JEWISH KING JESUS IS COMING AT THE RAPTURE FOR US IN THE CLOUDS-DON'T MISS IT FOR THE WORLD.THE BIBLE TAKEN LITERALLY- WHEN THE PLAIN SENSE MAKES GOOD SENSE-SEEK NO OTHER SENSE-LEST YOU END UP IN NONSENSE.GET SAVED NOW- CALL ON JESUS TODAY.THE ONLY SAVIOR OF THE WHOLE EARTH - NO OTHER.
1 COR 15:23-JESUS THE FIRST FRUITS-CHRISTIANS RAPTURED TO JESUS-FIRST FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT-23 But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming.ROMANS 8:23 And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.(THE PRE-TRIB RAPTURE)
DANIEL 7:23-24
23 Thus he said, The fourth beast (EU,REVIVED ROME) shall be the fourth kingdom upon earth,(7TH WORLD EMPIRE) which shall be diverse from all kingdoms, and shall devour the whole earth, and shall tread it down, and break it in pieces.(TRADING BLOCKS-10 WORLD REGIONS/TRADE BLOCS)
24 And the ten horns out of this kingdom are ten kings(10 NATIONS-10 WORLD DIVISION WORLD GOVERNMENT) that shall arise: and another shall rise after them; and he shall be diverse from the first, and he shall subdue three kings.(THE EU (EUROPEAN UNION) TAKES OVER IRAQ WHICH HAS SPLIT INTO 3-SUNNI-KURD-SHIA PARTS-AND THE REVIVED ROMAN EMPIRE IS BROUGHT BACK TOGETHER-THE TWO LEGS OF DANIEL WESTERN LEG AND THE ISLAMIC LEG COMBINED AS 1)
LUKE 2:1-3
1 And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.
2 (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)
3 And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.
Cameron: No second chance after Brexit vote By Eszter Zalan-FEB 22,16-EUOBSERVER
BRUSSELS, Today, 20:17-British prime minister David Cameron warned that the UK would not be able to negotiate another deal, and have another referendum in case British voters chose to leave the EU in a referendum set for 23 June.Cameron, who sealed a deal with fellow EU leaders last week on a reformed UK membership of the EU, set out the agreement to lawmakers Monday.In a thinly veiled attack on London mayor Boris Johnson, who Sunday said he would support the UK leaving the EU and suggested that a better deal for the UK and another referendum would be possible after a No vote, Cameron said: “This is a vital and final decision for our country”.The Conservative Party leader outlined to lawmakers that if British voters voted to leave, he would invoke article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, the mechanism for exiting the bloc.It would trigger two years of negotiations, after which the UK would be presented with a package by the EU.Cameron warned however that after two years if there is no agreement then exit is automatic, unless all other 27 members agree to delay it.“It is not an invitation to rejoin,” Cameron said, adding this would create uncertainty, endanger jobs, as 53 trade deals and access to the single market would be cut immediately.Aiming at his Tory rival, Johnson, and his idea of a second referendum, Cameron said: “I won't dwell on the irony that some people who want to leave want to use a leave vote to remain. I know a number of couples who have begun divorce proceedings, but none who have done so to renew their marriage vows”.-Risk national security-Cameron warned the House of Commons it was not the time to divide Europe, amid threats from ISIS and Russia.“The challenges facing the West today are genuinely threatening ... In my view this is no time to divide the West,” he told parliament.“The only person I can think of who would like us to leave the EU is Vladimir Putin,” he added.Cameron also warned that that a vote to leave the EU would risk Britain's economic and national security.The fear of Brexit drove Britain’s currency, the pound sterling, down to its lowest level in almost seven years, when it was in the midst of the financial crisis.The pound has traded as low as $1.406, a fall of more than three cents (or 2.3 percent) since Friday night.Moody’s credit rating agency also warned that Brexit would be bad for the UK economy.In an apparent rebuttal of comments made by senior Tory politician Iain Duncan Smith, Europe's policing agency said Monday that Britain's citizens could be left more vulnerable to attacks by terror groups and organised crime gangs if they decided to leave the European Union."I see a very clear picture of the UK's dependency on the EU to help protect its security interest," Europol's director Rob Wainwright said in The Hague.He warned the UK "will no longer have the benefits that it currently has", direct access to databases, taking part in intelligence projects and other areas.Duncan Smith had said that remaining in the EU made the UK more vulnerable to a Paris-style terrorism attack.-Brussels not in campaign mode-The European Commission said Monday it would not take part in the campaign to keep Britain in the EU.“The commission will not campaign, will not take part in the campaign,” spokesman Margaritis Schinas told journalists.“I don't see the commission having a role in a campaign that is for the British people and the British people alone,” he added.The commission has not always been so firm. The EU executive strongly supported the ‘Yes’ vote in the lead up to a Greek referendum on the EU-IMF bailout terms in July last year.“A 'No' would mean ... that Greece had said no to Europe,” EU commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker had said ahead of the vote.
WORLD POWERS IN THE LAST DAYS (END OF AGE OF GRACE NOT THE WORLD)
EUROPEAN UNION-KING OF WEST-DAN 9:26-27,DAN 7:23-24,DAN 11:40,REV 13:1-10
EGYPT-KING OF THE SOUTH-DAN 11:40
RUSSIA-KING OF THE NORTH-EZEK 38:1-2,EZEK 39:1-3
CHINA-KING OF THE EAST-DAN 11:44,REV 9:16,18
VATICAN-RELIGIOUS LEADER-REV 13:11-18,REV 17:4-5,9,18
WORLD TERRORISM
GENESIS 6:11-13
11 The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.(WORLD TERRORISM,MURDERS)(HAMAS IN HEBREW IS VIOLENCE)
12 And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.
13 And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence (TERRORISM)(HAMAS) through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.
GENESIS 16:11-12
11 And the angel of the LORD said unto her,(HAGAR) Behold, thou art with child, and shalt bear a son, and shalt call his name Ishmael;(FATHER OF THE ARAB/MUSLIMS) because the LORD hath heard thy affliction.
12 And he (ISHMAEL-FATHER OF THE ARAB-MUSLIMS) will be a wild (DONKEY-JACKASS) man;(ISLAM IS A FAKE AND DANGEROUS SEX FOR MURDER CULT) his hand will be against every man,(ISLAM HATES EVERYONE) and every man's hand against him;(PROTECTING THEMSELVES FROM BEING BEHEADED) and he (ISHMAEL ARAB/MUSLIM) shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.(LITERAL-THE ARABS LIVE WITH THEIR BRETHERN JEWS)
ISAIAH 14:12-14
12 How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer,(SATAN) son of the morning!(HEBREW-CRECENT MOON-ISLAM) how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!
13 For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:
14 I (SATAN HAS EYE TROUBLES) will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.(AND 1/3RD OF THE ANGELS OF HEAVEN FELL WITH SATAN AND BECAME DEMONS)
JOHN 16:2
2 They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service.(ISLAM MURDERS IN THE NAME OF MOON GOD ALLAH OF ISLAM)
Russia wants to fly over US with advanced digital camera-Associated Press By DEB RIECHMANN-FEB 22,16-YAHOONEWS
WASHINGTON (AP) — Russia will ask permission on Monday to start flying surveillance planes equipped with high-powered digital cameras amid warnings from U.S. intelligence and military officials that such overflights help Moscow collect intelligence on the United States.Russia and the United States are signatories to the Open Skies Treaty, which allows unarmed observation flights over the entire territory of all 34 member nations to foster transparency about military activity and help monitor arms control and other agreements. Senior intelligence and military officials, however, worry that Russia is taking advantage of technological advances to violate the spirit of the treaty.Russia will formally ask the Open Skies Consultative Commission, based in Vienna, to be allowed to fly an aircraft equipped with high-tech sensors over the United States, according to a senior congressional staffer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the staff member wasn't authorized to discuss the issue publicly.The request will put the Obama administration in the position of having to decide whether to let Russia use the high-powered equipment on its surveillance planes at a time when Moscow, according to the latest State Department compliance report, is failing to meet all its obligations under the treaty. And it comes at one of the most tension-filled times in U.S.-Russia relations since the end of the Cold War, with the two countries at odds over Russian activity in Ukraine and Syria."The treaty has become a critical component of Russia's intelligence collection capability directed at the United States," Adm. Cecil D. Haney, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, wrote in a letter earlier this year to Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., chairman of a House subcommittee on strategic forces."In addition to overflying military installations, Russian Open Skies flights can overfly and collect on Department of Defense and national security or national critical infrastructure," Haney said. "The vulnerability exposed by exploitation of this data and costs of mitigation are increasingly difficult to characterize."A State Department official said Sunday that treaty nations had not yet received notice of the Russian request, but that certification of the Russian plane with a "digital electro-optical sensor" could not occur until this summer because the treaty requires a 120-day advance notification. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the issue publicly.The official also said that the treaty, which was entered into force in 2002, establishes procedures for certifying digital sensors to confirm that they are compliant with treaty requirements. The official said all signatories to the treaty agree that "transition from film cameras to digital sensors is required for the long-term viability of the treaty."In December, Rose Gottemoeller, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, sought to temper concerns about Russian overflights, saying that what Moscow gains from the observation flights is "incremental" to what they collect through other means."One of the advantages of the Open Skies Treaty is that information — imagery — that is taken is shared openly among all the treaty parties," she said at a joint hearing of the House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees in December. "So one of the advantages with the Open Skies Treaty is that we know exactly what the Russians are imaging, because they must share the imagery with us."Still, military and intelligence officials have expressed serious concern."The open skies construct was designed for a different era," Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told lawmakers when asked about the Russian overflights during a congressional hearing. "I'm very concerned about how it's applied today."Robert Work, deputy secretary of defense, told Congress: "We think that they're going beyond the original intent of the treaty and we continue to look at this very, very closely."Steve Rademaker, former assistant secretary of state for the bureau of arms control and the bureau of international security and nonproliferation, told Congress at a hearing on security cooperation in Europe in October that Russia complies with the Open Skies Treaty, but has "adopted a number of measures that are inconsistent with the spirt" of the accord.The treaty, for instance, obligates each member to make all of its territory available for aerial observation, yet Russia has imposed restrictions on surveillance over Moscow and Chechnya and near Abkhazia and South Ossetia, he said. Russian restrictions also make it hard to conduct observation in the Kaliningrad enclave, said Rademaker, who believes Russia is "selectively implementing" the treaty "in a way that suits its interests."
Austria plans Western Balkan meeting on migrant caps By Nikolaj Nielsen-FEB 22,16-EUOBSERVER
BRUSSELS, Today, 09:00-Austria is asking Western Balkan nations and Bulgaria to meet to discuss the migrant crisis, ahead of a gathering of EU interior ministers in Brussels.The move follows Austria's decision last week to cap the daily number of asylum applications to 80, and allow 3,200 migrants to travel through its territory each day.The decision roused fears of bottlenecks along the Balkan route and further border clamp downs and drew sharp criticism from Germany and the European Commission.The Austria meeting will take place on Wednesday (24 February) and will be attended by ministers from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia, reports Reuters.The aim is reportedly to clarify Austria's border restrictions, its implications, and how best to coordinate efforts along the Balkan route.Austria's interior minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner and foreign minister Sebastian Kurz have sent invitations.Despite criticism from some of her peers, Mikl-Leitner said she intended to impose further restrictions.The gathering on Wednesday may build on a separate pact agreed last week by police chiefs from Austria, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia and Serbia.-Afghan bottleneck-All five agreed to organise joint transport of migrants directly from the Macedonia-Greece border to Austria, where they can opt to stay or continue to Germany.“We’ll sign a joint statement on how to profile and transport the migrants from the Greek-Macedonian border to Germany,” Vlado Dominic, chief of the Croatian police, told Balkan Insight.EU interior ministers the following day will meet in Brussels to discuss new efforts to document everyone who passes through an external border. They will also discuss a new European border and coast guard proposal.Meanwhile, Macedonia is reportedly stopping Afghan nationals from entering from Greece.The Macedonian police told AP they had taken the measure because of a similar block imposed by Serbia, which in turn blamed Austria and Slovenia.Greek police on Sunday (21 February) confirmed to AP that Afghans were no longer being admitted into Macedonia."The authorities of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia informed us that, beginning at dawn Sunday, they no longer accept Afghan refugees because the same problem exists at their border with Serbia," said a Greek police spokesperson.Police in Macedonia are also reportedly now only allowing people with valid identification documents to pass.
US, Russia announce Syria ceasefire, excluding strikes on IS-Halt in hostilities to come into effect on February 27; deal also won’t ban raids on al-Qaeda affiliate-By Maeva Bambuck and Bradley Klapper February 22, 2016, 7:46 pm-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL
The US and Russia on Monday announced an agreement for a cessation of hostilities in Syria, which will exclude attacks on the Islamic State group and al-Qaeda’s local affiliate.The ceasefire will come into effect on February 27.The officials said earlier that the two sides have agreed on the terms and conditions for the “cessation of hostilities.” The formal announcement had been expected after presidents Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin speak on the matter by telephone. The officials weren’t authorized to speak about the matter publicly and demanded anonymity.The announcement caps weeks of diplomacy that intensified in the past few days, aimed at reaching a temporary truce that would allow the parties to return to the negotiating table in Geneva. A first round of indirect talks collapsed rapidly last month after the government launched a massive offensive backed by Russian airstrikes in the northern province of Aleppo, near the Turkish border.Residents of the Syrian capital earlier Monday expressed skepticism about talk of a “provisional agreement” for a truce, a day after a wave of Islamic State bombings killed about 130 people in government-held areas near Damascus and another city.Details of the tentative ceasefire between the government and insurgents, announced in Jordan on Sunday by US Secretary of State John Kerry, have not been made public. Even if a truce were to take hold, IS would not be a party to it.The Russian Foreign Ministry put out a statement earlier Monday saying that Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Kerry spoke by telephone on Sunday and agreed on the parameters for the ceasefire.The statement said those parameters were then reported to Putin and Obama. No further details were immediately available.The UN’s special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, told The Associated Press on Monday that this week is shaping up as “crucial” for diplomatic efforts to help end the fighting, though he declined to provide details of the negotiations.Sunday’s blasts that ripped through the Sayyida Zeinab suburb of Damascus and the central city of Homs were among the deadliest bombings in government-held areas in Syria’s devastating civil war.The Islamic State group claimed both attacks. The extremists are dug in on the outskirts of the two cities and have repeatedly targeted pro-government strongholds.De Mistura condemned the bombings and said it suggested the group is feeling “cornered” amid an intensified diplomatic push to end the five-year war. The US also condemned the “barbaric terrorist attacks.”Inside the Hamidiyeh Souk, a popular Damascus bazaar which is typically crowded with shoppers, people said they were worried that a ceasefire would not be evenly observed and could leave the Syrian authorities vulnerable.“I hope there will be no ceasefire, because if there is a ceasefire, Turks will increase their support for criminals and traitors,” said Ahmad al-Omar from the northern Aleppo province, adding that Turkey may seek to let opposition fighters in via its border with Syria.Others at the bazaar echoed Syrian President Bashar Assad’s statements that a ceasefire could give an advantage to rebel forces and the Islamic State group.“I believe that those proposals now are … a pretext to stop the advance of the Syrian army, which is trying to liberate the homeland,” said Ahmad al-Issa.The Associated Press reported from the bazaar on a government-approved visit.On Monday, the Kremlin announced that Putin spoke with the emir of Qatar, a key supporter of the rebels fighting to topple Assad. The two sides agreed “to intensify bilateral contacts at various levels to facilitate the settlement of the crisis,” the statement said. Putin also discussed Syria with King Salman of Saudi Arabia, another leading backer of the rebels, in a phone conversation on Friday.Syrian officials said the government was ready to take part in a truce as long as it is not used by militants to reinforce their positions. Syrian troops backed by Russian warplanes are waging a major offensive in the northern Aleppo province, trying to seal the border with Turkey, a key supporter of the rebels, before any truce is reached.Meanwhile, the Syrian government’s supply route by land to the city of Aleppo was cut by heavy fighting Monday as the army, supported by allied militias and the Russian air force, fought to consolidate its recent gains in the northern province.The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which relies on a network of contacts to monitor the war, said Islamic militias assaulted government-held positions around Khanaser, a town southeast of Aleppo, setting off intense clashes that have lasted through the day. Khanaser lies along the government’s only access route to the city.Fighting has been fierce in Aleppo province in recent weeks amid a government offensive to cut off the rebel stronghold.Among the youth sitting around the Syrian capital’s landmark Omayyad mosque, at the entrance of the old souks, few wanted to talk politics.Those who did expressed their wariness of a political solution after several rounds of unsuccessful peace talks. “It’s good for the Syrians to stop fighting but it will not happen,” said Awuj Aqeel, a student.“Every time they agree on a truce for a period of time and then they break it.”
US Uses $400M F-22 Raptor Jets in Syria Despite Not Needing Them-ABC News By LEE FERRAN-FEB 22,16-YAHOONEWS
For years they were the highly-advanced aircraft without a mission, decried by critics as having been built from more than $80 billion in taxpayer dollars for an enemy that doesn’t exist. But now, more than a decade after the first jets went operational, the next-generation stealth F-22 Raptors are... still looking for that enemy, and settling for bombing militants in Syria and Iraq in the meantime.The jets, some of the most sophisticated and priciest stealth fighter planes ever built, are not sitting out the Air Force’s latest aerial operations in Iraq and Syria, as they did in previous campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Since their maiden mission in September 2014, F-22s have been “operating regularly” in the anti-ISIS campaign and have dropped more than 200 bombs on targets in 150 sorties, according to the Air Force.“We have generally been tasked to target and destroy Daesh [ISIS] training camps, vehicle-borne improvised explosive device manufacturing and storage facilities, fighting areas, various [ISIS] headquarters facilities and [ISIS-controlled] oil distribution capabilities,” Air Force Capt. Joseph Simms said in a statement provided to ABC News. “The F-22s have been instrumental in taking out a lot of high-value targets.”But these missions are not the ones for which the air-to-air combat specialist F-22 was initially designed, and the Air Force acknowledges that the pricey planes don’t necessarily need to be the ones conducting them.“The F-22 isn’t an operational necessity,” Air Force spokesperson Maj. Tim Smith told ABC News, “but it is one of the great tools that can be used in this conflict to deliver airstrikes with precision.”The Raptor was designed and developed in the late 1980s and 1990s with potential showdowns against the sophisticated militaries of Russia or China in mind -- not the series of drawn-out conflicts against poorly trained and equipped but nonetheless persistent foes like al Qaeda, the Taliban and, now, ISIS that came to pass. The U.S. government initially ordered more than 600 Raptors, but funding for new planes was cut off in 2009 and less than 200 of them were actually delivered, sending the price-per-plane skyrocketing to over $400 million including research and development costs. Then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates outlined the logic of the move in 2009:“The F-22 is clearly a capability we do need -- a niche, silver bullet solution for one or two potential scenarios -- specifically the defeat of a highly advanced enemy fighter fleet,” Gates said then. “[But] the F-22, to be blunt, does not make much sense anyplace else in the spectrum of conflict.”In 2011 Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., was more blunt when speaking with ABC News’ Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross. “Facts are stubborn things,” the senator said. “[The F-22] has not flown a single combat mission... I don’t think the F-22 will ever be seen in the combat it was designed to counter, because that threat is no longer in existence.”Now in Syria and Iraq and still lacking a "highly advanced enemy fighter fleet" to battle, the Air Force appears to be attempting to broaden the F-22’s spectrum by giving the planes missions more generally suited for air-to-ground attackers like the cheaper F-16 or, eventually, the F-22’s next-generation trouble-prone cousin, the F-35 Lightning.Though not totally necessary, Air Force officials have praised some of the bonuses the F-22 brings to the table in Operation Inherent Resolve. Last July, an unidentified squadron commander said in an Air Force press release that the F-22 is able to use its stealth capabilities to “operate much closer to non-coalition surface-to-air missiles and fighter aircraft with little risk of detection.” The unnamed lieutenant colonel also said the F-22’s munitions are “extremely accurate from very long distances and [have] the lowest collateral damage potential of any weapon in our inventory.”Maj. Smith told ABC News the plane has also shown its value by assuming the position of a kind of “aerial quarterback” in the complex airspace of Iraq and Syria.“Although we don’t have Syria, Russia or others actively opposing our air operations in the region, with the number of air defenses and aircraft from different nations at play, there is a demand for the kind of ‘aerial quarterback’ capabilities the F-22 provides that wasn’t present to the same degree in earlier operations over Iraq or Afghanistan,” he said.Air Force Gen. Hawk Carlisle touched on the “quarterback” quality in a speech at last February’s Air Force Association Air Warfare Symposium when he said the F-22 can “go to areas where other aircraft can’t, re-role and mission manage the entire force.” Air Force Times then paraphrased Carlisle’s remarks, reporting the F-22 could change mid-mission from an escort to “using its advanced sensors and avionics to help control other aircraft and change targets.”“The airplane has performed fantastically,” Carlisle said. “When you have F-22s in a package, every single airplane in that package is better because the F-22s are there.”The plane's performance has apparently even won over Sen. McCain."The ability of the F-22 to hold Putin's fighters, Assad's surface-to-air missiles, and other ground targets at risk, while simultaneously servicing [ISIS] targets, is a testament to its undeniable operational flexibility," McCain said Friday in a statement provided to ABC News.Supporters of the F-22, back in 2009 and more recently, say that the plane will really be worth its enormous price tag if the U.S. ever enters into conflict with Russia or China, as both nations are developing their own next-generation stealth fighters to rival the Raptor.In the meantime, the Air Force is looking for other ways to leverage the advanced fighters both through bombing missions in Iraq and Syria and in so-called "deterrent" missions elsewhere in the world -- missions in which the U.S. hopes that having the Raptors nearby will be enough to scare enemies straight. Last week four F-22s flew in formation with South Korean fighters over the Korean Peninsula in a move the Air Force said was meant to "demonstrate the strong alliance" between the U.S. and South Korea.The flights happened to take place days after North Korea unsettled the international community by launching a long-range missile.
US rejected N.Korea peace treaty bid: State Dept-AFP-FEB 22,16-YAHOONEWS
Washington (AFP) - The United States said Sunday it received a North Korean proposal to discuss a peace treaty for the Korean peninsula but rejected it when Pyongyang refused to consider reducing its nuclear arsenal.State Department spokesman John Kirby disclosed the exchange when asked about a Wall Street Journal report that President Barack Obama's administration had secretly agreed to peace talks to formally end the Korean War of 1950 to 1953, days before Pyongyang carried out its latest nuclear test early this year.That January 6 test -- the country's fourth after previous tests in 2006, 2009 and 2013 -- brought an end to the exploratory contacts that took place at the United Nations, where US and North Korean diplomats can mingle informally in the absence of formal relations between their two countries, the Journal reported."To be clear, it was the North Koreans who proposed discussing a peace treaty," Kirby told reporters traveling with Secretary of State John Kerry in Amman, Jordan."We carefully considered their proposal, and made clear that denuclearization had to be part of any such discussion," he added."The North rejected our response. Our response to the NK proposal was consistent with our long-standing focus on denuclearization."Citing unnamed US officials familiar with the matter, the Journal claimed the White House had dropped a long-standing condition to talks -- that North Korea first take steps to cut back its nuclear arsenal."Instead the US called for North Korea's atomic-weapons program to be simply part of the talks," the newspaper reported.In response to the North's January nuclear test, which triggered global concern and condemnation, the UN Security Council agreed to roll out new measures to punish the reclusive Asian nation.And on Thursday, Obama signed off on new measures passed by the US Congress that tighten sanctions on anyone importing goods or technology related to weapons of mass destruction into North Korea, or anyone who knowingly engaged in human rights abuses.The measure also heaps additional financial pressure on the already-sanctioned regime of leader Kim Jong-Un, by aiming to cut down on money laundering and narcotics trafficking, two major illicit activities believed to be funneling millions of dollars into Kim's inner circle.
1/3RD OF SHIPS DESTROYED
REVELATION 8:8-9
8 And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood;
9 And the third part of the creatures which were in the sea, and had life, died; and the third part of the ships were destroyed.
Indonesia sinks 27 foreign boats to stop illegal fishing-AFP-FEB 22,16-YAHOONEWS
Jakarta (AFP) - Indonesia sank 27 impounded foreign boats on Monday, a minister said, as the world's largest archipelago nation stepped up a campaign against illegal fishing in its waters.The empty vessels from the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Myanmar were blown up or scuttled at five separate locations across the country, said Fisheries Minister Susi Pudjiastuti.The boats had been all caught fishing illegally in the archipelago of more than 17,000 islands. Four Indonesian boats were also sunk after they were caught fishing without proper documentation."The government is taking stronger and firmer action to enforce regulations to keep our waters safe," Pudjiastuti, a key figure in the campaign against illegal fishing, told journalists.Indonesia has sunk foreign boats on several occasions since the government launched the drive to combat illegal fishing, with President Joko Widodo claiming the practice costs the country's economy billions of dollars annually.However, the campaign has caused tensions with other countries in the region. China last year expressed concern after a Chinese boat was blown up.
CAMPAIGN 2016-Trump’s fight with the lights offers glimpse of what GOP race will be like when there’s no one left for him to fight-Dylan Stableford-Senior editor-February 22, 2016-YAHOONEWS
When the lights suddenly went out during a Donald Trump rally in Atlanta on Sunday, the Republican frontrunner gave us a glimpse of what the race for the GOP nomination may look like if no one catches up to him.“Oh, I like that much better,” Trump told the crowd inside Georgia World Congress Center. “Those lights were brutal. Are they coming from the dishonest press?”According to NBC News, a protester had pulled a cable, turning them off. But when they came back on, the brash billionaire demanded that they remain off.“Don’t turn the lights on!” Trump said. “No, get those lights off. Off! Turn them off, they’re too bright. Turn them off!”The real estate mogul tried to turn the situation with the lights into a teachable moment.“We save on electricity, right? And because the lights don’t work, I won’t pay the rent — so, better lighting, and we don’t pay the rent. That’s the way we have to negotiate for our country … the lights go off, it’s better. We say we want the lights. Oh, it’s terrible, we take a big deduction off the rent because the lights are off, but it’s actually better. It’s the kind of sick thinking we really need for our country.”Trump’s rant came a day after his 10-point victory in the South Carolina primary — a bludgeoning that led former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, one of Trump’s favorite targets, to bow out of the race.“With no Bush as foil,” NBC News’ Ali Vitali wrote, “Trump rails against the light.”On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said he believes it’s now a two-person race for the Republican nomination, with Trump and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio the last candidates standing.“The bigger advantage is to Trump,” McCarthy said. “He’s got the momentum. I think there’s more than a 50 percent chance he’s the nominee. And I think that’s what’s setting in for a lot of people. Could they get their heads around Trump being the nominee?”McCarthy was asked if he could work with a President Trump.“Oh, yeah, I think I can work with Donald Trump,” he said.Meanwhile, Rubio may soon find himself in Trump’s crosshairs.On Saturday, Trump retweeted a link to an online article questioning whether the Florida senator, whose parents are from Cuba, is eligible to be president.“@ResisTyr: Mr.Trump…BOTH Cruz AND Rubio are ineligible to be POTUS! It’s a SLAM DUNK CASE!! Check it! https://t.co/NjqWP0pP6X”— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)-February 20, 2016 -On ABC’s “This Week” Sunday, Trump was pressed by host George Stephanopoulos about floating another potential birther conspiracy theory.“Do you really believe that?” Stephanopoulos asked.“I think the lawyers have to determine that,” Trump replied. “It was a retweet, not so much with Marco. I’m not really that familiar with Marco’s circumstances.”Then why retweet it? “Because I’m not sure,” Trump said. “I mean, let people make their own determination.”He added: “I’ve never looked at it, George. I honestly have never looked at it. As somebody said, he’s not [eligible]. And I retweeted it. I have 14 million people between Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and I retweet things, and we start dialogue and it’s very interesting. And maybe that’s why I have 14 million people instead of 200 people, I don’t know.”
Inside Rubio and Cruz’s high-stakes ground-game battle in Nevada-Andrew Romano and Holly Bailey-February 21, 2016-YAHOONEWS
LAS VEGAS — Donald Trump has led the GOP field in every single poll taken in Nevada since he entered the race last June, often by as many as 20 percentage points. And after his resounding victory in South Carolina, the tinsel-haired mogul is the heavy favorite to win yet again when Nevada Republicans come out to caucus on Tuesday.But as recent back-to-back visits to the neighboring Las Vegas headquarters of Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz made clear, neither campaign seems particularly concerned about Trump — or any of the other Republican candidates — in the final days of the Silver State contest. They’re far more focused on each other.That’s because both camps believe that with Trump coasting on his celebrity as usual, they can reshape the results and beat expectations on caucus night by quietly and methodically mastering the unglamorous work of getting out the vote. Their thinking is that in a state where the polling is particularly unreliable, the process is particularly chaotic, and the turnout is particularly low, the ground game could have a bigger effect than anywhere else.“Oh, you have to see this,” a gray-haired Rubio volunteer with a thick Southern accent told Yahoo News, gesturing toward her laptop. On the screen was a picture of Cruz’s louche, smirking face superimposed on the body of a naked man lounging in a rubber-duck-filled bathtub — a cheeky response, posted online by a Rubio fan, to the Cruz campaign’s poorly Photoshopped image of Rubio shaking hands with President Obama.“He has all his ducks in order!” the volunteer chirped. “Isn’t that hilarious?”An hour later at Cruz HQ, which is tucked into a somewhat seedy strip mall a few doors down from a shop selling vaporizers and bongs, staffers could barely contain themselves when a reporter mentioned that he had just visited Rubio’s command post in the fancier office complex one block west on Tropicana Avenue.“How many people were there?” snapped Matthew Bell, a field representative for Cruz. “As many as we have here?” Told that the number of Rubio volunteers, about a dozen, matched the number of Cruz volunteers, Bell looked deflated.The mutual obsession makes perfect sense. Early on, Jeb Bush, who suspended his campaign Saturday after a distant fourth-place finish in South Carolina, built what was widely considered the best operation here; the consultant who was running his campaign, Ryan Erwin, led Mitt Romney to caucus victories in both 2008 and 2012. As Lt. Gov. Mark Hutchison, Rubio’s Nevada campaign chairman, told Yahoo News, “Technically, Bush did everything right.” And yet the latest polls, taken before Bush dropped out, showed him in last place locally, behind even Ben Carson and John Kasich.Carson and Kasich remain in the race, but neither is poised to make much of an impact. Like Bush, Carson was on the ground early, but he has been losing steam for months, and his last-place showing in the Palmetto State won’t help. And Kasich isn’t even visiting Nevada between now and caucus day.That leaves Cruz and Rubio. With Trump appearing to hold a sizable lead — and with the two young senators from Florida and Texas having just finished neck-and-neck in South Carolina — the battle for second place will likely be the marquee event Tuesday night.Cruz and Rubio have been preparing for this moment for months. Caucuses are fairly new to Nevada — and confusing to voters; Republican turnout in 2012 was tiny: just 32,894 voters. (By comparison, 182,000 Republicans caucused earlier this month in Iowa.) Buoyed by his fellow Mormons, Mitt Romney managed to capture 50 percent of the vote four years ago — a huge win, but still only 16,486 votes. The campaigns cautiously expect a similar turnout this time; no one knows whether the number will go down without a Mormon in the race, or up because of increased interest among other Republicans. The bottom line, however, is that someone could come in second on Tuesday with fewer than 10,000 votes; the Rubio campaign, for one, says it has been preparing for a couple-hundred-vote race since the beginning.“In Nevada, organization is key,” Jeremy Hughes, Rubio’s state director, told Yahoo News. “I wouldn’t say it’s sexy, but it’s the grind work you’ve got to do to win elections here.”Rubio was up and running first, as early as a year ago, and his operation has been described as “the most organized and impressive … of the Republican field.” When Yahoo News shadowed the senator on a trip to Nevada in October, the key elements of his strategy — which is being shaped by Mike Slanker, the top political adviser for both Gov. Brian Sandoval of Nevada and the state’s junior senator, Dean Heller — were already in place. The Cruz campaign, meanwhile, has been playing catch-up.At every speech, Rubio made sure to remind voters that he’d spent part of his childhood in Las Vegas. His parents moved from Miami in 1979 and stayed until Rubio, now 44, was in the eighth grade. His dad tended bar at an off-Strip casino called Sam’s Club; his mother worked at the Imperial Palace.“Believe it or not, we still have more family in southern Nevada than in south Florida,” Rubio told one crowd. “So if I only win by 68 votes here, you’ll know why.”When Rubio returns to Nevada Sunday night, he will continue to harp on his local connections. His cousin Mo Denis is a state senator, and his other cousins have accompanied him to various events.“These other guys all come flying in, but only Marco knows what it’s like,” Slanker told Yahoo News. “He lived here.”The second piece of the puzzle is turnout, and the Rubio campaign is counting on two demographic groups in particular to put him over the top on Tuesday.“You have to remember who’s going to show up to caucus,” Slanker said. “There are going to be, like, seven people there. So you want to look to your most civic-minded people. Who is that in this state? It’s Mormons and seniors. It’s a powerful combination. If you can’t get those folks, you’re not going to win.”Mormons made up a quarter of caucus-goers in 2012, even though they represent only 4 percent of the state’s total population; senior citizens vastly outnumbered younger voters. Rubio’s itinerary in October was revealing in this regard. By far his biggest event, with more than 1,000 attendees, was at Sun City Summerlin, the largest “active adult” community in the state. Everywhere the senator went, he was introduced by Lt. Gov. Hutchison — the state’s most prominent Mormon politician. (As a kid in Las Vegas, Rubio himself was briefly a member of the Mormon Church.) Later, Rubio made a point of visiting Boulder City, a Mormon enclave 20 miles outside Las Vegas, where he was accompanied and introduced by former Clark County Commissioner Bruce Woodbury, a man Slanker described as “the godfather of the Mormon Church in this state.” And when the senator returns to Nevada this week, he will be touring the Mormon-rich northern part of the state — Elko, Reno, Minden — with both Hutchison and Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who is also Mormon.“Other folks” — non-Mormons and non-seniors — “can’t figure it out,” Slanker explained. “The caucus will come and go, and they’ll be like, ‘Oh! I could have voted? Can I still vote?’”Not that the Rubio campaign is dismissing the rest of the electorate. It has people working in each of Nevada’s 17 counties; at five campaign offices scattered throughout the state, dozens of volunteers have been calling registered Republicans and trying to identify potential supporters. The important thing, as Hughes put it, is “finding your voters and making sure they know where to go.” Before Rubio speaks, Hughes’ team puts a supporter commitment card and a printout explaining the caucus process on every seat; the literature steers voters to caucus.marcorubio.com, which then allows them to look up their caucus sites while providing the campaign with crucial data.“It’s a dedicated website that tells people where to go caucus,” Hughes said. “And because we know that John Smith has found his voting location, we don’t have to waste a call on him. Meanwhile, Suzie over here hasn’t looked up her location yet — so we know we have to get in touch with her.”“By the time this is over, we will have met every caucus-goer and taught them how to caucus,” Slanker added.As the South Carolina campaign wound down, Rubio’s Las Vegas HQ was buzzing. Junk food — the sustenance of pretty much every political operation — was everywhere: Krispy Kreme boxes, jars of Skippy, bottles of Pepsi, Jack Link’s beef and cheese packages. Maps of precincts and framed photos of “top volunteers” lined the walls; a massive navy blue “Nevada Is Marco Rubio Country” sign hung nearby. Hutchison stood in the middle of the room recording a quick Web video — “Just wanted to remind everyone to get out and vote on Feb. 23!” — while volunteers on either side of him hunched over their laptops, running down a 412-page list of uncommitted voters and making calls. A spreadsheet pinned to the wall hinted at just how organized Rubio is: each local caucus site, from Arbor View High School to Western High School, with columns for captain, surrogate, rally coordinator and estimated turnout — 885 here, 717 there. It was a campaign in full swing.“This team has won statewide before,” Hutchison. “We’re doing the same thing with Rubio. We know how to win.”Around the corner at Cruz’s slightly more Spartan headquarters, the scene was similar. Similar maps, similar signs — if far fewer snacks. On a whiteboard, somebody had scrawled “Call record 3,263”: the most calls this particular office had made so far in a single day. Meanwhile, volunteers dialed donors and read from a script designed to convert them into “neighborhood leaders.”“Today, Ted’s volunteers are in full force building our ground game in Nevada,” they said into their cellphones. “And the most important part of our ground game is establishing local contacts in individual precincts so that every voter has the opportunity to hear Ted’s message.”Two weeks earlier, just one person had been manning the phones in what was then a bare-bones office; back in October, Rubio’s organization had dwarfed Cruz’s. But with the caucuses approaching, Cruz has ramped up operations in Nevada, bringing in ground staff from Iowa and holding multiple caucus- organizing sessions every day in Las Vegas — sessions that have attracted as many as 50 volunteers, many of whom are first-time voters, according to the campaign. Meanwhile, a Cruz aide told Yahoo News that phone banks across the state have made “hundreds of thousands of phone calls” in recent weeks as part of the campaign’s get-out-the-vote effort.“We’re hitting our targets,” said Matthew Bell, the Cruz field representative. This isn’t surprising; Cruz had by far the most sophisticated caucus operation in Iowa, and his Nevada team is drawing on that expertise to ensure that their voters turn out on Tuesday.Aides declined to provide specific numbers, but they said that Cruz has a mix of volunteer and paid staff in all 17 of Nevada’s counties. And while Cruz is also targeting Mormons, his biggest advantage over Rubio may be his laserlike focus on the more rural parts of the Silver State, where voters tend to be heavily conservative and more committed to caucusing.In January, Cruz scored the endorsement of state Attorney General Adam Laxalt. The grandson of a former governor, Laxalt won in 2014 by running against the establishment; he was also the first statewide official in a century to get elected without carrying Las Vegas or Reno. In recent weeks, Laxalt has been back on the trail, stumping for Cruz in the far-flung towns that carried him to victory two years ago—Winnemucca, Yerington, Elko, Ely.“We’re like that Johnny Cash song,” Ryan Hamilton, a Nevada political strategist who joined Cruz’s campaign last fall. “We’re going everywhere, to every town we can, to find support.”On Sunday, Laxalt joined Cruz in Pahrump — a libertarian outpost in the middle of one of the largest and least populous counties in the United States — for the candidate’s first caucus-week campaign stop. Men wore pistols on their hips; signs for the Chicken Ranch Brothel lined the road. In his speech, Cruz pivoted from the evangelical emphasis of his South Carolina campaign and channeled his inner Rand Paul instead, criticizing the Obama administration for eavesdropping on American citizens and promising to give the “85 percent” of Nevada land owned by the federal government “back to the state, back to the people.”“I’m thrilled to be surrounded by lovers of liberty,” Cruz said from the bed of a black pickup truck. “If every one of you gets 10 people to show up Tuesday night, the men and women standing in this parking lot can change the outcome of the Nevada caucuses.”As usual, Cruz is also reaching out to evangelicals; his father, Rafael, preached at a church in Las Vegas last year. But for the most part, the campaign is hoping that anti-establishment conservatives — voters who are still angry about a billion-dollar tax hike approved two years ago by the GOP-led state Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Sandoval — will turn out Tuesday in record numbers and propel Cruz past Rubio, and perhaps even Trump.“We think our message plays well with these disenfranchised Republicans,” Hamilton said. “They’ve voted for candidates who talked the talk during campaign season — but haven’t walked the walk in their governing.”
23 Thus he said, The fourth beast (EU,REVIVED ROME) shall be the fourth kingdom upon earth,(7TH WORLD EMPIRE) which shall be diverse from all kingdoms, and shall devour the whole earth, and shall tread it down, and break it in pieces.(TRADING BLOCKS-10 WORLD REGIONS/TRADE BLOCS)
24 And the ten horns out of this kingdom are ten kings(10 NATIONS-10 WORLD DIVISION WORLD GOVERNMENT) that shall arise: and another shall rise after them; and he shall be diverse from the first, and he shall subdue three kings.(THE EU (EUROPEAN UNION) TAKES OVER IRAQ WHICH HAS SPLIT INTO 3-SUNNI-KURD-SHIA PARTS-AND THE REVIVED ROMAN EMPIRE IS BROUGHT BACK TOGETHER-THE TWO LEGS OF DANIEL WESTERN LEG AND THE ISLAMIC LEG COMBINED AS 1)
LUKE 2:1-3
1 And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.
2 (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)
3 And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.
Cameron: No second chance after Brexit vote By Eszter Zalan-FEB 22,16-EUOBSERVER
BRUSSELS, Today, 20:17-British prime minister David Cameron warned that the UK would not be able to negotiate another deal, and have another referendum in case British voters chose to leave the EU in a referendum set for 23 June.Cameron, who sealed a deal with fellow EU leaders last week on a reformed UK membership of the EU, set out the agreement to lawmakers Monday.In a thinly veiled attack on London mayor Boris Johnson, who Sunday said he would support the UK leaving the EU and suggested that a better deal for the UK and another referendum would be possible after a No vote, Cameron said: “This is a vital and final decision for our country”.The Conservative Party leader outlined to lawmakers that if British voters voted to leave, he would invoke article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, the mechanism for exiting the bloc.It would trigger two years of negotiations, after which the UK would be presented with a package by the EU.Cameron warned however that after two years if there is no agreement then exit is automatic, unless all other 27 members agree to delay it.“It is not an invitation to rejoin,” Cameron said, adding this would create uncertainty, endanger jobs, as 53 trade deals and access to the single market would be cut immediately.Aiming at his Tory rival, Johnson, and his idea of a second referendum, Cameron said: “I won't dwell on the irony that some people who want to leave want to use a leave vote to remain. I know a number of couples who have begun divorce proceedings, but none who have done so to renew their marriage vows”.-Risk national security-Cameron warned the House of Commons it was not the time to divide Europe, amid threats from ISIS and Russia.“The challenges facing the West today are genuinely threatening ... In my view this is no time to divide the West,” he told parliament.“The only person I can think of who would like us to leave the EU is Vladimir Putin,” he added.Cameron also warned that that a vote to leave the EU would risk Britain's economic and national security.The fear of Brexit drove Britain’s currency, the pound sterling, down to its lowest level in almost seven years, when it was in the midst of the financial crisis.The pound has traded as low as $1.406, a fall of more than three cents (or 2.3 percent) since Friday night.Moody’s credit rating agency also warned that Brexit would be bad for the UK economy.In an apparent rebuttal of comments made by senior Tory politician Iain Duncan Smith, Europe's policing agency said Monday that Britain's citizens could be left more vulnerable to attacks by terror groups and organised crime gangs if they decided to leave the European Union."I see a very clear picture of the UK's dependency on the EU to help protect its security interest," Europol's director Rob Wainwright said in The Hague.He warned the UK "will no longer have the benefits that it currently has", direct access to databases, taking part in intelligence projects and other areas.Duncan Smith had said that remaining in the EU made the UK more vulnerable to a Paris-style terrorism attack.-Brussels not in campaign mode-The European Commission said Monday it would not take part in the campaign to keep Britain in the EU.“The commission will not campaign, will not take part in the campaign,” spokesman Margaritis Schinas told journalists.“I don't see the commission having a role in a campaign that is for the British people and the British people alone,” he added.The commission has not always been so firm. The EU executive strongly supported the ‘Yes’ vote in the lead up to a Greek referendum on the EU-IMF bailout terms in July last year.“A 'No' would mean ... that Greece had said no to Europe,” EU commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker had said ahead of the vote.
WORLD POWERS IN THE LAST DAYS (END OF AGE OF GRACE NOT THE WORLD)
EUROPEAN UNION-KING OF WEST-DAN 9:26-27,DAN 7:23-24,DAN 11:40,REV 13:1-10
EGYPT-KING OF THE SOUTH-DAN 11:40
RUSSIA-KING OF THE NORTH-EZEK 38:1-2,EZEK 39:1-3
CHINA-KING OF THE EAST-DAN 11:44,REV 9:16,18
VATICAN-RELIGIOUS LEADER-REV 13:11-18,REV 17:4-5,9,18
WORLD TERRORISM
GENESIS 6:11-13
11 The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.(WORLD TERRORISM,MURDERS)(HAMAS IN HEBREW IS VIOLENCE)
12 And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.
13 And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence (TERRORISM)(HAMAS) through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.
GENESIS 16:11-12
11 And the angel of the LORD said unto her,(HAGAR) Behold, thou art with child, and shalt bear a son, and shalt call his name Ishmael;(FATHER OF THE ARAB/MUSLIMS) because the LORD hath heard thy affliction.
12 And he (ISHMAEL-FATHER OF THE ARAB-MUSLIMS) will be a wild (DONKEY-JACKASS) man;(ISLAM IS A FAKE AND DANGEROUS SEX FOR MURDER CULT) his hand will be against every man,(ISLAM HATES EVERYONE) and every man's hand against him;(PROTECTING THEMSELVES FROM BEING BEHEADED) and he (ISHMAEL ARAB/MUSLIM) shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.(LITERAL-THE ARABS LIVE WITH THEIR BRETHERN JEWS)
ISAIAH 14:12-14
12 How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer,(SATAN) son of the morning!(HEBREW-CRECENT MOON-ISLAM) how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!
13 For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:
14 I (SATAN HAS EYE TROUBLES) will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.(AND 1/3RD OF THE ANGELS OF HEAVEN FELL WITH SATAN AND BECAME DEMONS)
JOHN 16:2
2 They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service.(ISLAM MURDERS IN THE NAME OF MOON GOD ALLAH OF ISLAM)
Russia wants to fly over US with advanced digital camera-Associated Press By DEB RIECHMANN-FEB 22,16-YAHOONEWS
WASHINGTON (AP) — Russia will ask permission on Monday to start flying surveillance planes equipped with high-powered digital cameras amid warnings from U.S. intelligence and military officials that such overflights help Moscow collect intelligence on the United States.Russia and the United States are signatories to the Open Skies Treaty, which allows unarmed observation flights over the entire territory of all 34 member nations to foster transparency about military activity and help monitor arms control and other agreements. Senior intelligence and military officials, however, worry that Russia is taking advantage of technological advances to violate the spirit of the treaty.Russia will formally ask the Open Skies Consultative Commission, based in Vienna, to be allowed to fly an aircraft equipped with high-tech sensors over the United States, according to a senior congressional staffer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the staff member wasn't authorized to discuss the issue publicly.The request will put the Obama administration in the position of having to decide whether to let Russia use the high-powered equipment on its surveillance planes at a time when Moscow, according to the latest State Department compliance report, is failing to meet all its obligations under the treaty. And it comes at one of the most tension-filled times in U.S.-Russia relations since the end of the Cold War, with the two countries at odds over Russian activity in Ukraine and Syria."The treaty has become a critical component of Russia's intelligence collection capability directed at the United States," Adm. Cecil D. Haney, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, wrote in a letter earlier this year to Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., chairman of a House subcommittee on strategic forces."In addition to overflying military installations, Russian Open Skies flights can overfly and collect on Department of Defense and national security or national critical infrastructure," Haney said. "The vulnerability exposed by exploitation of this data and costs of mitigation are increasingly difficult to characterize."A State Department official said Sunday that treaty nations had not yet received notice of the Russian request, but that certification of the Russian plane with a "digital electro-optical sensor" could not occur until this summer because the treaty requires a 120-day advance notification. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the issue publicly.The official also said that the treaty, which was entered into force in 2002, establishes procedures for certifying digital sensors to confirm that they are compliant with treaty requirements. The official said all signatories to the treaty agree that "transition from film cameras to digital sensors is required for the long-term viability of the treaty."In December, Rose Gottemoeller, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, sought to temper concerns about Russian overflights, saying that what Moscow gains from the observation flights is "incremental" to what they collect through other means."One of the advantages of the Open Skies Treaty is that information — imagery — that is taken is shared openly among all the treaty parties," she said at a joint hearing of the House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees in December. "So one of the advantages with the Open Skies Treaty is that we know exactly what the Russians are imaging, because they must share the imagery with us."Still, military and intelligence officials have expressed serious concern."The open skies construct was designed for a different era," Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told lawmakers when asked about the Russian overflights during a congressional hearing. "I'm very concerned about how it's applied today."Robert Work, deputy secretary of defense, told Congress: "We think that they're going beyond the original intent of the treaty and we continue to look at this very, very closely."Steve Rademaker, former assistant secretary of state for the bureau of arms control and the bureau of international security and nonproliferation, told Congress at a hearing on security cooperation in Europe in October that Russia complies with the Open Skies Treaty, but has "adopted a number of measures that are inconsistent with the spirt" of the accord.The treaty, for instance, obligates each member to make all of its territory available for aerial observation, yet Russia has imposed restrictions on surveillance over Moscow and Chechnya and near Abkhazia and South Ossetia, he said. Russian restrictions also make it hard to conduct observation in the Kaliningrad enclave, said Rademaker, who believes Russia is "selectively implementing" the treaty "in a way that suits its interests."
Austria plans Western Balkan meeting on migrant caps By Nikolaj Nielsen-FEB 22,16-EUOBSERVER
BRUSSELS, Today, 09:00-Austria is asking Western Balkan nations and Bulgaria to meet to discuss the migrant crisis, ahead of a gathering of EU interior ministers in Brussels.The move follows Austria's decision last week to cap the daily number of asylum applications to 80, and allow 3,200 migrants to travel through its territory each day.The decision roused fears of bottlenecks along the Balkan route and further border clamp downs and drew sharp criticism from Germany and the European Commission.The Austria meeting will take place on Wednesday (24 February) and will be attended by ministers from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia, reports Reuters.The aim is reportedly to clarify Austria's border restrictions, its implications, and how best to coordinate efforts along the Balkan route.Austria's interior minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner and foreign minister Sebastian Kurz have sent invitations.Despite criticism from some of her peers, Mikl-Leitner said she intended to impose further restrictions.The gathering on Wednesday may build on a separate pact agreed last week by police chiefs from Austria, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia and Serbia.-Afghan bottleneck-All five agreed to organise joint transport of migrants directly from the Macedonia-Greece border to Austria, where they can opt to stay or continue to Germany.“We’ll sign a joint statement on how to profile and transport the migrants from the Greek-Macedonian border to Germany,” Vlado Dominic, chief of the Croatian police, told Balkan Insight.EU interior ministers the following day will meet in Brussels to discuss new efforts to document everyone who passes through an external border. They will also discuss a new European border and coast guard proposal.Meanwhile, Macedonia is reportedly stopping Afghan nationals from entering from Greece.The Macedonian police told AP they had taken the measure because of a similar block imposed by Serbia, which in turn blamed Austria and Slovenia.Greek police on Sunday (21 February) confirmed to AP that Afghans were no longer being admitted into Macedonia."The authorities of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia informed us that, beginning at dawn Sunday, they no longer accept Afghan refugees because the same problem exists at their border with Serbia," said a Greek police spokesperson.Police in Macedonia are also reportedly now only allowing people with valid identification documents to pass.
US, Russia announce Syria ceasefire, excluding strikes on IS-Halt in hostilities to come into effect on February 27; deal also won’t ban raids on al-Qaeda affiliate-By Maeva Bambuck and Bradley Klapper February 22, 2016, 7:46 pm-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL
The US and Russia on Monday announced an agreement for a cessation of hostilities in Syria, which will exclude attacks on the Islamic State group and al-Qaeda’s local affiliate.The ceasefire will come into effect on February 27.The officials said earlier that the two sides have agreed on the terms and conditions for the “cessation of hostilities.” The formal announcement had been expected after presidents Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin speak on the matter by telephone. The officials weren’t authorized to speak about the matter publicly and demanded anonymity.The announcement caps weeks of diplomacy that intensified in the past few days, aimed at reaching a temporary truce that would allow the parties to return to the negotiating table in Geneva. A first round of indirect talks collapsed rapidly last month after the government launched a massive offensive backed by Russian airstrikes in the northern province of Aleppo, near the Turkish border.Residents of the Syrian capital earlier Monday expressed skepticism about talk of a “provisional agreement” for a truce, a day after a wave of Islamic State bombings killed about 130 people in government-held areas near Damascus and another city.Details of the tentative ceasefire between the government and insurgents, announced in Jordan on Sunday by US Secretary of State John Kerry, have not been made public. Even if a truce were to take hold, IS would not be a party to it.The Russian Foreign Ministry put out a statement earlier Monday saying that Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Kerry spoke by telephone on Sunday and agreed on the parameters for the ceasefire.The statement said those parameters were then reported to Putin and Obama. No further details were immediately available.The UN’s special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, told The Associated Press on Monday that this week is shaping up as “crucial” for diplomatic efforts to help end the fighting, though he declined to provide details of the negotiations.Sunday’s blasts that ripped through the Sayyida Zeinab suburb of Damascus and the central city of Homs were among the deadliest bombings in government-held areas in Syria’s devastating civil war.The Islamic State group claimed both attacks. The extremists are dug in on the outskirts of the two cities and have repeatedly targeted pro-government strongholds.De Mistura condemned the bombings and said it suggested the group is feeling “cornered” amid an intensified diplomatic push to end the five-year war. The US also condemned the “barbaric terrorist attacks.”Inside the Hamidiyeh Souk, a popular Damascus bazaar which is typically crowded with shoppers, people said they were worried that a ceasefire would not be evenly observed and could leave the Syrian authorities vulnerable.“I hope there will be no ceasefire, because if there is a ceasefire, Turks will increase their support for criminals and traitors,” said Ahmad al-Omar from the northern Aleppo province, adding that Turkey may seek to let opposition fighters in via its border with Syria.Others at the bazaar echoed Syrian President Bashar Assad’s statements that a ceasefire could give an advantage to rebel forces and the Islamic State group.“I believe that those proposals now are … a pretext to stop the advance of the Syrian army, which is trying to liberate the homeland,” said Ahmad al-Issa.The Associated Press reported from the bazaar on a government-approved visit.On Monday, the Kremlin announced that Putin spoke with the emir of Qatar, a key supporter of the rebels fighting to topple Assad. The two sides agreed “to intensify bilateral contacts at various levels to facilitate the settlement of the crisis,” the statement said. Putin also discussed Syria with King Salman of Saudi Arabia, another leading backer of the rebels, in a phone conversation on Friday.Syrian officials said the government was ready to take part in a truce as long as it is not used by militants to reinforce their positions. Syrian troops backed by Russian warplanes are waging a major offensive in the northern Aleppo province, trying to seal the border with Turkey, a key supporter of the rebels, before any truce is reached.Meanwhile, the Syrian government’s supply route by land to the city of Aleppo was cut by heavy fighting Monday as the army, supported by allied militias and the Russian air force, fought to consolidate its recent gains in the northern province.The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which relies on a network of contacts to monitor the war, said Islamic militias assaulted government-held positions around Khanaser, a town southeast of Aleppo, setting off intense clashes that have lasted through the day. Khanaser lies along the government’s only access route to the city.Fighting has been fierce in Aleppo province in recent weeks amid a government offensive to cut off the rebel stronghold.Among the youth sitting around the Syrian capital’s landmark Omayyad mosque, at the entrance of the old souks, few wanted to talk politics.Those who did expressed their wariness of a political solution after several rounds of unsuccessful peace talks. “It’s good for the Syrians to stop fighting but it will not happen,” said Awuj Aqeel, a student.“Every time they agree on a truce for a period of time and then they break it.”
US Uses $400M F-22 Raptor Jets in Syria Despite Not Needing Them-ABC News By LEE FERRAN-FEB 22,16-YAHOONEWS
For years they were the highly-advanced aircraft without a mission, decried by critics as having been built from more than $80 billion in taxpayer dollars for an enemy that doesn’t exist. But now, more than a decade after the first jets went operational, the next-generation stealth F-22 Raptors are... still looking for that enemy, and settling for bombing militants in Syria and Iraq in the meantime.The jets, some of the most sophisticated and priciest stealth fighter planes ever built, are not sitting out the Air Force’s latest aerial operations in Iraq and Syria, as they did in previous campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Since their maiden mission in September 2014, F-22s have been “operating regularly” in the anti-ISIS campaign and have dropped more than 200 bombs on targets in 150 sorties, according to the Air Force.“We have generally been tasked to target and destroy Daesh [ISIS] training camps, vehicle-borne improvised explosive device manufacturing and storage facilities, fighting areas, various [ISIS] headquarters facilities and [ISIS-controlled] oil distribution capabilities,” Air Force Capt. Joseph Simms said in a statement provided to ABC News. “The F-22s have been instrumental in taking out a lot of high-value targets.”But these missions are not the ones for which the air-to-air combat specialist F-22 was initially designed, and the Air Force acknowledges that the pricey planes don’t necessarily need to be the ones conducting them.“The F-22 isn’t an operational necessity,” Air Force spokesperson Maj. Tim Smith told ABC News, “but it is one of the great tools that can be used in this conflict to deliver airstrikes with precision.”The Raptor was designed and developed in the late 1980s and 1990s with potential showdowns against the sophisticated militaries of Russia or China in mind -- not the series of drawn-out conflicts against poorly trained and equipped but nonetheless persistent foes like al Qaeda, the Taliban and, now, ISIS that came to pass. The U.S. government initially ordered more than 600 Raptors, but funding for new planes was cut off in 2009 and less than 200 of them were actually delivered, sending the price-per-plane skyrocketing to over $400 million including research and development costs. Then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates outlined the logic of the move in 2009:“The F-22 is clearly a capability we do need -- a niche, silver bullet solution for one or two potential scenarios -- specifically the defeat of a highly advanced enemy fighter fleet,” Gates said then. “[But] the F-22, to be blunt, does not make much sense anyplace else in the spectrum of conflict.”In 2011 Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., was more blunt when speaking with ABC News’ Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross. “Facts are stubborn things,” the senator said. “[The F-22] has not flown a single combat mission... I don’t think the F-22 will ever be seen in the combat it was designed to counter, because that threat is no longer in existence.”Now in Syria and Iraq and still lacking a "highly advanced enemy fighter fleet" to battle, the Air Force appears to be attempting to broaden the F-22’s spectrum by giving the planes missions more generally suited for air-to-ground attackers like the cheaper F-16 or, eventually, the F-22’s next-generation trouble-prone cousin, the F-35 Lightning.Though not totally necessary, Air Force officials have praised some of the bonuses the F-22 brings to the table in Operation Inherent Resolve. Last July, an unidentified squadron commander said in an Air Force press release that the F-22 is able to use its stealth capabilities to “operate much closer to non-coalition surface-to-air missiles and fighter aircraft with little risk of detection.” The unnamed lieutenant colonel also said the F-22’s munitions are “extremely accurate from very long distances and [have] the lowest collateral damage potential of any weapon in our inventory.”Maj. Smith told ABC News the plane has also shown its value by assuming the position of a kind of “aerial quarterback” in the complex airspace of Iraq and Syria.“Although we don’t have Syria, Russia or others actively opposing our air operations in the region, with the number of air defenses and aircraft from different nations at play, there is a demand for the kind of ‘aerial quarterback’ capabilities the F-22 provides that wasn’t present to the same degree in earlier operations over Iraq or Afghanistan,” he said.Air Force Gen. Hawk Carlisle touched on the “quarterback” quality in a speech at last February’s Air Force Association Air Warfare Symposium when he said the F-22 can “go to areas where other aircraft can’t, re-role and mission manage the entire force.” Air Force Times then paraphrased Carlisle’s remarks, reporting the F-22 could change mid-mission from an escort to “using its advanced sensors and avionics to help control other aircraft and change targets.”“The airplane has performed fantastically,” Carlisle said. “When you have F-22s in a package, every single airplane in that package is better because the F-22s are there.”The plane's performance has apparently even won over Sen. McCain."The ability of the F-22 to hold Putin's fighters, Assad's surface-to-air missiles, and other ground targets at risk, while simultaneously servicing [ISIS] targets, is a testament to its undeniable operational flexibility," McCain said Friday in a statement provided to ABC News.Supporters of the F-22, back in 2009 and more recently, say that the plane will really be worth its enormous price tag if the U.S. ever enters into conflict with Russia or China, as both nations are developing their own next-generation stealth fighters to rival the Raptor.In the meantime, the Air Force is looking for other ways to leverage the advanced fighters both through bombing missions in Iraq and Syria and in so-called "deterrent" missions elsewhere in the world -- missions in which the U.S. hopes that having the Raptors nearby will be enough to scare enemies straight. Last week four F-22s flew in formation with South Korean fighters over the Korean Peninsula in a move the Air Force said was meant to "demonstrate the strong alliance" between the U.S. and South Korea.The flights happened to take place days after North Korea unsettled the international community by launching a long-range missile.
US rejected N.Korea peace treaty bid: State Dept-AFP-FEB 22,16-YAHOONEWS
Washington (AFP) - The United States said Sunday it received a North Korean proposal to discuss a peace treaty for the Korean peninsula but rejected it when Pyongyang refused to consider reducing its nuclear arsenal.State Department spokesman John Kirby disclosed the exchange when asked about a Wall Street Journal report that President Barack Obama's administration had secretly agreed to peace talks to formally end the Korean War of 1950 to 1953, days before Pyongyang carried out its latest nuclear test early this year.That January 6 test -- the country's fourth after previous tests in 2006, 2009 and 2013 -- brought an end to the exploratory contacts that took place at the United Nations, where US and North Korean diplomats can mingle informally in the absence of formal relations between their two countries, the Journal reported."To be clear, it was the North Koreans who proposed discussing a peace treaty," Kirby told reporters traveling with Secretary of State John Kerry in Amman, Jordan."We carefully considered their proposal, and made clear that denuclearization had to be part of any such discussion," he added."The North rejected our response. Our response to the NK proposal was consistent with our long-standing focus on denuclearization."Citing unnamed US officials familiar with the matter, the Journal claimed the White House had dropped a long-standing condition to talks -- that North Korea first take steps to cut back its nuclear arsenal."Instead the US called for North Korea's atomic-weapons program to be simply part of the talks," the newspaper reported.In response to the North's January nuclear test, which triggered global concern and condemnation, the UN Security Council agreed to roll out new measures to punish the reclusive Asian nation.And on Thursday, Obama signed off on new measures passed by the US Congress that tighten sanctions on anyone importing goods or technology related to weapons of mass destruction into North Korea, or anyone who knowingly engaged in human rights abuses.The measure also heaps additional financial pressure on the already-sanctioned regime of leader Kim Jong-Un, by aiming to cut down on money laundering and narcotics trafficking, two major illicit activities believed to be funneling millions of dollars into Kim's inner circle.
1/3RD OF SHIPS DESTROYED
REVELATION 8:8-9
8 And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood;
9 And the third part of the creatures which were in the sea, and had life, died; and the third part of the ships were destroyed.
Indonesia sinks 27 foreign boats to stop illegal fishing-AFP-FEB 22,16-YAHOONEWS
Jakarta (AFP) - Indonesia sank 27 impounded foreign boats on Monday, a minister said, as the world's largest archipelago nation stepped up a campaign against illegal fishing in its waters.The empty vessels from the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Myanmar were blown up or scuttled at five separate locations across the country, said Fisheries Minister Susi Pudjiastuti.The boats had been all caught fishing illegally in the archipelago of more than 17,000 islands. Four Indonesian boats were also sunk after they were caught fishing without proper documentation."The government is taking stronger and firmer action to enforce regulations to keep our waters safe," Pudjiastuti, a key figure in the campaign against illegal fishing, told journalists.Indonesia has sunk foreign boats on several occasions since the government launched the drive to combat illegal fishing, with President Joko Widodo claiming the practice costs the country's economy billions of dollars annually.However, the campaign has caused tensions with other countries in the region. China last year expressed concern after a Chinese boat was blown up.
CAMPAIGN 2016-Trump’s fight with the lights offers glimpse of what GOP race will be like when there’s no one left for him to fight-Dylan Stableford-Senior editor-February 22, 2016-YAHOONEWS
When the lights suddenly went out during a Donald Trump rally in Atlanta on Sunday, the Republican frontrunner gave us a glimpse of what the race for the GOP nomination may look like if no one catches up to him.“Oh, I like that much better,” Trump told the crowd inside Georgia World Congress Center. “Those lights were brutal. Are they coming from the dishonest press?”According to NBC News, a protester had pulled a cable, turning them off. But when they came back on, the brash billionaire demanded that they remain off.“Don’t turn the lights on!” Trump said. “No, get those lights off. Off! Turn them off, they’re too bright. Turn them off!”The real estate mogul tried to turn the situation with the lights into a teachable moment.“We save on electricity, right? And because the lights don’t work, I won’t pay the rent — so, better lighting, and we don’t pay the rent. That’s the way we have to negotiate for our country … the lights go off, it’s better. We say we want the lights. Oh, it’s terrible, we take a big deduction off the rent because the lights are off, but it’s actually better. It’s the kind of sick thinking we really need for our country.”Trump’s rant came a day after his 10-point victory in the South Carolina primary — a bludgeoning that led former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, one of Trump’s favorite targets, to bow out of the race.“With no Bush as foil,” NBC News’ Ali Vitali wrote, “Trump rails against the light.”On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said he believes it’s now a two-person race for the Republican nomination, with Trump and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio the last candidates standing.“The bigger advantage is to Trump,” McCarthy said. “He’s got the momentum. I think there’s more than a 50 percent chance he’s the nominee. And I think that’s what’s setting in for a lot of people. Could they get their heads around Trump being the nominee?”McCarthy was asked if he could work with a President Trump.“Oh, yeah, I think I can work with Donald Trump,” he said.Meanwhile, Rubio may soon find himself in Trump’s crosshairs.On Saturday, Trump retweeted a link to an online article questioning whether the Florida senator, whose parents are from Cuba, is eligible to be president.“@ResisTyr: Mr.Trump…BOTH Cruz AND Rubio are ineligible to be POTUS! It’s a SLAM DUNK CASE!! Check it! https://t.co/NjqWP0pP6X”— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)-February 20, 2016 -On ABC’s “This Week” Sunday, Trump was pressed by host George Stephanopoulos about floating another potential birther conspiracy theory.“Do you really believe that?” Stephanopoulos asked.“I think the lawyers have to determine that,” Trump replied. “It was a retweet, not so much with Marco. I’m not really that familiar with Marco’s circumstances.”Then why retweet it? “Because I’m not sure,” Trump said. “I mean, let people make their own determination.”He added: “I’ve never looked at it, George. I honestly have never looked at it. As somebody said, he’s not [eligible]. And I retweeted it. I have 14 million people between Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and I retweet things, and we start dialogue and it’s very interesting. And maybe that’s why I have 14 million people instead of 200 people, I don’t know.”
Inside Rubio and Cruz’s high-stakes ground-game battle in Nevada-Andrew Romano and Holly Bailey-February 21, 2016-YAHOONEWS
LAS VEGAS — Donald Trump has led the GOP field in every single poll taken in Nevada since he entered the race last June, often by as many as 20 percentage points. And after his resounding victory in South Carolina, the tinsel-haired mogul is the heavy favorite to win yet again when Nevada Republicans come out to caucus on Tuesday.But as recent back-to-back visits to the neighboring Las Vegas headquarters of Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz made clear, neither campaign seems particularly concerned about Trump — or any of the other Republican candidates — in the final days of the Silver State contest. They’re far more focused on each other.That’s because both camps believe that with Trump coasting on his celebrity as usual, they can reshape the results and beat expectations on caucus night by quietly and methodically mastering the unglamorous work of getting out the vote. Their thinking is that in a state where the polling is particularly unreliable, the process is particularly chaotic, and the turnout is particularly low, the ground game could have a bigger effect than anywhere else.“Oh, you have to see this,” a gray-haired Rubio volunteer with a thick Southern accent told Yahoo News, gesturing toward her laptop. On the screen was a picture of Cruz’s louche, smirking face superimposed on the body of a naked man lounging in a rubber-duck-filled bathtub — a cheeky response, posted online by a Rubio fan, to the Cruz campaign’s poorly Photoshopped image of Rubio shaking hands with President Obama.“He has all his ducks in order!” the volunteer chirped. “Isn’t that hilarious?”An hour later at Cruz HQ, which is tucked into a somewhat seedy strip mall a few doors down from a shop selling vaporizers and bongs, staffers could barely contain themselves when a reporter mentioned that he had just visited Rubio’s command post in the fancier office complex one block west on Tropicana Avenue.“How many people were there?” snapped Matthew Bell, a field representative for Cruz. “As many as we have here?” Told that the number of Rubio volunteers, about a dozen, matched the number of Cruz volunteers, Bell looked deflated.The mutual obsession makes perfect sense. Early on, Jeb Bush, who suspended his campaign Saturday after a distant fourth-place finish in South Carolina, built what was widely considered the best operation here; the consultant who was running his campaign, Ryan Erwin, led Mitt Romney to caucus victories in both 2008 and 2012. As Lt. Gov. Mark Hutchison, Rubio’s Nevada campaign chairman, told Yahoo News, “Technically, Bush did everything right.” And yet the latest polls, taken before Bush dropped out, showed him in last place locally, behind even Ben Carson and John Kasich.Carson and Kasich remain in the race, but neither is poised to make much of an impact. Like Bush, Carson was on the ground early, but he has been losing steam for months, and his last-place showing in the Palmetto State won’t help. And Kasich isn’t even visiting Nevada between now and caucus day.That leaves Cruz and Rubio. With Trump appearing to hold a sizable lead — and with the two young senators from Florida and Texas having just finished neck-and-neck in South Carolina — the battle for second place will likely be the marquee event Tuesday night.Cruz and Rubio have been preparing for this moment for months. Caucuses are fairly new to Nevada — and confusing to voters; Republican turnout in 2012 was tiny: just 32,894 voters. (By comparison, 182,000 Republicans caucused earlier this month in Iowa.) Buoyed by his fellow Mormons, Mitt Romney managed to capture 50 percent of the vote four years ago — a huge win, but still only 16,486 votes. The campaigns cautiously expect a similar turnout this time; no one knows whether the number will go down without a Mormon in the race, or up because of increased interest among other Republicans. The bottom line, however, is that someone could come in second on Tuesday with fewer than 10,000 votes; the Rubio campaign, for one, says it has been preparing for a couple-hundred-vote race since the beginning.“In Nevada, organization is key,” Jeremy Hughes, Rubio’s state director, told Yahoo News. “I wouldn’t say it’s sexy, but it’s the grind work you’ve got to do to win elections here.”Rubio was up and running first, as early as a year ago, and his operation has been described as “the most organized and impressive … of the Republican field.” When Yahoo News shadowed the senator on a trip to Nevada in October, the key elements of his strategy — which is being shaped by Mike Slanker, the top political adviser for both Gov. Brian Sandoval of Nevada and the state’s junior senator, Dean Heller — were already in place. The Cruz campaign, meanwhile, has been playing catch-up.At every speech, Rubio made sure to remind voters that he’d spent part of his childhood in Las Vegas. His parents moved from Miami in 1979 and stayed until Rubio, now 44, was in the eighth grade. His dad tended bar at an off-Strip casino called Sam’s Club; his mother worked at the Imperial Palace.“Believe it or not, we still have more family in southern Nevada than in south Florida,” Rubio told one crowd. “So if I only win by 68 votes here, you’ll know why.”When Rubio returns to Nevada Sunday night, he will continue to harp on his local connections. His cousin Mo Denis is a state senator, and his other cousins have accompanied him to various events.“These other guys all come flying in, but only Marco knows what it’s like,” Slanker told Yahoo News. “He lived here.”The second piece of the puzzle is turnout, and the Rubio campaign is counting on two demographic groups in particular to put him over the top on Tuesday.“You have to remember who’s going to show up to caucus,” Slanker said. “There are going to be, like, seven people there. So you want to look to your most civic-minded people. Who is that in this state? It’s Mormons and seniors. It’s a powerful combination. If you can’t get those folks, you’re not going to win.”Mormons made up a quarter of caucus-goers in 2012, even though they represent only 4 percent of the state’s total population; senior citizens vastly outnumbered younger voters. Rubio’s itinerary in October was revealing in this regard. By far his biggest event, with more than 1,000 attendees, was at Sun City Summerlin, the largest “active adult” community in the state. Everywhere the senator went, he was introduced by Lt. Gov. Hutchison — the state’s most prominent Mormon politician. (As a kid in Las Vegas, Rubio himself was briefly a member of the Mormon Church.) Later, Rubio made a point of visiting Boulder City, a Mormon enclave 20 miles outside Las Vegas, where he was accompanied and introduced by former Clark County Commissioner Bruce Woodbury, a man Slanker described as “the godfather of the Mormon Church in this state.” And when the senator returns to Nevada this week, he will be touring the Mormon-rich northern part of the state — Elko, Reno, Minden — with both Hutchison and Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who is also Mormon.“Other folks” — non-Mormons and non-seniors — “can’t figure it out,” Slanker explained. “The caucus will come and go, and they’ll be like, ‘Oh! I could have voted? Can I still vote?’”Not that the Rubio campaign is dismissing the rest of the electorate. It has people working in each of Nevada’s 17 counties; at five campaign offices scattered throughout the state, dozens of volunteers have been calling registered Republicans and trying to identify potential supporters. The important thing, as Hughes put it, is “finding your voters and making sure they know where to go.” Before Rubio speaks, Hughes’ team puts a supporter commitment card and a printout explaining the caucus process on every seat; the literature steers voters to caucus.marcorubio.com, which then allows them to look up their caucus sites while providing the campaign with crucial data.“It’s a dedicated website that tells people where to go caucus,” Hughes said. “And because we know that John Smith has found his voting location, we don’t have to waste a call on him. Meanwhile, Suzie over here hasn’t looked up her location yet — so we know we have to get in touch with her.”“By the time this is over, we will have met every caucus-goer and taught them how to caucus,” Slanker added.As the South Carolina campaign wound down, Rubio’s Las Vegas HQ was buzzing. Junk food — the sustenance of pretty much every political operation — was everywhere: Krispy Kreme boxes, jars of Skippy, bottles of Pepsi, Jack Link’s beef and cheese packages. Maps of precincts and framed photos of “top volunteers” lined the walls; a massive navy blue “Nevada Is Marco Rubio Country” sign hung nearby. Hutchison stood in the middle of the room recording a quick Web video — “Just wanted to remind everyone to get out and vote on Feb. 23!” — while volunteers on either side of him hunched over their laptops, running down a 412-page list of uncommitted voters and making calls. A spreadsheet pinned to the wall hinted at just how organized Rubio is: each local caucus site, from Arbor View High School to Western High School, with columns for captain, surrogate, rally coordinator and estimated turnout — 885 here, 717 there. It was a campaign in full swing.“This team has won statewide before,” Hutchison. “We’re doing the same thing with Rubio. We know how to win.”Around the corner at Cruz’s slightly more Spartan headquarters, the scene was similar. Similar maps, similar signs — if far fewer snacks. On a whiteboard, somebody had scrawled “Call record 3,263”: the most calls this particular office had made so far in a single day. Meanwhile, volunteers dialed donors and read from a script designed to convert them into “neighborhood leaders.”“Today, Ted’s volunteers are in full force building our ground game in Nevada,” they said into their cellphones. “And the most important part of our ground game is establishing local contacts in individual precincts so that every voter has the opportunity to hear Ted’s message.”Two weeks earlier, just one person had been manning the phones in what was then a bare-bones office; back in October, Rubio’s organization had dwarfed Cruz’s. But with the caucuses approaching, Cruz has ramped up operations in Nevada, bringing in ground staff from Iowa and holding multiple caucus- organizing sessions every day in Las Vegas — sessions that have attracted as many as 50 volunteers, many of whom are first-time voters, according to the campaign. Meanwhile, a Cruz aide told Yahoo News that phone banks across the state have made “hundreds of thousands of phone calls” in recent weeks as part of the campaign’s get-out-the-vote effort.“We’re hitting our targets,” said Matthew Bell, the Cruz field representative. This isn’t surprising; Cruz had by far the most sophisticated caucus operation in Iowa, and his Nevada team is drawing on that expertise to ensure that their voters turn out on Tuesday.Aides declined to provide specific numbers, but they said that Cruz has a mix of volunteer and paid staff in all 17 of Nevada’s counties. And while Cruz is also targeting Mormons, his biggest advantage over Rubio may be his laserlike focus on the more rural parts of the Silver State, where voters tend to be heavily conservative and more committed to caucusing.In January, Cruz scored the endorsement of state Attorney General Adam Laxalt. The grandson of a former governor, Laxalt won in 2014 by running against the establishment; he was also the first statewide official in a century to get elected without carrying Las Vegas or Reno. In recent weeks, Laxalt has been back on the trail, stumping for Cruz in the far-flung towns that carried him to victory two years ago—Winnemucca, Yerington, Elko, Ely.“We’re like that Johnny Cash song,” Ryan Hamilton, a Nevada political strategist who joined Cruz’s campaign last fall. “We’re going everywhere, to every town we can, to find support.”On Sunday, Laxalt joined Cruz in Pahrump — a libertarian outpost in the middle of one of the largest and least populous counties in the United States — for the candidate’s first caucus-week campaign stop. Men wore pistols on their hips; signs for the Chicken Ranch Brothel lined the road. In his speech, Cruz pivoted from the evangelical emphasis of his South Carolina campaign and channeled his inner Rand Paul instead, criticizing the Obama administration for eavesdropping on American citizens and promising to give the “85 percent” of Nevada land owned by the federal government “back to the state, back to the people.”“I’m thrilled to be surrounded by lovers of liberty,” Cruz said from the bed of a black pickup truck. “If every one of you gets 10 people to show up Tuesday night, the men and women standing in this parking lot can change the outcome of the Nevada caucuses.”As usual, Cruz is also reaching out to evangelicals; his father, Rafael, preached at a church in Las Vegas last year. But for the most part, the campaign is hoping that anti-establishment conservatives — voters who are still angry about a billion-dollar tax hike approved two years ago by the GOP-led state Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Sandoval — will turn out Tuesday in record numbers and propel Cruz past Rubio, and perhaps even Trump.“We think our message plays well with these disenfranchised Republicans,” Hamilton said. “They’ve voted for candidates who talked the talk during campaign season — but haven’t walked the walk in their governing.”
