Khloé Kardashian & Penelope Disick, 2, Snuggle in Matching Pajamas on Christmas—See the Sweet Photos!
Cutest Kardashian Christmas moments ever?
Khloé Kardashianwas the ultimate doting aunt this holiday, snuggling with little niecePenelope Disick, who wore matching, festive pajamas. The 30-year-old reality star posted photos of the two on herInstagrampage on Christmas Day, using their nicknames, Auntie KoKo and P.
Penelope, 2, is the middle child of sisterKourtney Kardashian, 35, and partner Scott Disick, 31, who star with Khloé and their kids onKourtney & Khloé Take the Hamptons. The twowelcomed their third child, a baby boy named Reign Aston Disick, on Dec. 14, who shares a birthday with 5-year-old brotherMason Disick.
Khloé and Kourtney's sisterKendall Jenneralso sported the same Christmas-themed pajamas in another photo posted on Kourt'sInstagram, which showed the 19-year-old reality star and model half-laying under an animal-print, furry blanket with a child, who appears to also be Penelope.
Christmas morning was a little much for them...❤," Kourtney said.
"Xmas morning watchingThe Grinch. YOU GUYS," Kendall said on herInstagram, alongside another photo, which did not show the child's face.
On Christmas Eve, Khloé, Kendall and sister Kylie Jenner, 17, attended "momager" Kris Jenner's annual holiday bash.
The Jenner sisters' dad Bruce Jenner, whose divorce from Kris was finalized just one week ago, also made an appearance, as seen in a pic posted by Kylie, as did sister Kim Kardashian, 34, and her husband Kanye West, 37, as seen in a photo shared by family friend and party guest Jonathan Cheban.
Pumped! Missouri gas price drops below $2 a gallon
Missouri is the first state in five years to have its statewide gas price average drop below $2 per gallon, according to AAA.
The average price in the Show Me State stood on Friday at $1.98 per gallon, $1.02 per gallon less than the statewide average one year ago.
The state, which has one of the lowest gas taxes in the USA, crossed below the $2 mark as the nation has seen the average price on a regular gallon of fuel plummet 12 cents in the last week and 50 cents in the last month. The national average for a regular gallon of gas stood at $2.32 on Friday.
Oklahoma's statewide average, $2.01 on Friday, is likely to drop below $2 this weekend, said Michael Green, AAA spokesman. Kansas ($2.06), Indiana ($2.09) and Texas ($2.09) round out the top five cheapest states to fuel up your car.
Gasoline prices have now fallen nationally a record 92 straight days, and consumers could see gas prices plunge another 5 to 10 cents per gallon by the New Year, according to AAA.
Savings at the pump are the result of increased U.S. oil production, OPEC's refusal to cut production and more fuel efficient vehicles cutting the demand for gas. The weakening economic situation in Europe and Asia as well a strong U.S. dollar have also contributed to the drop in price.
Consumers are saving more than $450 million per day on gasoline compared to the highs in the spring and summer earlier this year, according to AAA.
SEOUL, South Korea — It's difficult to imagine that kidnappers could get away with abducting a privileged foreign student from a French university and spiriting him thousands of miles away to his home country via a flight departing from a public airport.
But that's precisely what North Korean operatives are accused of attempting this fall.
Even more astonishingly, the move was essentially standard operating procedure for the despotic country's spy masters.
The young man in France, whose surname is Han, is the son of a high-level official who fell out of favor with Kim Jong Un's regime, and was reportedly executed earlier this year. The son first went missing from his architecture school, Ecole Nationale Superieure d'Architecture de Paris-La Villette, in October. Two weeks later, in early November, he appeared with his kidnappers at Charles De Gaulle airport. There, he made a bold escape, fleeing in a last-ditch attempt to save himself from imprisonment — or worse.
He's now in hiding, possibly with the help of the French government. The story didn't break until late November, first getting out through the South Korean press.
"This is a young guy who is the son of an important man in the North Korean regime," a French official told TIME, who asked not to be named because she was not authorized to speak about the case. "His dad was executed a few months ago so that is why, I suppose, he was targeted."
The French embassy in Seoul could not be reached for comment.
The news comes almost a year after Kim Jong Un's nephew, Kim Han Sol, also went into hiding in France, rattled by the purge of the Supreme Leader's uncle, Jang Song Taek. His side of the family — reviled and pretty much excommunicated from North Korea — could easily have been targeted as well.
While these kidnappings are not exactly numerous, no one, at least in previous decades, had been entirely safe from them. The regime's history of abductions on foreign soil have targeted North Koreans in exile as well as complete innocents who have nothing to do with the regime.
That said, North Korean kidnappings on foreign soil were pretty much a Cold War tactic. In the 1970s and 1980s, dozens (and possibly hundreds) of Japanese, Europeans and Southeast Asians were believed to be abducted from their own soil, forced to train spies in their native tongues and customs; many are still unaccounted for. A few were even married off to American military deserters.
Overseas North Koreans like Han, on the other hand, would likely be treated as ideological enemies preparing to stand trial, rather than non-Koreans kidnapped for a special purpose.
The kidnapping racket, although no longer a big part of North Korea's clandestine operations, didn't fully come to light until the past decade, following decades of denials by the government and its far-left sympathizers around the world.
Here are a few of the most egregious cases:
The Japanese wife of an American deserter
In 1965, Charles Robert Jenkins, a National Guard patrolman stationed in South Korea, dropped his equipment and ran across the heavily mined demilitarized zone, surrendering to North Korean forces. At least, that's how he recounted it in his 2005 memoir The Reluctant Communist.
Jenkins, who didn't want to serve in Vietnam, hoped that he'd be sent back to Washington via a prisoner exchange with the Soviet Union. Instead, the regime seized on his propaganda value, keeping him in Pyongyang and later casting him as the villain in anti-American films. He stayed in North Korea for most of his life.
More than a decade later, the unlikely celebrity was offered a wife by a regime that wanted to keep him happy. She was Hitomi Soga, who like at least 13 of her Japanese compatriots, was snatched from her own soil.
In 1978, accompanying her mother home after ice cream, on an island off the country's west coast, North Korean agents nabbed Soga, then a nursing student, and carried her away in body bag and onto a skiff hidden beneath a bridge. Soga's mother also disappeared, presumably kidnapped, but was never heard from again.
Soga spent the next two decades teaching North Korean spies how to act and speak like the Japanese.
In what led to a diplomatic incident in 2002, she and four other abductees were briefly allowed to go home to Japan, but all defied the regime's orders to return to North Korea. It was only a few years later that Jenkins and their two daughters were permitted to depart Pyongyang, emotionally reuniting with Soga. The American deserter then surrendered at a U.S. military base in Japan, only to face a surprisingly light court martial.
The family continues to live in Japan, and has called on North Korea to reveal the whereabouts of Soga's mother.
Suspected: The Romanian wife of another American deserter
In 1978, a Romanian art student in Italy, Doina Bumbea, vanished after being approached by a man who promised to fix her up with an exhibition space in either Hong Kong or Japan, depending on whose account you believe.
Nobody had an inkling of her whereabouts until Jenkins released his 2005 autobiography. He alleged that the ex-wife of fellow defector James Dresnok — an American deserter who still lives in Pyongyang — was actually a troubled and heavy-drinking abductee from Romania. Her name? Dona — eerily similar to "Doina."
There were other parallels, too, although skeptics questioned the tale's weirdness and lack of sourcing. With no passport to visit a Hong Kong art tour, Jenkins alleged that a mysterious Italian man, a regime sympathizer, fixed up a fake North Korean one for Dona. While on a layover in Pyongyang en route to Hong Kong, she was arrested and forced to confess to being a spy — revealing the Italian man's true intentions, according to the book.
A 2006 documentary on Dresnok, Crossing the Line, soon roused the suspicions of Bumbea's brother, who believed something was amiss in North Korea.
When Dresnok's son made an appearance in the film, the brother claimed she bore an uncanny resemblance to his Romanian sister. Soon after, a bombastic Italian newspaper investigation alleged that the art student had probably been ushered away to teach languages in North Korea, just like the rest of the captives.
The Romanian government filed a request for information but didn't hear back from North Korean authorities. Sadly, Dona died of lung cancer in 1997, ending any chance to tell her story.
South Korean film legends
After the devastating Korean War of 1950 to 1953, North Korea waged a shadow campaign of incursions and kidnappings against its southern enemy. Fishing trawler crews near the DMZ were attacked and seized, as were vulnerable farmers and construction workers whose identities could be stolen and used for spying.
The practice is hardly an issue today, but the South Korean government maintains that more than 3,500 South Koreans have been nabbed since the Korean War armistice.
The most high-profile of these heists was ordered by the second of three Kims who would rise to become North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Il.
A cinephile and maker of cheesy propaganda films, Kim (prior to becoming leader) apparently had trouble finding actual talent within his isolated kingdom. So instead of dipping into the regime's drug-money coffers to hire a starlet, he did what any aspiring despot would do: ordered the abduction of South Korea's most glamorous husband and wife celebrity team — director Shin Sang Ok and actress Choi Eun Hee in 1978 — while they were in Hong Kong.
The unlucky duo, then just divorced, was forced to slave away on a line-up of annoyingly bad films, including a Godzilla knock-off named Pulgasari. Shin was imprisoned for trying to escape twice, but the team finally broke free through the US Embassy in Vienna in 1986, while attending a film festival with a delegation of government minders, according to Shin's Korean-language memoir.
At first, Kim Jong Il was convinced that the Americans kidnapped them, asking them to come home. But he later shelved their films out of anger. Shin
Abundance of blight reveals Detroit's wooden treasures
DETROIT — James Cadariu was planning construction of his hip, new coffee bar, Great Lakes Coffee Roasting Company, in 2011 when he first heard about Reclaim Detroit, a nonprofit agency retrieving old and valuable wood and other treasures from Detroit homes set for demolition.
It sounded like material he could use at the coffeehouse he was fashioning on Woodward Avenue in Midtown Detroit.
When he eventually made his way to Reclaim Detroit's warehouse, then located at Focus: HOPE, he was delighted with what he found, stacks of rare, old-forest lumber, hand-carved mahogany doors and antique fixtures, some of it more than a hundred years old.
And something more personal — wood taken from a home on Grayton Street on the city's east side, two doors down from his uncle's house, where he used to visit as a child.
"To me, that was it," he said in an interview earlier this month. "Wood from a street where I used to play as a kid. This material, this wood they're saving, it all has a story to tell. It's so much a part of the city. That's what I really liked about it."
Reclaim Detroit, now more than 3 years old, is gaining national attention as a leader in the burgeoning deconstruction movement, where trained workers remove valuable material in homes set for demolition, and then resell it, creating jobs and sparing landfills millions of tons of debris.
The nonprofit employs 25 people, and has deconstructed 68 homes. It's a small dent in the city's 78,000 abandoned homes, but the momentum is picking up, with big banks, like J.P. Morgan and Bank of America, providing grant money. And the orders are coming in, with interest, from as far away as Japan.
Reclaim Detroit crew member Gary Coklow, 33, of Detroit
Reclaim Detroit crew member Gary Coklow, 33, of Detroit removes nails from wood flooring as he helps deconstruct a house in Detroit. Reclaim Detroit, an organization the salvages valuable wood, fixtures, copper, and other treasures from houses set for demolition, is gaining national attention for its work. A crew works over a house on Ferry Park Street in Detroit Friday Dec. 5, 2014.(Photo: Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press)
"Right now, we're struggling to keep up with demand for the materials," said Reclaim Detroit Executive Director Craig Varterian, adding that they are selling it almost as fast as they can remove if from the houses.
"We had a good supply in the beginning but then we gained a certain amount of notoriety, so now we've got artists, architects, designers, people who are environmentally conscious, people who are rehabbing their homes and have an interest in these design elements, and things just started accelerating."
Most recently, Carhartt, the clothing company that specializes in outerwear for construction workers, has become a sponsor, and sent out a camera crew to create a feature film. And Esquire magazine has been calling.
"On one hand, it's exciting that this is gaining such popularity," Varterian said, "but it's daunting as we develop the supply chain."
Unlike standard demolition, which can take a few hours, deconstructing a home typically takes three days, and the job can be labor intensive, with workers methodically removing nails from old wood, tearing up walls to locate Douglas fir and pine, and removing antique windows, prized for their cloudy, sometimes bubble-filled glass. But when they finish one house, they move right on to the next.
"In terms of raw materials, there is certainly no lacking of that in Detroit," Varterian said. "It's bountiful. No one is doing this in the country on this scale. When we look across this city, it's as if we were looking at thousands of acres of forests sitting in those homes, wood you can't buy anymore."
Blight as an asset
The city's vast blight may prove to be one of its greatest assets.
"The whole blight removal movement in the city is scaling up," said Brian Farkas, director of special projects for the Detroit Building Authority, leading the fight against blight. "It opens up a whole host of opportunities for jobs and job training, and those are jobs that transfer. We're not going to be fighting blight in this city forever, and then the people trained in these jobs can build houses instead of deconstructing them."
The city was once demolishing about 200 homes a month. Now, under Mayor Mike Duggan's stepped-up efforts to fight blight, it averages 200 a week, peaking last summer when 1,000 homes a month were coming down.
“This material, this wood they're saving, it all has a story to tell. It's so much a part of the city. ”
James Cadariu, business owner
The city has developed a method to determine which homes might contain valuable material — and be worth the extra deconstruction efforts — based on the age of the homes. Those homes go out to bid to companies like Reclaim Detroit.
"It's one of the successful things under Duggan and it's not just the city, but across the state and country," Farkas said, noting that the federal government is supplying millions of dollars in aid to the city to fight the blight. "It seems like everybody is rowing in the same direction finally, broad-based teams doing what we need to do."
"It's a very exciting time to be in the city," he said.
Wood that sings
The beauty of the wood sells itself.
While Cadariu was smitten by the oak wood and fir wood from his childhood, he eventually selected wood retrieved by Reclaim Detroit from a home on Carpenter Street in Hamtramck, and used it to construct a massive butcher block bar in his coffee bar and a wine-tasting table that contains the indentations from bullets, fired long ago. "To throw material like this away, it's almost like a crime against culture," he said. "People love that there is a story behind this wood."
Not all of the reclaimed wood ends up in construction projects. Some is so gorgeous it is used to construct one-of-a-kind guitars.
"You can kind of hear the wood sing," said Curt Novara, owner of Woodward Guitar, which he operates out of his garage in Livingston County, where he works as a detective in the sheriff's department.
Using Douglas fir and maple obtained from Reclaim Detroit, Novara has built nine custom guitars since Woodward Guitar opened several months ago.
He works with George Gorodnitski, of Master Guitars in Los Angeles, to create the instruments. Each guitar takes about 60 hours to complete. The old wood makes the instruments extraordinary, he said. Metro Detroit music shops sell them — at about $2,000 a guitar.
His most recent guitars were constructed of wood taken by Reclaim Detroit from a house on Ford Street in Highland Park, near the Detroit city border.
"You can tap that wood and hear it hum," he said. "It's amazing."
So far, Novara has declined to sell them online.
"You have to play it, to get a feel for it, to experience it," he said. "These guitars might be new, but they've got an extraordinary history."
Tragic, inspiring, fun, controversial. And, yes, Kim Kardashian. These are the most clicked-on stories of 2014.
This is not a subjective list of the top news of the year. This is a look at the stories that you guys, the readers, clicked on the most across USA TODAY's website, and mobile and tablet apps.
Sometimes, what's most amazing about top news is looking at what's left out. You won't see anything below about Ebola. Not a word about gay marriage. No mention of the Islamic State. The Sochi Olympics aren't here, nor is the legalization of marijuana, the two Malaysia Airline disasters, Bill Cosby, Donald Sterling. Did we mention Ebola didn't make the list?
You did the clicking (or tapping) and we measured the page views. Here, the winners:
10. Coke put your name on the label
For its summer campaign, Coca-Cola replaced its iconic logo on limited edition, 20-ounce bottles of Coke, Diet Coke and Coke Zero with one of 250 popular names. Did your name make it on? A website let fans see who made the the cut, and a tour with 500 stops nationwide let those with less-popular names get their own customized mini-cans.
9. Kim Kardashian released naked photos and we all cared enough to click
First, pictures of her butt were released in an effort to "break the Internet." At least that was the headline associated with the images and a story about Kardashian in Papermagazine. And then, just when the buzz had started to die down (who are we kidding, everyone was still sharing those butt pictures), a second batch of photos was released. There was Kim, completely naked except for some pearls around her neck and her shins modestly covered by the gown she wasn't wearing. "We know you came just to read the article," she tweeted.
8. She stopped to rescue ducklings and people died
Emma Czornobaj's good intentions went horribly wrong when she stopped her car on a Canadian highway to herd wandering ducklings off the road. A motorcycle carrying Andre Roy and his daughter, Jessie, crashed into the back of Czornobaj's car, and both Andre and Jessie were killed. Czornobaj was found guilty on two counts of criminal negligence causing death and and two counts of dangerous driving causing death. She was sentenced to 90 days in prison and a 10-year driving ban.
7. Inspiration comes in the form of pirouettes
Misty Copeland was told at age 13 that she was "too old" to be considered for a ballet academy, plus she had the wrong torso length, bust, and Achilles tendons to dance. All of her "flaws" are read aloud by a young girl as we watch Copeland slowly begin to dance. And then, as the music intensifies, Copeland lets go and absolutely owns it. USA TODAY's For the Win blog post sharing Under Armour's inspirational commercial featuring the soloist with the American Ballet Theatre was the seventh most-visited page on USA TODAY digital platforms.
Under Armour produced this commercial titled "I will what I want" starring Misty Copeland of the American Ballet Theatre.
6. Open letter: Here's what Kenny Smith thinks about Charles Barkley and Ferguson
Kenny Smith and Charles Barkley are analysts on TNT's Inside the NBA. They're also friends who have differing opinions on the events in Ferguson, Mo. After Barkley publicly called the people looting in Ferguson "scumbags," Smith responded with anopen letter to Barkley via For the Win. Smith wrote that he dislikes Barkley's use of the word "scumbag" to describe looters and civilians burning down businesses. "When you are in 'The Struggle' to not expect that that potential reaction is foolish on our part," he wrote. He also doesn't think Barkley's opinion on race relations should be valued alongside those of lifelong activists. What "I consistently find interesting is how writers and media members view your insights in politics, and now race relations, with the same reverence as your insights in sports," Smith wrote. Barkley and Smith had a civil,face-to-face chat on air the next night during their show.
5. Tony Stewart hits, kills another driver
In a tragic accident that prompted new NASCAR rules, racing star Tony Stewart killed 20-year-old Kevin Ward during a sprint race when Ward got out of his car on a Canandaigua, N.Y., track and was struck by Stewart's car. Ward had angrily approached Stewart's car during a caution lap after he was spun out by Stewart on a previous lap, and Stewart's car ran over Ward, who was then thrown down the track. Stewart did not face criminal charges in Ward's death. Toxicology reports showed that Ward was under the influence of marijuana and at level that could impair judgment.
4. It's a battery commercial, but it brought us (OK, me) to tears
"They told me it couldn't be done. That I was a lost cause. ... But I've been deaf since I was three. So I didn't listen." Seattle Seahawks fullback Derrick Coleman shared those words in a moving Duracell commercial in January. There's not much text in the fourth most-read story on USA TODAY's digital platforms, but this For the Win post points readers to the ad, which they then shared more than 2 million times. Coleman was passed over in the 2012 draft, but now plays for the Seahawks. In his first game with the team, he had three catches for 30 yards. Coleman is the first deaf offensive player to ever play in the NFL.
The Seattle Seakhawks player Derrick Coleman stars in a commercial for Duracell called 'Trust your power.' Coleman is the first deaf player in the NFL.
3. Dirty trick in Ukraine infuriates the world
The leaflets distributed to Jewish residents of Donetsk, Ukraine, telling them to register with pro-Russia militants were eventually dismissed as political trickery. But if the purpose of the leaflets was to completely freak out the entire world, it worked. Jews in the town at the center of the Ukraine-Russia territorial fight were emerging from synagogue when a note on official-looking letterhead said to register with the pro-Russia militants who were running Donetsk's temporary government. They were told to provide a list of property and pay a registration fee or face deportation. But the pro-Russian group's leader, Denis Pushilin, said he was not responsible for the leaflets. Unfortunately, this isn't the first time the anti-Semitism card has been played in Ukraine.
2. Robin Williams is gone
The death of a comedic genius caught us all off guard. Robin Williams was found dead in his California home, and early reports pointed to suicide. Across the nation, grieving tweets and statements emerged mourning the actor and reminiscing about his touching and hilarious performances. And then came the facts. Investigators released gruesome, heart-wrenching details about how Williams hanged himself in his bedroom with a leather belt. Fans' attention shifted from the news of his death to the furor over those intimate, uncomfortable details made public.
1. The grand jury makes a decision about officer Darren Wilson
A white police officer will not face charges for fatally shooting an unarmed black teenager. The news of the grand jury's decision – to not press charges against Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. – was the most-read article on USA TODAY digital platforms in 2014. The statement was announced on the evening of Nov. 24, and USA TODAY's Yamiche Alcindor was with Michael Brown's mother, Lesley McSpadden, when attorney Benjamin Crump told McSpadden there was no indictment. She began crying and shouting. Her body vibrated with pain as she jumped to her feet. The nation, too, jumped to its feet. Protests, which had somewhat quieted since the Aug. 9 shooting, ignited with a new fury from coast to coast.
SPOKANE VALLEY, Wash. – A Spokane, Wash. charity called "Big Table" decided to deliver a little Christmas spirit to hundreds of fast food workers who spent Christmas Eve and Christmas day working.
Big Table gave $20 to 350 employees who had to work over this Christmas season.
"These folks serve all of us on Christmas day. We're going around trying to spread a little cheer," said a volunteer who wanted to be called Santa. "Everybody gets a twenty dollar bill. Little extra something for all those serving us out here."
Kevin Hamberg, a Carl's Jr. employee, said he does not mind working on the holidays so that employees who have kids can have the time off.
"I don't have kids so I'm glad that I'm working as opposed to people who do have kids," said Hamberg. "It's better for them to be home with them."
Hamberg was thankful for the visit from Big Table.
"It made today a lot better that's for sure. Just to see somebody being so happy and bringing cheer when people are working on Christmas," said Hamberg.
In total, $7140 was given to employees at 34 restaurants in the Spokane, Wash. area.
The money was raised by Big Table volunteers and donors.
Obama: U.S. less racially divided now than in 2009
Despite police shootings and demonstrations in New York City and Ferguson, Mo., President Obama says the United States is less divided by race now than it was when he took office in early 2009.
"I actually think that it's probably -- in its day-to-day interactions -- less racially divided," Obama tells NPR News
.
NPR provided a couple of clips from the interview to be broadcast next week.
In a discussion about his legislative outlook for 2015, Obama says the new Republican-run House and Senate must prove to voters that can get things done.
"Now you've got Republicans in a position where it's not enough for them simply to grind the wheels of Congress to a halt and then blame me," Obama tells NPR News.
HAVANA — Gloria Gomez remembers the day she lost out on a job because she showed up to the interview with a cross hanging from her necklace.
It was 1970, at the peak of Cuban leader Fidel Castro's crackdown on Catholic Church institutions around the island. Gomez said she not only lost the secretary job, but also friends who either renounced their religion to appease the communist government or didn't want to be associated with her being so outspoken about religion.
Gomez, 72, never backed down. She kept going to church. She brought out a Nativity scene and a small, plastic Christmas tree in her home each December. She watched as Castro's government slowly allowed Catholics to practice their religion more freely and as Pope Francis helped broker last week's deal to restore diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba.
Thursday, she joined dozens of others who have maintained their Catholic faith to celebrate Christmas Day Mass in a central Havana church, a cross still hanging around her neck.
"It's so beautiful to see religion blooming again," said Gomez (no relation to this reporter).
Christmas in Cuba is far different than the U.S. version. The holiday is celebrated here, but it's muted. There are no real Christmas trees. Hotels and restaurants that cater to tourists hung twinkling lights and other decorations for the holiday, but few homes or businesses did the same.
Because of widespread poverty on the island, there are few families who can afford to pile up gifts for their children. Gomez has no relatives abroad who can send her money, so she survives on her government pension.
"Everything's too expensive here," Gomez said. "I buy some small gifts for my friends, but that's it."
The Catholic Church has always held an uncomfortable position in Castro's Cuba.
Castro — baptized into the Roman Catholic Church and graduated from a Jesuit high school in Havana — went on to shut the doors of most religious institutions around the country after he assumed power in 1959 and created a communist government.
Marciano Garcia, a Catholic priest who has led churches in the central city of Matanzas and now Havana, said it wasn't as simple as Castro simply cracking down on the church. At the time, the Catholic Church had taken a position to excommunicate communists from its ranks, so Garcia said Castro's decision to fight the church did not come as a surprise.
People who wouldn't denounce their religion were barred from joining the Communist Party, meaning they faced a tough road to secure the good, state-run jobs or attend state-run universities.
Though Castro's officials confiscated churches for government use, Garcia said Castro never shut all the doors. Many remained open, albeit in an awkward situation, stuck between those Catholics who continued practicing their faith and communist officials intent on diminishing their ranks.
Garcia said he received death threats from anti-Castro counter-revolutionaries for simply maintaining a dialogue with the government, as well as threats of prison from Castro's officials.
"I was denounced for supporting the revolution and denounced for attacking the revolution," Garcia, 80, said, laughing at the position he was in. "I felt like Christ between the two thieves."
Garcia said he never saw any physical attacks against churchgoers, but the pressure was more moral. They were constantly ridiculed and questioned by government officials.
"The terror, the horror that they came to me with," he said, his voice trailing off. "People would confess to me that they were communists. Many left."
A small core kept going to church, and Garcia said that helped them endure more than five decades of economic ruin and despair.
"That's what sustained a lot of people here," he said.
Still, the church ranks dwindled. As more people left the island for the USA and others decided it wasn't worth the hassle from government officials, church attendance fell dramatically in Cuba.
Yancey Ruiz, 33, said he has only one relative who is a practicing Catholic. "And I've got a big family, so that should tell you something," he said.
Ruiz said the practicing Catholics left in Cuba are mostly from the older generation, the ones who practiced it before Castro's revolution triumphed. He said few people of his generation ever embraced Catholicism.
"It just wasn't part of our culture growing up," he said.
Although most people in Cuba celebrate Christmas Eve with a big dinner, Ruiz said that has more to do with family, rum and dancing than any celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ.
"It's a party," he said.
Cubans settled into that situation for years. Many continued going to church, many more stayed away. Some practiced the island's Santería religion, an Afro-Cuban mix that has become the most identifiable religious affiliation to those outside of Cuba.
Then came 1998.
"Everything changed after the pope came," said Gerardo Mitchell, 57, a promoter in Havana.
Pope John Paul II's visit served as a total shock to the system. Castro shook hands with the pope, even trading in his military uniform for a business suit for the occasion. Castro allowed for more open expressions of religion and even agreed to make Christmas Day a national holiday for the first time, a tradition that has endured. After Pope Benedict XVI visited in 2012, Good Friday became a national holiday as well.
"Now you can practice whatever you want," said Mitchell, who admits he practices both Catholicism and Santería.
Many Cubans said Christmas Day 2015 could look a lot different from this one. All around Havana, they point to last week's announcement by Cuba and the United States as a sign that their situation, especially economically, could be changing quickly. As more Americans will be able to visit and invest in Cuba, people here said they will finally free themselves of the economic noose they've been caught in all these years.
Garcia said he wept as he watched Cuban President Raúl Castro speak at the same time as President Obama last week, announcing that the five-decade diplomatic thaw was finally over.
"I thought I was going to die before I heard that kind of announcement," he said. "It was a triumph of reason."
For Garcia and so many others on the island, the leaders' words gave them something more — faith.
S.Korea, U.S., Japan to share intel on North Korea
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korea, the U.S. and Japan will sign their first joint intelligence-sharing pact next week to better cope with North Korea's increasing nuclear and missile threats, officials said Friday.
The U.S. has separate, bilateral intelligence-sharing agreements with South Korea and Japan, both American allies which are hosts to tens of thousands of U.S. troops.
But Seoul and Tokyo don't have such bilateral pacts, partly a result of long-running history disputes stemming from Japan's colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945. In 2012, the two almost forged an intelligence-sharing pact, but its signing was scrapped at the last minute following a backlash in South Korea.
Under the latest initiative, South Korea and Japan would share intelligence only on North Korea's nuclear and missile programs via the U.S., according to a statement from Seoul's Defense Ministry.
The pact would enable the three countries to swiftly respond to any North Korean provocation at a time when its threats are growing following a third nuclear test in February 2013, the statement said. The use of Japanese intelligence assets would boost surveillance on North Korea, it said.
South Korean officials say the North is believed to have made progress in manufacturing nuclear warheads that are small and light enough to be placed on a missile capable of reaching the U.S. North Korea conducted its first bomb test in 2006, followed by another in 2009.
The formal signing of the pact by the South Korean vice defense minister and his U.S. and Japanese counterparts will take place Monday, according to South Korean defense officials.
The Korean Peninsula was divided into a U.S.-backed South Korea and a Soviet-supported, socialist North Korea at the end of the Japanese occupation. The two Koreas fought a devastating three-year war in the early 1950, which ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.
In October, troops of the rival Koreas exchanged gunfire along their heavily fortified border twice, though no causalities were reported.
Pakistan officials: U.S. missile strikes kill 7 militants
DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan (AP) — A suspected U.S. drone fired missiles at two compounds in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal region Friday, killing at least seven alleged militants, while security forces killed the alleged planner of the deadly recent attack on a school, Pakistani officials said.
Four intelligence officials said the early morning strikes hit the compounds of the Punjabi Taliban and a group of Uzbek militants in the Shawal area of North Waziristan.
Two missiles struck the compound of the Punjabi Taliban in the village of Kund, killing four militants, the officials said. They said the compound was being used as a training facility by the group's commander, Qari Imran, but it was unclear whether Imran himself was present at the time of attack. The officials all spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media.
Minutes later, another drone-launched missile struck the compound of a group of Uzbek militants in the village of Mangrotai, killing three alleged militants, the officials said.
Drone strikes are largely unpopular in Pakistan where many consider them a violation of the country's sovereignty and resent the collateral damage caused to Pakistani civilians. But the U.S. insists these attacks are effective to eliminate militants in areas inaccessible to the Pakistani military.
Meanwhile, a top government official in the Khyber tribal region said security forces have killed the alleged planner of the recent school attack in the city of Peshawar. Security troops, acting on intelligence information, conducted a raid in the Bara area late Thursday night, where they fought a gunbattle with the militant commander known as Saddam and his accomplices, said Shahab Ali Shah, head of police administration in Khyber.
Shah said that Saddam was killed in the hour-long shootout, while his six accomplices were injured and arrested. He said Saddam helped plan the Peshawar school attack and was also involved in attacks on health workers giving polio vaccinations in the Peshawar valley.
On Dec. 16, militants strapped with explosives broke into a military-run school in Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, and killed 148 people — most of them children.
People across Southeast Asia gathered along the shores of the Indian Ocean on Friday to mark the 10th anniversary of the devastating tsunami of 2004.
One of the deadliest natural disasters in modern history, it killed 230,000 people and displaced millions in 12 countries.
Services were held to remember the dead in countries including Indonesia, Thailand, India and Sri Lanka. Moments of silence were planned in several locations to mark the exact time the tsunami hit.
"I cannot forget the smell of the air, the water at that time … even after 10 years," Teuku Ahmad Salman said at a prayer service attended by thousands of people in Banda Aceh, Indonesia.
Sobbing, the 51-year-old said: "I cannot forget how I lost hold of my wife, my kids, my house."
He said he refused to believe for years that his family had died, but eventually gave up looking for them.
Family prepares to say goodbye to missing Des Moines man
Dukan Diew breathed a prayer as she scrolled through the listings on her smartphone.
It was a gray Tuesday — Dec. 17, 2013 — and she'd been napping before her shift as an overnight supervisor at a Des Moines residential treatment center. Now she skimmed through 36 missed calls from relatives and friends in Iowa and South Sudan, seeking the name that mattered most: her husband's.
Nothing.
Their kids would be out of school soon, so she pulled on a coat and grabbed the keys to her minivan, returning a call from one of her husband's cousins in Des Moines. "Your brother made it to the U.N. Mission," he said, "but your husband is not there."
Both knew this meant that Koang Toang was, at best, running for his life. What Dukan didn't know that day was that the journey ahead would be her own — a year of seeking answers in her husband's disappearance and figuring out how to help her family let go of a father, brother and cousin whose fate might never be known.
A dual citizen of Nuer descent, Koang, 43, had returned to South Sudan in 2010 to take a job with its newly independent government. But on Dec. 15, 2013, an ethnic-based dispute between the president and vice president had erupted.
For two days, Nuer citizens had flooded into the United Nations base in Juba, telling of family members shot down as they ran from Presidential Guard forces. For two days, Dukan had prayed.
Now she put the phone on speaker, listening to messages, returning calls. Some said Koang had been spotted at the U.N. base; others said he'd been last seen facedown at gunpoint on a Juba street.
Dukan, 36, had run from war as a child and knew how to function within its chaos. As she arrived at the school, she decided to tell her kids — then ages 3 through 16 — the truth as she saw it: Their dad had been captured, but they would assume he was in jail. She resolved to stay strong.
But that day, a wound began to break open for her. If the kids lost their dad, they would grow up with an emptiness she and Koang had both known. Was it some kind of curse? She pushed down the thought.
In Dukan's earliest memories, she sees a beach where a tributary of the Nile River curved near her village, Jikou, on Sudan's eastern border with Ethiopia. In the heat of the day, she and her cousins played along its banks while aunts and uncles looked on. When the air cooled, they walked home together.
Born in the late 1970s, Dukan started life during a rare decade of peace in a place that has known little of it since 1956, when the Sudan was released from British and Egyptian rule.
While the conflicts' causes are complex, historians note that in their exit, Sudan's colonial-era rulers placed agro-pastoral southern states under the jurisdiction of northern leaders with a history of brutality. Historians also cite a powder keg of regional exploitation sparked in the 1970s after foreign companies, including U.S. firms, discovered oil beneath land families had farmed for generations.
The Second Sudanese Civil War began in 1983. For Dukan, it began the day soldiers opened fire at the beach. She doesn't know whether they were with the government or the Sudan People's Liberation Movement. What she remembers is that little kids and grandparents cried out as the river's current swept them under. She was 5.
She fled into the grasslands with her family, running for days while gunfire rattled nearby. When they returned, they found ashes. All day, kids cried for food. It was hard to find heroes, but Dukan's was her dad, who left daily at sunup to fish so his children could eat. Her father, the village chief, was killed in 1986, reportedly during a meeting with government leaders from the north.
Dukan stepped off a plane in Des Moines in 1994 with her mother, sister and three brothers. After 11 years of surviving war, they had accepted a U.N. resettlement grant.
Among the first people they met was a young man from Jikou who worked for a local agency, helping new arrivals navigate Des Moines life. Koang Toang had been here since 1992. To Dukan, he was breathtaking. The two married in 1995 and started a family a few years later.
DESMOINESREGISTER
Iowa Sudanese leaders: Avoid conflict here, despite war at home
Like many in the diaspora, Koang felt driven to catch up with the Western world. He studied economics, agronomy and public administration at Des Moines Area Community College, Iowa State and Drake University and worked his way up at Pioneer Hi-Bred and Wells Fargo.
Koang had endured many of the hardships that would later become known through publicity about the so-called Lost Boys of Sudan: guerrilla warfare, wild animals, near-starvation. When he spoke of it, Dukan would stop him. It was too sad, too hard to hear. She wanted to think about what they had: food, sleep without fear, healthy children.
In 2005, Sudan's Comprehensive Peace Agreement began a six-year process of granting South Sudan independence, and the couple began to nurture a dream. Neither had been able to forget Jikou. They talked of moving their children back to help rebuild, starting with an orphanage.
As the war wound down, southern Sudanese leaders traveled to central Iowa, where the Sudanese community had grown to an estimated 5,000, and Omaha, Neb., where as many as 9,000 had relocated. Koang's friend Joseph Malual recently recalled what he heard in addresses by Salva Kiir and Riek Machar, the war generals who later became South Sudan's president and vice president.
"They said that we had a lost generation because of the war," Malual said. "That's why you are needed so badly. You came here because of war, so now it's not only about your family."
Koang was moved. In 2010, he was offered a position financing business startups and orphanages in South Sudan's Ministry of Social Welfare. To Dukan, the timing seemed bad. She was pregnant with their seventh child, and the older boys were approaching their teens.
Still, it was a step toward getting everyone home.
On a Sunday after church, they drove to Old Country Buffet on Des Moines' south side. The kids loaded their plates. Koang quieted them for his news: "I've decided to take a job in Africa."
Silence. "What?"
"Yeah," he replied. "I've taken a job where your mom and I are from. Eventually, we want to move all of you there, so you can know the culture."
The kids were incredulous. "We're not going! We were born in this country! Why are you leaving us?" Grumbling, they went to get ice cream.
"It didn't seem real to them," Dukan would later recall.
On a hot August night in 2010,she dropped Koang off at Des Moines International Airport, and for the next three years, the kids knew their dad mostly through Sunday night phone calls.
Dukan was able to see him once, in 2013. Together, they traveled to Jikou to discuss a nonprofit they had established to raise funds for an orphanage, school and clinic. Excited, community leaders donated 25 acres of land. They said they would cut timber by hand and construct the buildings themselves.
On a rainy night this past July, Dukan walked down a jetway at Ethiopia's Addis Ababa Bole International Airport. She had three flights and 24 hours to herself before she would pick up life where she'd left it in Des Moines.
For the first three months of the year, she had wept, it seemed, nonstop. Her children's aunts had made dinners; their uncles had ordered pizza. As winter turned to spring, she had gone through the motions, praying for a miracle.
Now, for five weeks, she had chased down every lead she could find in the refugee camps of her home state and Ethiopia's Gambella region, talking with friends, relatives — anyone who had escaped the incidents in Juba. They told their stories, always saying Koang might still be alive, but his relatives had searched the prisons. It was over.
She sank into her seat, leaned against the window and wept, letting go of everything — graduations with a dad in the stands, weddings with an escort down the aisle, newborn babies with a grandpa to wonder over the miracle. She wept, too, for a nation that had come so close to something better.
Two months earlier, the U.N. had released a report on the violence that swept South Sudan, citing forces loyal to both Kiir and Machar for relentless violence and gross violations of human rights. Hospitals, churches and U.N. bases had been attacked. Civilians had been raped, tortured and murdered. More than a million people had fled their homes and farms; famine threatened millions more.
Dukan hadn't read the report, but she had seen the faces in Jikou. Her mind wandered back over her weeks of searching. Everywhere she had looked, there had been tents, hungry children and mud in a scene more desperate than the one she had left during the war that had taken her dad, brother and more than 2 million others in their bid for freedom.
She'd wanted to pick up a gun and fight on their behalf. Instead, she had mixed up some cornmeal and milk, warmed it over a fire, and gathered a group of old family friends. Many had lost children and parents. They had eaten together, talking and laughing — one bowl, many spoons. For the first time in seven months, Dukan had felt at peace.
Next she sought the community leaders, telling them she hadn't raised any funds for the orphanage since Koang's disappearance but hoped to resume the effort soon. "Maybe next year," they said, "there will be peace."
Her final meeting was with former Vice President Machar, who had resumed command of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army from Ethiopia. Without proof of her husband's death, she told him, her kids would be unable to apply for aid in the U.S., including college scholarships and grants. Machar, who is Nuer, presumably had no way of confirming the death but followed up with a document.
Flight attendants came by with a rice dish, and Dukan ate a little as she thought through the next steps. Her family in Des Moines would need time to come to terms with the truth that seemed clear to her.
Meanwhile, she had other issues to manage. To make ends meet, she had taken a second job, assisting refugees with a Des Moines agency. Her oldest son's grades had slipped; he would need a solid GPA for college. And the two little girls would need clearer answers to their bedtime questions. She imagined the conversation:
"When is Dad coming home?"
"Dad is not coming home. Dad is gone, so you don't have a dad."
"Why don't you go to the store and buy us another dad?"
"It doesn't work that way. You only have one dad, and that was your only dad."
She longed for a gravesite, where the loss might seem real to them. She let the grief wash over one more time before the plane touched down, then she gathered her things to find her next gate.
In September, Dukan Diew walked into a Des Moines Social Security office carrying the makeshift death certificate Machar had developed at her request. An official there looked it over and said he would get back to her.
She waited three weeks, then called U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin's Des Moines office and met with a staff assistant, who said he would inquire with the U.S. Embassy in Juba regarding a death certificate.
Now she saw another opportunity. In two months, the anniversary of her husband's disappearance would come and go. If she planned a service, friends and relatives would travel from across the Midwest. Everyone would have the chance to speak. For her kids, it would offer one last glimpse of their father, this time through the eyes of the people who loved him.
Dukan called her brother-in-law, who also lives in Des Moines.
"You know what?" she said. "I'm just going to take a stand. I'm going to set up a memorial service for Koang in December, and whoever wants to come, they can just come, because they are invited."
She knew what he would ask next: What if Koang was still alive? "If it happens," she said, "then we'll celebrate."
She got ready for bed, thinking through the next steps. Money was still tight, and 65-hour workweeks left her exhausted most of the time. But her oldest son's grades had rebounded, and he was talking about college. Like his dad, he had laser focus when it counted. In this country, she thought, a son of hers could become a doctor. A daughter could become a lawyer.
Now she pictured the basement at Trinity Lutheran Church, where she and Koang had sat through Nuer-language services with their squirmy kids for more than a decade of Sundays. She pictured the room filled with people, a celebration of her husband's life.
She pictured tables in the gym, with bowls of steaming rice and soup with beef and onions, tomatoes and spicy red peppers.
She pictured herself in Jikou once a year, in the summertime. She had survived war; she could survive this — all of it.
She pictured an orphanage, and cornmeal and milk, stirred over a fire. She pictured one bowl and many spoons.
She breathed a prayer and a goodbye.
===
Report from Juba offers answers
Human Rights Watch, an independent research organization, in August released a report of the incidents that began in Juba on Dec. 15, 2013. The report states that Koang Toang was detained that day by pro-Kiir Dinka National Security forces at a checkpoint in the Gudele neighborhood. It also describes a massacre of 200 to 400 Nuer men in the Gudele police compound on Dec. 16, 2013, stating that Toang was likely killed then. A Dinka resident living nearby reported that on Dec. 17, security forces moved "huge" numbers of bodies into trucks. Read
How to donate
Good Shepherd Orphanage in Jikou, South Sudan, is accepting donations in Koang Toang's name. To donate,
Memorial service Saturday
A memorial service for Koang Toang, 43, will be conducted at 1 p.m. Saturday at Trinity Lutheran Church, 3223 University Ave., Des Moines.
