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Sen. Rand Paul broke with the field of Republicans considering a 2016 presidential run on Thursday, calling President Barack Obama's decision to normalize relations with Cuba a "good idea" since the American embargo against Cuba "just hasn't worked." Paul, a likely presidential candidate, made the remarks in an interview with News Talk 800 WVHU's Tom Roten, just a day after his potential competitors for the Republican nomination -- former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Sen. Marco Rubio and Sen. Ted Cruz -- slammed the decision to normalize relations as a dangerous move. Rubio and Cruz are sons of Cuban immigrants. Paul...

Kurdish Pershmerga forces say they've recaptured territory near Sinjar Mountain in northern Iraq from ISIS and "cleansed" the area of ISIS fighters. "We have opened a corridor from south of Zummar to the Mountain Sinjar," said Masrour Barzani, chancellor of the Kurdistan Region Security Council, on Thursday. Kurdish military officials said coalition airstrikes were key in the success of their ground forces. "ISIS is always making damage, killed the people, steal the stuff, kidnapping people, taking money from people. That's what ISIS is doing, and that's not Islam," said Peshmerga fighter Khalid Suleymen Kolaoh, who was on the front line....

U.S. government officials are preparing to publicly blame North Korea for the Sony Pictures hack -- but haven't yet decided how to respond to the attack. The White House and other agencies are holding a series of high-level meetings to discuss the United States' range of options, a senior official in President Barack Obama's administration said. "We do think it's appropriate to respond," the official said. Those options could include new sanctions against North Korea, another source said. White House press secretary Josh Earnest wouldn't confirm that the Obama administration has pinned the hack on North Korea, saying it's still...

OTTAWA - A slickly produced video released on Sunday urged Muslims to launch indiscriminate attacks against Canadians, similar to those carried out in October in Ottawa and Montreal. The SITE Intelligence Group, an American based company that monitors trends within the global jihadist movement, said the video was produced by the Islamic State and the Levant. It was also been distributed on Twitter and jihadi forums. On the video a man, who says he is a Canadian and identifies himself as "Abu Anwar al-Canadi," urges his Muslim countrymen to follow the example of Martin Couture-Rouleau. The National Post identified the...

Bloomberg article, link only. Link

President Obama announced plans to normalize diplomatic relations with North Korea and ISIS today, including opening an embassy in both North Korea and the ISIS Caliphate. "We will end an outdated approach that for decades has failed to advance our interests," Obama claimed, "And instead we will begin to normalize relations between our three countries." Specifically, the White House took three major steps today as part of their "New Course on North Korea and ISIS": 1. Initiating discussions to reestablish diplomatic relations, including a U.S. embassy in Pyongyang and Raqqa, and North Korean and ISIS embassies in the United States....

IT feels like terror has come to our home town. After this week’s events, Sydney joins New York, London, Madrid, Mumbai and Ottawa on the list of great cities visited by politically motivated ­violence since 2001. ..... Australians are not innocents when it comes to terrorism. Nearly a dozen Australians were killed in the September 11 attack in 2001. A year later, 88 died in the Bali bombings in Indonesia. Australians died in the 2005 Bali bombings, the 2005 London bombings, and the 2009 Jakarta hotel ­attacks. All those incidents took place thousands of kilometres away. This event occurred in...

A 15-year-old girl was prevented from joining the terror group Isil after police dramatically stopped her plane on the runway at Heathrow. The youngster, from Tower Hamlets, London, had secretly saved up money for her flight without her parents’ knowledge and tried to flee to Syria. But counter-terrorism officers, who had been tipped over about her plans, raced to the airport and stopped her plane which had already begun taxiing on to the runway. The flight, which was heading to Turkey, was turned around while officers took the youngster off and returned her to her family. However, in an unrelated...

Sydney's head Islamic funeral director has said that no Muslim funeral home will accept the body of Siege gunman Man Haron Monis, suggesting instead that authorities dump his body at sea. The body of Monis remains in the morgue, and has yet to be claimed. It is set to be be released before Christmas. The body will be given a simple funeral by the Department of Health if his partner does not claim it, reports Daily Telegraph. When asked about the fate of the 50-year old extremists body, Amin Sayed, the funeral director within the Lebanese Muslim Association, said 'we...

YERUSHALAYIM (Hamodia Staff) - Russia wants in on the Israeli natural gas boom, but the U.S. wants them to stay out, and that’s why they haven’t made progress negotiating with the Israelis, ambassador to Israel Sergey Yakovlev hinted in an interview with Globes. Russia has been seeking entry into the Mediterranean gas fields for some time, but so far to no avail. Gazprom, for one, showed interest in becoming a partner in the Leviathan reserve, one of the most important in the Mediterranean Sea, but nothing substantive came of it...

Countries determined by the Secretary of State to have repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism are designated pursuant to three laws: section 6(j) of the Export Administration Act, section 40 of the Arms Export Control Act, and section 620A of the Foreign Assistance Act. Taken together, the four main categories of sanctions resulting from designation under these authorities include restrictions on U.S. foreign assistance; a ban on defense exports and sales; certain controls over exports of dual use items; and miscellaneous financial and other restrictions. Designation under the above-referenced authorities also implicates other sanctions laws that penalize persons...

President Barack Obama displayed "political courage" when he changed over 50 years of U.S. policy by announcing a renewal of diplomatic relations with Cuba, former President Jimmy Carter told MSNBC's "Morning Joe." Critics of Obama's announcement have said the move only served the Cuban government, but Carter said there was "no doubt" that the "beneficiaries of this primarily will be the Cuban people." "I'm very proud and grateful that President Obama has shown such good wisdom, and, also, I'd say, political courage in taking this long overdue step," Carter said Thursday.

The South Florida families of pilots fatally shot down by Cuba in 1996 are speaking out against the Wednesday release of three members of the convicted spies known as the “Cuban Five” in a prisoner swap — among them one who had been convicted of conspiracy to commit murder over the shootdown. "For the only person that we had responsible for what happened to be let go — it’s a slap in the face to my dad," Marlene Alejandre-Triana said at a news conference Alejandre-Triana's father Armando Alejandre, a Vietnam veteran, was one of four pilots killed when Cuban MiGs...

Islam in Europe...

p>If a pro-life website had said that the most vocal supporters of abortion-on-demand also have a soft spot for Satan, it would have become one of Right-Wing Watch's top tweets. But a left-wing website has posted an entry praising the devil's disciples for doing their part to thwart pro-life laws. In an article for the pro-abortion website Care2.com entitled “Four Ways Satanists are Improving the U.S. Government,” blogger Kevin Mathews wrote, “If there’s one religious group I’m really impressed with at this point, it’s the Satanists.”One of The Satanic Temple's four acts of faith that garnered Mathews' approval is “Supporting...

One of the U.S. Army’s giant surveillance blimps will rise to 10,000 feet above Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland on Friday for a three-year test. A second aircraft will begin testing in January. The Army’s Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System (JLENS), which is built by Raytheon, will be tested for its ability to identify incoming enemy aircraft. “This will enable senior defense officials to support a determination whether to transition JLENS capabilities to an enduring mission at the conclusion of the three-year operational exercise,” the North American Aerospace Defense Command said in a statement on...

Syrian rebel Yarmouk Brigades ditch US and Israel allies, defect to ISIS The Syrian rebel militia Al Yarmouk Shuhada Brigades, backed and trained for two years by US officers, mostly CIA experts, in Jordan, and supported by the Israeli army, has abruptly dumped these sponsors and joined up with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, debkafile’s exclusive military and counter-terrorism sources reveal. The sudden defection of this 2,000-strong anti-Assad force leaves IDF defense formations on the Golan, US and Jordanian deployments in the northern part of the kingdom, and pro-Western rebel conquests in southern Syria in danger of collapse....

Former Mossad chief, British-born Efraim Halevy, has released an interview to Israeli media asking Israel to commit suicide and withdraw to the pre-1967 "Auschwitz borders". He also attacked Naftali Bennett's plan for an arrangement with the Arabs. Halevy looks like one of the figures created by Peter Simple, the Daily Telegraph's cartoonist. Or like Mrs Dutt-Pauker, who in the '60s symbolized "the Hampstead liberal". Dutt-Pauker is a rich heiress living in Hampstead, in a villa known as "Marxmount House", where she collects a pair of false teeth belonging to Communist leader Bukharin, Ming vases and writings of Stalin. Mrs Dutt-Pauker...

MIAMI — They were known as the Cuban Five, members of a spy ring that descended on South Florida in the 1990s and infiltrated exile groups and military installations. They, along with other members of the ring, tried to make themselves indispensable to the exile groups whose secrets they stole. One of the operatives worked at the Naval Air Station in Key West, while another worked undercover in Tampa. “They were very good,” said Ramón Saúl Sánchez, the founder of the Movimiento Democracia, one of the exile organizations that was infiltrated. “When you trust somebody who you honestly believe is...

WASHINGTON — Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said Thursday that starting to trade with Cuba "is probably a good idea" and that the lengthy economic embargo against the communist island "just hasn't worked." Paul became the first potential Republican presidential candidate to offer some support for President Barack Obama's decision to try to normalize U.S. relations with Cuba. The president's surprise announcement on Wednesday was slammed by several potential GOP candidates, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who said it amounted to appeasing the Castro regime. Paul said in a radio interview with Tom Roten of...