The Old North State (Of Insanity, Yet Again)

Everything the Republican Party in North Carolina is trying to do right now involves them trying to make sure Democrats never regain power in the state again.  That means voting in the state must be curtailed as much as possible, and the latest GOP scam is reducing the number of places to vote "to save taxpayers money". Of course, the cuts are coming in poorer urban areas where Democrats live.  One such place is Shelby, NC, near where I grew up. Cleveland County is losing 3 or its 5 voting precincts, and they just happen to be in areas where black voters are.

When Alan Langley, a Republican member of the local elections board here, explains a new proposal to consolidate five voting precincts into two, it sounds procedural and well-meaning: He speaks of convenient parking and wheelchair access at the proposed polling places, and of saving more than $10,000 per election. 

Those precincts, however, are rich with black voters who generally vote Democratic. And when the Rev. Dante Murphy, the president of the Cleveland CountyN.A.A.C.P. chapter, discusses the plan, he talks of “disenfranchisement” and “conspiracy.” 

“We know,” Mr. Murphy said, “that this is part of a bigger trend — a movement to suppress people’s right to vote.” 

The bitter disagreement in this city of 20,000 is part of a broader voting rights battle charged by race and partisan politics that is happening in a number of communities, many of them Southern, where changes to election laws no longer require advance approval from the federal government after a year-old Supreme Court ruling voided a key section of the Voting Rights Act.

Mr. Langley here is shocked -- shocked, he'll tell you -- that anyone would attribute racial animus to these precinct cuts.  Cuts in a predominately black part of the county, of course.  He's hurt that the NAACP doesn't trust Republicans in North Carolina.  Republicans who instituted multiple hoops to jump through in order to vote in the worst set of voter ID laws in the nation to prevent "voter fraud" they accused Democrats of perpetrating, and they speak of trust.

Sure.

Voting rights advocates fear that these local changes — combined with a number of new state laws restricting ballot access and requiring voters to show picture IDs — amount to a concerted effort to reduce voting by minority groups. Conservatives say that the laws ensure against voter fraud, and in some cases are more cost-efficient. 

In places affected by the Supreme Court decision, the overt racism of the 1960s is largely a thing of the past: What often lingers is a racial mistrust that can make the moving of a polling place from a fellowship hall to a public park seem innocent to some, sinister to others. 

It's a hard past to overcome.  It's even harder when one party is trying to take the country back to the worst times of that past.

Who honestly believes that the solution to a county's problems is making it harder to vote?

The Old North State (Of Insanity, Con't)

The Department of Justice has finally dropped the hammer of NC Republicans and their odious voter suppression law with a lawsuit announced on Monday by AG Eric Holder.

A North Carolina judge will decide whether portions of the state’s voter ID law, described as “discriminatory” by critics, should be implemented or delayed, following suits filed by the federal government and others. 

The law requires voters to show photo ID at the polls, eliminates same-day registration and pre-registration for students as young as 16, and cuts the early-voting period from 17 to 10 days. Lawyers from the U.S. Department of Justice, NAACP, and League of Women Voters will argue for a preliminary injunction against portions of the law in a U.S. District Court in Winston-Salem on Monday. A trial will be held in the case in 2015,according to the Associated Press. 

“The state legislature took extremely aggressive steps to curtail the voting rights of African-Americans,” U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said at a press conference announcing the lawsuit Monday. “This is an intentional step to break a system that was working and it defies common sense.” 

The law, 49 pages long, includes a number of other changes to the state’s elections and campaigns, including increasing the amount of money donors can give to candidates by $5,000, eliminating a one-box straight-ticketing voting option on ballots, and repealing the requirement that candidates appear in their own campaign ads and say they “approve this message.”

This isn't a voter ID law, this is a "help Republicans and their donors" law, and the NC GOP knows it.  It's why the Moral Monday movement in NC has been protesting for over a year now, and are moving now to register as many voters as they can for November.

In 2011, Republicans, with the help of free-spending non-profit advocacy groups, seized both chambers of the legislature, also called the General Assembly, from the Democrats. Republican Pat McCrory won the governor’s mansion two years later, giving his party its first lock on North Carolina’s government since 1870. That set the stage for last year’s overhaul of the state’s election laws: In a single bill, lawmakers eliminated same-day registration, youth preregistration and out-of-precinct voting, and reduced the number of days of early voting. They required voters to show government-issued photo identification starting in 2016; student ID cards from state universities won’t be honored. Republicans say the law was aimed at creating consistency and eliminating fraud. State statistics show almost no documented cases of impersonation fraud at the polls. 

Now, the Moral Monday movement, the NAACP and the League of Women Voters have the DoJ backing them up.  Hopefully, my home state of North Carolina will find a way through this mess and vote out the GOP.

StupidiNews!

• Four people were injured Monday when a roller coaster at Six Flags Magic Mountain in California derailed after a tree branch fell on the tracks.
• The White House is confirming that most of the unaccompanied children crossing the border from Mexico will not be allowed to stay in the US and will be deported.
• Half a million people were urged to evacuate Monday as Japan's southern coast was battered by Super Typhoon Neoguri, the storm continuing to bring heavy rain across the country.
• Ukrainian forces are not resting on a cease fire as they continue to retake territory from pro-Russian separatist rebels, as EU sanctions against Russia may be expanded as early as Wednesday.
• Dutch-rooted space tourism company XCOR says if the Netherlands can survive the World Cup and win this week, the Dutch team is going to space on the house.

Last Call For It Finally Registering With You

Pew Research has more details on the one group in their political ideology poll from last month that didn't have a voting preference: the 10% of Americans who both aren't registered to vote and who don't care about politics enough to do so.  Pew calls them "Political Bystanders".

While Bystanders view the Democratic Party more favorably than the GOP, they have a mix of liberal and conservative attitudes. They are sympathetic to the plight of the poor, but as many say that government aid to the poor does more harm than good as vice versa. They express fairly liberal views on homosexuality and same-sex marriage, but 54% say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. 

Bystanders are young (38% are under 30), and nearly a third (32%) are Hispanic. A third of Bystanders are foreign born, a higher share than any of the other typology groups, including 29% total who are not citizens. 

Asked about their interest in a number of topics, 73% of Bystanders say they have no interest in government and politics, and two-thirds (66%) say they are not interested in business and finance. So what topics do interest them? Health, science and celebrities: 64% of Bystanders are interested in celebrities and entertainment (vs. 46% of the public). And, in a sign of their youth, they are drawn to video games: 35% call themselves a “video or computer gamer” (vs. 21% of the public). 

In our survey, Bystanders were often more likely than other political cohorts to answer “don’t know,” to say they’ve “never heard of” the topic in question or to refuse to answer questions altogether.

So, minus the 29% of Political Bystanders who aren't US citizens and can't vote, that still leaves 71% of 10% of voting age Americans -- some 7.1% of eligible voters -- who could vote if they wanted to register. Or could register, with awesome GOP voter suppression laws.

The 38% of the Bystanders who are Millennials are the ones most likely to have common cause with the Democrats.  If even half of them were convinced to register and vote blue in 2014, that would be a 2% boost across the board for the Dems, and that would go a long, long way in saving the Senate.

Why do you think Republicans are trying to make voting so difficult for the young and the poor?

Tryin' To Catch Me Ridin' Dirty

We've long known that conservatives (being those completely logical, reasonable creatures that they are) will do anything detrimental, obnoxious, stupid, childish, or dangerous as long as they know that doing it pisses off liberals.  Case in point: diesel pickup trucks that are "rolling coal".

Pickup trucks customized to spew black smoke into the air are quickly becoming the newest weapon in the culture wars.

"Coal Rollers" are diesel trucks modified with chimneys and equipment that can force extra fuel into the engine causing dark black smoke to pour out of the chimney stacks. These modifications are not new, but as Slate's Dave Weigel pointed out on Thursday, "rolling coal" has begun to take on a political dimension with pickup drivers increasingly viewing their smokestacks as a form of protest against environmentalists and Obama administration emissions regulations. 

Last month, Vocativ noted many coal rollers focus their fumes on "nature nuffies," or people who drive hybrids, and "rice burners," or Japanese-made cars.

"The feeling around here is that everyone who drives a small car is a liberal," a roller named Ryan told Vocativ. "I rolled coal on a Prius once just because they were tailing me."

To recap, people spend money tricking out their diesel pickups to purposely make them more fuel-inefficient so they can belch more carbon smoke because screw you Obama liberals in your hybrids.  Adding more of a carbon footprint on purpose to counteract environmentally conscious folks because haha, Al Gore is fat is a completely, 100% viable thing to do if you're a winger, kids.

You have to be impressed with people who deny global warming so vehemently that they pay money to make it worse just in case it's real.  These guys are like Bluto from the old Popeye cartoons.

With this explosion in online attention, the battles between coal rollers and their environmentalist enemies are playing out in social media pages, Youtube videos and internet comment sections. Many of the rolling coal Facebook pages feature memes that mock hybrid drivers and liberals. Coal rollers have also posted videos showing their trucks blasting more environmentally efficient cars with smoke.

Opponents of the practice have also taken to the internet. Weigel noted "a mid-June surge of comments" from progressives attacking coal rolling social media pages in the wake of the Vocativ article. In 2012, one outraged YouTube user posted a video entitled "Victim Of Coal Rolling" that showed a pickup shooting fumes at his car.  

"Blow your smoke at me you son of a bitch," the driver says in the video. 

Though the clip seemed designed as a criticism of coal rollers, it attracted a slew of comments from people who were clearly on the side of the pickup driver. 

"What a loser you are, ain't nothing wrong with rolling some confederate coal," one person replied. 

"Stupid ricers. what were you gonna do you bitch?" another said.

And of course, it all comes back to douchebags still fighting the War of Nawthun Aggression.

Ridin dirty, indeed.

Soccer It To Her, Boys

MoDo The Red cracks open another box of Franzia Sunset Blush and attacks her computer again, disgorging her latest incomprehensible paean to mediocrity, apparently something having to do with the US men's national team in the World Cup in Brazil.

AMERICA’S infatuation with the World Cup came at the perfect moment, illuminating the principle that you can lose and still advance.

Once our nation saw itself as the undefeatable cowboy John Wayne. Now we bask in the prowess of the unstoppable goalie Tim Howard, a biracial kid from New Jersey with Tourette’s syndrome.

With our swaggering and sanguine image deflated by epic unforced errors, Americans are playing defense, struggling to come to grips with a world where we can no longer dictate all the terms, win all the wars and lead all the charges.

“The Fourth of July was always a celebration of American exceptionalism,” said G.O.P. pollster Frank Luntz. “Now it’s a commiseration of American disappointment.”

From Katrina to Fallujah, we’re less the Shining City Upon a Hill than the House of Broken Toys.

Dowd goes on like this for another 1500 words or so, and I'll spare you all that, but apparently our inability to win World Cups is proof that America sucks now, when we used to just hate and laugh as soccer and didn't care about it at all.  Now, mushy Millennials are worried about hashtags and are too global and not MURICA enough or something and oh yeah, Obama sucks and it's his fault (there always has to be "Obama sucks" in these drunken outbursts) and maybe it was always like this.

Then she crawls back into the box of wine, and a nation is grateful for the point she stops writing her stream of unconsciousness.

Amazing, even for Dowd's normal drunken "AbFab" benders.

StupidiNews!

• Some 63 kidnapped women and girls abducted by Boko Haram militants in Nigeria have escaped and returned home over the weekend, but hundreds more women and girls remain in captivity.
• A Study published this week in the journal Science finds fracking responsible for the 23,000% increase in earthquakes in Oklahoma since 2008.
• Hamas militants are claiming Israeli air strikes early Monday have killed seven in retaliation for roughly 25 rockets fired from Gaza into Israel on Sunday.
• Ukraine's army has scored the largest victories so far in its three-month battle with pro-Russian separatists, reclaiming several towns in the Donetsk region and pushing rebels eastward.
• New software from a PhD student at the University of Longborough in the UK will allow doctors to use 3D printers to customize splints for rheumatoid arthritis patients and more.

Last Call For Bundystan

Looks like the long arm of the law in Nevada has finally had enough of Cliven Bundy, Professional Scofflaw and his violent thugs.

In an interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial board, Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie said that BLM-defying rancher Cliven Bundy must be ‘held accountable’ for his actions.

Gillespie said he had spoken with Bundy multiple times in the months before the BLM rounded up his cattle which were grazing on government land despite Bundy’s refusal to pay grazing fees. Gillespie said that he he made it clear to Bundy that, if there was going to be a protest, it must be peaceful.

However, the sheriff said, Bundy crossed the line when he allowed supporters, including armed militia members, onto his property to brandish weapons at police.

“If you step over that line, there are consequences to those actions. And I believe they stepped over that line. No doubt about it,” Gillespie said. “They need to be held accountable for it.”

At some point we're a nation of laws, or a nation of guys with the biggest weapons making those laws.  I'm glad that Sheriff Gillespie is finally going to take care of things.

I hope.

The Law Of Unitended Consequences

The Hobby Lobby decision and its terrible, silppery slope reasoning will wreck American jurisprudence for years.  It's so broad and so sweeping that you could justify just about anything based on religious beliefs, including, say, the rights of Gitmo detainees.

Lawyers for two Guantanamo Bay detainees have filed motions asking a U.S. court to block officials from preventing the inmates from taking part in communal prayers during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. The lawyers argue that – in light of the Supreme Court’s recent Hobby Lobby decision – the detainees’ rights are protected under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA).

The motions were filed this week with the Washington D.C. district court on behalf of Emad Hassan of Yemen and Ahmed Rabbani of Pakistan. U.K.-based human rights group Reprieve said both men asked for the intervention after military officials at the prison "prevented them from praying communally during Ramadan."

During Ramadan, a month of prayer and reflection that began last weekend, Muslims are required to fast every day from sunrise to sunset. But what is at issue in this case is the ability to perform extra prayers, called tarawih, "in which [Muslims] recite one-thirtieth of the Quran in consecutive segments throughout the month."

U.S. Army Lt. Col. Myles B. Caggins III, a spokesman for the Department of Defense, told Al Jazeera on Friday that the "Defense Department is aware of the filing," and that the "government will respond through the legal system."

The detainees' lawyers said courts have previously concluded that Guantanamo detainees do not have "religious free exercise rights" because they are not “persons within the scope of the RFRA.”

But the detainees’ lawyers say the Hobby Lobby decision changes that.

"Hobby Lobby makes clear that all persons – human and corporate, citizen and foreigner, resident and alien – enjoy the special religious free exercise protections of the RFRA," the lawyers argued in court papers.

Which is exactly what justice Alito said in his ruling.  Despite claiming how narrow it is, the ruling itself is a door big enough to drive a truck through.  Meet the new truck, folks.

Spies Like Us, Again

Washington Post's Barton Gellman both simultaneously screws over Team Dudebro Defector by stomping all over the "big scoop" and embarrasses himself with the same breathless hyperbole of "The NSA is watching everything Americans are doing!" when that's simply not the case.  He does get around to the actual story, however in paragraph five.

Among the most valuable contents — which The Post will not describe in detail, to avoid interfering with ongoing operations — are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks.

Months of tracking communications across more than 50 alias accounts, the files show, led directly to the 2011 capture in Abbottabad of Muhammad Tahir Shahzad, a Pakistan-based bomb builder, and Umar Patek, a suspect in a 2002 terrorist bombing on the Indonesian island of Bali. At the request of CIA officials, The Post is withholding other examples that officials said would compromise ongoing operations.

News flash:  the NSA spies on foreign bad guys who do bad, bad things.  Like, nuclear things.  But apparently we stopped these bad guys by then having conversations with Americans.  This means we have to apparently throw away these conversations, in Snowden's world.

As I keep saying, if your goal was to inflict maximum damage on the US capability to gather intelligence, what Edward Snowden has done in the last several months could not have been more effective.

Which, as I keep saying, was Snowden's goal all along.

Last Call For Another 47% Solution

Republicans are terrible learners, that's all I have to say.  And yes, their absolute disdain for half of America is legendary.  It's a feature of Republicanism, not a bug.  Take Colorado GOP former Rep. Bob Beauprez, for instance.  He's running for Governor against John Hickenlooper in November, and he just lost the race, Mitt Romney-style.

On Wednesday, as Republican gubernatorial nominee Bob Beauprez toured Colorado to "build unity," a video surfaced that Democrats say shows his divisiveness.

The video shows Beauprez in a speech to the Denver Rotary Club in 2010 making comments that echo those that hurt Mitt Romney's challenge to President Barack Obama two years later.

"I see something that frankly doesn't surprise me, having been on Ways and Means Committee: 47 percent of all Americans pay no federal income tax," Beauprez said in the video. "I'm guessing that most of you in this room are not in that 47 percent — God bless you — but what that tells me is that we've got almost half the population perfectly happy that somebody else is paying the bill, and most of that half is you all."

He indicated Democrats had reasons to keep it that way.

"I submit to you that there is a political strategy to get slightly over half and have a permanent ruling majority by keeping over half of the population dependent on the largesse of government that somebody else is paying for," Beauprez said.

When Beauprez says that, he means Grandma and Grandpa on Social Security and the poorest working-class Americans.  And as I said, many working American pay payroll tax.

The canard that people don't carry their fair share is a trope that Republicans love to roll out, and the 47 percent figure is their favorite data point to support it.

But as I have been saying for some time now, the 47 percent figure, while technically accurate as it relates to federal income taxes, doesn't include what people do pay through the payroll tax, sales taxes, excise taxes, and all sorts of other levies . So here is a partial breakdown of how those other burdens fall on the population, courtesy of the Tax Policy Center and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy:

28.3 percent pay payroll taxes, which cover Social Security and Medicare.

10.3 percent pay no federal income tax because they are retired or elderly, and Social Security payments are not taxed. I can't imagine that Romney objects to this category.

It turns out that just 6.9 percent of people who are non-elderly don't pay income tax. That is a far cry from 47 percent. We are not, in fact, a nation of moochers, as Romney seems to suggest.

But why would Beauprez tell the truth?  It doesn't fit the Republican lie that "the majority" of Americans are lazy moochers that need to be punished by God-fearing, patriotic Republican voters.

We're all "those people" to the GOP.

The Unending Cycle Of Payback

Three Israeli teens found dead near the West Bank two weeks ago has escalated into the latest IDF bombing campaign against the Palestinians, who have responded with rockets, prompting retaliation where a Palestinian teen was abducted and burned alive.

Mohammed Abu Khedair, a Palestinian teenager who was abducted and killed in Jerusalem this week, died from being burned alive and hit with a blunt object to the head, according to Palestinian General Prosecutor Mohammed al-Auwewy, sourcing the medical autopsy.

Al-Auwewy said the autopsy discovered traces of smoke inside the lungs of the 16-year-old , meaning that it was inhaled during the burning.

Mark Regev, spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said his country is aggressively investigating the killing. "We'll get to the bottom of it and catch those responsible," he told CNN on Saturday.

This of course led to more fighting at the teen's funeral.

The teenager's death sparked widespread outrage among Palestinians and clashes with Israeli security forces broke out during his funeral on Friday.

More than 60 people were injured in fighting in parts of Jerusalem, according to the Palestinian Medical Relief Society, a group that said it was involved in evacuating injured Palestinians. It said the injuries mostly involved rubber bullets fired at the upper body and chest.

Israeli police said 13 of their officers were slightly injured in clashes in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Shuafat, where Palestinian protesters were throwing rocks at police, who responded by firing rubber bullets and tear gas.

 And so on, and so on, and so on...

In a separate incident, two videographers recorded men in the uniform of Israeli security forces holding down and pummeling a teenager in Shuafat. Relatives say he is a U.S. citizen from Florida and a cousin of Abu Khedair.

The victim, Tariq Khdeir, 15, is a high school sophomore in Tampa, family members there said. He was visiting his Palestinian relatives in Jerusalem for the first time in over a decade when he was attacked and detained outside the home of his cousin, who was kidnapped and killed on Wednesday.

The two videos, which were posted independently, say the beating occurred on Thursday.

CNN's Ben Wedeman confirmed that the videos appeared to show an area near the home of the killed teen.

Hard to fight thousands of years of hatred and death.  Very hard indeed.

Hillary's Snowden Split

There are some advantages being a Democrat not currently in the Obama administration right now, and one of them is that you can take a complete non-position position on the fate of Edward Snowden.

Hillary Clinton said Friday that it’s up to NSA leaker Edward Snowden to decide whether to return to the U.S. and defend himself in court.

“If he wishes to return knowing he would be held accountable and also able to present a defense, that is his decision to make,” the former secretary of state said in an interview with the Guardian, the newspaper that broke the story uncovering many NSA programs with help from leaks from Snowden. The paper received the Pulitzer Prize for public service reporting for its coverage.

Clinton has been critical of Snowden in the past, calling him an “imperfect messenger” who could have gone about his whistleblowing in a way that would have been less damaging to national security. In April, she said it was “sort of odd” that he fled to China and Russia, countries that have restrictive cyberpolicies, and that his leaks helped certain terrorist networks.

“Whether he chooses to return or not is up to him,” she said Friday. “He certainly can stay in Russia apparently under Putin’s protection for the rest of his life if that’s what he chooses.”

Snowden isn't her problem to deal with.  Of course, Team Dudebro Defector has repeatedly said there's precisely zero chance of Snowden ever deciding to come back, because "he can't possibly get a fair trial."  Loosely translated, that means "He'd be found guilty" and we can't have that, so.

It's a moot point, and she knows it.

The SCOTUS Bait And Switch

It seems the Supreme Court isn't quite done injecting religious freedom into health insurance coverage for women.  On Tuesday, a day after ruling Hobby Lobby had the right to refuse to provide company health insurance coverage for contraception it (erroneously) believed was abortion, the Supreme Court ruled that Hobby Lobby's beliefs trumped women's individual rights and that the company could then refuse to cover any forms of birth control.

Less than a day after the United States Supreme Court issued its divisive ruling onBurwell v. Hobby Lobby, it has already begun to toss aside the supposedly narrow interpretation of the decision. On Tuesday, the Supremes ordered lower courts to rehear any cases where companies had sought to deny coverage for any type of contraception, not just the specific types Hobby Lobby was opposed to.

The Affordable Care Act had listed 20 forms of contraception that had to be covered as preventive services. But Hobby Lobby, a craft supply chain, claimed that Plan B, Ella, and two types of IUD were abortifacients that violated the owners' religious principles. The science was against Hobby Lobby—these contraceptives do not prevent implantation of a fertilized egg and are not considered abortifacients in the medical world—but the conservative majority bought Hobby Lobby's argument that it should be exempted from the law.

Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the the 5-4 opinion, used numerous qualifiers in an attempt to limit its scope, but a series of orders released by the court Tuesday contradict any narrow interpretation of the ruling.

It got worse on Thursday as the Supreme Court then decided that non-profit organizations who objected to birth control coverage were somehow being crushed by a substantial burden of having to inform the government that they were non-profit organizations who wanted an exemption, and gave Illinois's Wheaton College an immediate injunction against having to fill out paperwork to say they wanted to opt out.

 In a decision that drew an unusually fierce dissent from the three female justices, the Supreme Court sided Thursday with religiously affiliated nonprofit groups in a clash between religious freedom and women’s rights.

The decision temporarily exempts a Christian college from part of the regulations that provide contraception coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

The court’s order was brief, provisional and unsigned, but it drew a furious reaction from the three female members, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan. The order, Justice Sotomayor wrote, was at odds with the 5-to-4 decision on Monday in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, which involved for-profit corporations.

“Those who are bound by our decisions usually believe they can take us at our word,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. “Not so today.”

The court’s action, she added, even “undermines confidence in this institution.”

So, oops!  Sorry about your vagina, but the religious rights of a corporation outweigh the individual rights of a .woman's belief that birth control is a necessary medical expense that she should have covered through insurance she gets as part of compensation from her employer for working there.

Happy Independence Day, corporations!  You're now more important than women!  Congratulations!

StupidiNews, 4th of July Weekend Edition!

• Hurricane Arthur has made landfall as a Category 2 storm along North Carolina's Outer Banks, but is rapidly heading out to sea and looks to bypass New England.
• Six months after legalizing marijuana, Colorado's crime rate is down sharply and state revenues from taxing cannabis are up.
• The Iraqi Army has rallied after losing ground to ISIS militants and has retaken territory south of Tikrit, including Awja, the village where former dictator Saddam Hussein was born.
• The Pentagon has grounded its entire fleet of F-35 fighter jets as a precaution as a cockpit fire aboard one plane forced an aborted takeoff.
• Actress Lindsey Lohan is suing the makers of smash hit video game Grand Theft Auto V claiming that one of the game's characters is too close in likeness to the film star.