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BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: This morning on CBS This Morning. Holly Williams is the foreign correspondent for CBS News, and she was reporting about the war against ISIS in Syria and the impact of US air strikes there. WILLIAMS: The fighters in Mahmoodin village told us that the US-led air strikes against ISIS in Syria have so far had very little impact on the ground. Like many people, in this part of the world, they would like to see more of them. RUSH: What? What? What? Whoa, whoa! Wait, wait, wait. That's not right. Last week John Kerry said that they...

A local militant, who had fought US forces in Iraq and became a local leader in the Islamic State’s (IS or ISIS) armies, was shot dead by Peshmerga forces, Kurdish security officials said. Yonus Assad, who was also known as Abu-Qazifa and was once arrested by Kurdish forces for his militant activities, was killed in an area close to the IS stronghold of Mosul in northern Iraq last week, the officials said, speaking to Rudaw on condition of anonymity. They said they were given orders to capture the wanted man alive. But he was killed after Peshmerga forces surrounded him...

Islamic insurgent groups such as Boko Haram use the Qur'an to justify their actions. This has led many non-Muslims to see Muslims - especially those with full beards and dressed in hijab - as terrorists. But in fact, the vast majority of Muslims, including devout youth from across Nigeria, are united in condemning the nefarious acts of religious extremists.Concepts such as 'terrorism', 'insurgence' and 'extremism' are often associated with Islamic jihad. But it is erroneous to equate this term with violence, according to Toyeeb (20), a Muslim student in Oyo in south-west Nigeria."Non-Muslims who want to know about Islam should...

Members of Minnesota's large Somali community gathered Sunday to condemn the recruitment of youth by terrorist groups and urge collaboration to find solutions to address the problem. About 100 people attended a town hall meeting to denounce groups such as the Islamic State and al-Shabab, which together have recruited more than two dozen fighters from Minnesota since 2007. U.S. Attorney Andy Luger told the crowd he's working hard to bring more resources to the community to address the root causes of the problem. "I have two children and if somebody was recruiting my children to go overseas and die, I...

When Ariel Sharon died in January this year, eight years after a stroke, he'd survived for longer than would probably be expected had he lived elsewhere in the world. Since 2005 it's been illegal in Israel to turn off ventilators when a person is dying or has no hope of recovery. The result is that large numbers of patients spend years on life support, many of them unconscious... In most countries a ward like this would not exist, and doctors and families in discussion together, might have made the decision to turn off Schmail's ventilator to allow him to die....

Videos showing Islamic extremists beheading western hostages are putting young Britons off pursuing jihad in the Middle East, one of the UK’s most senior police officers has suggested. Sir Peter Fahy, the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, said footage of the shocking murders had backfired as far as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) was concerned, serving as a deterrent rather than a recruiting poster. Sir Peter, who is leads on counterterror for the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) said the “sheer brutality” of the ISIL footage was discouraging young British Muslims from getting involved....

The governor of California, Jerry Brown, has signed a bill that makes the state the first in the United States to define when “yes means yes” and adopt requirements for colleges to follow when investigating sexual assault reports. State lawmakers last month approved a bill by Senator Kevin de Leon, a Los Angeles Democrat, as states and universities across the US are under pressure to change how they handle rape allegations. Campus sexual assault victims and women’s advocacy groups delivered petitions to Brown’s office on 16 Sept urging him to sign the bill. De Leon has said the legislation will...

The man accused of beheading a great-grandmother in her back garden is a would-be cage fighter who converted to Islam five years ago, it has emerged. Nicholas Salvadore, 25, was charged late on Friday with the murder of 82-year-old Palmira Silva, who was hacked to death in an apparently random attack on Thursday afternoon. Mr Salvadore was also charged with assaulting a police officer. Mrs Silva is understood to have been attacked by a suspect who had argued with his flatmates minutes earlier, prompting them to flee in terror in a car as he smashed one of its windows. The...

The Great Recession has lasted a lot longer for some than for others. A new survey from Rutgers University’s John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development found that “one in five workers - or nearly 30 million people - say they were laid off from a job in the past five years," dating back to the end of the recession in June 2009. "Nearly 4 in 10 of these laid-off workers say they searched for a job for more than seven months before finding another one; one in five workers laid off during the past five years never found another...

A Saudi Raqi (religious healer) raped a girl who visited him for treatment of a psychological illness after misleading her into believing her womb was haunted by the jinn (spirits), a newspaper reported on Monday. The Raqi in the capital Riyadh told the girl he has the powers to exorcise jinns in one session if she accepts his recipe at his home. Once the girl, whose age was not specified, surrendered to the man, he raped her, causing her to lose virginity, 'Arar' Arabic language daily said. Police arrested the Raqi after the girl realised her mistake and reported him...

More Americans moved to Texas in recent years than any other state: A net gain of more than 387,000 in the latest Census for 2013. And Austin was the fastest growing major city. Jobs is the No. 1 reason for population moves, with affordable housing a close second. "It take two things to draw people inland in big numbers: jobs and housing affordability," said Nela Richardson, chief economist for the real estate broker Redfin. Texas and other heartland states have two advantages that translate into affordable housing: Plenty of cheap land around cities and easy regulations that enable developers to...

A 37-year-old man has been executed in Iran after being found guilty of heresy and insulting prophet Jonah, according to human rights activists. Mohsen Amir-Aslani was arrested nine years ago for his activities which the authorities deemed were heretical. He was engaged in psychotherapy but also led sessions reading and reciting the Qur’an and providing his own interpretations of the Islamic holy book, his family said. Amir-Aslani was hanged last week for making “innovations in the religion” and “spreading corruption on earth”, but human rights activists said he was a prisoner of conscience who was put to death because of...

Colleen Hufford was born in 1960. Life is full of grim twists and cruel vicissitudes, but in mid-20th century America it would not have occurred to anyone that one needed to worry about going to work and being beheaded by a colleague. Yet that's what happened to Ms Hufford on Thursday: She turned up for her job at at the Vaughan Foods food processing plant in Moore, and Alton Alexander Nolen decapitated her. Why would he do that? Well, as the initial reports were at pains to assure us, it's nothing to do with terrorism. That's true, in the sense...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: What a non-judgmental society amounts to is that common decency is optional — which means that decency is likely to become less common. The biggest issue in this fall's election is whether the Obama administration will end when Barack Obama leaves the White House or whether it will continue on, by appointing federal judges with lifetime appointments who share President Obama's contempt for the Constitution. Whether such judges will be confirmed by the Senate depends on whether the Senate continues to be controlled by Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid. Why in the world would...

Imagine you consult an attorney with an important case. He says, “I'll accept your case, but I have to tell you at the start, I don't respect you. In fact, you're a coward.” The Obama administration entrusted the most important cases of our nation to an attorney general who held the people he was hired to represent in contempt. Presidential administrations have mottos. Theodore Roosevelt spoke softly but carried a big stick; John Kennedy pointed to new frontiers and self-sacrifice; Lyndon Johnson spoke of a great society. As Eric Holder departs, in order to recover from his verbal abuse of...

Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History by Richard J. Evans (Brandeis University Press) As everyone knows, the supreme court 
ruled six–three for Al Gore in the great dispute over the Florida recount in 2000. As everyone also knows, Gore emerged as the ultimate victor in that recount, and with his poetic and moving inauguration address he managed to unify a badly divided nation. For a long period, the Gore years continued the peace and prosperity established under President Clinton, punctuated by the successful prevention of an apparent terrorist plot in 2001, by the enactment of health care reform in 2003 (mocked...

John Hopkins Medicine researchers will track the physical activities and daily diet of 50 overweight freshman from Lakewood High School as part of a pilot project using Fitbit – an electronic wristband that records activity and sleep patterns. The effort, funded by a $100,000 grant from insurer Florida Blue, is focused more on teaching healthy habits than weight loss, and is expected to be one of the first studies involving adolescence and wearable heath-related technology, Reuters reports. Researchers told the news service the pilot project eliminates the need to bring students in to the doctor’s office, and they’re hoping to...

Strict laws must be put in place to combat New York City’s massive tobacco smuggling problem, former Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives Assistant Director Rich Marianos told The Daily Caller News Foundation.“Street gangs, narcotics crews, Russian and Asian organized crime networks, and terrorists are trading cigs for guns, narcotics — even humans,” Marianos, who was with the ATF for 27 years, said.NYC’s disproportionately high cigarette tax is allowing hardened criminals and even terrorists to fund illicit activity and make huge profits, with almost no risk, thanks to lax tobacco smuggling laws.Since 2006, the tax rate on NYC...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: The Clinton Global Initiative is timed to occur the same week in New York as the United Nations week-long confab is, and that's because the United Nations was bigger at first and attracted more women to town. So Clinton timed the Clinton Global Initiative to coincide with the arrival of a whole lot of foreign women with their delegations. Now, it is said that the Clinton Global Initiative is actually outnumbering the occurrences of the week at the United Nations. During the week at the Clinton Global Initiative, Clinton said that "the American economy isn't feeling as...