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Kurdish fighters, supported by coalition warplanes, pushed into the town of Sinjar in northern Iraq, days after breaking a siege of a mountain where ethnic Yazidis had been trapped for months by Islamist extremists.

Massoud Barzani, an Iraqi Kurdish leader claimed his peshmerga forces had already taken a "large area" of the town of Sinjar, which has been held since August by fighters of the so-called Islamic State.

NPR's Deborah Amos reports that breaking the months-long siege of Mount Sinjar "was the largest military operation in Iraq since the U.S. took a direct role, 8,000 Kurdish troops backed by U.S. air power."

Barzani, on a visit to the recently captured area on Sunday, praised God that his forces had "opened and controlled all the roads" to the mountain.

"The liberation of the center of Sinjar town was not part of our plans, but we have managed to take control of a large area of it," he was quoted by the BBC as saying.

"Most of the districts are under our control," Barzani told his troops. "We will crush the Islamic State."

The peshmerga launched the military operation last week and managed to first open up a corridor to Mount Sinjar, allowing thousands of Yazidis trapped there to escape.

Now, the fighters are pressing an offensive to retake the town itself. The Associated Press reports that as the battle continued to rage in the city on Sunday, where loud explosions and gunfire echoed from inside the town and coalition warplanes bombed ISIS positions.

Nabil Mohammed, a 28-year-old Kurdish fighter, said there were "snipers everywhere inside" the town.

"One of them fired a rocket-propelled grenade at us," he said. "I ran into a house and I was hit by a sniper's bullet in my thigh."

The AP quotes a spokesman for the Kurdish forces, Jabbar Yawar, as saying the fighters are still facing resistance from pockets of militants still inside the town and that it is "far from cleared." He declined to provide more details on the ongoing operation, the news agency said.

peshmerga

Islamic State

Kurds

Iraq

President Obama tells CNN that he doesn't consider North Korea's hack of Sony Pictures an act of war, but instead a case of "cybervandalism." But, he stands by his criticism of the movie studio for pulling the satirical film The Interview because its plot angers Pyongyang.

"If we set a precedent in which a dictator in another country can disrupt through cyber, a company's distribution chain or its products, and as a consequence we start censoring ourselves, that's a problem," Obama told CNN's State of the Union this morning.

"And it's a problem not just for the entertainment industry, it's a problem for the news industry," he said. "CNN has done critical stories about North Korea. What happens if in fact there is a breach in CNN's cyberspace? Are we going to suddenly say, are we not going to report on North Korea?"

The film depicts comedy duo Seth Rogen and James Franco as journalists who score an interview with North Korea's reclusive leader, Kim Jong Un. In the film, the CIA recruits the pair to assassinate Kim.

The president's latest remarks on CNN follow a Friday news conference in which called Sony's decision to cancel the release of The Interview a mistake.

"Sony is a corporation. It suffered significant damage. There were threats against its employees. I'm sympathetic to the concerns that they faced," Obama said. "Having said all that, yes I think they made a mistake."

Responding to the president's initial remarks, Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton told NPR that the studio "did not capitulate" to hackers.

"We don't own movie theaters, and we require movie theater owners to be there for us to distribute our film," Lynton told NPR's All Things Considered.

"We very much wanted to keep the picture in release. When the movie theaters decided that they could not put our movie in their theaters, we had no choice at that point but to not have the movie come out on the 25th of December," he said. "This was not our decision."

On Saturday, North Korea denied its involvement in the cyberattack against Sony Pictures and said it wanted to help the United States investigate the breach. But the regime also threatened "serious" consequences if Washington declined the offer.

the interview

hacking

North Korea

For many Norwegian-American families, the biggest Christmas treat isn't foil-wrapped chocolate or sugar-dusted cookies. It's lefse, a simple flatbread.

Lefse are sort of like soft tortillas, made mostly out of mashed potatoes (with a little fat and flour mixed in to form a tender dough). They're usually spread with butter and sugar, or rolled up with a bit of lingonberry jam. And families that make them make them by the dozens.

"It's probably one of the first foods I fell in love with," says Megan Walhood, who lives in Portland Ore., and has family roots in Norway. "The rest of the year, I would just think about, when are we going to have lefse again?"

The Salt

Why We Hold Tight To Our Family's Holiday Food Traditions

Walhood loves the unique toasty potato flavor. And, she says, "there's something so comforting about soft, starchy things."

For the Walhood family, that comfort goes way back.

Megan's dad, Dale Walhood, grew up in North Dakota, with a strong sense of his Norwegian heritage — and lefse. "On my father's side of the family, lefse arrived [with the family to the U.S.] in 1825, for the opening of the Erie Canal."

Many of the surrounding families in their rural part of North Dakota had similar roots. And it showed in the lefse. "Weddings and funerals and christenings. Anything that smacked of a lot of Norwegians there — yeah, there'd be stacks of it," Walhood remembers.

These days, lefse in America is pretty much reserved for Christmas (and, in some families, Thanksgiving). For the Walhoods, lefse-making is a true family project. Peggy Walhood, Megan's mother, has Swedish roots ("a mixed marriage," she laughs), but learned from her mother-in-law the art of wrapping up the still-warm lefse in towels to keep them soft and pliable.

As with many simple foods, much of it comes down to technique. The key to lefse, the Walhoods explain, is to keep things tender. That means chilling the mashed potatoes so that you only need a minimum of flour to form a dough, and rolling them nice and thin with a special grooved rolling pin.

"You want to roll it thin enough, and then also even," Megan Walhood explains. "You don't want to have a fat edge and a skinny edge, which are not the ideal. They're not approved by the 'Lefse Commission,' " she and her dad laugh.

There's even an art to shimmying a long flat stick — called a lefse stick — beneath the dough to transfer it to the griddle.

Then you brush off the extra flour, to keep it from either burning on the griddle or being absorbed and toughening the flatbread. It's a step that yields a nice finished product, but also a fair amount of floury mess. Dale Walhood jokes that cleanup was "about a six-hour vacuum job."

Once the lefse are finished, all warm and toasty and inviting, they're spread with butter and sugar. And devoured.

Carrying on the lefse tradition is especially poignant this year, the family says. Dale Walhood was diagnosed with cancer in the spring. They didn't think they'd get this Christmas together.

The Walhood lefse legacy extends far beyond this particular floury table. A few years back, Megan and her husband Jeremy opened a business and food truck in Portland, Ore., called Viking Soul Food. The entire menu is based around Dale's lefse.

"I'm incredibly proud of her," Dale says, nearly overcome. "Her sensitivity, and her dedication to quality. And I'm one of seven children, so they all look to her for their lefse."

Megan and Jeremy estimate that Viking Soul Food will turn about 250 pounds of potatoes into lefse this week — enough make memories on dozens of Christmas tables.

food traditions

Norway

I've always had a good time in Cuba. The people are friendly and funny, the rum is smooth, the music intoxicating and the beaches wide, white and soft.

But you're accompanied everywhere by government minders. They call them responsables. Any Cuban you interview knows your microphone might as well run straight to their government.

If you want to talk to someone with a different view, you have to slip out of your hotel in the middle of the night without your minder — though dissidents say other security people follow you.

Each trip I've made as a reporter has revealed a little more of what kind of society Cubans live in. It's a warm, sunny place, filled with industrious and accomplished people who laugh loudly in public but mutter or whisper under their breath about the government. And the government is everywhere.

In Cuba, the government is the news and the economy. It is the only voice in every broadcast or book. Every neighborhood has a local "Committee for the Defense of the Revolution," on watch for what they call "counter-revolutionary activities."

You still sometimes make a human connection with your responsable, and each trip, I've left with a light suitcase. Responsables beg — that is not too strong a word — for you to leave them your blue jeans, razor blades, toothpaste, or The Economist magazine, which they cannot get and often try to sell.

Government press people say, each trip, "Return as a tourist. Bring your family," and I've been tempted. Havana is beautiful, caught in a kind of pastel time capsule of a 1940's sea-breeze skyline and 1950's Chevies nosing noisily up the street. Havana would be something to see before new Hyatts, Starbucks, or Chase Bank buildings make it look like many other modern cities.

But tourists inhabit a separate Havana. They can spend dollars, eat lobster, and drink wine in beachside restaurants in which Cubans are not permitted. They can watch news from around the world and travel the Internet as Cubans can't.

And it is startling and sad to see legions of young women lined up behind tourist hotels, hoping, as Yoani Sanchez, the Cuban blogger, has written, to "snag ... a tourist to take them to a hotel and offer them, the next morning, a breakfast that comes with milk."

The largest hotel company in Latin America is the Grupode Tirismo Gaviota. It is owned by the Cuban military. So while I've been glad to go to Cuba as a reporter, I can't bring myself to return as a tourist.

Maybe now, more Americans will get the chance to see Cuba. And I hope they get to know what they're really seeing.

Latin America

tourism

Cuba