Heritage News

  "We have held our first talks with the Taliban, which lasted 3.5 hours," Recep Tayyip Erdogan said (File) Istanbul, Turkey:  President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday said Turkey has held its first talks with the Taliban in Kabul, adding that Ankara was still assessing the terrorist group's offer to run the Afghan capital's airport. "We have held our first talks with the Taliban, which lasted 3.5 hours," Erdogan told reporters. "If necessary, we will have the opportunity to hold such talks again."

  The City Council of Oakland, California started 2021 by strengthening its prohibitions on community surveillance through an amendment to its municipal code. The amendment, passed unanimously, prohibits the city’s police department from using biometric and predictive policing technology. Both practices have raised concerns over invasion of privacy, racial bias, and the targeting of minority communities. This follows a recent trend of local governments adopting anti-surveillance legislation that ranges from regulation of surveillance technology to an outright ban. Although other cities have passed ordinances regulating the use of surveillance and facial recognition technology, as Nathan Sheard of the Electronic Frontier Society points out, Oakland is “the first city to incorporate these prohibitions into a more comprehensive Community Control of Police Surveillance ( CCOPS ) framework.” The types of technology banned include those that can “identify a person based on ‘physiological...

  An American for Prosperity Foundation rally in Washington DC ( credits ). As the Supreme Court itself stated in its majority opinion, its July 1 decision in  American Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, Attorney General of California  may also protect religious organizations that are controversial or unpopular, and their donors. The case was promoted by American for Prosperity Foundation (APF), founded by the billionaire Koch brothers and regarded as one of the largest right-wing political advocacy groups in the United States, and by the Thomas More Law Center, a Christian conservative public interest law firm. They sued the State of California’s Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who now serves as Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Biden administration, after he enforced a requirement that charities and nonprofits operating in California should provide the Attorney General with the names of individuals and companies that in a given year donated more than $5,000 or...

  Robert Mobili on May 15, 2021, led President and Mrs. Aliyev in visiting an “Albanian” church in Nij, “restored” by erasing the Armenian inscriptions. Source: Presidency of the Republic of Azerbaijan. “The restoration of the Albanian Apostolic Church will be the final blow to Armenia,” and make Azerbaijan’s victory in the Second Karabakh War of 2020 definitive and irreversible. This declaration may sound strange, but  it was published in the official site  of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Science, which is part of the local government. These were words of Robert Mobili, chairman of the Albanian-Udi Christian Religious Community of the Republic of Azerbaijan, who these days is often seen with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. What is this all about? “Caucasian Albanians” have nothing to do with the European country of Albania. The name “Albanians” was given by Greek historians around the time of Jesus Christ to a kingdom that probably has been in existence from se...

  Gurdwara Nanaksar Sahib in Chak Fateh Binder as it appears now. From Twitter. Chak Fateh Bhinder is a village in Daska tehsi of Sialkot district of Pakistan’s Punjab. It is not a famous village, except that Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh religion, stopped there after completing his fourth  udasi  (peregrination). This makes the village sacred for the Sikh, and a new shrine called  Gurdwara Nanaksar Sahib was built there at the beginning of the 20 th  century. In theory, the Pakistani government is committed to preserve sacred and historical places of worship of minority religions. In practice, this is not always the case, particularly when the buildings are far away from the main cities and do not attract large crowds of pilgrims, nor significant donations. The largest Sikh representative body, Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC), has now written to the Pakistani government claiming that the Gurdwara in Chak Fateh Binder is in an obvious state ...

      Even as pediatric COVID-19 cases  have risen dramatically across the country, the Los Angeles Unified School District has decided not to disclose to some parents that students in their children’s classrooms have tested positive for the disease. The policy adopted by the nation’s second largest school district, whose fall semester started this week, could effectively limit the ability of parents to remove their kids from school or have them tested for COVID-19 after potentially being exposed to the highly contagious Delta variant. Vaccines for children under 12 have not yet been granted emergency approval by the FDA, heightening concerns about the spike in pediatric COVID cases.   In a 44-page  COVID containment plan  released to the public on Friday, Aug. 13, three days before school reopened, LAUSD states that “those in close contact with the student [who has tested positive for COVID-19] will be notified of the potential exposure by school admi...