This process can and must be stopped. After all, we did it in the 1980s. We opted for de-escalation, for the reunification (of Germany). And back then it was a lot tougher than now. So we could do it again.”

Mr Gorbachev, 83, who has run a civil society foundation since he retired from politics, said he thought the United States was largely to blame for the confrontation today. “I don’t want to praise our government too much,” he said. “It has also made quite a few errors, but today the danger comes from the American position. They are tortured by triumphalism.”

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Pope Says it is Wrong to Equate Islam with Violence

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Umit Bektas

Photo Credit: REUTERS / Umit Bektas

Pope Francis said on Sunday that equating Islam with violence was wrong and called on Muslim leaders to issue a global condemnation of terrorism to help dispel the stereotype.

Francis, the leader of 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, told reporters aboard his plane returning from a visit to Turkey that he understood why Muslims were offended by many in the West who automatically equated their religion with terrorism.

Francis’ predecessor, Benedict XVI, caused storms of protest throughout the Islamic world in 2006, when he made a speech that suggested to many Muslims that he believed Islam espoused violence.

Benedict said he had been misunderstood and apologized. But this year, the image of a violent religion has once more been promoted by Islamic State, who have seized swathes of Syria and Iraq, slaughtering or driving out Shi’ite Muslims, Christians and others who do not share their radical brand of Sunni Islam.

The Argentine pope, who has been trying to foster cooperation with moderate Islam in order to work for peace and protect Christians in the Middle East, said it was wrong for anyone to react to terrorism by being “enraged” against Islam.

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Flu Vaccine Death Toll Rises

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Photo Credit: Daniel PaquetRome: The number of people who have died in Italy after being administered a flu vaccine made by Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis has risen to 13.

The Italian Medical Agency (AIFA) has warned against panic and stressed there is not proof yet that it was the vaccine that led to the deaths.

However it said it had banned two batches of the product – called FLUAD – as a precautionary measure, pending further studies.

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Four Family Members Traveled to Syria to Fight Alongside ISIS

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Photo Credit: ISIS video

Photo Credit: ISIS video

Four members of the same family are suspected of having flown to Syria to fight alongside the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

Two brothers aged 17 and 20, from Camden in north London, are believed to have traveled with their cousins via Milan to Istanbul before they all crossed the border into Syria, The Sunday Timesreports.

The boys from London, who have not been named, were reported missing by their parents when they noticed that they had disappeared sometime in September.

Their cousins, also brothers and are from Wednesbury in the Midlands, have been identified as Mejanul Islam, 22, and Kamran Islam, 19, and their parents told the Sunday Times that the young men had told them that they were going to London to visit their extended family.

Their father Saydul Islam, 43, told the newspaper that there was no concrete knowledge as to where they went or when they are expected to return.

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Turkish President: The West Wants Muslims Dead

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Photo Credit: Daily Caller

The hardline president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, declared that the West doesn’t like Muslims and wants to see them dead in a Thursday address in Istanbul.

“Believe me, they don’t like us,” Erdogan stated at a meeting of the Standing Committee for Economic and Commercial Cooperation of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (COMCEC), Agence France-Presse reports. “They look like friends, but they want us dead, they like seeing our children die. How long will we stand that fact?”

The Turkish president, who’s a noted Muslim fundamentalist and Western critic, further claimed the West and “foreigners” in general only want to exploit the Muslim world for its resources and intentionally spread conflict in the region.

“Only we can solve our problems. I speak openly; foreigners love oil, gold, diamonds, and the cheap labor force of the Islamic world. They like the conflicts, fights and quarrels of the Middle East,” Erdogan said.

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'They Even Cut the Throats of the Babies': Yazidi Survivors Share How they Lost their Families to ISIS

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

In Kurdish-protected and internationally-organized refugee camps throughout Iraq and Syria, Christians, Yazidis, and Muslim Kurds live a tentative life in which many have lost their entire families and have no sense of when they will be able to return to a life of normalcy.

Speaking to the UK’s Daily Mail, a number of refugees living in various centers across Iraq told stories and shared photos of the family they had either never seen again or watched die before their eyes. “My older brother, my father, my mother, my wife and even my two kids were killed. All I have left of them is just one picture on my mobile phone,” says one man, Tahysn, whose two sons were aged three and four when killed.

A Yazidi grandmother identified as Rezal, who escaped Mount Sinjar, managed to escape the wrath of the Islamic State, but watched children die on the mountain of thirst and heat. “When we left Sinjar, the kids suffered a lot… Many men from our village died, many women have been captured. I saw some kids dying because of the heat,” she said. “Daesh [the local name for ISIS based on their Arabic acronym]… even cut the throats of the babies,” she said.

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