ISIS video claims to show beheading of British hostage David Haines

Islamic State militants have released a video claiming to show the beheading of British aid worker David Haines, in what British Prime Minister David Cameron has described as "an act of pure evil."
The 44-year-old Haines was abducted in Syria in 2013 while working for an international aid agency. The British government had managed to keep his kidnapping secret out of concern for his safety until the most recent video identified him as a captive.
Prime Minister David Cameron described the apparent murder as "an act of pure evil" in a tweet from his official account. 
Sky News reports that Cameron is returning to Downing Street to chair a COBRA emergency response meeting.
The UK Foreign Office had said earlier in a statement that they were "working urgently to verify" the video.
"If true, this is another disgusting murder," the Foreign Office said in the statement.
"We are offering the family every support possible. They ask to be left alone at this time."
Islamic State militants have beheaded two American journalists, James Foley and Steven Sotloff, as well as Kurdish and Lebanese fighters, and posted video evidence online. At the end of the last video showing the beheading of  American journalist  Steven Sotloff, the Islamic State group threatened to kill Haines next and briefly showed him on camera.
In the video posted Sunday, the group threatened to kill another Briton.  Both British men were dressed in orange jumpsuits against an arid Syrian landscape, similar to that seen in the Foley and Sotloff videos.
The SITE Intelligence Group, a U.S. terrorism watchdog, reported the video, which was also posted online by users associated with the Islamic State group.
The video was entitled "A Message to the Allies of America." Haines' purported killer, who appeared to be the same man speaking with a British accent as in the previous videos, tells the British government that its alliance with the U.S. will only "accelerate your destruction" and will drag the British people into "another bloody and unwinnable war".
Late Friday, the family of Haines issued a public plea urging his captors to contact them.

Obama Cartoon

Vermont bans brownies, turns kids on to kale, gluten-free paleo lemon bars

It’s a best-seller at bake sales, a king of American confections, even a mandatory munchie of marijuana users. But the iconic chocolate brownie, that perfect blend of cake and cookie, is banned in Vermont schools.
In its place are new hoped-for kid favorites like fruit shish kebab, kale and even gluten-free paleo lemon bars.
The switch stems from nutrition mandates required under the new Smart-Snacks-in-Schools program in effect for public schools.
“The new school lunch pattern has low-fat, leaner proteins, greater variety and larger portions of fruits and vegetables; the grains have to be 100 percent whole-grain rich,” Laurie Colgan, child nutrition program director at the Agency of Education, told Vermont Watchdog.
The new rules, which evolved out of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, spell death to brownies, cupcakes, cookies and other bake sale goodies used to raise money for extracurriculars at money-strapped schools.

Military source: ISIS hostages dispersed after revelation of Foley rescue mission

After the administration released details of the July mission to rescue journalist James Foley and others in Syria, intelligence suggests ISIS dispersed the remaining hostages to multiple locations, making them harder to locate, a military source told Fox News.
In addition, the source added guard forces around the hostages doubled while widely publicized reporting about the scope of new aerial surveillance in the region caused ISIS to change its pattern of behavior on the ground.
"Any time you (disclose) very highly sensitive tactical information, you're giving away your road map if you will, your strategy,"  said Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, who as chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee receives regular intelligence briefings. "It's very highly damaging to the hostages."
The details about the rescue mission were released by the Defense Department and National Security Council one day after a video was posted online Aug. 19 of Foley’s execution.
The administration said its hand was forced because unnamed reporters had learned about the raid to rescue Foley and other hostages, believed to include Steven Sotloff, who was also later executed by ISIS.
Asked about the ramifications of providing the information in such a public way, Defense Department spokesman John Kirby said Friday it was still the right call.
"We regret it at the time we had to talk about this," Kirby said. "There was absolutely no intention of ever having to talk about that rescue attempt but because of leaks to certain reporters, it forced our hand to try and provide some context to that. So it's not about do I now regret it. We regret it at the time. We still regret that we had to talk about it."
The military source said the disclosures, which included specific details about the mission itself -- including personnel and hardware -- increased the risk for special operations forces in the future. 
Two separate sources also told Fox the release of information was damaging because the Foley case was considered "an ongoing mission" after the raid did not locate him and the others near the ISIS stronghold of Raqaa, Syria.
Some Republicans, including McCaul, believe the administration shoulders some of the blame.
"It's all because the administration leaked this information that is highly sensitive,” he said. “And quite frankly is in violation of the law."
Asked about ISIS' response to the disclosures, a National Security Council spokeswoman said she could not discuss intelligence matters, adding the administration had nothing to do with the original leaks to reporters, describing those claims as "baseless."

Adrian Peterson indicted: Arrest warrant issued for Minnesota Vikings running back

MINNEAPOLIS –  Authorities in Texas issued an arrest warrant Friday for star Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson after he was indicted on a charge of child abuse for using a branch to spank his son. He was swiftly benched by his team for this weekend's game against New England.
Peterson's attorney, Rusty Hardin, said that the charge in Montgomery County, near Houston, accuses Peterson of using a switch to spank one of his sons. Hardin said Peterson didn't mean to hurt the boy, whose injuries and age were not disclosed.
"Adrian is a loving father who used his judgment as a parent to discipline his son. He used the same kind of discipline with his child that he experienced as a child growing up in East Texas," Hardin said.
"Adrian has never hidden from what happened. He has cooperated fully with authorities and voluntarily testified before the grand jury for several hours," he said. "Adrian will address the charges with the same respect and responsiveness he has brought to this inquiry from its beginning. It is important to remember that Adrian never intended to harm his son and deeply regrets the unintentional injury."
The Vikings, about an hour after issuing a statement acknowledging the case, said Peterson would be on the inactive list Sunday for their home opener against New England. Houston police and authorities in Montgomery and Harris counties declined comment.
Peterson will have to surrender to authorities, but there is no timeline for when he will appear in Texas, Hardin said.
"We are just obligated to try to get it done as soon as possible, which we intend to honor," he said.
Peterson is in his eighth season, all of them with the Vikings. Widely considered the best running back in the league, he has rushed for 10,190 yards and 86 touchdowns in his career.
The allegations against one of the NFL's biggest stars came during a week in which the NFL has been under heavy criticism and scrutiny for the way it handled a domestic violence case involving former Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice and his then-fiancee. Commissioner Roger Goodell initially suspended Rice for two games, but he was suspended indefinitely this week after a longer version of security video surfaced showing Rice punching her in the face.
Critics are also closely watching how the league proceeds in the cases of Carolina Panthers defensive end Greg Hardy and Ray McDonald of the San Francisco 49ers, both still playing with domestic abuse cases pending. Hardy was convicted July 15 of assaulting a woman and communicating threats, but is appealing. San Jose police are still investigating an Aug. 31 incident involving McDonald.
The NFL didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on Peterson's situation.
Peterson did not practice on Thursday because of what coach Mike Zimmer called a "veteran day," allowing experienced players to rest, but Peterson was at the team facility that day and spoke to reporters about the upcoming game against the Patriots.
He returned to practice on Friday and was in the locker room following the workout with the rest of his teammates for lunch. Shortly thereafter, Peterson posted a message on his Twitter account that said in part: "It's your season! Weapons may form but won't prosper! God has you covered don't stress or worry!"
A man who identified himself as Peterson's uncle, Chris Peterson, answered the door at the running back's home in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, and said Peterson wasn't there and that the family had no comment.
Peterson grew up in little Palestine, Texas. When he was 7, his 8-year-old brother Brian was riding his bicycle when he was killed by a drunk driver. Years later, his half-brother, Chris Paris, was shot and killed the night before Peterson worked out for scouts and coaches at the NFL combine.
His mother, Bonita Jackson, was a former Olympic sprinting hopeful and his father, Nelson Peterson, spent eight years behind bars for laundering drug money yet still managed to be a positive influence on his son's life.
"I told him to always introduce himself, look a man in the eye, give him a firm handshake and say, 'I'm Adrian Peterson,'" Nelson said at the Pro Bowl in 2009. "Respect others. That will take you a long way in life."
Peterson rushed for 2,960 yards and 32 touchdowns during his senior season at Palestine High School, then racked up an NCAA freshman record 1,925 yards in his freshman season at Oklahoma in 2004. He hasn't looked back, even with some bumps in the road.
Last season, not long after finding out that he had a 2-year-old son living in South Dakota, Peterson rushed to the hospital after authorities said the boy was brutally beaten by his mother's boyfriend. The boy died, and a 28-year-old man is scheduled to go on trial next month on second-degree murder charges in the case.
Hardin, the defense attorney, is a familiar name in sports circles. He successfully defended Roger Clemens in his recent perjury trial over the alleged use of performance-enhancing drugs and two years ago represented Los Angeles Lakers forward Jordan Hill, who was sentenced to one year of probation after pleading no contest to assaulting his former girlfriend.
He has worked with Peterson before, too: In 2012, he said Peterson was the victim after the player was charged with misdemeanor resisting arrest following an incident at a Houston nightclub.

ISIS Scared Cartoon

Brandeis faculty emails reveal anti-Israel bias

Emails within a tight circle of academics at an exclusive university just outside Boston founded by American Jews reveal a long-standing and vehement anti-Israel bias and anger at Fox News and a human rights advocate who renounced her Muslim faith.
Thousands of messages on a Brandeis University ListServ obtained by conservative students and reviewed by FoxNews.com were hyperbolic in their condemnation of Israel, regarding the recent fighting in Gaza and prior conflicts with the Palestinians. Accusations that Israel has committed war crimes and "holocaustic ethnic cleansing" against Palestinians appear in the messages from academics at the school. 
In one message, Brandeis Professor of Sociology Gordon Fellman urged Israeli academics to sign an “open letter” to “end the illegal occupation in Palestine.” The letter states that “the government of Israel, having provoked the firing of rockets by its rampage through the West Bank, is now using that response as the pretext for an aerial assault on Gaza which has already cost scores of lives.”

“Zionist olive trees grow wondrously on Palestinian corpses.”- Email from Brandeis Professor Donald Hindley

It goes on to note that “an atmosphere of hysteria is being deliberately provoked in Israel, and whole communities are being subject to collective punishment, a war crime.” Fellman later encourages participants to read an work titled, “S. African Nobel Laureate Tutu likens Mideast crisis to apartheid.”
The one-sided view of the Middle East is not new at the school, founded in 1948, the same year Israel was established, with funding from the American Jewish community.
“Zionist olive trees grow wondrously on Palestinian corpses,” Political Science Professor Donald Hindley wrote in 2007. “In that way, we combine great trees with our own holocaustic ethnic cleansing.”
Robert Lange, a physics professor at the Waltham, Mass., school, wrote in an email that “settlements on the West Bank are armed robbery.”
Some 8,500 emails were uncovered by Brandeis student Daniel Mael and passed on to Joshua Nass, founder and chairman of the Voices of Conservative Youth. Nass said they were given access to the server after some subscribers were “troubled by the path the list was taking and lent access to a few students” so it could be made public.  A ListServ is a mailing list software that sends one message to all the group’s subscribers. This particular ListServ, titled “Concerned,” was started by faculty members in 2002 “out of concern about possible war with Iraq.” It has more than 90 subscribers, some of which are professors from other universities, and is used to correspond about current news, Israel, Jewish people, America and world affairs in general.
In addition to expressing hatred for Israel, several professors rage among themselves about conservative values, Fox News and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a human rights activist who survived genital mutilation as a child in Somalia, renounced her Muslim faith and now crusades against radical Islam. Ali was slated to receive an honorary doctorate at Brandeis in April before the ceremony was canceled amid campus protests. Emails reveal where at least some of the faculty stood on the matter.
In March, Brandeis Professor of English Mary Baine Campbell wrote that Ali is “an ignorant, ultra-right-wing extremist, abusively, shockingly vocal in her hatred for Muslim culture and Muslims, a purveyor of the dangerous and imaginary concept, born of European distaste for the influx of immigrants from its former colonies… To call her a ‘woman’s rights activist’ is like calling Squeaky Fromm an environmentalist.’”
Campbell’s hate is also directed at Fox News. In one email, she imagines organizing a crippling boycott of the top-rated cable news network, urging participants to join a “new campaign to weaken the power of FOX” and “write to companies who advertise” on the “poisonous” network.
An email from Fellman urges others to help prevent the cable news network from being awarded Helen Thomas’ former front-row center seat in the White House briefing room because it is “not a legitimate news organization” and insists the “real, public news organization” NPR should be given the spot.
But given Brandeis' roots and tradition, the vitriol directed at Israel is perhaps most shocking. According to its website, Brandeis was founded as a nonsectarian university under the sponsorship of the American Jewish community to “embody its highest ethical and cultural values and to express its gratitude to the United States through the traditional Jewish commitment to education.”
“To see that kind of sentiment, disgusting as it is, is a double-standard (toward) America’s only allies in the Middle East. These sentiments are being sponsored and paid for… imagine how this hurts the Jewish donors to Brandeis University,” noted Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which focuses on racism in America and a history of the Holocaust. “Of course the very academic feel particularly free to let it all hang out because it’s all covered under rubric of freedom of expression when they’re not held accountable.”
However, the university’s president, Frederick Lawrence, has been quick to distance himself from the controversial mailing list. When approached for comment, Brandeis spokesperson Ellen de Graffenreid sent FoxNews.com a letter Lawrence sent to all faculty staff regarding the issue.
“While we maintain our staunch support of freedom of expression and academic inquiry, some remarks by an extremely small cohort of Brandeis faculty members are abhorrent. Such statements, which include anti-Semitic epithets, personal attacks, denigration of the Catholic faith and the use of crude and vulgar terms in discussions about Israel, do not represent the Brandeis community,” he wrote. “I condemn these statements under no uncertain terms.”
At least one professor who found himself on the ListServ appeared to see through the Israel-bashing, and called his ivory tower colleagues on it.
“Let’s not be disingenuous. You guys hate Israel. That’s what unites the group. That’s why it was founded,” Doron Ben-Atar – a professor of history at the New York-based Fordham University – wrote in a post earlier this year. “You support BDS and circulate their petitions – a movement led by Omar Barghouti who not only declared that Israel has no right to exist, but has told a group in San Diego a few months back that Israeli soldiers use Palestinian children for spot target practice and that they use their body parts… I think when progressives lose their center and align with bizarre Islamist groups we are all worse off.”

Obama authorizes military strikes against ISIS leadership

President Obama has authorized the Pentagon to target and kill leaders of the Islamic State militant group, with the organization’s head Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi being at the top of the administration’s list.
U.S. military officials confirmed to Fox News Thursday that Obama had approved the strikes against individual targets for the first time. The authorization was first reported by the Washington Post.
Obama had previously not permitted the military to target individuals from the terrorist organization, also known as ISIS or ISIL, even if intelligence showed where they were located.
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said in a press briefing Thursday that the president is “actively engaged” in selecting possible Islamic State targets that are “available.”
“The president has gotten guidance about targets that are available and would be critical to denying ISIL a safe-haven both in Iraq and in Syria,” Earnest said.
Earnest said the administration has identified the targets through ramped up "intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets” in the region.
Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby also told reporters Thursday that destroying a group like the Islamic State requires an “aggressive” approach, which includes “disrupting their ability to command and control and to lead their own forces.”
Obama announced on Wednesday he is sharply escalating the U.S. military campaign against militants, authorizing U.S. airstrikes in Syria along with expanded airstrikes in Iraq.
Obama outlined a “comprehensive” strategy for targeting the organization in Iraq and Syria, including by potentially aiding moderate factions of the Syrian opposition.
Also Thursday, the CIA said that new intelligence assessments of the Islamic State have found that the number of fighters the group is able to muster has grown to as many as three times previous estimates. 
A CIA spokesperson told Fox News that a review of intelligence reports from May to August found that the Islamic State can muster 20,000 and 31,500 fighters across Iraq and Syria. This new figure is a significant jump from the agency's previous assessment that the group could muster at least 10,000 fighters. 
"This new total reflects an increase in members because of stronger recruitment since June following battlefield successes and the declaration of a caliphate, greater battlefield activity, and additional intelligence," the spokesman said.