National Security - Page 2

TURBAT, Pakistan—Something fell out of the sky near Arif Saleem’s home at 5:20 a.m. on Nov. 25, 2013. He scrambled outside to find a 25-foot-wide crater just beyond the mud wall surrounding his family compound. The strike was one of three, in quick succession, that morning in the village of Kulahu, in Pakistani Baluchistan, 45 miles east of the Iran border. One of the blasts damaged the local mosque. Pages from the Quran fluttered in the air before landing gently on the rubble.

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei decided to jump into the American debate on Twitter concerning police shootings of black criminal suspects.

A video being widely circulated in Palestinian social media networks teaches jihadists how to stab a Jewish person in a manner that ensures their speedy death.

The U.S. Commander of American Special Operations forces in the Middle East is tapping outside government experts in search of innovative ideas to use in the fight against the Islamic State’s ideology, reports The New York Times.

Among the trends of 2014 – “Gone, Girl,” Lena Dunham, and $55,000 potato salad – was another the list-makers seem to have missed: it was also a very good year for Islamic jihad. And while this was true on the battlefields of Syria and the cities and villages of Pakistan, it was true, too, in more subtle ways throughout the West – and especially in Europe. It was, for instance, the year of Mehdi Nemmouche’s slaughter of four Jews at the Jewish Museum in Brussels.

In a breakthrough ceremony for Argentina based on laws meant to prevent the mass killing or abandoning of the seventh child of a family due to superstition, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner adopted a 21-year-old Jewish man as a national “Godson” this week, the first non-Catholic to receive the bizarre patronage from the South American country.

Hamas, the Sunni Islamist terror group that controls the Gaza Strip, has denied that the government of Qatar has stopped financing its activities, contradicting a report last week in Arab media that claimed Doha had ceased its funding of the jihadist group in an attempt at detente with Egypt.

Though the Chinese Communist Party is the largest explicitly atheist organization in the world, with 85 million official members, it is now overshadowed by an estimated 100 million Christians in China. It is no wonder Beijing is nervous and authorities are cracking down on Christian groups.

The London Telegraph reported yesterday on the classified findings of a new security assessment by the British government simulating a storm-induced power blackout of two weeks’ duration in southwestern England. As the paper put it, the assessment concluded that:  “Britain is

There’s a frequently heard complaint that while the mainstream media frequently report on jihadist attacks, they seem to ignore the attacks on Christians.

Congressional Democrats, leftwing groups, and the mainstream media were certain this month’s Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA enhanced interrogation program (which they call torture) would spark a groundswell of anger against Bush administration officials and the CIA that would change the subject from the president’s growing unpopularity and the Democratic Party’s poor showing in the mid-term elections.

In an interview with National Public Radio published Monday, President Barack Obama offered Iran the prospect of becoming a “regional power” in exchange for a nuclear deal.

“The presence of large families is a hope for society,” Pope Francis said Sunday. “In a world often marked by selfishness, the big family is a school of solidarity and sharing, and these attitudes benefit the whole of society,” he said.

(Reuters) – Cuba’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.

UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 18 (UPI) — A draft measure with a definitive timetable for a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank, targets for Palestinian sovereignty and territorial exchanges received the support of Arab countries at the United Nations Security Council.

(Reuters) – Google Inc’s Gmail was blocked in China after months of disruptions to the world’s biggest email service, with an anti-censorship advocate suggesting the Great Firewall was to blame.

(Reuters) – The Islamic State militant group has killed 1,878 people in Syria during the past six months, the majority of them civilians, a British-based Syrian monitoring organization said on Sunday.

President Barack Obama hinted that he might be prepared to establish a new U.S. embassy in Tehran ” if we can get a deal on making sure that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon,” and the deal led to warmer relations with the Iranian regime.

The missing AirAsia flight is likely to be at the “bottom of the sea”, the head of Indonesia’s search and rescue operation has said. The BBC reports that Bambang Soelistyo said that due to the coordinates of the flight when

The latest edition of Al-Qaeda’s glossy recruiting magazine Inspire, released on Christmas eve has made a renewed call on the faithful to strike out against the West in lone-wolf attacks, taking on airlines and prominent public figures with home-made bombs.

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras says the country will hold early national elections on Jan. 25, after lawmakers failed to elect a new president in a third and final round of voting. His coalition government’s candidate

BAGHDAD (AP) — A suicide bomber struck a funeral north of Baghdad on Monday, killing at least 10 mourners, officials said.

The U.S.-led international force formally ended its 13-year combat mission in Afghanistan during the bloodiest year of the war, the longest in American history.

Louise Sidharta, 25, from Indonesia, could not wait to see her fiancée Alain, 27, and enjoy one last vacation before their wedding in May.

The Darfur genocide has sometimes been called “Everybody’s favorite African war,” since George Clooney and other movie stars, and politicians like Susan Rice, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden have all made “Stop the genocide” and “Save Darfur” and “Enough is enough” part of a very stylish and progressive do-good campaign.

New reports on Pope Francis’ encyclical letter on ecology, slated for release in the spring of 2015, appear to be aimed at stoking fires of division between conservatives and liberals. Though contents of the letter have yet to be released, the Guardian predicts that the Pope’s letter on human and environmental ecology “will anger deniers and US churches.”

Monrovia (AFP) – The Ebola epidemic has cast a dark shadow over Christmas this year in Liberia, where small businesses are especially feeling the pinch.

Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish man who fired two bullets at point blank range into Pope John Paul II’s body in May 1981, paid a visit to the Pope’s grave on Saturday, laying two bunches of white roses at the site. It was Ali Agca’s first visit to the Vatican since the assassination attempt.

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran’s Revolutionary Guard says one of its senior commanders was killed during a battle against the Islamic State extremist group in Iraq.

Dera Sacha Sauda (Dera) Chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim is alleged to have played a role in the castration of up to 400 of his followers. According to The Times of India, a “former follower” named Hansraj Chauhan made the claim

The evidence of an informal alliance between the U.S. and Iran in the fight against ISIS (or Daesh) in Iraq may give comfort to those who support President Barack Obama’s “leading from behind” foreign policy. However, it is a strategic disaster for the United States.

Saturday’s protest at Pan Pacific Park in Los Angeles was briefly monitored by a drone which was brought to the #MillionsMarchLA event by a concerned private citizen who gave his name as Pierre. “I just wanted to be able to capture everything from the sky’s perspective,” Pierre told Breitbart News.

An official with Indonesia’s search and rescue agency says an air search for the missing AirAsia jet with 162 people on board has been suspended due to nightfall and will resume Monday morning.

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — An AirAsia plane with 161 people on board lost contact with ground control on Sunday while flying over the Java Sea after taking off from a provincial city in Indonesia for Singapore, and search and rescue

I am not — nor ever have been — a member in good standing of the Kim Jong-un Fan Club. In fact, I am pretty sure the teacup child despot inherited his father’s seat in the Axis of Evil. I think it would be really great if everyone in the Axis of Evil were destroyed, though I do not have much faith in American politicians anymore to stick with any such plan long enough to accomplish such a monumental task.