11:40 a.m.: Police have blocked the road in front of the old Durham County Courthouse at 201 E. Main St. ahead of a rumored white supremacist protest.

11:35 a.m.: Several downtown Durham businesses, including Scratch Bakery and SunTrust bank, have closed early or not opened as rumors swirl of a planned white supremacist rally.

11:25 a.m.: In a recorded message to employees, Durham County closed office buildings and sent workers home early on Friday. All employees were instructed to leave for the day, take their belongings and avoid downtown.

Amid rumors that white supremacist groups plan to demonstrate in Durham, the Durham County Sheriff's Office on Friday issued a statement reminding citizens that protests require a legal permit and any demonstrators must abide by the law.

The statement reads, in full:

The Sheriff's Office is thoroughly researching the potential of several groups with opposing viewpoints holding demonstrations in Durham. This is partly why the Sheriff's Office continues to remind demonstrators to first obtain a permit and most importantly, abide by the law. I expect demonstrators to conduct themselves in such a manner that is legal and respectful of the Durham County community. Again, I call upon city and county leaders to establish rules for demonstrators.

After racially-charged protests and anti-protests turned violent last weekend in Charlottesville, Va., a group of people associated with the Workers World Party and others pulled down a Confederate statue outside the Durham County courthouse. Their actions were reflected in a rallies, protests and calls for the removal of Confederate symbols nationwide.

A new poll released Thursday shows a majority of Americans want to keep Confederate statues in place to "honor" fallen leaders of the South.

According to an NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist poll, which was conducted among 1,125 U.S. citizens by phone Aug. 14-15, the overwhelming majority - 62 percent - want the monuments to remain while a much smaller share of Americans - 27 percent - want them removed.

The polling comes as the national debate over whether such monuments to Confederate leaders should be left alone, be removed or be relocated. Last weekend's violent protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, was sparked by the city's effort to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

During the demonstration, a white supremacist allegedly drove his car into a crowd, killing 32-year-old counterprotester Heather Heyer. Two Virginia State Police officers also died in a helicopter crash as they responded to the violence.

A bust of President Abraham Lincoln in the predominantly-black Chicago neighborhood of West Englewood is the second monument of the 16th president to be vandalized in the US this week. And President Donald Trump is responsible, a Chicago alderman says.

The 91-year-old bust of Lincoln was found burnt and broken in Chicago, according to Alderman Raymond Lopez (15th Ward), who posted an image of the charred remains on his Facebook page Thursday.

"What an absolute disgraceful act of vandalism," Lopez wrote in a post that has been shared nearly 10,000 times as of Thursday afternoon.

The parents of a severely mentally disabled man are speaking out on how the FBI groomed him as a right wing terrorist, knowing he's paranoid schizophrenic.

It's become a near-weekly occurrence. Somewhere in some state, the FBI will announce that they've foiled yet another terrorist plot and saved lives. However, as the data shows, the majority of these cases involve psychologically diminished patsies who've been entirely groomed, armed, and entrapped by FBI agents. Simply put, the FBI manufactures terror threats and then takes credit for stopping them.

While many of these cases have garnered attention and been exposed in the alternative media, a recent case out of Oklahoma sets a new low for FBI and exposes how insidious these plots can be.

Through the hundreds of 'foiled terror plots' the FBI has 'busted' over the years, many of them have been focused on people of Middle Eastern descent or people associated with ISIS or Al Qaeda. This time, in the case of Jerry Drake Varnell, the 23-year-old diagnosed schizophrenic, accused of attempting to bomb a bank, the FBI fomented terror from a right wing dialogue.

One American soldier was killed and a combined 20 US and Afghan troops wounded during operations against Islamic State in Afghanistan's Nangarhar province, as a number of senior Pentagon officials visited the country.

US and Afghan troops were hit by an explosion inside a building in Nangarhar Wednesday night, US military officials told Reuters.

The deceased US soldier was Staff Sgt. Aaron R. Butler, 27, of Monticello, Utah, according to the Department of Defense. He purportedly died after being injured by an improvised explosive device in a combat operation. The military is investigating the incident.

Utah Governor Gary Herbert said Thursday that the one killed and eleven injured soldiers belonged to the Utah National Guard. They ran into an improvised explosive trap while clearing a building.

The number of people trying to reach Spain from North Africa has at least tripled this year. Spanish coastguards have reported rescuing almost 600 people in just one day, while the UN expects the country to overtake Greece as the second primary route for asylum seekers.

On Wednesday, Spanish patrols pulled 599 people from rafts and dinghies in the Gibraltar Strait and near Alborán, an island outpost midway between Spain and Morocco, the coastguard reported on Thursday. There were 35 minors, including a baby among those rescued, AFP reported.

The number is considered large for Spain, which is becoming an increasingly popular destination for people seeking to reach Europe in the hopes of asylum.

Members of an Iraqi special forces unit abused civilians during the major offensive to retake Islamist-held Mosul, the country's prime minister said after months of inquiry into disturbing torture allegations first reported by Germany's Spiegel magazine.

"The [investigation] committee has concluded ... that clear abuses and violations were committed by members of [special forces unit] the ERD," the office of Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said in a statement, according to Reuters. The prime minister's office added the perpetrators would face prosecution.

The Iraqi government launched an investigation in May after German magazine Spiegel published a news story that included disturbing images taken by a freelance photographer who accompanied the soldiers of the elite Emergency Response Division (ERD) unit on their way to Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) stronghold Mosul.

Every living nation needs symbols. They tell us who we are as one people, in what we believe, and on what basis we organize our common life.

This fact seems to be very clear to the current leadership in Russia, particularly to President Vladimir Putin, in restoring and reunifying a country rent by three generations of Red and White enmity to achieve a national synthesis. With regard to things spiritual, this meant first of all the world-historic reunification of the Russian Orthodox Church, between the Moscow Patriarchate and the New York-based Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. It also meant the rebuilding of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior dynamited by the communists in 1931, not coincidentally the recent target for desecration by degenerates hailed by western "democracy" advocates.

Civic and military symbols matter as well. After 1991 there were those who wanted landmarks of the communist era to be ruthlessly expunged the way the Bolsheviks had themselves sought (in Solzhenitsyn's description) to rub off the age-old face of Russia and to replace it with a new, ersatz Soviet image. Instead, wisdom prevailed. The national anthem adopted in 2001 retains the Soviet melody but with new lyrics (written by Sergey Mikhalkov, who with Gabriel El-Registan had penned the original lyrics in 1944!) - Lenin and Stalin are out, God is in. The old capital is again Saint Petersburg, but the surrounding district still bears the name Leningrad. The red star marks Russia's military aircraft and vehicles, while the blue Saint Andrew's cross flies over the fleet. The red stars likewise are still atop the Kremlin towers while the Smolensk icon of Christ once again graces the Savior Gate. The red banner that was hoisted triumphantly on the Reichstag in 1945 is carried on Victory Day. The remains of exiled White commanders like Anton Denikin and Vladimir Kappel were repatriated and reburied at home with honor.

The liberal/progressive/left are enjoying their drunkfest of denunciation. I can't say I have ever witnessed anything like it. These are the people who sat on their hands for 16 years while Washington destroyed in whole or part seven countries. Not being satisfied with this level of warmongering and crimes against humanity, Washington orchestrated a conflict situation with Russia. Americans elected a president who said he would defuse this dangerous conflict, and the liberal/progressive/left turned on him. In contrast, one person is killed after the hated Charlottesville protest event was over, and there is endless absurd outrage against the president of the US.

Three New York Times presstitutes yesterday blamed the crisis on Trump, declaring him "increasingly isolated in a racial crisis of his own making." Apparently, Trump is responsible for the crisis because he blamed both protest groups for the violence.

There is currently, on the streets, smashing storefronts and setting things on fire, a group called 'Antifa,' for 'anti-fascist.' Antifa are not a new phenomenon; they surfaced during the Occupy movement, and during the anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Antifa movements began in early-20th-century Europe, when fascism was a concrete and urgent concern, and they remain active on the Continent. Lately, Antifa have emerged as the militant fringe of #TheResistance against Donald Trump - who, they maintain, is a fascist, ushering into power a fascist regime. In Washington, D.C., Antifa spent the morning of Inauguration Day lighting trash cans on fire, throwing rocks and bottles at police officers, setting ablaze a limousine, and tossing chunks of pavement through the windows of several businesses. On February 1, Antifa set fires and stormed buildings at the University of California-Berkeley to prevent an appearance by Breitbart provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. (They succeeded.) In April, they threatened violence if Ann Coulter spoke on the campus; when the university and local law enforcement refused to find a secure location for her to speak, she withdrew, saying the situation was too dangerous.

These and similar episodes call to mind Woody Allen's character's observation in the 1979 film Manhattan: 'A satirical piece in the Times is one thing, but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point of it.'

All politics is, at some level, a vocabulary contest, and it happens that American politics is currently engaged in a fierce fight over, and about, words. The central word at issue is 'fascist,' but there are others: 'racist,' 'sexist,' and the like. A great many people are currently involved in a turf war, aiming to stake out conceptual territory for these charged words: What is fascism? What isn't it?