Islamic militants are quickly advancing on Baghdad after claiming a huge stretch of predominantly Sunni Arab territory in northern and north-central Iraq. Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari acknowledged the security forces which Washington invested billions in training and equipping before withdrawing its own troops in 2011 had simply melted away.

It comes on top of new arrangements to rotate thousands of US marines through bases in the Northern Territory, agreed to by the Gillard Labor government in 2011. Prime Minister Tony Abbott met US President Barack Obama on Thursday morning.

Earlier this month, the Senate took patent reform off the table for this legislative session. The Senate leadership did this despite the fact that a strong bill passed in the House with overwhelming support. And thousands of constituents have called for meaningful reform to finally put an end to patent trolling. Instead of listening to innovators and entrepreneurs across the country, the Senate followed marching orders from big biotech, pharmaceutical, and trial lawyer lobbyists.

Iranian ambassador and head of the Malaysian Joint Chief of Staff in a meeting in Kuala Lumpur surveyed avenues for the two countries‘ military cooperation on June 13.

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Two armed Japanese F15 fighters dangerously interfere with a surveillance plane of China over the skies of East China sea. The People Liberation Army issued a stern warning against Japan´s military provocation.

Japan on Friday denied Beijing‘s claims that its Self-Defence Force planes came „dangerously close“ to Chinese aircraft in an incident over the East China Sea on Wednesday, demanding China takes down the footage allegedly showing the incident.

its forces were originally created as informal popular committees (lijan shaabiyya), centered in villages and neighborhoods and aimed at protecting their own local areas. This was particularly important during the early days of the uprising: by drawing in youths from a given area, the committees categorized particular neighborhoods as loyal to the regime, distinguishing these from neighborhoods where youth engaged in protests and were disloyal to the regime.

A security source told The Daily Star Friday that the patrols were centered around the outskirts of the Bekaa Valley border town of Arsal and nearby ravines.

The ceasefire on the Armenian-Azerbaijani contact line was broken 27 times in numerous directions on June 12, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said on June 13.

A few weeks ago, we covered a NY Times article about how the Supreme Court was quietly changing rulings well after they had been released — and often doing so without notifying anyone other than a few big legal publishers. Because of that, many people were still relying on the old and outdated versions. A few people suggested setting up an automated system to just check the Supreme Court website for changing documents and monitor those changes — and that‘s exactly what someone has done.

Lawyer David Zvenyach quickly hacked together a system to check the Supreme Court‘s website every five minutes for any opinion that changes, and to then automatically tweet out an announcement @SCOTUS_servo. He then follows it up with a manual explanation of the change, and recently added a feature that will highlight the actual change in the document.

Immerhin, die Namen der Angeklagten dürfen nun von der Presse genannt werden.