Globe Trot: Obama visits mosque with extremist ties

UNITED STATES: Today when President Barack Obama stepped shoeless into a mosque at the Islamic Society of Baltimore, he embarked on the first such visit of his presidency to a Muslim site with deep ties to extremist elements, including the Muslim Brotherhood. WORLD has previously reported on the Islamic American Relief Agency, an unindicted co-conspirator in a lengthy and contorted terrorism case.

ISIS: The U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State in Iraq and Syria aims to recapture Mosul this year and drive the militants out of its headquarters in Syria. But the Pentagon is revving up (subscription required) a budget that appears to put more arms in Europe, not the Middle East.

As they have now for more than 18 months, Kurdish fighters are holding a taut line against ISIS in northern Iraq—and serving as proxy for U.S. ground forces: “Yesterday we are attacked by an anti-aircraft gun,” a Kurdish commander said. “It only shot five times before the Americans destroyed it.”

PUERTO RICO: With new proposals on the table to restructure public debt, not everyone in Puerto Rico is seeking bankruptcy protection, after all. (subscription required)

NIGERIA: The UN Security Council has condemned an attack by Boko Haram militants in Dalori village that killed 86 Nigerians over the weekend. But the UN took no new action to protect the Muslim village and nearby Christian villages under siege.

GERMANY: The Babylonians used complex geometry and a form of integral calculus to calculate the path of Jupiter somewhere between 350 and 50 B.C. in modern-day Iraq, according to a recently translated cuneiform tablet housed in the British Museum. To understand the magnitude of the discovery, consider: Current textbooks on the history of math say that invention took place around A.D. 1350.