[Jpost] Blake entered the plea through his lawyer during a livestreamed court hearing, his first public appearance since he was shot in the back by a white Kenosha police officer on August 23.
Jacob Blake, the 29-year-old Black man whose shooting by a white police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, reignited nationwide protests over racism and police brutality, pleaded not guilty "Wudn't me." on Friday to criminal charges filed prior to the shooting.
A complaint accuses Blake of criminal trespass, third-degree sexual assault and disorderly conduct based on statements by his ex-girlfriend at the time, the mother of three of his children, who told police Blake broke into her home on May 3 and sexually assaulted her before stealing her truck and debit card.
Blake entered the plea through his lawyer during a livestreamed court hearing, his first public appearance since he was shot in the back by a white Kenosha police officer on August 23.
Blake, who was left paralyzed from the waist down by the shooting, was propped up in his hospital bed, dressed in a blue shirt and yellow tie, with his lawyer, Patrick Cafferty, sitting in a chair to his side.
Cafferty noted that Blake had been working as a painter and that he had no prior criminal record or convictions in any state.
Blake raised his hand to greet Loren Keating, a Kenosha County judicial court commissioner, when addressed, saying "Yes sir," when asked if he could hear clearly and whether he understood the terms of his $10,000 signature bond.
"The state recognizes that these are serious charges but also that the defendant has serious injuries and he's recovering at the hospital," said Zeke Wiedenfeld, a prosecutor.
The court set trial to begin on Nov. 9 with jury selection. The complaint does not identify the ex-girlfriend by name.
Libyan MP: Turkey Must Expel Mercenaries, Abide by Arms Embargo Before Discussing Peace Talks
“... Turkey continues to deliver weapons, mercenaries, and even terrorists to the two airbases of Misrata and Al-Watiya...”#Libya#LibyaReviewhttps://t.co/AO8TqpL3hp
[IsraelTimes] Ali Riza Polat appears in French court where he faces most serious charge among 14 accused, complicity in a terrorist act, which carries a potential life sentence.
A primary suspect in the trial over the 2015 massacres at satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo ...A lefty French satirical magazine, home of what may well be the majority if the active testicles left in Europe... and a Kosher supermarket in Gay Paree denied on Friday any responsibility for the attacks carried out by jihadists, one of whom was a close associate.
Ali Riza Polat, a 35-year-old Franco-Ottoman Turkish man, was placed in durance vile Youse'll never take me alive coppers!... [BANG!]... Ow!... I quit! a few weeks after the terror attack that stunned La Belle France, with Sherlocks saying he tried to flee the country several times heading for Syria.
"I am innocent!" Polat told the court, his head shaved and his face hidden behind a cloth mask.
"I’m here because certain people, lying squealers, said all sorts of nonsense... but they’re lying," he said.
Born in Istanbul, Polat moved to La Belle France when he was three and said he fell into petty crime when he was 13 or 14, later starting to deal drugs.
He grew up in the same rough Gay Paree suburb of Grigny as Amedy Coulibaly, who killed a police officer on January 8, 2015 and four people at the Hyper Cacher Jewish supermarket the next day before being killed by police.
Those attacks came just after two brothers, Said and Cherif Kouachi, stormed the Charlie Hebdo offices, killing 12.
Suspected of helping provide the weapons for all three button men, Polat is facing the most serious charge among the 14 accused: complicity in a terrorist act, which carries a potential life sentence.
But Polat, who says he converted to Islam in 2014,
..a Turk who was not born Muslim? There aren’t many of those left...
insisted he had no role in the attacks.
"I have nothing to do with them. You cannot kill the innocent... I am not violent mostly peaceful," he said.
For his defense, Polat has chosen Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, the lawyer who defended the convicted international terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as "Carlos the Jackal." She later became his lover companion and married him in a religious ceremony in prison, though the union has no legal validity.
The trial of Polat and thirteen other suspects accused of aiding the three button men opened Wednesday, and is set to run until November.
[AlAhram] French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo ...A lefty French satirical magazine, home of what may well be the majority if the active testicles left in Europe... , the target of a jihadist attack in 2015, said Friday that its latest edition reprinting controversial caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed had sold out in just one day.
Wednesday's issue featured a dozen cartoons mocking the prophet of Islam, including images that sparked huge protests when first published, to mark the start of the trial this week of alleged accomplices to the massacre.
Charlie Hebdo distributed three times its normal print run on Wednesday, but eager readers pounced on the paper and many intending to grab their copy later in the day were left frustrated.
A new batch of 200,000 copies is currently being printed and will hit French newstands from Saturday.
"It shows that we are supported, that freedom of expression, secularism and the right to blasphemy ...the act of insulting or showing contempt or lack of reverence to a deity, or sacred objects, or toward something considered sacred or inviolable. Some religions consider it to be a crime. In Pakistain you can commit blasphemy by looking cross-eyed at a Koran... are not obsolete values, and that they are supported by the French public who chose to buy the issue," a Charlie cartoonist who goes by the pen name "Juin" told AFP.
Twelve people, including some of La Belle France's most celebrated cartoonists, were killed on January 7, 2015, when brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi went on a gun rampage at the paper's offices in Gay Paree.
"We will never lie down. We will never give up," director Laurent "Riss" Sourisseau wrote in an accompanying editorial to Wednesday's issue, which was headlined: "All of this, just for that."
The decision to reprint the cartoons sparked angry condemnations from Pakistain, Iran ...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneously taking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet militias to extend the regime's influence. The word Iran is a cognate form of Aryan. The abbreviation IRGC is the same idea as Stürmabteilung (or SA). The term Supreme Guide is a the modern version form of either Duce or Führer or maybe both. They hate JewsZionists Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol... and The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire... as well as Egypt's highest Moslem authority al-Azhar.
On Friday, thousands rallied in anti-La Belle France demonstrations across Pakistain, with protestors calling for boycotts and the French ambassador's expulsion.
But Charlie Hebdo defended its decision in the editorial, arguing that republishing the cartoons was "essential."
"We worked on the principle that some people don't know the cartoons, some weren't even born when they were published by Charlie in 2006, and they need to understand why the attacks happened," Juin said.
"The right to blasphemy and freedom of speech exist if we use it. For us, it was justifiable to reprint the cartoons because it shows that these rights still exist and allows us to defend them," he added.
[AlAhram] Macron defended satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo , which published caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that helped inspire two French-born Islamic murderous Moslems to mount a deadly January 2015 attack on the paper's newsroom.
French President Emmanuel Macron criticized Friday what he called "Islamic separatism" in his country and those who seek French citizenship without accepting La Belle France's "right to commit blasphemy ...the act of insulting or showing contempt or lack of reverence to a deity, or sacred objects, or toward something considered sacred or inviolable. Some religions consider it to be a crime. In Pakistain you can commit blasphemy by looking cross-eyed at a Koran...
Macron defended satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, which published caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that helped inspire two French-born Islamic murderous Moslems to mount a deadly January 2015 attack on the paper's newsroom.
The weekly republished the images this week as the trial began of 14 people over the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and on a kosher supermarket.
Speaking at a ceremony Friday celebrating La Belle France's democratic history and naturalizing new citizens, the French president said, "You don't choose one part of La Belle France. You choose La Belle France....The Republic will never allow any separatist adventure."
Freedom in La Belle France, Macron said, includes "the freedom to believe or not to believe. But this is inseparable from the freedom of expression up to the right to blasphemy.''
Noting the trial that opened Wednesday, he said, "To be French is to defend the right to make people laugh, to criticize, to mock, to caricature.''
The 2015 attacks killed 17 people and marked the beginning of a wave of violence by the Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems.... group in Europe.
Macron's centrist government has promised a law in the coming months against "Islamic separatism" but it is not clear yet exactly what it would police. Some critics fear it could unfairly stigmatize La Belle France's largely moderate Moslem population, the largest in western Europe.
[Reason] Both sides are getting their information through purposely bottlenecked media reports, and the results are predictably distorted and dangerous.
"YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO FILM!" is a cry you hear incessantly at protests in Portland, Oregon, always shouted at close range to your face by after-dark demonstrators. You can assert that, yes, you can film; you can point out that they themselves are filming incessantly; you can push their hands away from covering your phone; you can have your phone record them stealing your phone—all of these things have happened to me—and none will have any impact on their contention that "YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO FILM" and its occasional variation, "PHOTOGRAPHY EQUALS DEATH!"
I cannot say who came up with these anti-camera battle cries. But it's easy to understand why protesters use them: to shape the narrative the country sees about the protests. And that narrative, in my estimation after many weeks covering street clashes in a city where I lived for 15 years, is 90 percent bullshit.
I wondered, the first time I attended the protests at the federal building back in July, who all these young people with PRESS emblazoned on their jackets or helmets were. I asked one such guy who he worked for.
"Independent Press Corps," he told me. As it turned out, dozens of other young PRESS people happened to work for the same outfit, which I at first assumed was a fancy way of saying "I want to report stuff and stream it on my Instagram."
This turned out to be naive. The IPC is an organized group in league with the activists, and it is usually their footage you see streamed online and recycled on the news: mostly innocent protestors being harassed and beaten by police.
The police indeed have tear-gassed and beaten people; there has been brutality. It is equally true, but featured less prominently in the news coverage, that activists spend hours every night menacing and setting fires to police stations and other institutions: City Hall, Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters, and last week Mayor Ted Wheeler's apartment building (until he agreed to move out). With the PRESS crew recording part of the story and the "YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO FILM!" crew harassing other journalists, the result can be a misleading view of the protests. It's a revolution via the cellphone video they allow you to see.
The IPC and other documentarians who are deemed sympathetic to the activists' cause agree on certain principles. You do not show activists' faces. You only show activists in a defensive position: responding to, rather than inciting, violence. You enhance what can appear to be police brutality, e.g., activists defending themselves with homemade shields, often bearing the anarchist circle-A, against police. The shields are largely ineffective for personal defense, but extremely effective for optics, and that's precisely the point. If a member of the IPC is arrested, he or she will be protected.
Reporters seen as not sufficiently sympathetic to the cause—which is defined by the Ten Demands for Justice, and includes most notably the abolition of the police—will be followed, be harassed, have their notes photographed and their phones blocked or stolen. (All these things have happened to me in the last month. A photographer friend has been repeatedly doxxed and placed on a list of "enemies.")
If you forget any of these rules, you can just refer to the handy Google spreadsheet of approved journalists and suggested behavior. The spreadsheet contains names, Twitter handles, and ways to financially support the journos who make the cut.
Note who the people on this activist-approved list are writing for. Sergio Olmos, who made IPC's list of approved journalists, is freelancing as a man on the ground for The New York Times.* Freelancer Robert Evans, whose early tick-tock of events on the ground I have admired, tweeted on July 19 that the burning of the Portland Police Association was "the single biggest win so far." When questioned why, he replied that protesters have been "tear-gassed and beaten" for weeks. Unmentioned in his tweets: Protesters have been setting fire to the building for hours on many nights throughout the summer before a police response materializes.
These protester-approved journalists are producing much of the news you see about the protests, with an assist from the national press. Kate Shepherd isn't on the list, but she was previously a sympathetic reporter for local Portland media, and she is now filing such stories for The Washington Post, with headlines like "Portland police arrest a hate crime survivor and Wall of Moms organizer in crackdown."
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Eyeing a longer-term modernization for its Vipers, Greece selected the F-16V upgrade that will bring 84 aircraft — all of them Block 52+ and Block 52+ Advanced jets — to Block 70/72 standard, including the AN/APG-83 Scalable Agile Beam Radar (SABR) with active electronically scanned array (AESA), Raytheon Modular Mission Computer, remodeled cockpit including the second-generation Joint Helmet Mounted Cueing System (JHMCS ΙΙ), and the Link 16 data link, among other enhancements. Most of the work will be undertaken by HAI in Greece
[AnNahar] The U.N.'s nuclear watchdog said Friday that Iran ...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneously taking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet militias to extend the regime's influence. The word Iran is a cognate form of Aryan. The abbreviation IRGC is the same idea as Stürmabteilung (or SA). The term Supreme Guide is a the modern version form of either Duce or Führer or maybe both. They hate JewsZionists Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol... had granted its inspectors access to one of two sites where undeclared nuclear activity may have taken place in the early 2000s.
"Iran provided Agency inspectors access to the location to take environmental samples," an ineffective International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report seen by AFP said.
"The samples will be analyzed by laboratories that are part of the Agency's network," it added.
One diplomatic source told AFP the results of this analysis could take up to three months.
An inspection at the second site will take place "later in September 2020," the report said.
Iran had denied the agency access earlier this year, prompting the IAEA's board of governors to pass a resolution in June urging Tehran to comply with its requests.
In a separate report also issued on Friday, the IAEA said Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium now stands at more than ten times the limit set down in a 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
Tehran announced last week it would allow the IAEA access to the two sites, following a visit by IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi.
In a separate report also issued on Friday, the IAEA said Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium now stands at more than ten times the limit set down in a 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
The limit was set at 300 kilograms (661 pounds) of enriched uranium in a particular compound form, which is the equivalent of 202.8 kg of uranium.
Measured against the latter figure, Iran's stockpile now stands at over 2,105 kg, the report said.
Iran is also continuing to use more advanced centrifuges to enrich uranium than is permitted under the deal.
However, the hip bone's connected to the leg bone... the level of enrichment has not gone above that which would be needed for use in a nuclear weapon.
- U.S. TRYING TO UP PRESSURE -
The 2015 deal has been fraying ever since US President Donald Trump ...The tack in the backside of the Democratic Party... dramatically withdrew from it in May 2018 and re-imposed swingeing sanctions on Iran.
Tehran has responded by progressively exceeding limits on its nuclear activities set down in the deal.
In recent months the Trump administration has tried to increase pressure on Iran, but Washington suffered a humiliating defeat in August when it failed in its bid to reimpose international sanctions on the Islamic republic.
At a meeting in Vienna earlier this week the remaining parties to the 2015 deal -- Britannia, La Belle France, Germany, China and Russia -- said they remained committed to the deal and wanted to find a way to ensure its "full implementation despite current challenges".
The second IAEA report issued Friday also gave an update on another location in Tehran which had not been declared to the agency and where it found uranium particles last year.
The Agency has analysed samples from the site, the results of which were "not inconsistent" with information provided by Iran about the possible origin of the particles.
"However, the hip bone's connected to the leg bone... the Agency has recently informed Iran that there are a number of other findings for which further clarifications and information need to be provided," the report says.
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[Rudaw] Two Yezidi children reunited with their family in the Kurdistan Region on Friday after returning from The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...Qatar's satrapy in Asia Minor... with Kurdistan Region President Nechirvan Barzani, who was on an official visit to Ankara.
"Two Yezidi children, who had been kidnapped by ISIS [Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems.... ] turbans many years ago, have returned to the Kurdistan Region on Friday. The two siblings, a boy and a girl, accompanied the Kurdistan Region delegation headed by President Nechirvan Barzani as it arrived back to Erbil from an official visit to the Ottoman Turkish capital Ankara," read a Friday evening statement released by the Kurdistan Region Presidency.
The children were reunited with their family at Erbil International Airport, it added.
Amir Khudeda Hussein, 10, and Amira Khudeda Hussein, 11, were among 6,417 Yezidis kidnapped by ISIS when it attacked Shingal district in August 2014. According to KRG data, 2,878 remain missing.
The two siblings were said to have been adopted by a Turkmen family who then gave both children to an orphanage in Kirsehir province in 2017 to hide their affiliation with ISIS. They had changed Amir’s name to Ahmed and Amira to Aya, the Ottoman Turkish edition of the Independent reported in mid-July.
Their sister Hadiya has battled Ottoman Turkish courts since 2017 to reunite with her siblings. Authorities refused to hand over the children on the grounds that their parents could be alive.
"Their parents fell to the hands of ISIS in 2014 but there has not been any news of them yet. Therefore, the children are still under the control of their parents," read a November 2019 ruling from a Ottoman Turkish court, according to the Independent.
"For more than three years, the Office of Yazidi Abductees’ Affairs, established by President Nechirvan Barzani, put intense efforts into finding the two children; and with the help of good samaritans and relevant authorities of the government of Turkey, the office managed to locate the two children and return them to their family in the Kurdistan Region," read the statement from the KRG Presidency.
This is not the first time Yezidi survivors have been found in Turkey.
Three brothers and a sister from the family are still missing, Hadiya told Rudaw from Erbil International Airport.
Data from the KRG puts the number of those killed in the first day of the ISIS attack at 1,293, adding that the attack has internally displaced some 310,000 Yezidis and forced more than 100,000 to flee Iraq. Additionally, 2,745 children have been orphaned.
The ethnoreligious minority lived mainly in the district of Shingal in Nineveh before it was attacked by ISIS on August 3, 2014, in what has been recognised by many states as a genocide. Many Yezidi men and elderly people were killed, and young women and girls sold into sexual slavery.
The plight of the Yezidis was brought to renewed attention in 2018 when survivor Nadia Murad was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.
[BenarNews] Malaysia’s new government will not extradite ethnic Uyghurs to China if Beijing requests it and will allow them safe passage to a third country, a cabinet member told parliament recently, responding to questions from a politician concerned that the policy could damage relations with China.
Although the government believes every country has the right to solve its internal problems as it chooses, the government also believes Uyghurs are being oppressed in China, so it won’t send them back there, said Redzuan Md Yusof, minister in the Prime Minister’s Department.
Redzuan’s comments mark the first time that the government of Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin has publicly articulated a stance on the Uyghurs since coming to power in Moslem-majority Malaysia six months ago.
The previous government, led by Mahathir Mohamad, had also said it wouldn’t extradite Uyghurs to China.
[EN.ANNAHAR] Leb ...an Iranian colony situated on the eastern Mediterranean, conveniently adjacent to Israel. Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects. The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozeen flavors of Christians. It is the home of Hezbollah, which periodically starts a war with the Zionist Entity, gets Beirut pounded to rubble, and then declares victory and has a parade. The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers... ’s prime minister-designate said Wednesday he wants to swiftly form a government of specialists committed to enacting urgent reforms in the crisis-stricken country that can regain the trust of the Lebanese and the international community.
Mustapha Adib, a 48-year-old diplomat, spoke to news hounds after holding consultations with members of parliament over the formation of a new crisis Cabinet. He was hastily approved for the job of prime minister earlier this week, ahead of a two-day marathon visit by French President Emmanuel Macron that ended Tuesday night.
It was Macron’s second visit in less than a month as Lebanon faces multiple crises and challenges — including an unprecedented financial and economic meltdown and the aftermath of last month’s massive explosion in Beirut’s port that destroyed the capital.
The giant Aug. 4 explosion, caused by the ignition of nearly 3,000 tons of improperly stored ammonium nitrate, has resulted in intense pressure on Lebanon’s ruling elite, already blamed for driving the small country to the brink of total collapse. At least 190 people were killed and thousands were maimed in the blast.
[Jpost] Facebook took down the pages as part of efforts to remove "violent social militias" from its social networks, said spokesman Andy Stone.
Facebook Inc on Friday removed the pages of U.S. right-wing group Patriot Prayer and its founder Joey Gibson, a company front man told Rooters.
Patriot Prayer has hosted dozens of pro-gun, pro-Trump rallies. Attendees have repeatedly clashed with left-wing groups around Portland, Oregon, where one group supporter was killed this week.
The victim, 39-year-old Aaron Danielson, was walking home on Saturday night after a pro-Trump demonstration in the city when he was shot.
Facebook took down the pages as part of efforts to remove "violent mostly peaceful social militias" from its social networks, front man Andy Stone said.
The company updated its policies last month to ban groups that demonstrate significant risks to public safety.
Its dangerous organizations policy now includes groups that celebrate violent mostly peaceful acts or suggest they will use weapons, even if they are not directly organizing violence.
In a statement posted on Patriot Prayer's website, Gibson accused Facebook of a double standard.
"Antifa ...the armed wing of the Democratic Party... groups murdered my friend while he was walking home, and instead of the multibillion dollar company banning Portland Antifa pages they ban Patriot Prayer, Joey Gibson and several other grandmas that are admins," he wrote.
Antifa is a largely unstructured, far-left movement whose followers broadly aim to confront those they view as authoritarian or racist.
Gibson espouses non-violence but is accused by anti-fascist ...anybody you disagree with, damn them... groups of provoking confrontations.
After the shooting of Danielson he cautioned supporters not to seek Dire Revenge, but rather "push back politically, spiritually."
As of earlier this week, the Patriot Prayer page had nearly 45,000 followers on Facebook. It was created in 2017.
Facebook last week removed content associated with the Kenosha Guard, a group which had posted a "call to arms" in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
The company acted the day after two people were shot and killed at protests in the city, which broke out in response to the police shooting of a Black man earlier that week.
Users had flagged the material to Facebook 455 times but were told initially it did not violate the company's policies, BuzzFeed reported.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
A lefty French satirical magazine, home of what may well be the majority if the active testicles left in Europe...
A lefty French satirical magazine, home of what may well be the majority if the active testicles left in Europe...
...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for 
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling 
[Reason] Both sides are getting their information through purposely bottlenecked media reports, and the results are predictably distorted and dangerous.
...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for 
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling 
...an Iranian colony situated on the eastern Mediterranean, conveniently adjacent to Israel. Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects. The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozeen flavors of Christians. It is the home of Hezbollah, which periodically starts a war with the Zionist Entity, gets Beirut pounded to rubble, and then declares victory and has a parade. The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers...
...the armed wing of the Democratic Party...
