Steve Harvey gives Miss America Crown to Colombia instead of Philippines

59 Missing in China Landslide

BEIJING – Fifty-nine people are missing in a landslide that struck an industrial park in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, in Guangdong province, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

Xinhua had previously reported 41 people missing in the landslide that buried 33 residential and industrial buildings in the Liuxi industrial park, later revising those figures downward to 27, but then upping the total to 59. Three other people were slightly injured.

At least 900 local residents were evacuated, the news agency said.

The landslide was followed by a gas pipeline explosion that scattered debris over some 100,000 square meters (about 25 acres), Xinhua said.

“I saw a bunch of red earth and mud moving toward the (buildings),” one of the industrial park employees told Xinhua.

Another eyewitness told the local daily Shenzhen Evening News that he saw the van his father was driving buried by the earth and mud and no sign has been found of either the vehicle or his father.

More than 1,500 emergency workers are participating in rescue operations, looking for survivors among the debris, with the help of some 100 fire trucks, 4 drones and 13 search dogs, although they are being hampered by rain, mud and poor night visibility.

Emergency officials said that possible signs of life had been detected in three spots underneath the debris.

Among the buildings buried in the tragedy were two dormitories for workers at the industrial park, the state-run CCTV television network reported.

Ren Jiguang, the assistant director of the Shenzhen public safety office, told CCTV that most of the evacuated people had been transferred to safe areas.

The Beijing Youth Daily newspaper quoted a local resident who said that the landslide was caused by construction activity and that the earth that gave way had been accumulating at the site over the past two years.

Shenzhen is a prosperous industrial city with four border crossing points providing access to neighboring Hong Kong.

Israel Kills Top Hezbollah Member in Syria Airstrike

BEIRUT – The Israeli air force killed Samir Qantar, an important member of the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah, considered by many Lebanese to be a “symbol of the anti-Israel resistance.”

The death of the 53-year-old Qantar, who was held in Israeli prisons for almost 30 years and in September had been placed on the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorists, occurred on Saturday night and was announced Sunday in a communique by Hezbollah, which said that “aircraft of the Zionist enemy at 10:15 p.m. bombarded a residential building in ... Damascus and killed a fighter, the dean of the Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails, as well as several Syrian civilians.”

Qantar’s brother Basel also confirmed his death.

Al Manar television, run by Hezbollah, showed the ruins of the building hit in the Israeli airstrike by four missiles, which completely destroyed it.

A few hours after Qantar’s death became known, three rockets were fired from the southern part of Lebanon near Tyre into northern Israel, according to both countries’ militaries. So far, no group has claimed responsibility for the attack, which injured nobody.

In response, Israeli army aircraft entered Lebanese airspace and carried out several very low flights and simulated attacks in the area from where the rockets were fired.

Meanwhile, the leader of Hezbollah, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, announced that he will give a speech on Monday in which presumably he will discuss Qantar’s death, and the Syrian Parliament met and condemned Qantar’s killing, calling the attack a “terrorist crime.”

Qantar, a member of Lebanon’s Druze community and sentenced to life in prison in Israel in 1979 for participating in the murder of an Israeli police officer and two civilians, was held for almost 30 years – the longest of any Lebanese citizen in Israeli jails – until he was exchanged in a 2008 prisoner swap between Hezbollah and Israel.

Israeli military affairs experts are interpreting the airstrike as a message to Hezbollah and Tehran – which is allied with Hezbollah and the Syrian regime of Bashar Al-Assad – not to open a new armed front on the Golan Heights.

Forced marriage of under 15-year-old girls on rise in Iran

Forced marriages of girls 15 years old or even younger have become commonplace in Iran’s Sistan and Baluchistan Province, south-eastern Iran, according to a report published on the website of the Women’s Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran ( NCRI ).
Studies show that underage marriages take place in single parent families or families where the parents are illiterate, drug addicts or psychologically disturbed as well as in families that are struggling with a low income.
In Baluchistan, many girls below the age of 15 are forced into marriage, the report said.

Russia’s upper parliament house freezes contacts with Turkish parliament — MP

MOSCOW, December 18. /TASS/. Russia’s Federation Council upper parliament house has frozen contacts with the Turkish parliament following the incident with Turkey’s downing a Russian warplane in Syria, Konstantin Kosachev, the chairman of the Federation Council’s international committee, said on Friday.

"Our contacts with colleagues in the Turkish parliament, which have been very active until now, has been frozen," he told journalists.

He said the upper house had taken this decision and "sees no point in unfreezing such contacts as long as the Turkish lawmakers are unthinkingly and dogmatically upholding the position taken by the Turkish president." "There is no sense in dialogue in such case," he saud.

Kosachev confirmed that Russian lawmakers had "no contacts" with their Turkish counterparts.

Moreover, Kosachev said he did not even knew his new counterpart, who had taken charge of the Turkish parliament’s international committee after the parliamentary elections in Turkey. "I knew the previous chairman, but I refused to speak with him when he made attempts to contact me," he said.

Earlier, the Russian State Duma lower parliament house said it was suspending contacts with the Turkish parliament. "In the foreseeable future, top officials of the State Duma see no possibility for contacts at the higher parliamentary level between the State Duma and Turkey’s parliament," Alexei Pushkov, the chairman of the State Duma international committee, said on December 7.

The Russian Su-24M all-weather bomber was on anti-terrorism mission in Syria on November 24, when it was shot down by a Turkish F-16 fighter jet. Ankara claimed it downed the Russian warplane after it had violated Turkey’s airspace, while the Russian defense ministry says the bomber was in the airspace over Syria at the time of the attack. Both pilots of the downed warplane ejected safely after they were hit by an air-to-air missile, but the commander was killed in a militants’ gunfire from the ground as he was parachuting.

Two Russia’s Mi-8 helicopters were engaged in the pilots’ search and rescue operation, which reportedly lasted for some 12 hours. One of the helicopters dispatched for the rescue mission came under fire and was subsequently forced to an emergency landing after sustaining damages. One Russian contract serviceman, a marine, was killed during the emergency landing. The rest of the servicemen on board of the helicopter were safely evacuated. The downed Mi-8 helicopter was later destroyed by mortar fire from the territory under control of the militants.

Iran, the Islamic State, and the Perversion of Islam

By Maryam Rajavi

Source: WorldPolicy

It seems that for all our progress in social and human development, with each new generation radical factions emerge, shaking the world with their ability to convince ordinary people to commit unspeakable atrocities.

We reflect on recent attacks in San Bernardino, carried out by invoking God and religion, with the same bewilderment that confounded us amid the many senseless cruelties of the 21st century. We struggle to understand how such wanton violence could be conceived by human minds and spread like wildfire. And, of course, we set ourselves to right it, asking how we can combat this most current version of extremism and prevent new forms from plaguing the world.

The breed of extremism that we face today is a lethal cocktail of medieval barbarism and modern-day fascism. It is a worldview that shuns political tolerance, promotes misogyny, and, of course, glorifies violence. This specific brand pursues the implementation of Sharia and its draconian punishments. It has never had any connections to Islam, and there is clearly no place in the modern world for such a worldview.

However, it is a worldview with contemporary precedent. Ever since Ruhollah Khomeini came to power in 1979, Tehran championed itself as a successful model, which fundamentalists could follow in order to gain stature, power, and sovereign legitimacy. This presents a tantalizing message to Sunni extremists like the Islamic State– why can they not create their own “Islamic” State when Shiite fundamentalists have already done so?

While the conceptual origins of this extremist ideology took shape in the early years of Islam, it only turned into a formidable global force when fundamentalism gripped Iran in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution.

The regime that replaced the Shah—who was also detestable and undemocratic—began exporting Islamic fundamentalism on an unprecedented scale almost overnight. High-profile hostage-takings, bombings, suicide attacks, and assassinations became the norm as the mullahs in Tehran began building their own version of a theocratic state.

In these early stages, Shiite terrorist factions, including militias in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and others were directly formed by the Iranian regime. Without such state sponsorship from Tehran, their clout and influence would have quickly evaporated and they would have vanished. The vicious ideology and proliferative model grew increasingly lethal as its proponents gained access to veritable troves of military, diplomatic, political, and propaganda resources within the sovereign state borders of Iran.

So began the first modern-day “caliphate”—years before al-Qaida’s first attack burned in Yemen, and a full three decades prior to the rise of the Islamic State.

Many assume that Sunni fundamentalism is a unique phenomenon, entirely separate from the dogmas espoused by the Shiite mullahs in Tehran, but the differences are ancillary. In fact, Sunni fundamentalists have found tremendous strength under the political and spiritual umbrella of the Iranian theocracy. Both share the same ideological building blocks: the establishment of a religious state, which implements Sharia by force.

There is considerable evidence that the regime in Tehran has armed and financed Sunni extremists at various times and locations. Not only is Iran a long-standing sponsor of Hamas, but also as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said recently, “ISIS was created by Assad releasing 1,500 prisoners from jail, and Maliki releasing 1,000 people in Iraq who were put together as a force of terror.” Tehran is the known puppet-master of both.

In recent years, the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Sunnis in Iraq and Syria at the hands of the Iranian regime and its proxies has provided a wellspring of sociopolitical sustenance for the Islamic State. Iran is propping this extremist hydra up on all sides, and finding new and creative ways to reinvigorate the beast as our security and intelligence missions stride in its wake. If Iran is one of the linchpins that legitimize the global Islamic extremist threat, what is to be done?

History tells us that nothing is more dangerous for fundamentalism and extremism than democratic and moderate ideals. This has been made clear in Iran, where the regime’s suppressive tactics find their chief targets are the moderate Muslim factions, including the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK).

To meet with true success, the current military campaigns and intelligence operations in the region must be complemented by the promotion of an interpretation of genuine Islam that is both democratic and tolerant. Only through a nuanced but unambiguously affirmative strategy that provides lasting moral and physical support to the people of Iran and the region in their quest for freedom and moderate leadership will we escape the echoes of history’s darkest narratives.

*****

Maryam Rajavi is the president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, which seeks the establishment of a democratic, secular, and non-nuclear Iran.

ISIS News

Let's not forget the beheading of children and crucifying youths in their genocidal war against Christians, Yazidis, and whomever else is standing in the way .