One never knows how seriously to take the output of the Islamic State’s media apparatus, but they announced on Friday morning that their female American hostage, Kayla Jean Mueller, was killed in a Jordanian air strike.
The Boko Haram crisis in northern Nigeria continues to rage. On Wednesday, Boko Haram staged a major counter-attack against Cameroon– one of the nations leading an African Union coalition against the terrorist group– launching a bloody rampage through the border town of Fotokol that killed at least 91 villages and wounded over 500, according to the Associated Press.
Yemen’s Shiite Houthi rebels announced today that they have dissolved the Yemeni parliament and installed their own “transitional national council of 551 members” plus a five-member “presidential council” to rule the country for at least two years, as reported by CBS News. A new national constitution is to be drafted by the revolutionary government.
The ground beneath NBC anchor Brian Williams’ feet grew more unstable on Thursday, as the New York Post reports NBC News icon Tom Brokaw is calling for Williams to be fired after he was forced to recant a phony story about taking fire in Iraq that he’s been telling for years.
President Obama’s visit to India was generally considered successful—perhaps a bit too successful in the eyes of Mayor Bharat Shah, who presides over Vadodara, a city that proved instrumental in electing current Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Nobody puts the SoS in Secretary of State quite like John Kerry, who has overseen the rout of American influence and prestige in every corner of the globe, managing the neat trick of making Hillary Clinton look relatively consequential, or at least harmless. Kerry has finally been given the recognition he deserves by foreign policy scholars, who named him the least effective SecState of the past 50 years.
What sheer, blind foolishness. What dangerous idiocy. It’s terrifying to think our national defense is headed up by someone so willfully blind and shallow, someone whose opinion of his own nation and its history is so bleak and slanted. He really can’t see anything beyond the unyielding borders of his ideology.
Veterans in all branches of the military who have sacrificed to keep America safe are livid at NBC News anchor Brian Williams, who was forced to admit this week that he had, for 12 years, lied about taking fire in a helicopter over Iraq. Below, responses from career veterans who condemn his use of a false story to elevate his resume for more than a decade:
Zacarias Moussaoui, the “20th hijacker” from the 9/11 terror plot, has been in U.S. custody for the past 13 years under a sentence of life in prison. Last October, he gave testimony from the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, as part of a civil suit filed by the families of 9/11 victims against the government of Saudi Arabia.
The atrocities of ISIS have gone almost beyond the power to shock, but it’s still jarring to see so much depravity collected into a single report. The U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child speaks of the Islamic State selling young children into slavery, pressing mentally handicapped kids into service as suicide bombers, using them as human shields against American air strikes, and conducting mass executions of children by beheading them, crucifying them, and burying them alive.
Mayor de Blasio is blaming a “broken policy” for the payment of $5,000 to the machete-wielding Ruhim Ullah, who attacked NYPD officers in 2010.
The much touted “unemployment rate” is a false measure of prosperity. Especially since those on the left seem to be targeting, rather than building up, the Middle Class.
A report at Politico says “dozens of House Democrats are privately threatening to skip” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s March 3 address, while Vice President Joe Biden has yet to commit to attendance. They might want to rethink their position, as a new Rasmussen poll finds considerable public support for Netanyahu’s speech.
In the wake of the horrifying videotaped immolation of captured Jordanian pilot Mu’ath Kaseasbeh, the Obama Administration suddenly decided to reveal that the United Arab Emirates withdrew from the anti-ISIS coalition almost two months ago, citing fears that their own pilots would be captured by the Islamic State.
Hopefully the crude effort by the Democrat-media complex to use the current measles outbreak as a political club against Republicans is winding down, since there are important stories out there awaiting coverage.
It’s not entirely news that the under-equipped Kurdish forces holding the front lines against ISIS in Iraq have accepted help from Iran. There have been reports of arms shipments from Iran to Iraqi Kurdistan since last summer, as promised military support from the West proved slow in arriving.
Website Citizen Warrior gathers polls from the U.S. and Europe to paint a portrait of growing unease about Islam in the Western world, presented as evidence that “the Great Awakening has begun.”
Canadian academic William Schabas has resigned from his position as the head of the United Nations’ inquiry into war-crimes allegations in last summer’s Gaza war, which pitted Hamas against the Israeli Defense Force.
The Islamic State has released a video online showing the execution of captive Jordanian pilot Mu’ath al-Kaseasbeh, who appears in the video being immolated while held in a cage.
Members of Japan’s opposition party are beginning to publicly criticize Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for his choice to send humanitarian aid to nations fighting the Islamic State, a decision blamed for triggering a hostage crisis that took the lives of two Japanese citizens.
It’s suddenly obligatory for every Republican 2016 presidential hopeful to weigh in on vaccines and prepare for a grilling from the media if they voice anything less than enthusiastic support.
Taken as a group, the Super Bowl ads tell a story of a distressingly anxious nation, perpetually on guard against insult and injury.
Cyber-war is everywhere, most assuredly including the conflicts where physical bullets and bombs are flying. The struggle to topple the Assad regime in Syria, for example, has been “marked by a very active, if only sporadically visible, cyberbattle that has engulfed all sides,” according to a weekend article at the New York Times.
The Islamic State’s brutal murder of its second Japanese hostage, Kenji Goto, has Japan’s government talking about vengeance — a major shift in tone for post-war Japan, observers have noted.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s outreach to the anti-vaccination crowd is one of the strangest things anyone has done during the 2016 shadow primary season. In the midst of a significant outbreak of preventable, communicable diseases among children, Christie decided to throw anti-vaxxers a bone, making President Obama look enormously sensible by comparison.
