Sunday Post

Your argument may be invalid but that watermelon is a great way to finish off a barbecue.

ISIS has now declared territory it has seized in Iraq and Syria as a "new caliphate":

An offshoot of al Qaeda which has seized territory in Iraq and Syria has declared itself an Islamic "caliphate" and called on factions worldwide to pledge their allegiance, a statement posted on Islamist websites and Twitter said on Sunday.

The move poses a direct challenge to the central leadership of al Qaeda, which has disowned it, and to conservative Gulf Arab rulers who already view the group as a security threat.

The group, previously known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and also known as ISIS, has renamed itself "Islamic State" and proclaimed its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as "Caliph" - the head of the state, the statement said.

"He is the imam and khalifah (Caliph) for the Muslims everywhere," the group's spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani said in the statement, which was translated into several languages and read out in an Arabic audio speech.

"Accordingly, the "Iraq and Sham" (Levant) in the name of the Islamic State is henceforth removed from all official deliberations and communications, and the official name is the Islamic State from the date of this declaration," he said.

The Sunni Muslim militant group follows al Qaeda's hard-line ideology but draws its strength from foreign fighters battle-hardened from Iraq.

It seeks to re-create a medieval-style caliphate erasing borders from the Mediterranean to the Gulf. It deems Shi'ite Muslims to be heretics deserving death.

It is time to sit back and watch this unfold. The Islamic world has wanted to make the entire globe a caliphate. Now, it can compete with other states in that region.

Interesting times...

Related: Obama is willing to send $500 million USD to train rebels in Syria but will not even speak about the elimination of historic Christian populations in that region.

Also:

A 17-year-old girl and her husband were killed by her family for marrying without its consent, and another young woman was burned alive by a man for refusing his proposal in Pakistan’s eastern Punjab province, police said Sunday.

The government of Ontario has refused to fund a child's medical treatment:

A three-year-old city girl has run into a government-sized roadblock in her fight against a high-risk form of childhood leukemia.

Diagnosed with the aggressive cancer when she was nine weeks old, Phoebe Rose Doull-Hoffman recently had a relapse for a third time.

Her family and doctors agree her best bet at beating the disease is a Phase 1 clinical trial at a New York Hospital.

It's pricey, in the $250,000 range. They asked OHIP to pay for the treatment and after an 18-day wait, Phoebe's parents, Jenny and Jonathan, got the bad news -- the province won't fund the treatment.

In a letter, the Ontario ministry of health said it had "evaluated this patient's" application but found Phoebe's case "does not satisfy the evidence requirement" for funding of the treatment, saying there wasn't enough proof the treatment would work.

The government said in the letter, provided to QMI Agency by the office of Ottawa-Vanier MPP Madeleine Meilleur, it "does not fund treatment that is considered experimental in Ontario."

What the government of Ontario will fund.

Discuss.


What is wrong with people?

The mother of a toddler who died in an unattended SUV in suburban Atlanta told investigators she did online research on how hot it needs to be for a child to die in an unattended vehicle because she was afraid it might happen, police said.

Nothing about this makes sense.


Interesting:

On the western coast of Hudson Bay in northern Manitoba there's a gravelly cliff, covered in grass and large rocks, with a 360-degree view of the stark and wild area around it.

It doesn't look like much to the untrained eye, but some 400 years before Europeans set foot in North America, the cliff was a thriving hunting camp for the ancestors of today's Inuit.

Today, there are remnants of 22 large tent rings, as well as food caches, burial grounds and kayak rests — all estimated to be about 1,000 years old.

Researchers are heading to the site, just south of the Manitoba-Nunavut border, next weekend to carefully excavate for animal bones and tools in the hope of gaining insight into the lives of the ancient Inuit known as the Thule.

Ladies and gentlemen, take a trip back in time when the railroad did not run.