The Iraqi army was trying on Thursday to reach a town south of Mosul where Islamic State has reportedly executed dozens to deter the population against any attempt to support the U.S.-led offensive on the jihadists' last major city stronghold in Iraq.

slamic State fighters are keeping up their fierce defense of the southern approaches to Mosul, which has held up Iraqi troops there and forced an elite army unit east of the city to put a more rapid advance on hold.

The fall of Mosul would mark Islamic State's effective defeat in Iraq.

Iraqi army fighting to reach site of ISIL executions

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said on Thursday his country could join naval exercises with Japan, but repeated there would be no more war games with long-time ally the United States and again gave vent to his anger against Washington.

I had told the prime minister some of my sentiments against the Americans. They are treating us like dogs on a leash," he said. "The prime minister understands that."

Trump’s last-second Hail Mary pitch—which is literally “What the hell do you have to lose?”—is  not going to work.

In 2016, bitter and unyielding contests have placed the state at the center of national debates about race, civil rights, violence, and elections. In the span of a year, an anti-transgender bathroom bill sparked rallies and a fierce debate over civil rights, flames licked the streets of a resegregated Charlotte during protests over a police shooting, a local GOP office was firebombed, and a collection of new laws have been enacted—and promptly challenged in court. But the most contentious and sustained rift has been in the arena of voting rights, and it is there where White’s words resound most loudly.

China’s Communist party has given the president, Xi Jinping, the title of “core” leader, putting him on par with previous strongmen Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, but signalled his power would not be absolute.

An unofficial campaign to name Xi the “core” has been under way this year, with about two-thirds of provincial leaders referring to him as such in speeches, according to figures compiled by Reuters, before the plenum formally accorded him the title.

“It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition: that it must be lived forwards.” This observation was made in 1843 by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in a journal entry, but it might have been written about the contemporary Middle East.

By 2009, the movement Zarqawi created was all but dead. But not quite. Embers of his Islamic state remained, kept alive by Sunni rage.

The group's roots are in the Sunni terror group al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), started in 2004 by Jordanian Islamist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It was a major player in the insurgency against the US-led forces that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, and against the Shiite-dominated government that eventually replaced Hussein.

Nixon in the 1970s and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s won landslides that swept the country. Yet the scope of their victories disguised the emergence of new regional biases. As the Democrats took a more leftward turn from the mid-20th century, so the Republicans shifted to the right and the electoral map flipped. The GOP is now a nearly all-white party with a political base in the South and West, while the Democrats have taken over the 19th-century Republican strongholds of the North. 

The map above is a great example. Made in 1900, it portrays Russia as an octopus with tentacles reaching out in all directions, strangling Poland, Finland, and China, and reaching toward Turkey, Afghanistan, and Persia. The map’s creator, British cartographer Frederick Rose, was, in his time, perhaps the most influential maker of what are known as anthropomorphic maps. Though the octopus is the main character of this map, most European countries are depicted as various people, which is where the style gets its name.