The frightful and bloody hours of Friday night and Saturday morning in Munich and Kabul - despite the 3,000 miles that separate the two cities - provided a highly instructive lesson in the semantics of horror and hypocrisy. I despair of that generic old hate-word, "terror". It long ago became the punctuation mark and signature tune of every facile politician, policeman, journalist and think tank crank in the world.

Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror. Or terrorist, terrorist, terrorist, terrorist, terrorist.

But from time to time, we trip up on this killer cliché, just as we did at the weekend. Here's how it went. When first we heard that three armed men had gone on a "shooting spree" in Munich, the German cops and the lads and lassies of the BBC, CNN and Fox News fingered the "terror" lever. The Munich constabulary, we were informed, feared this was a "terrorist act". The local police, the BBC told us, were engaged in an "anti-terror manhunt".

And we knew what that meant: the three men were believed to be Muslims and therefore "terrorists", and thus suspected of being members of (or at least inspired by) Isis.

Then it turned out that the three men were in fact only one man - a man who was obsessed with mass killing. He was born in Germany (albeit partly Iranian in origin). And all of a sudden, in every British media and on CNN, the "anti-terror manhunt" became a hunt for a lone "shooter".

Bill Clinton reportedly made nearly $50 million from more than 220 paid events that the State Department approved while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, according to an Associated Press report.

Mainstream media outlets have been scrutinizing the Clintons, especially Bill Clinton's speaking fees that doubled or tripled after his wife became Secretary of State, after the many revelations in Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer's Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. NBC News reporter Andrea Mitchell said Schweizer's blockbuster book was a "playbook" for any news organization investigating the Clintons and was "overshadowing" Hillary Clinton's campaign rollout.

Hillary Clinton and her team aren't thrilled that the head of the Democratic National Committee was forced out on the eve of the nominee's coronation — but they aren't exactly distraught to see Debbie Wasserman Schultz booted from the tent.

Several senior Democratic officials with ties to Hillary and Bill Clinton told POLITICO that campaign higher-ups have been trying to replace the oft-off-message Florida congresswoman from the start of Clinton's campaign late last year.

John Podesta, Clinton's campaign chairman — and a former top adviser to Barack Obama — broached the idea of replacing Wasserman Schultz as early as last fall, only to be rebuffed by the president's team, according to two people with direct knowledge of the conversation.

"It came down to the fact that the president didn't want the hassle of getting rid of Debbie," said a former top Obama adviser. "It's been a huge problem for the Clintons, but the president just didn't want the headache of Debbie bad-mouthing him. ... It was a huge pain in the ass."

When German journalists asked the very simplistic question on whether Putin considered himself a friend or a foe to the West- he answered neither.

There is the simple concept of national interests, which may or may not be at odds with other countries. Diplomacy is the art of being able to reconcile your national interests, alongside those of other States, compromising on certain aspects along the way.

However, the Atlanticist world view (EU/US/NATO) has shown not to allow for mutual respect, nor for cooperation. Through a number of covert means, they ask for nothing less than for Russia to no longer ascertain its national interests, which makes President Putin #1 Boogeyman in the world today.

United States Central Command denies Islamic State's claim that its fighters shot down a US warplane and killed the crew in Iraq's western Anbar province.

Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) claimed that the jet was flying near Ain Al-Asad air base, which is run jointly by Iraq and the US about 100 miles north of Baghdad.

However, US Central Command tweeted that there is no truth to the terrorist organization's claims, adding that all aircraft are accounted for.

Tel Aviv responded with airstrike to shelling of the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights from the Syrian territory, the Israeli army's spokesman Lt. Col. Peter Lerner said on Monday.

"Indiscriminate fire targeted wasteland close to the border fence in the central part of the Golan Heights. There was no injuries. In response the Israeli Air Forces bombed the source of fire in Syria," Lerner said in a statement.

Several dozens of militant groups, including the outlawed in Russia and other countries Islamic State and al-Nusra Front are estimated to be involved in clashes with the Syrian government's troops along the 50-miles long Israeli-Syrian border.

The New York Times(7/15/16), writing about the man who reportedly killed 84 people in a truck attack in Nice, France, provided no evidence that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel was motivated by either politics or religion to commit violence—yet still labeled the murders as "terrorism," as though the definition of that crime were based on ethnicity rather than motivation.

Times correspondent Andrew Higgins wrote that Lahouaiej Bouhlel was known to his neighbors only as a moody and aggressive oddball. He never went to the local mosque, often grunted in response to greetings of "bonjour" and sometimes beat his wife — until she threw him out.... Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel appeared not to have left behind any public declaration of his motive or indicated any allegiance to the Islamic State or another extremist group....

"The churches are our barracks, the bells are our helmets, the Kremlin spires are our bayonets, and Putin trolls are our soldiers..."

... Well, it doesn't have quite the ring of the better known poem that, having once landed Erdogan in jail, has now ensured his survival.

So people are now asking: Without Erdogan's closer ties to a religion far more passionary than Orthodox Christianity, without his allegedly superior democratic credentials, would anyone actually bother out to defend the Dark Lord of the Kremlin cometh the Great Day of his Reckoning that every second Russia think-tank analyst in London and Washington D.C. has been prophesying for more than a decade?

Of course not. I even feel a bit stupid for putting fingers to keyboard to write this post. But nonsense has to be cleared up.

I
The first problem with thinking about a prospective Russian coup is finding even a semi-plausible candidate to play the plotters' part.

The actors that immediately come to mind are the generals - but they are also the unlikeliest group to move against Putin. The last time the Russian armed forces had regularly played kingmaker was during the 17th century, when the streltsy acted as a kind of Praetorian guard to the Tsars. The last successful coup that relied on military support took place more than two century ago, when Catherine the Great deposed the wildly unpopular Peter III, an 18th century Wehraboo who had withdrawn Russia from a hard-fought but successful war against Prussia on account of his boyhood fascination with Frederick the Great and the Prussian Army. The Russian military would never again be politically influential. The Kornilov putsch in 1917 failed. In both 1991 and 1993, the Armed Forces remained loyal to their respective heads of state, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, even though neither man enjoyed their respect. Despite the frailty of post-Soviet polities, the entire region would only see three military coups after 1991: One successful coup in Georgia, and two coups in Azerbaijan, of which one was successful. Azerbaijan is, of course, the closest "relative" to Turkey - with its seven coups this past century alone - in the former USSR, so it is unlikely that its experience would be much extensible to Russia.

Afghanistan is interested in enhancing its cooperation with Russia against international terrorism, Afghan National Security Adviser Hanif Atmar told Sputnik on Monday.

"The reason I am here is to ask Russia for help [fight Islamic State]. Russian help was extremely helpful and effective [in fighting terrorism]," Atmar said.

He added that he planned to focus on political cooperation, security and economic issues with Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev.

Moreover, Hanif Atmar told Sputnik that Kabul hoped for renewed cooperation between Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on Afghanistan.

The head of Turkish Foreign Ministry Mevlut Cavusoglu thanked Russia for supporting Turkey during the military coup in the republic. In particular, the minister expressed gratitude to Russian president Vladimir Putin. Last week, rumors spread that Russia had warned Turkey about the planned rebellion a few hours before it began. However, the Kremlin did not confirm this information.

Cavusoglu announced on TV channel Haberturk that Russia provided "Turkey with unconditional support during the military coup". "We thank President Vladimir Putin and all Russian officials for their support," said Minister of foreign affairs of Turkey, quoted by "Interfax".

Last week information appeared in the press that supposedly Moscow warned Ankara about the impending coup a few hours before its start. This, in particular, was reported by Iranian news agency FARS, with reference to several Arab media outlets, who learned about it from sources in diplomatic circles. It was noted that the Russian military had intercepted coded radio messages and critical information exchanged between the organizers of the rebellion. Then Moscow passed the evidence of the preparation of the coup to the National intelligence organization of Turkey (MIT).