Hasta La Gadget!

ISTANBUL (AP) — Asiya Ummi Abdullah doesn’t share the view that the Islamic State group rules over a terrorist dystopia and she isn’t scared by the American bombs falling on Raqqa, its power center in Syria.

As far as she’s concerned, it’s the ideal place to raise a family. In interviews with The Associated Press, the 24-year-old Muslim convert explained her decision to move with her toddler to the territory controlled by the militant group, saying it offers them protection from the sex, drugs and alcohol that she sees as rampant in largely secular Turkey.

“The children of that country see all this and become either murderers or delinquents or homosexuals or thieves,” Umi Abdullah wrote in one of several Facebook messages. Living under Shariah, the Islamic legal code, means that her 3-year-old boy’s spiritual life is secure, she said.

“He will know God and live under His rules,” she said.

Ummi Abdullah’s experience illustrates the pull of the Islamic State group, the self-styled caliphate straddling Iraq and Syria. It also shows how, even in modern Turkey entire families are dropping everything to find salvation.

Ummi Abdullah, originally from Kyrgyzstan, reached the Islamic State group only last month, and her disappearance became front-page news in Turkey after her ex-husband, a 44-year-old car salesman named Sahin Aktan, went to the press.

Legions of others in Turkey have carted away family to the Islamic State group under less public scrutiny and in greater numbers. Earlier this month, more than 50 families slipped across the border to live under Islamic State, according to opposition legislator Atilla Kart.

Kart’s figure appears high, but his account is backed by a villager from Cumra, in central Turkey, who told AP that his son and his daughter-in-law are among the group. The villager spoke on condition of anonymity, saying he fears reprisals.

The movement of foreign fighters to the Islamic State group has been covered extensively since the group tore across Iraq in June. The arrival of entire families, many but not all of them Turkish, has received less attention.

“It’s about fundamentalism,” said Ahmet Kasim Han, a professor of international relations at Istanbul’s Kadir Has University. “It kind of becomes a false heaven.”

Like many others, Ummi Abdullah’s journey to radical Islam was born out of loneliness. Born Svetlana Hasanova, she converted to Islam after marrying Aktan six years ago. The pair met in Turkey when Hasanova, still a teenager, came to Istanbul with her mother to buy textiles.

Aktan said the relationship worked at first.

“Before we were married we were swimming in the sea, in the pool, and in the evening we would sit down and eat fish and drink wine,” he said.

Aktan said his wife became increasingly devout after the birth of their son, covering her hair and praying frequently. In her messages to the AP, Ummi Abdullah accused her husband of treating her “like a slave.”

“I was constantly belittled by him and his family,” she said. “I was nobody in their eyes.”

Ummi Abdullah found the companionship she yearned for online, chatting with jihadists and filling her Facebook page with religious exhortations. In June, she and Aktan divorced. The next month, she took their child to a Turkish town near the Syrian border, before leaving for the Islamic State group.

Aktan says he hasn’t seen his son since.

The Islamic State group appears eager to advertise itself as a family-friendly place. One promotional video shows a montage of Muslim fighters from around the world holding their children in Raqqa against the backdrop of an amusement park.

A man, identified in the footage as an American named Abu Abdurahman al-Trinidadi, holds an infant who has a toy machine gun strapped to his back.

“Look at all the little children,” al-Trinidadi says. “They’re having fun.”

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Suzan Fraser contributed from Ankara, Turkey.

After spending nearly six years of his presidency installing a series of constraints on U.S. counterterrorism operations, President Obama has launched a broad military offensive against Islamist groups in Syria that stretches the limits of those legal and policy enclosures.

As we have all heard (and experienced) before, looking great has a lot to do with feeling amazing in you’re clothes, whether that be a proper fitting shirt, tailored pants or even .. the right underwear.

Not many people feel so passionately about the latter that they leave their careers in the name of properly fitting under garments. But Kerry O’Brien, founder and designer of Commando, is not like many others. The undie-expert ditched her longtime job in finance back in 2003 to start her own business centered around what goes underneath your clothes. Countless pieces on the runway and a patented elastic-free waistband later, O’Brien continues to revolutionize the way we get dressed.

While we’ve always been comfy-clothes advocates, running around at New York Fashion Week further solidified for us that effortless style begins by dressing with ease. Who better to chat with, then, than the woman who has spent eleven years thinking of ways to make undergarments easier and more comfortable to wear?

We chatted with O’Brien about the horrors of elastic, the secret to her continued success and how excited she was that a certain “bad girl” wore one of her designs.

On leaving her career in finance to start Commando:

“It wasn’t really an ‘aha!’ moment. It was more like, ‘Now I’m going to start a new chapter.’ It gave me permission and made me rethink my life in a way. I felt like although everything in my life was going wonderfully in certain aspects, I didn’t feel passionately about my career anymore.”

On how undergarments make a fashion statement of their own:

“Your fashion moment starts the second you put on your underwear. In my opinion, it sets the tone for the rest of the day. People need to think about outfits in their entirety, which includes what goes underneath.”

Commando’s Double-Take Thong

On the evils of elastic:

“I have always resented elastic around my body. It interferes with my look, it creates lines. It’s hard to feel beautiful and confident when your underwear is uncomfortable and digging into you. That’s where the idea for the non-elastic waistband came from.”

On the secret to her success:

“Instead of feeling shy about my ideas, I kept pushing the limits and asking how I could make them come to life. Doing that definitely took some fearlessness, which I needed to muster up at times, but it was worth it.”

On committing to great underwear:

“You need to invest in underwear, just like you would with the perfect pair of boots or a great pair of black pants. You need to wear things that make you feel fabulous, that don’t fight with your body but rather love and understand it.”

On that time Rihanna wore Commando:

“I happened to be at the party [for the CFDA Fashion Awards] when Rihanna won the Style Icon award. She was wearing Commando underwear underneath that gorgeous Adam Selman dress, and her underwear was as visible as the dress! That was a lot of fun.”

There was a time when American pharmaceutical companies had finally found a way to access the large reserves of cash they had piling up in places like the Cayman Islands. The process was simple: Acquire a smaller foreign rival, repatriate in the rival’s home country and then dip into the offshore money without fear of paying the U.S. corporate tax rate of 35 percent.

But the U.S. Treasury Department effectively undercut that strategy this week, issuing new rules that will make it a lot harder for U.S. companies to tap into offshore cash without paying taxes — even if they move their headquarters abroad in one of these deals, known as “inversions.”

There are more than a dozen inversions currently pending, and it’s not yet clear whether the raft of new rules will scuttle any of those deals. But of the pending inversions, those involving drug companies seem to be most immediately at peril, tax experts told The Huffington Post, because those companies are the most likely to be pursuing inversions as a way to get tax-free access to offshore cash.

“The new rules will make these companies stop and think twice,” said Frank Clemente, the executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, a tax reform advocacy group that opposes inversions.

Among the deals that could be in trouble are those involving Medtronic and AbbVie, two American drug companies with plans to buy smaller Irish rivals and then invert, moving their headquarters abroad for the purposes of taxation. Pfizer’s on-again, off-again pursuit of the British drugmaker AstraZeneca could also be imperiled. The three U.S. companies collectively hold more than $100 billion offshore, tax filings show.

Shares of Medtronic and AbbVie fell nearly 3 percent and 2 percent, respectively, on Tuesday. Pfizer’s stock was down about 0.5 percent.

A Medtronic spokesman said the company was reviewing the Treasury’s actions. A spokeswoman for Pfizer said she had no comment, but noted that the company had previously said it did not plan to make a takeover offer for AstraZeneca. (Discussions have continued behind closed doors, according to news reports.) AbbVie did not respond to a request for comment.

Other companies that have pursued inversions — including Burger King, which is buying Tim Hortons in Canada, and Chiquita, which aims to acquire Fyffes in Ireland — may not be dissuaded by the new rules. Neither Burger King nor Chiquita has much cash stored abroad. Tax experts say they may be motivated more by the benefits of a practice called “earnings stripping,” in which the U.S. subsidiary of the inverted company gets loaded up with debt in a bid to lower the domestic tax bill.

Tax experts estimate that Walgreens, which had planned an inversion with Alliance Boots of Switzerland, could have saved $4 billion over five years through such a tactic. (Fearing a public backlash, Walgreens later canceled its plan to move its headquarters abroad.)

Drug companies don’t have much need for earnings stripping, mainly because they have already mastered the art of making it look as if they make much less money than they actually do.

A favorite big-pharma tax-avoidance method is to set up a subsidiary in a low-tax jurisdiction and then sell that subsidiary the patents for certain drugs. The American parent company then pays the subsidiary royalties for medication sold in the U.S. — thereby reducing its own domestic earnings and lowering its tax bill. This is how many pharma giants have built such big stacks of cash offshore.

In comments Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew acknowledged that the new rules might stop some inversions, but said they were unlikely to kill the practice entirely.

Comprehensive corporate tax reform by Congress “is the only way to fully rein in these transactions,” he said.

By Jonny Hogg and Tom Perry

MURSITPINAR, Turkey/BEIRUT, Sept 24 (Reuters) – Islamic State has reinforced fighters who are battling Kurdish forces for control of a Syrian town at the border with Turkey, a redeployment triggered by U.S.-led air strikes on the group elsewhere, a Kurdish military official said.

Ocalan Iso, deputy leader of the Kurdish forces defending the town of Kobani at the Turkish border, said more Islamic State fighters and tanks had arrived since the U.S.-led coalition began air strikes on the group on Tuesday.

“The number of their fighters has increased, the number of their tanks has increased since the bombardment of Raqqa,” Iso told Reuters by telephone. He repeated calls for the U.S.-led coalition to expand its air strikes to Islamic State positions near Kobani, which is also known as Ayn al-Arab.

“Kobani is in danger,” he said.

Thousands of Syrian refugees enter Turkey at Yumurtalik crossing gate near Suruc, Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2014.(AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici)

The U.S.-led air strikes on Islamic State in Syria have so far targeted the provinces of Raqqa, Deir al-Zor and Hasakah. Islamic State launched a major offensive against Kobani last week, forcing nearly 140,000 Syrian Kurds to flee across the border into Turkey within days – the largest and fastest exodus of civilians since the Syrian conflict began in 2011.

Iso said Islamic State fighters had advanced to within 8 km (5 miles) from the southern periphery of Kobani – closer than they have been at any stage in the latest offensive.

“We call on American forces to hit their positions. They are 8 km from Kobani. They were 25 km away before,” he said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks violence in the Syrian conflict, earlier reported air strikes on Islamic State positions to the west of Kobani by warplanes that appeared to cross from Turkey.

But Kurdish officials in Kobani could not confirm the report, and Turkey said neither its air space nor a U.S. air base in the southern Turkish town of Incirlik had been used in the air strikes.

Turkish soldiers stand as Syrian refugees wait for permission to enter Turkey at the Yumurtalik crossing gate near Suruc, Turkey, Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2014. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici)

A group of several dozen Syrian Kurds who had fled the fighting watched from a hillside on the Turkish side of the border as Kurdish fighters battled Islamic State militants in a cluster of villages called Siftek. The sound of sporadic artillery and gunfire echoed around the hills.

The Kurds appeared to be firing mortars from the back of a truck into a village where Islamic State had taken up positions.

“Because of the bombing in Raqqa, Islamic State has taken all of their weapons and brought them here. There are more and more Islamic State fighters in the last two days, they have brought all their forces here,” said Ahmed Hassan, 60, a Syrian Kurd who fled to Turkey with his family.

“They have heavy weapons. We are running away from them. YPG haven’t got heavy weapons. That’s why we need help,” he said, referring to the main Kurdish armed group.

Idris Nassan, deputy minister for foreign affairs in a Kurdish administration controlling the Kobani area, said Islamic State remained around 15 km from the town in the east and west but had advanced in the south to within 10 km after heavy clashes with Kurdish forces.

“Now I hear the noise of mortars in the south,” he told Reuters by telephone. “Islamic State gathered heavy forces there. So did the YPG but Islamic State pushed them back.”

Thousands of Syrian refugees enter Turkey at Yumurtalik crossing gate near Suruc, Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2014. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici)

(Additional reporting by Seyhmus Cakan in Diyarbakir and Sylvia Westall in Beirut; Writing by Tom Perry; Editing by Peter Graff)