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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama returned to Washington just after midnight Monday for a two-day break from a summer vacation, during which airstrikes in Iraq and violent clashes in a St. Louis suburb intruded on his golf and beach plans. The exact reason for Obama's return remained unclear, though it appeared aimed in part at countering criticism that Obama was spending two weeks on the Massachusetts resort island of Martha's Vineyard in the midst of multiple crises. ... Obama had meetings on both matters scheduled for Monday. The president was scheduled to return to Martha's Vineyard Tuesday night. The...

More than a half-million acres of land across nine Western states is being proposed for designation as critical habitat for the yellow-billed cuckoo. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 546,335 acres of critical habitat is up for listing in 80 separate units in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Utah and Wyoming. The bird is a neotropical migrant that winters in South America and nests along rivers and streams in western North America. ... The Service is seeking information concerning the western yellow-billed cuckoo’s biology and habitat, threats to the species and current efforts to protect...

DONETSK Ukraine/BERLIN (Reuters) - A gun battle broke out in the center of the rebel-held Ukrainian city of Donetsk and residents ran for cover from artillery fire on Tuesday, taking a government military offensive into the heart of the retreating pro-Moscow separatist rebellion. Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart will meet next week for the first time in months to try to end their confrontation over the separatist rebellion in eastern Ukraine, their offices said. In a prelude to the talks between Putin and Ukraine's Petro Poroshenko, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is to visit the Ukrainian capital Kiev...

The White House has weighed sending President Obama to Ferguson, Mo., and has not ruled out a visit in upcoming weeks, according to sources familiar with the internal decisionmaking. For now, the White House believes a trip by Obama to Ferguson would do more harm than good, by diverting resources on the ground at a pivotal time for law enforcement. One senior administration official familiar with the talks said Obama didn’t rule a trip in or out at this point, but added that there are no immediate plans for the president to go to the St. Louis suburb. A presidential...

The international chemical weapons watchdog says that all the precursor chemicals for sarin gas removed from Syria have been destroyed. The 580 tonnes of chemicals were neutralised on board a specially built American ship in the Mediterranean Sea. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said the ship's crew have now begun to neutralise 22 tonnes of sulphur mustard. The process is part of a Russian-US deal to eliminate Syria's arsenal. The deal was drawn up after hundreds of people died in a sarin attack in the Ghouta area outside Damascus on 21 August last year... ...OPCW chief...

Chinese hackers stole 4.5 million patients’ names, Social Security numbers and other personal data from the computers of one of the country’s largest hospital chains, the company said Monday — the biggest reported cyberattack ever on a U.S. health care company. Community Health Services and its forensic expert, Mandiant, believe the attacker was an “advanced persistent threat” group from China that used highly sophisticated malware and technology, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The data stolen in April and June also included patients’ addresses, birth dates and phone numbers. The thieves did not swipe credit card...

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A senior official in Calais has confirmed that it will start demolishing the filthy makeshift camp that is home to as many as 2000 illegal immigrants bound for Britain. Numbers at the 'Jungle 2' camp have swollen in recent months, leading to staff at the UK Border Force admitting they are unable to cope.Deputy Mayor Philippe Mignonet, who is in-charge of immigration told the Daily Express: “The camp will be dismantled. All depends on the Home Office minister to give the instructions to do so.”He pointed out that working as virtual slaves on the UK illegal labour market can appear...

Progressive activists are launching a day-long, nationwide campaign Tuesday to sabotage the release of Paul Ryan’s new book by going to bookstores and wrapping the copies in demeaning fake covers.The Agenda Project, a New York-based progressive activist group founded by former Democratic National Committee official Erica Payne, urged its supporters to print out a digitally altered cover of Ryan pushing an old woman off a cliff – a visual version of the talking point Democrats used against Ryan’s entitlement plan during his 2012 run for vice president – and cover copies of his book The Way Forward at stores while...

Multiple murders in cities such as Chicago don't get the same attention as a single murder in suburban St. Louis "because it's politically incorrect to blame the wrong people," Dr. Ben Carson told Fox News's Sean Hannity Monday night. "If you have somebody, you know, like a police officer, that's an easy one to blame. But it's very difficult to blame a city council or a mayor that you like," he said. "We've got to stop picking and choosing who the villains are and who the good guys are." Carson called for objectivity: "And in particular, you know, in the...

Fed Ex was just indicted on charges that it helps facilitate the transport of illegal drugs, especially from Canadian pharmacies. (Where drugs are much less expensive.) That the CEO of FedEx, Fred Smith, is an ardent supporter of free enterprise, who has supported free market political groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and runs a non-union shop is a coincidence of course. That FedEx’s main competitor, is pro-union UPS (UPS got away with a $40 million fine, FedEx is looking at potentially over $1 billion) is also a coincidence. That pharma, which has close ties to this White House...

**SNIP** But the impression the president left with Mr. Reid was clear: Capitol Hill is not my problem. To Democrats in Congress who have worked with Mr. Obama, the indifference conveyed to Mr. Reid, one of the president’s most indispensable supporters, was frustratingly familiar. In one sense, Mr. Obama’s response was a reminder of what made him such an appealing figure in the first place: his almost innate aversion to the partisan squabbles that have left Americans so jaded and disgruntled with their political system. But nearly six years into his term, with his popularity at the lowest of his...

ISIS militants and their supporters are using social media to encourage protesters in Ferguson to embrace radical Islam and fight against the U.S. government. Jihadists in Syria and Iraq and their sympathisers in the West have taken to Twitter to send messages of support to hundreds of demonstrators taking part in a ninth night of angry protests in the U.S. city following the shooting by police of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown. The militants' tweets denounce local officers for the way they have attempted to quell the violence, make reference to historic acts of police brutality, and even use the...

Supporters of the “terrorist” Muslim Brotherhood group, report Egyptian media, set fire to a butcher shop Saturday evening in Aim Shams, a suburb in Cairo.The reason for this latest Brotherhood arson attack is that the owner of the shop objected to one of the Brotherhood’s protests. Three of the Brotherhood’s supporters were detained by intervening locals.Violence from Brotherhood supporters during their marches and protests is common in Egypt. One of the worst incidences is when a Coptic Christian woman was attacked and murdered by a protesting Brotherhood mob—simply because they saw her cross, which exposed her as a Christian.Retribution against...

......................"A visibly angry [Missouri State Police Capt. Ron ] Johnson said that officers had come under heavy gunfire from protesters and at least two people had been shot. Johnson said he did not know the condition of the shooting victims. Four officers had been injured when they were struck by rocks or bottles, though Johnson claimed that police had not fired a single shot. Citing what he called a "dangerous dynamic in the night," Johnson requested that protests take place during the daylight hours, so that officers could effectively isolate any troublemakers. However, Johnson said that his forces could not...

Contra smug liberals, riots in Missouri are a far cry from sectarian violence in the Middle East. Over at Vox, Max Fisher has indulged in what is becoming an increasingly common left-of-center pastime: smugly insinuating that the United States’s favorable impression of itself as a stable and developed nation is in some serious way misplaced. “How,” Fisher asks, “would American media cover the news from Ferguson, Missouri, if it were happening in just about any other country?” Substituting “province” for “state,” “sect” for “party,” and “village” for “city,” Fisher answers his own inquiry by fashioning a “satirical” description of “the...

Reverend Al Sharpton, host of PoliticsNation on MSNBC and former presidential candidate, will be the keynote speaker at the annual fundraiser for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity with an extremist history. CAIR’s 20th Annual Banquet will be held on September 27 in Arlington, Virginia and also features Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN). According to the U.S. Justice Department, CAIR is an entity of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood. More specifically, CAIR is part of the Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee, a secret body that was established to push the agenda of Hamas and...

Oh, dear. They even have a name for them: Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the plant’s concentrated sun rays — “streamers,” for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair.Federal wildlife investigators who visited the BrightSource Energy plant last year and watched as birds burned and fell, reporting an average of one “streamer” every two minutes, are urging California officials to halt the operator’s application to build a still-bigger version.The investigators want the halt until the full extent of the deaths can be assessed....

Circumcision: “Circumcision is obligatory (for every male and female) (by cutting off the piece of skin on the glans of the penis of the male, but circumcision of the female is by cutting out the bazr ‘clitoris’ [this is called khufaadh 'female circumcision']).” — ‘Umdat al-Salik e4.3, translated by Mark Durie, The Third Choice, p. 64Sex slavery: “Certainly will the believers have succeeded: They who are during their prayer humbly submissive, and they who turn away from ill speech, and they who are observant of zakah, and they who guard their private parts except from their wives or those their...

Human rights group Amnesty International has taken “unprecedented” action to deal with unrest in Ferguson by sending a delegation that has never before been deployed inside the United States.The organization has had members on the ground in Ferguson since Thursday, in the wake of the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer. According to a news release, the 12-person delegation is there to “observe police and protester activity, gather testimony, seek meetings with officials and offer support to the community.”Organizers will also train local activists on methods of non-violent protest.“Law enforcement, from the FBI to state...