Three Russian troops were killed in a gunfight with terrorists in Syria in late February, the Defense Ministry has said. A gang of 30 militants responsible for the attack has since been identified and eliminated.

The Russian servicemen were returning to base in a car after a humanitarian aid delivery in the Deir ez-Zor Province when they were ambushed by a group of gunmen. "After the battle that broke out, the troops were missing in action," the ministry said in a statement.

The search for the troops, which the Syrian military also took part in, started right after their disappearance. The fighters who organized the attack were eventually identified and the death of Russian soldiers was confirmed.

The UW's teacher preparation program is a militant immersion in social justice activism and identity politics that almost entirely neglects the study of pedagogy, intellectual inquiry, and the development of academic expertise.

The University of Washington's Secondary Teacher Education Program (STEP) is a twelve-month immersion in doctrinaire social justice activism and identity politics that awards a masters degree in teaching. Rather than an academic program centered around pedagogy and public policy, STEP is a bizarre political experiment, rife with juvenile requirements and light on academic rigor, in which the faculty quite consciously whips up a fraught emotional climate in order to underline its ideological message. As a consequence, the key components of teaching - pedagogy and the dissemination of academic knowledge - are fundamentally neglected. With no practical training or preparation, students begin their student-teaching practicums woefully unprepared in a sink or swim mentality focused mostly on emotional hypersensitivity. Even for the ardent social justice activist, the program's lack of practicality offers a value to its graduates little more than as a barrier to entering the teaching profession.

Organized according to the standard tenets of social justice theory, those in the graduate school class who do not identify as a straight white male are encouraged from the outset to present themselves as victims of oppression in the social hierarchy of the United States. And so a culture emerges rapidly in the 60-student cohort in which words and semantics fall under constant scrutiny, and ideas contrary to the ascendant ideology are rooted out in order to advance the high cause of social justice. Moreover, instead of imparting knowledge in pedagogy or working with graduate students to develop academic content and lesson-planning for high school courses, the faculty and leadership declare that their essential mission is to break the colonialism, misogyny and homophobia to which the important civic institutions and those at the top of the social hierarchy as they define it (white, male, straight) in American society are currently engaged. The logic being employed here is that an entire profession of teachers fluent in social justice will have the effect of reordering society itself by educating young people at all levels of K-12 and post-secondary education under this framework. This lofty ethos explains why the program focuses so heavily on training students in the discourse of far-left identity politics, and with such serious outcomes at stake why it demands the total intellectual acquiescence of those within it, with a consequently high drop-out rate and a chilling of frank discussion. When you consider that STEP's purpose is to prepare graduates to become novice high school teachers, such an acrimonious and psychologically manipulative environment in a public university is difficult to justify. I have decided to write this account with specific examples of the daily experience, in order to illustrate how social justice activism in the academy has a high opportunity cost, and how the program has become almost entirely untethered from its mission.

Ask a teen today how she communicates with her friends, and she'll probably hold up her smartphone. Not that she actually calls her friends; it's more likely that she texts them or messages them on social media.

Today's teens - the generation I call "iGen" that's also called Gen Z - are constantly connected with their friends via digital media, spending as much as nine hours a day on average with screens.

How might this influence the time they spend with their friends in person?

A Swedish TV commercial showing a man, presumed to be a migrant, reading his daughter a bedtime story in his native language instead of Swedish sparked social media uproar.

Many Swedish TV viewers were left baffled last week after a local broadcaster ran a commercial in a language that most of the viewers could not grasp - and it didn't even have subtitles.

The ad, launched by the local department store Ahlens, shows a father reading a bedtime story to his daughter - a piece from the Swedish children's book Pippi Longstocking - apparently in Dari, a dialect of Persian spoken largely in Afghanistan.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Sunday voiced the possibility of reverting the Hagia Sophia, which has been used as a museum since 1935 and is considered one of the world's wonders, to a mosque.

"This is not unlikely. We might even change its name to Ayasofya Mosque," Erdoğan said during a live interview with Turkish broadcaster TGRT.

"This is not a strange proposal," he said regarding the calls to convert the historical building to serve the purpose it did for half a millennium.

An Irish woman accused of being a member of ISIS says she wants to return home. Lisa Smith is a former Army soldier and Air Corps corporal who went to Syria five years ago and is currently detained in a refugee camp.

"I want to go home. I think the people here should realise all the people here are not terrorists," Smith told a CNN reporter at the Al-Houl refugee camp controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces in northeast Syria.

Smith was asked whether she would be ready to go to jail in Ireland, and said, "I know they'd strip me of my passport and stuff and I wouldn't travel and I'd be watched kinda. But prison, I don't know. I'm already in prison."

The French Council of Muslim Faith (CFCM) announced they will file a complaint against Facebook and YouTube for hosting the video of the New Zealand shooting, claiming the platforms helped spread the shooter's hateful message.

The CFCM announced their decision to file the complaint on Monday, saying the social media sites had disseminated "violent messages inciting terrorism," which "seriously undermine human dignity" and were "likely to be seen or perceived by a minor," according to a copy of the complaint sent to AFP.

The CFCM is a non-profit organization that serves as an unofficial mediator between the French government and the country's Muslim population.

All around us the signs may be seen. And are accelerating. Watch Paul Joseph Watson as he explains why almost every factor that precedes the collapse of great civilizations has been met by the West.

Monitor Tell Mama says perpetrators have been using 'language, symbols or actions' inspired by Christchurch atrocity

Islamophobic incidents have rocketed by almost 600 per cent in Britain following the New Zealand terror attack, a monitor has reported.

Tell Mama said that in the week after 50 Muslim worshippers were gunned down, offenders used "language, symbols or actions" linked to the atrocity to target Muslims in the UK.

"Cases included people making impressions of pointing a pistol to Muslim women and comments about British Muslims, and an association with actions taken by the terrorist in New Zealand," the monitor said.

It came after an alleged terror incident linked to the Christchurch massacre, attacks on mosques in Birmingham and several arrests over online statements.

A senior Russian cleric has criticized gender reassignment surgeries and called for the criminal prosecution of parents who teach their children that they can choose their gender.

"Such surgeries are, in my opinion and in the opinion of the church, a crime against God," Metropolitan Hilarion, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church's external relations department, said in an interview.

He explained that the church doesn't recognize a person's "new" gender after sex affirmation surgery.

Hilarion reiterated that the Russian Orthodox Church "will never recognize such lifestyle as normal... when children from the cradle are being taught that there is a biological gender and a gender they can choose."