The Smoking Sword: The CIA has evidence that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was in close contact with the aide in charge of killing journalist Jamal Khashoggi while the hit was being carried out, The NY Times reports.

The adviser, Saud al-Qahtani, tops the list of Saudis placed under US sanctions for their part in the murder. The Times reports that US intelligence has evidence that Prince Salman and Qahtani had 11 exchanges that roughly coincided with the hit team’s operation at the  Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, where Khashoggi was murdered and dismembered.

Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst now at the Brookings Institution, told the Times, “There is only one thing they could possibly be talking about. This shows that the crown prince was witting of premeditated murder.”

41: Praise is pouring in for the late President George HW Bush, who has been dubbed by some as the best one-term president. Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton are all piling on to say what a wonderful guy he was.

Clinton described Bush as “Honorable, gracious and decent.” Bush is being marked as the standard of Presidential decency, a message to the current occupant of the White House.

The body of the former President is being flown to Washington today where it will lie in state at the Capitol before a service at the National Cathedral on Wednesday. Bush will be buried Friday on the grounds of his presidential library, next to his wife Barbara, at Texas A&M University.

The Trade War:President Trump was busy on Twitter this morning touting his trade agreement with China’s Xi Jinping. “China has agreed to reduce and remove tariffs on cars coming into China from the U.S. Currently the tariff is 40%,” Trump tweeted.

This being Trump, it needs verification. The Chinese press has not mentioned any concessions, but that’s not a surprise either.

Twister:A rare December blitz of 22 tornadoes hit Central Illinois on Saturday, injuring dozens of people while ripping apart homes. One man was found dead in the debris.

Student Athaletes:The 12-1 Oklahoma Sooners were given the last slot in the four-team College Football Playoff yesterday over Ohio State (12-1) and Georgia (11-2).

The other three teams chosen in the playoffs will be No. 1 Alabama (13-0), No. 2 Clemson (13-0) and No. 3 Notre Dame (12-0).

In semifinals, Clemson will play Notre Dame at the Cotton Bowl in Arlington, Tex., the afternoon of Dec. 29, and Alabama will play Oklahoma at the Orange Bowl in Miami Gardens, Fla. that night. The winners will play for the national championship on Jan. 7 in Santa Clara, Calif.

The Obit Page:Thomas Altizer, one of a handful of radical theologians in the 1960s who said that “God is dead,” died last week in Stroudsburg, Pa. at age 91.

After World War II and the Holocaust, some theologians began to question whether a benevolent God exists. Altizer taught religion at Emory University.

In 1966 Timemagazine published a cover with the question screaming from the cover, “Is God Dead?,” setting off a national argument in the US where at the time 97 percent of Americans believed in God.

Altizer appeared on the popular Merv Griffin show, where he was given two minutes to speak. He wrote later, “The response was a violent one,” he wrote later, “forcing the director to close the curtains and order the band to play forcefully, and after this event a crowd greeted me at the stage door, demanding my death.”

The God Letter:Speaking of God, Albert Einstein’s controversial “God letter” is set for auction tomorrow at Christie’s in New York.

Einstein in 1954 wrote by hand in German  that, “The word God is for me nothing but the expression of and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of venerable but still rather primitive legends.” He wrote, “No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change anything about this.”

Einstein wrote frequently about God and the Jewish faith, but this is the most famous letter. It’s being offered at the ungodly opening price of $1 million.

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