Meanwhile, in Montana...

"A Personal War" -- America’s Marxist Allies Against ISIS

SINJAR MOUNTAIN, Iraq—Nine years ago, Zind Ruken packed a bag and left her majority-ethnic-Kurdish city in Iran, escaping a brutal police crackdown and pressure to marry a man she’d never met. Now the 24-year-old is a battle-hardened guerrilla, using machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades to fight Islamic State extremists in Syria and Iraq.

She has deployed to reverse their advances on self-governing Kurdish communities. Last summer, she says, she helped rescue Kurdish-speaking Yazidis besieged on Sinjar Mountain. Her unit has fought Islamist insurgents and conventional armies in Syria, Turkey, Iran and Iraq—countries where an estimated 30 million Kurds live.

Ms. Ruken’s journey provides a glimpse behind the remarkable rise of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, the cultlike Marxist-inspired group she fights for and whose triumphs against Islamic State have helped it evolve from ragtag militia to regional power player.

The PKK and its Syrian affiliate have emerged as Washington’s most effective battlefield partners against Islamic State, also known as ISIS, even though the U.S. and its allies have for decades listed the PKK as a terrorist group. The movement in the past has been accused of kidnappings, murder and narcotics trafficking, but fighters like Ms. Ruken have presented the world an appealing face of the guerrillas—an image of women battling as equals with male comrades against an appallingly misogynist enemy.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-marxist-allies-against-isis-1437747949?mod=trending_now_5

Official: Two former Guantanamo detainees arrested in Belgium

(CNN)Two former detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba were arrested by Belgian police in a counterterrorism operation targeting a recruiting network for al Qaeda in Syria.

They were arrested Wednesday night along with three others as they were about to break into a house to raise funds in the town of Hoboken, near Antwerp, a senior Belgian counterterrorism official told CNN.

"We have dismantled a serious recruiting network for Syria," the official told CNN.

One of the former Guantanamo Bay detainees was Moussa Zemmouri, 37, a Moroccan national born in Antwerp, Belgian federal prosecutors announced Friday. The other was an Algerian identified as Soufiane A., who prosecutors believe spent time in Syria.

Both have been charged with participating in the activities of a terrorist group and all five have been charged with attempted armed robbery.

Zemmouri was released from Guantanamo in 2005 and authored a book "Innocent at Guantanamo" after returning to Belgium. His case was featured prominently by the UK Muslim prisoner advocacy group CAGE, which has long maintained that he has no links to terrorism.

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/07/24/politics/former-guantanamo-detainees-arrested-belgium/

Senegalese inventor builds plane with salvaged parts

Baila Ndiaye has already built a car entirely out of recycled materials, but the Senegalese virtuoso has set himself a new challenge. He's now in the process of putting together an ultra-light aircraft using only second-hand parts with the same goal as before: to prove that it's possible "to make what we want using only what we've got".

Fifty-one-year-old Baila Ndiaye settled in France after finishing high school. He set up a company in Mulhouse that specialised in electronics, before returning to Senegal 15 years later. That’s where, three years ago, he built 'Syndiély': a single-seater car made entirely from used parts.


Building on this first success, he threw himself a new challenge. He started to build an ultra-light aircraft, before personal reasons compelled him to return to France, where he runs an engineering company in Strasbourg. However, he hopes to return to Senegal to complete his project in the near future.

http://observers.france24.com/en/20150617-senegal-inventor-plane-recyled-aircraft

Go home FedEx, you're drunk

Obama administration in 'final stages' of planning the Guantanamo Bay closing

Source: CNN

(CNN)The Obama administration is in the "final stages of drafting a plan to safely and responsibly" close the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Wednesday.

"That has been something that our national security officials have been working on for quite some time," Earnest said.

Earnest was responding to a question about a story in the New York Times that says the effort to close the prison, one of the first promises the president made back in 2009 upon taking office, was faltering and "collapsing again."

Any plan would have to be approved by Congress which has placed significant obstacles in the way of transferring detainees out of the prison.

Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/22/politics/guantanamo-bay-closing-plans-obama-earnest/

Google Is Scouring Ancestry.com to Find Out What's in Your Genes

Google Inc.’s Calico, a biotechnology firm created by the search-engine giant to study aging and related diseases, will delve into the genetic database amassed by a unit of Ancestry.com LLC to look for hereditary influences on longevity.

AncestryDNA, a division of the Provo, Utah-based genealogy company, has gathered more than 1 million DNA samples from the $99 testing kits it sells to consumers to help map their family history. Beside the genetic information, Calico will have access to tens of millions of public family trees created by consumers, which include birth and death dates, relationships, and geographical locations.

“Now that we’ve got 1 million samples, there’s enough statistical power in the dataset to elucidate drug targets,” said Ken Chahine, Ancestry’s executive vice president and head of DNA and health. “If you aggregate a set of individuals who had long-lived families and we have their genetic information as well, that’s a way to start making hypotheses about the heritability of longevity.”

Health companies are mining the growing amounts of digital information on people’s genetic codes to hunt for clues about how diseases develop -- and how they might be cured or prevented. Databases are growing as costs fall as low as $1,000 to sequence a whole genome, while selective genotyping is even cheaper. Closely held Ancestry.com reported $619.5 million in revenue last year. Chahine wasn’t able to say how much the DNA kit sales contributed to revenue. The companies declined to disclose the financial terms of the deal.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-21/google-s-calico-to-scour-ancestry-com-data-for-longevity-genes


Funny how much stuff Google is dipping their hands in without anybody raising an eyebrow...

Chattanooga attack: Fifth victim dies from wounds

Source: BBC

The death of logistics specialist Randall Smith brings to five the number of people killed by gunman Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez. The other four victims were US marines. Abdulazeez was himself later killed in a shootout with police. The FBI has said his motives for the shooting were unclear. However, it says it has found no evidence that he was carrying out an international terror plot.

Abdulazeez first fired shots at a recruitment centre in Chattanooga, then drove about six miles (10km) to a Navy and Marine reserve centre, where he shot and killed the marines, and wounded Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Smith.
"A male Navy Petty Officer succumbed to wounds received in the July 16 shooting at the Navy Operational Support Center (NOSC) in Chattanooga, Tennessee" on Saturday at 02:17 local time (06:17 GMT), the US Navy said in a statement. It did not name the sailor, but family members confirmed it was Randall Smith.

Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33580151

Do You Live in a Fuck State or a Shit State?

The Guardian reports today on the latest work of Jack Grieve, a professor of forensic linguistics at Aston University in the UK, aided by research from Diansheng Guo and Alice Kasakoff of the University of South Carolina and Andrea Nini, of Aston University. Their research topic is this: how do people swear in different US states? Only a British newspaper could publish this, since American newspapers would never allow such family-unfriendly swill in their august pages. Hell, I may be stretching things by doing it at Mother Jones.

You can click the link for the full rundown, but you'll be interested to know that "fuckboy" is one of the fastest rising words of 2014. It's apparently popular in the mid-Atlantic region and in California starting just north of where I live—which explains why I've never heard of it.

In any case, here's a sample of Grieve's linguistic maps. On the left are states where "fuck" is especially popular, and on the right are states where "shit" is especially popular. California is clearly a fuck state, which fits with my observations of a lifetime. Of course, you also have some states—mostly in the polite Midwest—that don't use either, and some—mostly the coastal areas from South Carolina up to New Jersey—where they really like them both. Fascinating, no? Certainly more interesting than the old soda-pop-coke chestnut.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/07/do-you-live-fuck-state-or-shit-state

How do you explain THIS to the insurance company?

Watch Spooked Circus Elephant Attack Car After Apparent Whack by Employee

http://abcnews.go.com/International/watch-spooked-circus-elephant-attack-car-apparent-whack/story?id=32516732


PROTIP: Try returning these magnificent creatures to their natural habitat...