Libya’s U.N.-backed government has denounced France for sending troops into eastern Libya, declaring it a violation of Libyan sovereignty. The French sent in the troops to fight the Islamic State, whose followers have been murdering French people in large numbers.
To read an article on this, please hit this link.
French officials now say that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the Tunisian who murdered 84 people in Nice, had accomplices in preparing his assault.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
“The new evidence appears to contradict claims made by top French officials immediately after the rampage that Lahouaiej Bouhlel was radicalized in a matter of weeks, leaving security services little chance of stopping him when he plowed through throngs of revelers on Bastille Day with a 21-ton truck.
Instead, prosecutors, now say, Lahouaiej Bouhlel may have done surveillance on his target a year before he acted and communicated more than a thousand times with suspected accomplices, the paper reported.
To read The Wall Street Journal story, please hit this link.
U.S. and other NATO forces, working with an increasingly well trained and effective Afghan military, are making considerable progress against the Taliban insurgency.
The Washington Post reports: “The operations are part of a broader effort by Afghan forces, backed by increasing U.S airstrikes, to treat the Taliban more as a foreign enemy than as a domestic insurgent group worthy of some military restraint, according to Afghan officials and analysts. As a result, they say, there are signs the Taliban is under strain this summer while Afghan security forces, at least the elite ones, are finally becoming a battle-ready force.”
To read The Post’s story, please hit this link.
Downtown Manila.
This Reuters report looks at where money stolen by Bangladesh Bank hackers went. Much of the money disappeared into the Manila’s casino industry, where it has been so far impossible to track.
To read the article, please hit this link.
Republican Party presidential nominee Donald Trump says that if he is elected U.S. president, America will not necessarily come to the aid of a NATO ally under attack {most likely by Russia}. He said that such aid might depend on how much that ally has contributed to the alliance.
He has long said that other countries should start sharing more of the NATO’s collective-defense costs, much of which has long been borne by Washington And he threatened to move to cancel treaties he believes place too great a burden on the U.S.
The real-estate/reality TV mogul Mr. Trump also said that he would not pressure Turkey or other authoritarian allies to end crackdowns on political foes or the suppression of civil liberties.
To read The Guardian’s article on his remarks, please hit this link.