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Turkish Media Disclose New US Plan to Help Kurdish Militants to Build Bomb-proof Tunnels in Manbij

Kurdish forces
© FNA
The US forces plan to help the Kurds in the town of Manbij in Northeastern Aleppo to build bomb-proof tunnels to resist against the Turkish Army's possible attack on the town, a Turkish media outlet reported on Monday
The Turkish-language Yeni Safak daily reported that the US forces are planning to build modern tunnels in the Kurdish-held town of Manbij in Northeastern Aleppo after the Kurdish forces' US-built tunnels in the town of Afrin in Northwestern Aleppo were destroyed in the Turkish troops' attacks.

The daily said that the new tunnels are capable of resisting against cement-piercing bombs, adding that identifying the exact location of the tunnels is not simply possible too.

Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag said Sunday If the PYD/PKK terror group does not leave Syria's Manbij, Turkey would move there and towards East of Euphrates River.

Comment: See also: US reportedly sets up military base to protect Kurdish/SDF stronghold in Manbij


Megaphone

German court bans outdoor Muslim call to prayer

minaret
© Denis Balibouse / Reuters
The announcement of the traditional Muslim call to prayer via public outdoor loudspeakers has been banned by a German court.

The Gelsenkirchen Administrative Court of North Rhine-Westphalia issued the ban on Friday Muezzin calls, endorsing the local municipality's withdrawel of the mosque's original permit for gathering Muslims over loudspeakers, the local Westfalen Post reports.

The city of Oer-Erkenschwick first gave permission for the loudspeaker calls - also known as adzhan - by the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (Ditib) in 2013. Every Friday afternoon since the local imam issued two-hour public prayer calls until a local couple complained to the city over its permit to the mosque.

The complainants - who live just 900 metres from the mosque - said they felt affected by the muezzin's reputation for being against religious freedom. Their legal counsel stated: "This lawsuit is not only about the loudspeaker permit, but in particular about the inherent messages that are publicly distributed in the muezzin call."

Attention

Where is the coalition? Mosul lies in ruins, corpse-filled and receiving no aid months after liberation

Mosul
© Khalil Dawood / www.globallookpress.com
The ruins of al-Nuri Mosque are seen in Mosul, Iraq, on January 4, 2018.
More than half a year after being liberated, Mosul's battle wounds still fester. Entire districts lie in ruins with bodies scattered in the streets, and locals say they have yet to see the aid they were promised.

Iraq's once-bustling second largest city, Mosul now looks like a battle-scarred shadow of its former self. More than seven months after Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi swooped into Mosul to declare "total victory" over Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) terrorists there, large swathes of the city are still nothing but deserted crumbling ruins.

Aerial footage taken by the Ruptly video news agency reveals the devastation that still straddle the once densely populated areas, the consequence of incessant US-led coalition bombings and months of heavy fighting between Iraqi forces and the terrorists.

Comment: Washington is darned good at destroying stuff - but helping to rebuild, or create, is quite another story.


Sheriff

Cops rob business of $30K in booze and $10K in cash

NYPD
An innocent business owner is calling out the NYPD after he says they robbed him of $30,000 in liquor and beer as well as $10,000 cash. Adding credibility to the owner's claims is the fact that the entire robbery was captured on video.

Rolando Feliz has just filed a lawsuit against the 50th precinct of the NYPD after they stole his entire restaurant's liquor stock - from Corona and Negro Modelo to Patrón Silver and Hennessy - 124 cases in total.

According to the lawsuit, police had no reason to be at his business that night and the entire seizure was illegal.

Attention

Abdul El-Sayed, a young doctor running a populist campaign in Michigan may become America's first Muslim governor

Abdul El-Sayed

Abdul El-Sayed, a 33-year-old doctor and son of an Egyptian immigrant, is running an economically populist campaign that would also make him the first Muslim governor in American history.
Perhaps the signature state loss of Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign was Michigan. It had been the beating heart of the greatest industrial engine in the world and FDR's New Deal Democrats, but was economically obliterated by deindustrialization, enabled to no small degree by Clinton-style policies. Still, President Obama won the state by nearly 10 points in 2012, and liberals confidently predicted that Clinton would manage to hold the line. Instead she lost by 0.3 percent.

Today, a rather unlikely-sounding candidate to become Michigan governor is looking to take back the state for the Democrats.

Abdul El-Sayed, a 33-year-old doctor and son of an Egyptian immigrant, is running an economically populist campaign that would also make him the first Muslim governor in American history. He's competing to replace the term-limited Rick Snyder, the despised Republican who oversaw the infamous lead poisoning crisis in Flint (which was incidentally only recently declared over). It's a major test of whether diverse economic populism can assemble a multi-racial coalition to defeat Trump and his Republican lackeys.

Bad Guys

Politicized harassment: WADA and IOC continue targeting Russian Olympic athletes

Russian ice hockey Alyona Starovoytova
© Elena Rusko / Sputnik
Russian national women's ice hockey team player Alyona Starovoytova.
Russian female ice hockey players at the Winter Olympics came under scrutiny from World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) officers, who took 16 team members to doping control hours before a scheduled training session.

The team is competing at the Games under the name 'Olympic Athletes from Russia' following the ban imposed on the country by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) amid the ongoing doping scandal.

"The team had an exhausting journey [to South Korea], our luggage was delayed, and we were late for an evening training session," Aleksey Chistyakov, the head coach of the women's hockey team, told Match TV on Monday.

Comment: Spats and dramas between world leaders are one thing, but it's pretty reprehensible when international institutions use political agendas to target everyday people striving to make their mark in the world.


Arrow Down

Why is liberal California the poverty capital of the US?

Demonstrators and homeless advocates rally in Anaheim, Calif
© Los Angeles Times
Demonstrators and homeless advocates rally in solidarity with those experiencing homelessness and Disneyland workers struggling with poverty wages outside the theme park in Anaheim, Calif. on July 14.
Guess which state has the highest poverty rate in the country? Not Mississippi, New Mexico, or West Virginia, but California, where nearly one out of five residents is poor. That's according to the Census Bureau's Supplemental Poverty Measure, which factors in the cost of housing, food, utilities and clothing, and which includes non cash government assistance as a form of income.

Given robust job growth and the prosperity generated by several industries, it's worth asking why California has fallen behind, especially when the state's per-capita GDP increased approximately twice as much as the U.S. average over the five years ending in 2016 (12.5%, compared with 6.27%).

Better Earth

Why "open borders" is a bad idea and multicultural utopia a fantasy

globe
A decade before he fell to esophageal cancer Christopher Hitchens gave a series of riveting speeches on George Orwell. In them Hitchens argued that Orwell was an intellectual of such tremendous consequence because he got the "three great dramas" of the 20th century right. These were: the moral unsustainability of imperialism, the rising danger of Fascism, and the soulless cruelty of Communism. Most today agree that Orwell was a singularly perceptive observer of that barbaric century.

So in the opening decades of the new century, what are the great dramas bearing down on us? The danger of climate change is surely high on most lists. The promise and peril of artificial superintelligence? Or genetic engineering? Perhaps the danger lurks most in the threats we have slowly adjusted to and may be complacent about such as nuclear and biological weapons proliferation.

From my point-of-view, mass migration is the singular challenge of the 21st century. This is because it is a meta-issue that will affect our response to every other challenge. This is due to the fact that as mass migrations change demography, they may also affect changes in host nations' cultures and political economies. The specifics of these changes are exceedingly difficult to forecast, because they hinge on dozens of variables specific to the migrants, the host nation, and the scale and rate of the movements. While we do not yet know the vector, the titanic, high velocity migration the West is currently experiencing will cause profound changes.

Comment: See also: And be sure to check out Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind.


Chart Pie

Making Islam great again? Polling Europe's Muslim migrant population

City Hall, Graz, Austria.
© Tamirhassan/Wikimedia Commons
City Hall, Graz, Austria
  • In Germany, 47% of Muslims believe Sharia is more important than German law. In Sweden, 52% of Muslims believe that Sharia is more important than Swedish law.
  • The studies are supported by European intelligence reports. In Germany, intelligence agencies warned in the early fall of 2015 that, "We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other peoples, as well as a different understanding of society and law."
  • A recent Belgian study, in which 4,734 Belgians were polled, showed that two-thirds of Belgians feel that their nation is being "increasingly invaded".
"We cannot and will never be able to stop migration", wrote the EU's Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship, Dimitris Avramopoulos recently. "At the end of the day, we all need to be ready to accept migration, mobility and diversity as the new norm and tailor our policies accordingly".

Given that such people would have us believe that migration has become such a categorical and seemingly incontestable policy of the EU -- "Migration is deeply intertwined with our policies on economics, trade, education and employment", Avramapolous also wrote -- it is crucial to analyze what kind of "diversity" the EU is inviting to make its home on the European continent.

Professor Ednan Aslan, Professor of Islamic Religious Education at the University of Vienna, recently interviewed a sample of 288 of the approximately 4,000 predominantly Afghan asylum seekers in the Austrian city of Graz, on behalf of the city's integration department. Members of the department understandably wanted to know the views of the Muslim newcomers there. The results were published in a study, "Religiöse und Ethische Orientierungen von Muslimischen Flüchtlingen in Graz" ("Religious and ethical orientations of Muslim refugees in Graz").

Comment: It's past time that liberals realize that their utopic visions of multicultural rainbows and unicorns will never actually be a reality. That's not the way human groups are wired. "Tolerant" policies inevitably lead to intolerance between groups (it's a two-way street). Without a shared group identity, there is anomie and distrust, and intergroup conflict. And the only way to change that in a "multicultural" "society" is through hardline authoritarianism. Remember what happened the last time Europe experienced a group that was perceived as unable and unwilling to integrate? The so-called Jewish problem resulted in the deaths of millions of Jews. State-enforced "tolerance" can lead to a major and violent reaction like the Holocaust, or a takeover such as Palestine experienced with illegal Jewish immigration. That is, unless European politicians can get their act together and try to reverse their idiotic migration policies. Good luck with that...


Bad Guys

UK to use 'full force of government' to target wealthy Russian residents

wealthy Russians

Cars are seen parked on a street in Knightsbridge in London
Rich Russians suspected of corruption will be forced to explain their luxury lifestyles in the UK as part of a crackdown on organized crime, British security minister Ben Wallace said.

He told the Times that he wanted the "full force of the government" to bear down on criminals and corrupt politicians using Britain as a playground and haven. "We will come for you, for your assets, and we will make the environment you live in difficult," he warned.

According to the British government's estimates, around £90 billion ($127 billion) of illegal cash is laundered in the UK each year. Under so-called 'unexplained wealth orders,' which came into force last month as part of the Criminal Finance Act, wealthy people will be forced to explain the source of their assets if there is reason to suspect corruption. Officials could seize suspicious assets worth more than £50,000 ($70,565).

Comment: Profiling is okay as long as it targets those evil-natured Russians.