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ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — One of the oldest Catholic churches in St. Paul had to close down because of a dwindling congregation, but it's been given new life as an Islamic community center. The Church of St. John parish, built in 1886, closed in 2013. It reopened Friday as the Darul-Uloom Islamic Center, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported (http://bit.ly/1z0o5In ). "There are a lot of East Africans in the area, and we want to give them a place to worship, a place to be educated, a community space," center spokesman Feisal M. Elmi said. The former church held...

The Russians captured the Pirates, tied them up, put them on their boats, then set them all on fire. No more pirates. Plus, probably no more Somali pirates attacking Russian ships. This video shows Russian Navy commandos on a Somalia pirate ship shortly after the ​pirates had captured a Russian oil tanker. All conversations are in Russian with a single exception of when a wounded pirate says something in English and the Russian soldier says "This is not a fishing boat." All conversations between the commandos are in Russian. If you don't understand Russian, the pictures ​speak for themselves. The...

A Massachusetts mayor is calling for an end to refugee resettlement in his city, saying Somali families are putting pressure on already strained services in Springfield, a onetime industrial center where nearly a third of the population lives below the poverty line. Mayor Domenic Sarno is the latest mayor to decry refugee resettlement, joining counterparts in New Hampshire in Maine in largely rare tensions with the State Department, which helps resettle refugees in communities across America. The mayor is drawing criticism from those who say this country has a moral obligation to help the outcast and refugees who say they’re...

Extremists attacked a coastal area of Kenya for the second night in a row, killing at least nine people a day after the deaths of nearly 50, an official said Tuesday. Police spokesman Masoud Mwinyi said that al-Shabab militants attacked Majembeni village. The Somali militant group also claimed responsibility for the Sunday night attack in nearby Mpeketoni that killed 48 people. The back-to-back attacks underscore the weak security around the Lamu area, which lies just south of the Somali border. Lamu once attracted swarms of foreign visitors but its tourist sector has been suffering in recent years because of increasing...

A teenager who survived a flight to Hawaii as a stowaway in the plane's wheel well said he hopped on the closest flight that was going west in an effort to find his birth mom and can't believe he survived the journey. Yahya Abdi, 15, spoke over Google Chat to KPIX-5 in his first public comments since his improbable survival during the 5 1/2-hour flight from San Jose to Maui in April. The interview was reported on Tuesday night. Yahya, a Somali immigrant, ran away from his Santa Clara home and hopped a fence at Mineta San Jose International Airport....

A group of sailors have described their dramatic midnight escape after four years held hostage and tortured by a gang of Somali pirates. Barefoot, starving and terrified, the 11 men ran through the darkness for more than 10 kilometres, ducking behind low bushes to avoid recapture before they eventually reached safety. On Saturday night the men had broken a window in the cramped room in which they were being held, and fled. It was their last slim shot at freedom, as their captors had theatened to start torturing them again on Tuesday. “It was a do or die situation because...

Somalia could experience massive humanitarian crises against a backdrop of dwindling funds to support life-saving interventions, a senior UN relief official for Somalia said on Monday. Humanitarian coordinator for Somalia, Philippe Lazzarini, told a news conference in Nairobi that Somalia risked drifting into a humanitarian crisis due to fragile food situation, a spike in diseases and insecurity. “The humanitarian needs in Somalia remain vast based on credible assessment on the ground. An estimated two million people are grappling with food stress, malnutrition and communicable diseases,” said Lazzarini. He warned that the humanitarian crises experienced in 2011 could repeat itself in...

Security concerns have long been high in Kenya because of its proximity to Somalia and the al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group, al-Shabab that operates there. In September, four al-Shabab gunmen attacked a shopping mall in Nairobi, killing at least 67 people. The 1998 embassy bombing killed more than 200. Since the mall attack, Kenya has suffered numerous smaller bombings in Nairobi and Mombasa. Kenyan authorities, with the help of the FBI, also discovered a huge car bomb that could have caused massive damage. ... Terror attack kills 13 in Kenya as hundreds of Western tourists are evacuated under armed guard over safety...

Fox News Channel’s Megyn Kelly took the opportunity to once again have Ayan Hirsi Ali on her program to discuss sharia law since the kidnapping of hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls by Boko Haram remains in the news. Ali, who was born in Somalia explains perfectly why the transformation from the so-called ‘peaceful’ brand of Islam into the more violent strain is as reliable as a chemical formula. It all ends the same way. As peaceful men assemble to listen to well-intentioned, peaceful Muslim preachers, evil and hatred creeps in. This happens not because these preachers start out wanting to go...

Few pay attention to the common agendas shared by Boko Haram (the terrorist group that has kidnapped over 200 Nigerian schoolgirls) and the non-profit organizations ran by the Obama family. The primary goals of both is to eradicate western education in Africa; the evidence is overwhelming. ... the foundation bearing the name of Barack’s grandmother – the Mama Sarah Obama Foundation (MSOF). In the interview, Musa confessed that the MSOF accepts western donations under faulty premises (helping orphaned children with AIDS) and then uses those funds for scholarships to send Kenyan students to extremist Wahhabist schools in Saudi Arabia. In...

I thought Mika was going to cry as she presented the bad news in this new poll that basically shows that people are fed up with Democrats:

Some of the opinions on the Internet about refugee resettlement in Wyoming are inaccurate and racist, Gov. Matt Mead said. Wyoming is the only state without a formal refugee resettlement program, but there are likely refugees living in the Cowboy State, Mead said in an interview Wednesday with the Star-Tribune. At this point, Mead is working with volunteers to gain more information about establishing a refugee program in the state. Wyomingites will get to comment on a program as it’s developed, he said.

A teenage stowaway who survived a five-hour flight to Hawaii in the landing gear of an airplane won’t face federal charges, officials said Monday. He apparently didn’t even know where the flight was going. “This was not something he planned out,” said Special Agent Tom Simon, an FBI spokesman in Honolulu. “My impression is that he ran for the first flight he saw.” The 16-year-old was running away from his home in Santa Clara, Calif., and scaled a perimeter fence at San Jose International Airport early Sunday before entering a wheel well of a Hawaiian Airlines Boeing 767, authorities said....

"Kid's lucky to be alive," FBI spokesman Tom Simon in Honolulu told The Associated Press.A 16-year-old boy stowed away in the wheel well of a flight from California to Hawaii on Sunday, surviving the trip halfway across the Pacific Ocean unharmed despite frigid temperatures at 38,000 feet and a lack of oxygen, FBI and airline officials said. Not only was he unharmed, but officials also said he wasn't even dirty.

A 16-year-old boy stowed away in the wheel well of a flight from California to Hawaii on Sunday, surviving the trip halfway across the Pacific Ocean unharmed despite frigid temperatures at 38,000 feet and a lack of oxygen, FBI and airline officials said. FBI spokesman Tom Simon in Honolulu told The Associated Press on Sunday night that the boy was questioned by the FBI after being discovered on the tarmac at the Maui airport with no identification. "Kid's lucky to be alive," Simon said. Simon said security footage from the San Jose airport verified that the boy from Santa Clara,...

Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges .. hours after she lost the Southwest light-rail vote, she visited a Somali mall on E. 24th Street in a blue hijab, accompanied by her Somali liaison, Abdirahman Muse. Hodges’ office said she is fulfilling many of the promises she put forth in a 100-day plan for the Somali community, including asking the city attorney for a review of small business regulations. In an upstairs room, Somali shopkeepers praised her for showing up, and poured out their concerns through translators, telling her they needed more space to park, more opportunities for idle youth, and more Somali...

- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com - Ron Paul Institute Blames America for Muslim Kenya Mall AttackPosted By Daniel Greenfield On September 30, 2013 @ 11:10 am In The Point | 56 Comments The Ron Paul Institute is not the institution to which Ron Paul has been committed. It’s the Ron Paul outlet. And it reflects his Blame America for Muslim Terror philosophy. What happened in Kenya is a terrorist act. But for Obama to tell the rest of the story would undermine his narrative and unravel Washington’s strange relationship with the al-Qaeda affilliated al-Shabaab organization that claimed responsibility for the...

Soviet Sweden? Model Nation Sliding to Third World By Dale Hurd CBN News Sr. Reporter Wednesday, April 02, 2014 STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- When President Barack Obama visited Sweden last year, he expressed his deep admiration for the Swedish model. But that should make Americans a little nervous. One U.N. report says Sweden will be a third-world nation in about 15 years, below Libya and Bulgaria. Sweden is a society that believes it is racing into the future, but critics warn that it is racing to the bottom. It has been a laboratory for all kinds of social experiments: Swedish leaders...

House File 1944 and Senate File 1915, politically motivated measures aimed at suppressing political speech by membership organizations such as the NRA, continue to move quickly through the Minnesota legislature. These flawed and dangerous bills pose a grave risk to freedom of speech in Minnesota and overreach to impose excessive regulatory burdens on political interests. HF 1944 and SF 1915 would require organizations like the NRA, who engage in political speech, to disclose the names of many of their donors, including those who pay membership dues. This legislation would re-brand what is now recognized as free speech as “elections speech,”...

Excerpted from "Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Culture" One of the odder phenomena of the last decade is hearing national security elites, terrorism experts, and career diplomats discuss the finer points of “flow,” “bling,” and the “politics of cool.” American and European terrorism experts have increasingly expressed concerns over “anti-American hip-hop,” accenting the radicalizing influence of the genre. Noting that Al-Shabaab, the Somali-based Islamist group, uses “jihad rap” in its recruitment videos, Harvard scholar Jessica Stern wrote in Foreign Affairs: “The first- and second-generation Muslim children I interviewed for a study of the sources of radicalization in...