The face of ISIS, the man seen on video beheading three U.S citizens, was the target of a successful U.S airstrike. His fate is still unclear.
Mohammed Emwazi has participated in numerous propaganda videos showing the killings of Westerners, including American journalists Steven Sotloff and James Foley, American aid worker Abdul-Rahman Kassig, British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning and Japanese journalist Kenji Goto, officials said.
A senior U.S. official told NBC News that the Kuwait-born British citizen was directly “targeted” by the strike in the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa, Syria, on Thursday night.
“There is no vengeance, but there is accountability,” said the official, who stressed that “we are still assessing and not confirming” whether Emwazi had been killed.
A senior U.S. counter-terrorism official also told NBC News early Friday that there was “no definitive proof yet that he was killed.”
Terrorist experts are saying that Fox News’ decision to show all 23 unedited minutes of the Jordanian pilot’s death, “empowers ISIS.” Another terrorist expert said that Fox News is propagating “exactly what ISIS wants to propagate.”
YouTube removed a link to the video a few hours after it was posted there, and a spokesperson for Facebook told the Guardian that if anyone posted the video to the social networking site, “it would come down.”
The television network’s decision to host the footage drew criticism from terrorism analysts.
Malcolm Nance, the executive director of the Terror Asymmetrics Project on Strategy, Tactics and Radical Ideology think tank and an expert on counter-terrorism and radical extremism told the Guardian that by posting the video Fox News was propagating “exactly what Isis wants to propagate.”
“The whole value of terror is using the media to spread terror,” he said.
Rick Nelson, a senior associate in homeland security and terrorism at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that posting the video actually empowers Isis.
“They’re a terror organisation,” he said. “They seek to strike terror in the hearts and minds of people globally, and by perpetuating these videos and putting them out there into the internet, it certainly expands the audience and potential effects.”
After seeing one of their own murdered in a cage by ISIS today, Jordan officials announced that they have executed two prisoners associated to with the terrorist group.
Jordan said it had executed 2 prisoners early Wednesday after a new video surfaced on the Internet Tuesday showing ISIS burning alive a Jordanian pilot the terror group had held since December.
Government spokesman Mohammed al-Momani said that prisoners Sajida al-Rishawi and Ziad al-Karbouli were executed. Al-Rishawi has been on death row for her role in a triple hotel bombing in the Jordanian capital Amman in 2005 that killed dozens. Over the past week, Jordan had twice offered to swap her for the pilot, Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh. However, officials have said his captors did not deliver proof he was still alive, and the swap never moved forward.
The 44-year-old Iraqi woman’s suicide belt did not detonate at the time of the Amman attack and she fled the scene, but was quickly arrested. After a televised confession, she recanted, but her appeal was turned down.
Al-Rishawi had family ties to the Iraqi branch of Al Qaeda, a precursor of ISIS. Ziad Al-Karbuli was a former aide to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian Al Qaeda operative who was killed in 2006.
NBC news is reporting that three senior members of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) – including an aide to its leader – were killed in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq, a senior Iraqi security official told NBC News Thursday. The strike on the ISIS stronghold of Mosul killed Abu Hajar Al-Sufi, an aide to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as well as an explosives operative and the military leader of nearby Tel Afar, the source said on condition of anonymity. Al Arabiya cited the Iraqi Defense Ministry saying Baghdadi’s aide had been killed.
Pentagon Spokesman Col. Steve Warren could not confirm the deaths and said ISIS leaders had not been targeted. But he added that if ISIS leaders were embedded “inside troop formations they are likely to be killed.” The U.S. has been carrying out airstrikes across the country’s north after the brutal terror group gained ground in a murderous sweep in June. The U.S. and the West have stepped up their rhetoric against the group after what Obama’s opponents said was a slow start in articulating a solution to the crisis.
“A man is dead and a little girl’s life is ruined. I say this as a father of an eleven year old girl. Who would put an uzi in the hands of a nine-year-old girl? What is wrong with these people? What is wrong with this culture? What right is advanced by doing that?”
That was Joe Scarborough of MSNBC, lamenting the recent news from a shooting range in Arizona, where a shooting instructor was shot in the head and killed while trying to teach a nine year old to fire an Uzi.
“I find it hard to believe that our Founding Fathers put together a Second Amendment to give eight-year-old children the right to fire semi-automatic weapons,” Scarborough continued. “And if you think that’s what the Constitution of the United States says, you should really go back and read the Second Amendment, and then read cases, and then read what Scalia wrote in 2008 about what the Second Amendment is and what the Second Amendment is not and what the Second Amendment protects and what the Second Amendment does not protect. There is no reading of what Scalia said in 2008, 2009 that would suggest this has anything to do with the Constitution.”
I guess we should thank Israel for their kindness in allowing the innocent residents of Gaza – the ones still alive – to pull their dead from the rubble. Instead of a 12 hour cease fire, Israel gave the poor souls an additional 4 hours to prepare for more bloodshed!
Thousands of Gaza residents who fled the violence streamed back to devastated border areas during Saturday’s truce to find large-scale destruction: fighting pulverized scores of homes, wreckage blocked roads and power cables dangled in the streets.
In the northern town of Beit Hanoun, Siham Kafarneh, 37, sat on the steps of a small grocery, weeping. The mother of eight said the home she had spent 10 years saving up for and moved into two months earlier had been destroyed.
“Nothing is left. Everything I have is gone,” she said.
Across Gaza, more than 130 bodies were pulled from the rubble Saturday, officials said. In southern Gaza, 20 members of an extended family were killed before the start of the lull when a tank shell hit a building where they had sought refuge, Palestinian health official Ashraf al-Kidra said.
Israel launched a major air campaign in Gaza on July 8 and later sent ground troops into the Hamas-ruled territory in an operation it said was aimed at halting Palestinian rocket fire and destroying cross-border tunnels used for attacks.
Another Republican, or Teaparty mamber, or right-wing wacko, has decided to take his hate for our Democratically elected, Constitutionally approved President, to a whole new level.
Stephen Steinlight, a Senior policy analyst for the Center for Immigration Studies, told a group of Teaparty members in Florida that being impeached is not enough for our President. According to Steinlight, even “being hung, drawn and quartered” is too pleasant an experience for the American president in the White House.
A rash of opinion polls which have come out, not push polls, real polls, including one by Gallup that showed that 65 percent of the American people don’t want any part of an Obama-style immigration reform. But the idea of this [lawsuit] is vintage Boehner, it’s a political loser. There is no court that is going to stop Obama from doing anything. We all know, if there ever was a president that deserved to be impeached, it’s this guy. Alright? I mean, I wouldn’t stop. I would think being hung, drawn, and quartered is probably too good for him.
Like the average Republican/Teaparty/Right-Wing Wacko, Steinlight has not given any legitimate reasons why he hate the president. But whatever the president has done, Steinlight is apparently taking it personally.
A 400-pound asthmatic Staten Island dad died Thursday after a cop put him in a chokehold and other officers appeared to slam his head against the sidewalk, video of the incident shows.
“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” Eric Garner, 43, repeatedly screamed after at least five NYPD officers took him down in front of a Tompkinsville beauty supply store when he balked at being handcuffed.
Within moments Garner, a married father of six children with two grandchildren, stopped struggling and appeared to be unconscious as police called paramedics to the scene. An angry crowd gathered, some recording with smartphones.
“When I kissed my husband this morning, I never thought it would be for the last time,” Garner’s wife, Esaw, told the Daily News.
She got no details from police until after she had gone to the hospital to identify his body, she said.
Officials confirmed that NYPD Internal Affairs officers launched an investigation Thursday night.
Records show Garner was due in court in October on three Staten Island cases, including charges of pot possession and possession or selling untaxed cigarettes.
Esaw Garner said her husband was unable to work because he suffered from a host of ailments, including chronic asthma, diabetes and sleep apnea.
The Staten Island resident was sitting in front of Bay Beauty on Bay St. and Victory Blvd. just before 5 p.m. when two plainclothes cops began questioning him about selling untaxed cigarettes, a video obtained by the Daily News shows.
“I didn’t do s—!” the 6-foot-4 Garner, wearing a sweaty T-shirt and khaki shorts, told the officers from the 120th Precinct when they approached him. “I was just minding my own business.
“Every time you see me you want to mess with me. I’m tired of it. It stops today!” he yelled.
Ramsey Orta, 22, who shot the video, tried to intervene, telling the cops his friend had just broken up a fight between three men and had not been selling cigarettes.
But when backup uniformed officers arrived, the cops moved in to cuff Garner, the video shows.
“Don’t touch me, please,” he said.
When Garner refused orders to put his hands behind his back, one of the plainclothes cops, wearing a green T-shirt with a yellow No. 99 on the back, got behind him and put him in a chokehold, the footage shows.
A struggle ensued as three uniformed officers joined in on the arrest, knocking the man to the ground.
He screamed, “I can’t breathe!” six times before he went silent and paramedics were called.
“They jumped him and they were choking him. He was foaming at the mouth,” Orta told The News. “And that’s it, he was done. The cops were saying, ‘No, he’s OK, he’s OK.” He wasn’t OK.”
“They were choking him. He kept saying, ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe! Get off of me, get off of me!’ and I didn’t hear any more talking after that,” said witness Valencia Griffin, 50, of Staten Island. “He died right there.”
First of all, the pastor has a gun! I’m still having a hard time figuring out why a man of God, a follower of Christ, has a gun.
But I digress!
Donald Frazier noticed an intruder in his home. The 69-year-old pastor grabbed his gun and went to investigate. That is when he came in contact with 30-year-old Daniel Durham in his back yard. The two struggled and the stronger Durham took the gun away from Pastor Frazier. Frazier pleaded for his life but he was killed with his own weapon.
Frazier’s wife saw the struggle.
Another example of a good guy with a gun dead at the scene!
A FedEx truck crossed a freeway and slammed head-on into a bus carrying students in Northern California, killing 10 people, authorities said Friday.
The collision Thursday evening killed both drivers, five students and three chaperones, said Lt. Bill Carpenter with the California Highway Patrol.
At least 34 people were taken to local hospitals, authorities said.
The bus was taking students from various Los Angeles-area schools to visit Humboldt State University in Arcata. The collision occurred in Orland, about 100 miles north of Sacramento.
And here’s another story to prove that we love the guns and apparently hate the children.
An 11-year-old girl was killed by a 2 year-old in Philadelphia Saturday after the children were left unsupervised with a gun in the room.
The children were playing in a bedroom when the toddler pointed the cocked handgun at his sister Jamara Stevens and fired, hitting her in the arm around 10 a.m. Saturday, police told NBC10 Philadelphia.
The bullet traveled through the girl chest and struck her heart, police said. She was taken to a hospital but was pronounced dead, the station reported. The little boy was found with a burn and traces of gun powder on his arm.
Tiffany Goldwire was in the home with her four children, ages 14, 11, 7 and 2, the station reported.
Police believe her boyfriend came over and brought the gun, which was left with the children in the room when she went to the bathroom, according to NBC10.
No charges were filed Saturday. Police did not immediately return a message Sunday for an update.
A “snake-handling preacher” who believed that he was following a Biblical command by picking up snakes has died after being bitten.
Jamie Coots, star of an American reality television show Snake Salvation, which profiled Pentecostal snake-handling pastors, died at his home in Kentucky after refusing to go to hospital.
Coots had been bitten nine times before, losing part of his finger in the process.
“It’s a victory to God’s people that the Lord seen fit to bring me through it,” he said the day after a previous bite, in 1998.
Coots was killed by a rattlesnake, dying less than an hour after he ordered doctors away from his home. Followers of his sect frequently refuse mainstream medical care.
And his church was the site of a previous fatal snake bite in August 1995.
Melinda Brown, 28, from Tennessee, died after she was bitten on the arm by a large rattlesnake.
After her death, police considered charging Coots with violating Kentucky’s law against handling snakes in church, but a judge said Coots should not be prosecuted for practicing his faith. Kentucky banned handing poisonous snakes in religious services in 1940, but serious attempts to enforce the law ended decades ago because of reluctance by authorities to prosecute people for their religious beliefs.
Brown’s husband, John Wayne “Punkin” Brown, 34, later died after being bitten by another rattlesnake in church in Alabama.
Followers of the Pentecostal sect – the majority of whom live in the Appalachian states of Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama and Georgia.
In a practice begun around 1910, they say they are compelled by Scripture, particularly Mark 16:17-18 in the King James Version, to pick up serpents.
In this Gospel account, it reads: “In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.”
Followers of the strict interpretation will adhere to rigid dress codes – ankle-length dresses and uncut hair for women, short hair and long-sleeved shirts for the men – and occasionally drink poisons.
Last year Coots explained how snakes were the cornerstone of his faith.
“We use them in religious ceremonies and I believe as for me, if I don’t have them there to use I’m not obeying the word of God,” Coots said.
He described himself as a third-generation snake handler, and said he hoped to pass the church on to his son, Cody.
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