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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5 Problems with the Nuclear Talks with Iran

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kerry_johnThe Obama administration was forced to punt once again at the talks on Iran’s nuclear program when the Iranians refused to budge on their maximal demands on uranium enrichment and sanctions relief.

When they failed to strike a deal by Monday’s deadline, Iran and the P5 +1 (five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany) extended the negotiations for another seven months, until June 30, 2015.
There are five major problems with the negotiations, as currently structured:

1. Iran has been able to legitimize its once-covert nuclear program.

Tehran has won the acceptance of the P5 + 1 for illicit uranium enrichment activities at Natanz and the heavy water reactor at Arak, capable of functioning as a plutonium bomb factory, that Iran sought to hide from International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors before they were exposed in 2002. Other nuclear proliferators will demand the same lax treatment if they are caught red-handed in the future.

2. Iran has won sanctions relief disproportionate to its relatively minor concessions.

Tehran has pocketed significant economic benefits from sanctions relief, about $700 million per month, as part of the interim Joint Plan of Action. As the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., has noted: “The Obama administration’s Iran nuclear negotiations have done little to advance the security of the United States and our allies, but they have benefited Iran. As these negotiations drag on, Iran continues to enrich uranium, is free to pursue some nuclear-related R&D, and has been handed access to previously frozen assets and an easing of sanctions. At the same time, the United States has received little in return but a promise to keep talking.”

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In Kenya Attack, Terrorists Killed Those Who Could Not Answer Questions on Islam

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Al-Shabaab terrorists who killed 28 people on a bus in northern Kenya selected their victims by quizzing passenger to determine if they were Muslims, then shot dead those who were unable to answer satisfactorily, officials and eyewitnesses said Sunday.

After firing at and shooting a rocket-propelled grenade at the Nairobi-bound vehicle to stop it, the terrorists ordered the 59 passengers, many of them school teachers and health workers heading home for the Christmas holidays, to alight and began to question them.

“They asked how many times I pray in a day, asked me to recite a Qur’an verse and also greeted one in Islamic,” one of the survivors of the Saturday pre-dawn attack told Kenya’s Daily Nation. “If one failed to answer these questions, then you’d be asked to lie on a muddy patch of the road facing down.”

Identification cards and mobile phones belonging to non-Muslims were confiscated. Muslim passengers were told to return to the bus before those lying on the road were shot.

“They blew off their heads. Just like that,” the passenger was quoted as saying. Afterwards, the gunmen had fired their weapons in the air “in jubilation.”

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Mexico and Central America Thank Obama for Amnesty Decree

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The presidents of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, the leading source countries of illegal immigrants in the United States, hailed Obama’s executive decree to stop the deportation of many of their compatriots.

Obama’s unilateral measures will shield nearly five million illegal immigrant from U.S. immigration laws by granting them work permits, Social Security numbers, and deportation reprieves.

In administering the president’s overhaul of America’s immigration laws, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will prioritize the removal of certain serious criminal aliens.

Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are the top four countries where the majority of illegal aliens in the United States originate, according to the latest DHS estimate of the unauthorized immigrant population living in the U.S. The DHS data is consistent with most recent estimates by the Pew Hispanic Center.

About 73 percent of the estimated 11.4 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. were born in Mexico (6.7 million), El Salvador (690,000), Guatemala (560,000), and Honduras (360,000), DHS data shows.

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