Up to 25,000 Damascus residents and refugees from war-torn areas of Syria will be offered pre-dawn and sunset meals each day during Ramadan, the holy month for Muslims, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has promised.

"My dear mother, the president of the Regional Public Fund (ROF), has decided to organize daily pre-dawn and sunset meals for residents of Damascus and refugees from war-torn parts of Syria," Chechen leader Kadyrov wrote on Instagram on Monday.

Practicing Muslims all over the world are preparing for the month of Ramadan, said to be the longest in decades as it coincides with the summer solstice, meaning a longer period of fasting. Many Muslims will not drink water or eat during daytime, with fasting ending at sunset with a meal known as Iftar.

A gunman apparently acting alone killed five Jordanian intelligence agents on Monday (June 6) in a daylight "terrorist attack" on their office in a Palestinian refugee camp north of the capital.

Jordan is a leading member of the US-led coalition fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) group, and has been the target of militant attacks in the past.

"The intelligence agency office in the Baqaa camp was the target of a cowardly attack shortly before 7:00 am (0400 GMT) today that left five agents dead," government spokesman Mohammed Momani said.

Momani said security forces were investigating who was responsible for the "terrorist attack" on the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

A security source told AFP that preliminary findings suggested the attack was carried out by a lone gunman who opened fire with an automatic weapon before escaping.

The shooting happened as the team members were starting their shift.

Following two scandals involving the US military stationed on the Japanese island of Okinawa, a US Navy sailor was caught in a drunk-driving head-on collision with two other cars. The crash occurred off-base, despite tough new rules for personnel.

Aimee Mejia, 21, stationed at the Kadena Air Base, was driving in the opposite lane to the two vehicles, her blood alcohol level six times the legal limit, at about 11:40 pm local time on June 4, the Asahi Shimbun learned from the police. Two individuals in the other vehicles sustained injuries.

The incident comes at a troubled time for the US base in Okinawa. Already highly unpopular with locals, the US military found itself in the middle of two scandals involving a murder and a rape - both of the victims young Japanese women.

Faced with popular outrage, the US military put its servicemen on a short leash, with curfews, movement restrictions and a ban on drinking alcohol off base.

The six-week Verizon strike ended after tentative deals were reached between the company and the unions representing its workers. Those workers will still need to vote on the deals before things are set in stone, but it seems likely they will vote in favor. What does it mean?

From the New York Times:

Both sides claimed victory in the change.

"We only care that our members somewhere in the footprint are doing the work," said Robert Master, assistant to the District 1 vice president of the Communications Workers of America. "The push to outsource call center work was rebuffed."

Lending partial vindication to this claim was a commitment by the company to create over 1,000 unionized call center jobs over the next four years to accommodate new demand from customers. The company also agreed to reduce the number of call center closings.

The company also won the right to offer buyout incentives to employees once a year without first getting the union's blessing, making it easier to eliminate jobs that the new rule could eventually render obsolete.

Elsewhere, the outcome appeared more one-sided. The unions managed to beat back proposed pension cuts, including a cap on the accrual of pension benefits after 30 years of service.

The company also agreed to withdraw a proposal that would have allowed it to relocate workers for up to two months anywhere in its geographic coverage area, although it had already expressed an openness to withdrawing the proposal before the strike.

Proposals to change seniority rules and to make the company's sickness and disability policy more strict were also withdrawn, and the company agreed to change a performance review program in New York City that many workers considered abusive.

Significantly, the new contracts also cover some 65 unionized workers at Verizon Wireless stores, signaling the first time that retail wireless workers at the company have been included in a union contract, a potentially important precedent.

Makhlouf was killed near the city of Shahba in a shooting and explosion of his car on Damascus-Sweida road on Wednesday, the Arabic-language media outlets announced.

Alaa Makhlouf was from the village of Marj Moirban in al-Qardaheh region in Lattakia. He was an activist of Asma al-Assad humanitarian group.

Since the start of the Syrian crisis in March 2011, the western countries, including the US, have delivered state-of-the-art weapons to the terrorists in Syria.

"Why don't you share good things about Israel?"

A few days ago, a very good Palestinian friend of mine shared a post on Facebook, about Israeli Skinheads. It referred to activists of the fascist Kahane Hai movement. Rabbi Meir Kahane, who was convicted in 1971 for a terrorist bomb-plot of the Jewish Defense League, became a member of Knesset in 1984, until his party was banned from Knesset in 1988. He inspired some of the most radical religious-nationalism in Israeli history.

A Jewish-Israeli kibbutznik contact responded with the comment: "Why don't you share good things about Israel, we are many more than these few idiots?"

It is worth noting here, that my friend is actually involved in quite serious and close debate with prominent Zionist Israelis, including leading editors.

The response intrigued me because I was just planning to write this article, circling exactly around this question, which I had been asked in various forms over the past few years. This comes in various forms, but the nerve is similar - it is the suggestion that this is not representative of Israel as a whole.

Whilst I cannot reveal the sources of the following quotes, I would like to provide a few examples to demonstrate what I mean:

Matthew Desmond's book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, like Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, is a heartbreaking snapshot of the rapacious exploitation and misery we inflict on the most vulnerable, especially children. It is a picture of a world where industries have been created to fleece the poor, and destroy neighborhoods and ultimately lives. It portrays a judicial system that has broken down, a dysfunctional social service system and the license in neoliberal America to carry out unchecked greed, no matter what the cost.

"Her face had that look," Desmond wrote. "The movers and the deputies knew it well. It was the look of someone realizing that her family would be homeless in a matter of hours. It was something like denial giving way to the surrealism of the scene: the speed and the violence of it all; sheriffs leaning against your wall, hands resting on holsters; all these strangers, these sweating men, piling your things outside, drinking water from your sink poured into your cups, using your bathroom. It was the look of being undone by a wave of questions. What do I need for tonight, for this week? Who should I call? Where is the medication? Where will we go? It was the face of a mother who climbs out of the cellar to find the tornado has leveled the house."

Being poor in America is one long emergency. You teeter on the edge of bankruptcy, homelessness and hunger. You endure cataclysmic levels of stress, harassment and anxiety and long bouts of depression. Rent strips you of half your income—one in four families spend 70 percent of their income on rent—until you and your children are evicted, often into homeless shelters or abandoned buildings, when you fall behind on payments. A financial crisis—a medical emergency, a reduction in hours at work or the loss of a job, funeral expenses or car repairs—can lead inexorably to an eviction. Creditors, payday lenders and collection agencies hound you. You are often forced to declare bankruptcy. You cope with endemic violence, gangs, drugs and a judicial system that permits brutal police abuse and ships you to jail, or slaps you with huge fines, for minor offenses. You live for weeks or months with no heat, water or electricity because you cannot pay the utility bills, especially since fuel and utility rates have risen by more than 50 percent since 2000. Single mothers and their children usually endure this hell alone, because the men in these communities are locked up. Millions of families are tossed into the street every year.

The UK government should do more to promote a "pro-whistleblower" culture across all departments, the Public Accounts Committee said, as new data reveals the vast majority of whistleblowers choose to come forward anonymously. A report by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) warned that "shoddy treatment" experienced by staff who have come forward with allegations of wrongdoing may deter other employees from speaking out.

"Whistleblowers are on the frontline of defense against wrongdoing and bad practice," PAC chair Meg Hillier said. "They have a vital role to play in the day-to-day accountability of public spending and public service. This should be recognized by and enshrined in the culture of every government department. Where it isn't, senior officials in those departments should be held properly to account."

In response to the PAC report, the Cabinet Office has started collecting data on whistleblowing cases across departments. The first batch of data showed more than half of the 68 reported cases between April and September of 2015 were made anonymously. "At this stage, a common theme emerging is that the majority of complaints were made anonymously," the Cabinet Office said. Fourteen of the government's 32 departments, including the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), reported cases of whistleblowing over the period.

The Cabinet Office said the findings indicate most officials do not "have the confidence in their departments to deal with their case appropriately." In light of the findings, the Cabinet Office urged departments to "provide assurance to employees to enable them to raise their concerns openly."

'Business leaders who refuse to look into the realities of their own supply chains are misguided and irresponsible.'

Close to 46 million men, women, and children are enslaved across the world, according to a harrowing new report from the Australia-based Walk Free Foundation.

Many of them, the analysis notes, are in fact ensnared providing "the low-cost labor that produces consumer goods for markets in Western Europe, Japan, North America, and Australia."

The organization's 2016 Global Slavery Index—based on 42,000 interviews conducted in 53 languages, covering 44 percent of global population—found there to be 28 percent more "modern slaves" than previously estimated.

A new shocking twist in the Euro 2016 saga has emerged just days after stark warnings ISIS would make the event a target. It turns out 82 of the people hired for security posts on the football cup are on French terror watch lists.

The Directorate General of Internal Security (ISB) has screened a total of 3,500 individuals already hired for the job of ensuring the safety of visitors, according to Le Point. Those among the 82 found on the watch list could by definition either belong to a terrorist group, such as Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), or have a history of questionable behavior or extreme beliefs on either the left or right.

According to French authorities, some 90,000 personnel in total will be on duty during Euro 2016, including the stadiums, fan zones and on the streets. Of those, 77,000 are police and gendarmerie, while the rest comprise security and military personnel, as well as 1,000 or so volunteers.

"Such a unique event in exceptional circumstances requires extra security measures," Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told journalists.