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The Afghan Taliban have released a statement purportedly from the family of Mullah Omar saying he has died of an unspecified illness. The statement, emailed to The Associated Press on Thursday, didn’t say when he died. It followed an announcement from the Kabul government the day before. Senior Taliban figures have also told the AP that Mullah Omar died. The statement says it’s being issued in the name of Mullah Omar’s brother, Mullah Abdul Manan, and his son, Mohammad Yaqub. It apologizes for “any mistakes Mullah Omar (made) during his rule of Afghanistan.” …

Hillary Clinton isn’t catching a lot of breaks from her former friends in Hollywood.  Or so it seems, considering the fact that big-name, big-budget director Michael Bay is premiering his latest move, 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi on January 15, 2016, two hours before the Iowa Caucuses. You can see the trailer here. CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO It looks pretty exciting.  Bay is best-known for Transformers, which leads Moe Lane to comment, “It looks … a bit more serious than the stuff that Michael Bay usually does.”  But Bay also has Pearl Harbor on his...

Senior Iranian officials are accusing the Obama administration of lying about the details of the recent nuclear accord in order to soothe fears among U.S. lawmakers and Americans about the implications of the deal, which will release billions of dollars to the Islamic Republic while temporarily freezing its nuclear program, according to reports from Iran’s state-controlled media.

President Obama’s claim that Congress must either back his deal with Iran or plan for war does not square with the advice he has received from his top general, Senate lawmakers learned on Wednesday. Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, never presented Obama with such a binary choice. “At no time did that come up in our conversation nor did I make that comment,” Dempsey told Senator Joni Ernst (R., Iowa) during a Senate hearing on the Iran deal. “I can tell you that we have a range of options and I always present them.”...

Want to buy a used nuclear Armageddon from Hanoi John? It’s hard to imagine a worse salesman for the Iran deal than John Kerry. Kerry couldn’t sell himself to Americans as a presidential candidate. Now he has to sell a nuclear Armageddon to Americans. National security was Kerry’s undoing during his presidential campaign. He had shot American soldiers in the back during Vietnam to build a base for his own political future. He had eagerly pandered to Marxist-Leninist terrorists who massacred native peoples and burned their churches. He had been for the Iraq War before he was against it and...

Human rights lawyers in Zimbabwe have filed a court application seeking the release of an activist they suspect was abducted by state agents. The lawyers said Tuesday that Itai Dzamara, leader of a movement called Occupy Africa Unity Square, has been missing since Monday morning and that his family and associates have no idea of the activist's whereabouts.

Tuesday at the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on the Iran nuclear agreement, Secretary of State John Kerry admitted he does not have “access” to the secret deal between the IAEA and Iran on the enforcement of inspections and has only been briefed on the agreements when pressed by Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX). Partial transcript: KERRY: “No I haven’t seen it. I’ve been briefed on it. And –” POE: “–But you haven’t read it, you haven’t seen it.” KERRY: “No because it’s in the possession of the IAEA.” POE: “Are you going to read it?” KERRY: “We don’t have access...

There’s aircraft designers, and then there’s ace designers. There are thousands of engineers around the world producing planes, but ace designers only come along once every few decades. The United States had Kelly Johnson, the designer of the SR-71 Blackbird. Germany’s Willy Messerschmitt produced a line of famous fighter planes. The Soviet Union’s Mikhail Simonov created the muscular Su-27 fighter-bomber to compete with America’s F-15 Eagle. Each of these aces were highly skilled, but they also owed much of their success to circumstance. They came along when their respective governments invested millions — or billions — of dollars into transforming brainpower into cutting-edge combat...

Boeing and the U.S. Navy presented the first EA-18G Growler tactical jamming and electronic protection aircraft to the Royal Australian Air Force at a rollout ceremony in St. Louis, Missouri, July 29. In June 2014, the RAAF awarded Boeing the contract for 12 Growlers to be purchased under a foreign military sales agreement. The ceremony marked the presentation of the first Growler to Australia, the only foreign country to acquire the aircraft so far. The Growler is a derivative of the F/A-18 Super Hornet. The Australian Growler has some features not on the U.S. version. It has an advanced targeting...

To understand the economy, you've got to resort to psychology. Throughout the recovery, forecasters — including those at the Federal Reserve and the International Monetary Fund — have repeatedly overestimated the economy's strength. They've predicted faster economic growth than has occurred.The main reason for the errors, I have argued, is that the forecasters have underestimated the influence of the financial crisis and Great Recession on people's confidence. Lower confidence reduced Americans' willingness to spend. My argument has applied to the United States. Some new figures now suggest that the same phenomenon operates globally.The figures come from the Pew Research Center,...

Wednesday on Newsmax TV’s “The Steve Malzberg Show,” actor, author and former White House speechwriter Ben Stein said President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have “opened the door to more harm of Jewish people in the history of the world” with the Iran nuclear deal, which he called a “disgrace to humanity.”

"The document warns that 'preparations' for an attack in India are underway and predicts that an attack will provoke an apocalyptic confrontation with America," the report said. The ISIS is preparing to attack India to provoke an Armageddon-like confrontation with the US, according to an internal recruitment document of the feared group which also seeks to unite the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban into a single army of terror. An investigative story published yesterday by the USA Today and reported by American Media Institute refers to a 32- page Urdu document obtained from a Pakistani citizen with connections inside the Pakistani...

"Gee, do you think Secretary Kerry should have recused himself from the negotiations with Iran at the very outset because of his long-standing relationship to his Iranian counter-part, Mohammad Javad Zarif? Let me explain."....

Leave it to Team Obama to expect Jews to accept a Hail Mary. The Justice Department confirmed Tuesday that Jonathan Pollard, who spied for Israel, was granted parole and will be released by November, after having served 30 years in prison. The news came almost a week after Justice officials said they wouldn’t object if a parole panel granted his release. Israel and many American Jews have long sought Pollard’s freedom, arguing that he’d spied for an ally, Israel, not an enemy, and that his life sentence was harsher than what most other spies received.

UPDATED: French farmers said on Monday they had blocked and turned back as many as 300 trucks importing food from Germany, the latest protest against a fall in food prices.Farmers set up checkpoints on six roads between Germany and France late on Sunday night and said they would continue their action until later Monday. "We've already held back between 200 and 300 lorries transporting products that are distorting competition for us," said Franck Sander, local head of the FNSEA farming union. "For example, we made a lorry carrying Babybel (cheese) turn back. Consumers think this is French but the cheese...

Donald Trump may have hired a staff and commenced the building of a political organization, but Trump 2016 is best viewed not as a political campaign but as an evolving real-estate deal, with Trump playing the shifty developer and the voters representing the buyers to be wooed. Both developers and candidates are frequently derided as used-car salesmen. But that is unfair to used-car salesmen, who at least have in their possession—and for your inspection—the wheeled thing they’re selling. Developers and candidates, on the other hand, have only words and a few sketches to represent their product, which is a better...

WASHINGTON — Representative Sander M. Levin, Democrat of Michigan and the longest-serving Jewish member now in the House, said Tuesday that he would support the Iran nuclear accord, lending a hefty voice of approval in a chamber deeply skeptical of the deal. “Israel’s security has and always will be of critical importance to me and our country,” Mr. Levin said in a lengthy statement explaining his decision. “I believe that Israel, the region and the world are far more secure if Iran does not move toward possession of a nuclear weapon. I believe the agreement is the best way to...

Video: Yakub Memon was convicted for helping finance the serial blasts in Mumbai in 1993 in which 257 people were killed. NEW DELHI: Yakub Memon, convicted as "a driving spirit" for the 1993 blasts in Mumbai, was hanged a little before 7 am at Nagpur Central Prison. At 5 am, the Supreme Court had rejected his last-minute petition to stop his hanging after an unprecedented middle-of-the-night hearing. Here are the 10 latest developments: 1. President Pranab Mukherjee rejected Yakub Memon's mercy petition sent to him on Wednesday. 2. Activists and Memon's lawyers told the Supreme Court in a late-night appeal...

France's air crash investigation agency is studying a piece of plane debris found on Reunion Island off the east coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean for possible links to missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, a spokesman said on Wednesday. A person familiar with the matter told Reuters the part was almost certainly from a Boeing 777 but that it had not yet been established if it came from MH370. A U.S. official said air safety investigators had a "high degree of confidence" the debris was from the same model as MH370, the Associated Press reported. No trace has been...

As I read the reports of the killing of the famous Hwange National Park lion, Cecil, by an American client, hunting with a licensed professional hunter, I anticipated a rerun of the Musango Bull incident of a couple of years back. The bull elephant was another rock star of an attraction - in the Matusadona national park. He too was radio collared and he was shot by a sport hunter outside the park. There was within days the anticipated media frenzy over both the Bull and Cecil, but it turned out the two cases were markedly different. One element that...