SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- On Friday afternoon, following a contentious televised altercation with a former Obama appointee, Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) ridiculed as insufficient the president’s plan to continue supporting the Free Syrian Army (FSA) -- a moderate terror group that, like the United States, opposes al Qaeda’s al-Nusra Front, the regime of Syria’s Bashar Assad and ISIS. McCain accused President Obama of rejecting recommendations from national security advisers to further arm and train the FSA. “The commander-in-chief needs to start behaving like one; he needs to get his head in the game,” McCain told reporters Friday. “This is foreign policy 101. You arm one terror group to eliminate another. And when those guys turn on you, you arm a new extremist sect to put down that rebellion.” Because ISIS is now threatening Western targets, McCain is seeking support for a bold move to arm American domestic terrorists such as the Ku Klux Klan, Symbionese Liberation Army and Aryan Nations to take up the fight.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- The business news during the first quarter of 2014 has already been filled with executives moving to competing firms, mergers, acquisitions and notable divestitures, such as Google selling off Motorola. Following suit, the world’s premier terrorist organization, al Qaeda, announced that it would be severing ties with its best-known affiliate, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which is fighting a ferocious guerrilla war in both of those nations. Al Qaeda, the corporate parent, issued a blunt statement on Monday announcing the divestiture of the Islamic State from all Middle Eastern terror operations. Representatives for al Qaeda’s Pakistan-based headquarters called the move a strategic and necessary business decision similar to Google’s sale of Motorola. "Difficult as it is to sever a business partnership, we believe this move will free our engineers and operations specialists to focus on our core model, which has been suffering since 2011," said a senior al Qaeda press official.