The U.S. "regime change" operation in Syria recently tallied up some major successes.

The Syrian Democratic Force, a U.S.-sponsored group of mostly Syrian Kurds, is besieging the Islamic State-held eastern city of Manbij. According to the UN's Human Rights commissioner 70,000 civilians in Manbij are cut off from all supplies. We have yet to hear calls for an immediate breaking of the siege or for enforced air drops of supplies to these people. Where are all the R2P fans in the Obama administration and all the well-paid Syrian opposition propaganda groups on this? That the U.S. has managed to avoid any questions about this siege is surely a success.

Instead of delivering food the U.S. did some different air drops on Manbij:

At least 56 civilians were killed on Tuesday in air strikes north of the besieged Islamic State-held city of Manbij in northern Syria, and residents said they believed the attack was carried out by U.S.-led warplanes, a monitoring group said.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the dead included 11 children, and that dozens more people were wounded.

The CIA finances a long list of proxy groups in Syria to fight the Syrian government and the millions of people it protects. It has delivered high-powered TOW anti-tank weapons to many of these groups:

The groups that the CIA currently allows munitions to be shared with are: ... Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement, (Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki)...

According to the BBC Foreign News producer Riam Dalati it is a group of these Nour al-Din al-Zenki "moderate rebels" who yesterday captured a Palestinian boy of some 10, maybe 12 years, taunted him and accused him of fighting on the Syrian government's side. The boy had no uniform on and had medical infusion tubes in his right arm.

The failed coup attempt against Erdogan provoked a flurry of excited polemics in the alternative informational space, leading to the emergence of two competing hypotheses. The author already published his own analysis on how this was actually a sloppy, last-ditch move by the US to frantically offset the game-changing geopolitical consequences of the surprise Russian-Turkish detente, but the other main theory that's going around is that this was all a false flag attempt by Erdogan to seize more power.

The False Flag Theory

There are plenty of reasons why this is believable, not least of which is Erdogan's involvement in other false flag plans such as the aborted 2014 mission to attack the Suleyman Shah tomb in northern Syria as a pretext for launching an all-out invasion. The Turkish strongman has also been implicated in the terrorist bombing campaign that broke out in the southern part of the country last summer and was eventually used as the grounds for relaunching hostilities against the Kurds.

Advocates of the "false flag coup" theory point to Erdogan's immediate retribution against political opponents as alleged proof that he initiated his country's regime change drama in order to give him a reason to carry out more purges and complete the Islamification of the constitutionally secular state. Actually, it was already widely known that the President had a long list of political enemies that he was progressively dealing with one by one, and that the Muslim Brotherhood-inspired Salafization of society had been gradually enabled through internationally recognized "democratic" means (however flawed and manipulated they may be). Erdogan didn't need a "false flag coup" to continue with this years'-long and drawn-out agenda, though it did admittedly accelerate his plans.

In arguing against the "false flag coup" theory, it's relevant to bear in mind that Erdogan is the consummate politician and never misses a chance to exploit a crisis to his benefit. After the re-establishment of his power in the wake of the failed coup, Erdogan saw an unprecedented moment to take out all of his enemies in one fell swoop, which is exactly what he's in the process of doing right now. Still, this doesn't necessarily prove that he wasn't "in on it" all along.

Has our world come off its wheels?

On Sunday, June 12, we awoke to news of a massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando when a gunman walked into the club's Latin night armed with a semiautomatic and a handgun and began spraying bullets across the dance floor. Forty-nine people would die and more than 50 would be injured.

Dramatic video showed terrified clubgoers huddled inside bathroom stalls hiding from the gunman, who would periodically text and post on Facebook during the three-hour reign of terror.

Orlando became the worst mass shooting by a single gunman in U.S. history, something so horrific that we knew it would take weeks and months to process and heal.

But tremors from Orlando had barely subsided when another scene of carnage raced across screens from one of the world's busiest airports about two weeks later. Three terrorists armed with bombs and guns killed 41 people and injured more than 100 in an assault at Istanbul Ataturk Airport in Turkey.

Lutz Bachmann, founder of the anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic Pegida movement, has announced the establishment of a new political party. The long-expected move allegedly comes in response to German authorities mulling a ban on Pegida. The new group would be called the Popular Party for Freedom and Direct Democracy (FDDV), with Bachmann first saying he wanted to develop a "parliamentary arm" over a year ago.

The leader of the far-right party stressed that his new brainchild would not pit against the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. "We shall support the AfD in the next elections, and shall only field candidates in a limited number of constituencies," Bachmann said at a weekly meeting in the eastern German city of Dresden, DPA reported. Relations between the two far-right movements are good, he noted, highlighting the importance of "working together."

The AfD, which was set up just three years ago, won the recent elections in three regional governments in March, gaining huge popularity in Germany. The populist party has been widely criticized for going overboard with its increasingly anti-Muslim stance. Earlier this year delegates from the anti-immigration AfD party backed an election manifesto which slams Islam as incompatible with the constitution and calls for a ban on Islamic symbols.

The latest report by the UN chief regarding the Iran nuclear deal has come under fire from Russia, Iran and the US at the same time. They disagree with it, saying it contains "gross factual mistakes" and labeling it "unbalanced and biased."

Let us be straight: the United Nations secretary-general's report to the Security Council does not fit the necessary business rhythm," Russian Ambassador to the UNSC Vitaly Churkin told his colleagues on Monday.

"The document is politically-motivated and goes far beyond the frames of factual summary of the course of the implementation of Security Council Resolution 2231," Churkin added, according to TASS. "Moreover, it contains a lot of irrelevant information [and] gross factual mistakes."

He also accused the UN chief of "unacceptable" use of "unverified data taken from the mass media or obtained from certain countries."

Donations are pouring in to a crowdfunding page launched to help families of soldiers killed in Iraq take legal action against former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The families' aim to raise £50,000 (US$65,000) was close to being achieved on Tuesday afternoon, when the campaign already boasted more than £44,000.

Launched by Roger Bacon and Reg Keys, whose sons Matthew and Tom were killed in the war, the page has already reached 89 percent of its target with 30 days still to run before their deadline. Bacon and Keys say although they accept those who enlist for the armed forces do so in the understanding they may be hurt or killed, "the long-awaited Iraq Inquiry (Chilcot) Report has confirmed that there were serious failings in the lead-up to, planning and conduct of the War, which led to so many unnecessary deaths.

"Our armed forces must never again be so callously sacrificed by political ambition and the irresponsibility and failings of Government and Whitehall.

"Those responsible should be held to account," they said.

Despite the much-discussed failure of the coup attempt in Turkey, retired Turkish Admiral Turker Erturk told Sputnik Turkiye that it has actually reached its point: the actual target of the attempted overthrow, instigated by CIA, were the Turkish military, out of fear that they would hamper the "Greater Middle East" project.

"My view is that the CIA was behind the coup," Turker Erturk told Sputnik Turkiye.

"The major blow was delivered at the Turkish military. And the coup attempt was a success, in a sense that certain aims pursued by some certain forces, have been reached."

A subsidiary of Russia's nuclear corporation Rosatom has signed its first contract with a US nuclear power plant operator to supply Russian nuclear fuel.

"We believe in this project. We know how to make nuclear fuel; it has successfully operated in Western European nuclear power plants. We are not entering the American market with empty hands," said Rosatom CEO Sergey Kirienko.

He added Rosatom is working in collaboration with GE-Hitachi and has already signed a contract to send a pilot batch of Russian nuclear fuel to the US.

Bangladeshi forces on Monday announced a financial reward for any militant who chooses to return to normal life and provide information about other terrorists.

Days after the Dhaka cafe siege and the terror attack on the Eid gathering, Bangladesh's elite anti-crime force conducted a search in the city of Bogra to locate militant training camps and also promised a million Bangladeshi Taka (US $12,800) to any activist in exchange for specific information about the activities of militants.

"If someone wants to return to a normal life from the banned outfits and provide us information about his fellow militants, he will be given Taka 1,000,000 and all support for his social rehabilitation," the Director General of Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) Benazir Ahmed told a media briefing at Bogra.

Police discovered a hand-painted Islamic State flag in the room of the Afghan teen who attacked passengers on a train in Germany. The group claimed responsibility, releasing a video in which the alleged perpetrator promises to conduct an attack.

Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) has said the attacker was one of its fighters, according to IS-affiliated Amaq news agency. The agency later released a video, allegedly showing the axe attacker. Identifying him as Muhammad Riyad, IS called him a "soldier of the Caliphate."

In the video, the alleged perpetrator reportedly called on Muslims who couldn't reach IS strongholds in Syria and Iraq to conduct attacks in their own countries. The young man, whose identity cannot be immediately verified, is seen wielding a knife in a screenshot from a video which is circulating on social media. He reportedly claimed he would use the weapon in a slaughter to avenge the killings of people in Muslim countries.