Brexit’s data bogeyman

LONDON — The Irish border, citizens' rights, a free-trade agreement — the list of seemingly intractable Brexit issues facing European and British negotiators is neverending.

Here's another headache: data.

As the United Kingdom hurtles toward the EU exit door, both sides have yet to start discussing how to make sure that reams of digital information — everything from social media posts to companies' customer details — can continue flowing when London finally leaves the 28-member bloc early next year.

The Incredible, Rage-Inducing Inside Story of America’s Student Debt Machine

When Leigh McIlvaine first learned that her student loan debt could be forgiven, she was thrilled. In 2008, at age 27, she’d earned a master’s degree in urban and regional planning from the University of Minnesota. She’d accrued just under $70,000 in debt, though she wasn’t too worried—that’s what it took to invest in her future. But graduating at the height of the recession, she found that the kind of decent-paying public-sector job she’d anticipated pursuing was suddenly closed off by budget and hiring freezes. She landed a gig at a nonprofit in Washington, DC, earning a $46,000 salary. Still, she was happy to live on that amount if it was the cost of doing the work she believed in.

Myanmar Rohingya: UN says military leaders must face genocide charges

A UN report has said top military figures in Myanmar must be investigated for genocide in Rakhine state and crimes against humanity in other areas.

The report, based on hundreds of interviews, is the strongest condemnation from the UN so far of violence against Rohingya Muslims.

It says the army's tactics are "grossly disproportionate to actual security threats". Myanmar rejected the report.

At least 700,000 Rohingya fled violence in the country in the past 12 months.

ISIS Is Ready for a Resurgence

For nearly a year, Islamic State–watchers had wondered whether Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the group, was alive. Then, on Wednesday, he resurfaced for the first time in 11 months, releasing a recorded speech to mark the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha. In the 55-minute speech—his longest of those that have been made public—he referenced recent events, indicating that it was recorded over the past few weeks.

EU sees China plan emerging from fog of Trump’s trade war

U.S. President Donald Trump is fighting his trade war on too many fronts and the EU reckons the American plan is now to narrow the battleground to China.

Brussels is happy to team up with him — as long as it keeps the EU (and Germany's cars) out of the firing line.

Trump opened his tariff war with scattergun declarations against more or less everyone from Mexico to Germany, but European officials now see signs that Washington will have to call a ceasefire in hostilities with Western allies in order to rally an alliance against Beijing.

Election-Hacking Lessons from the 2018 Def Con Hackers Conference

Earlier this month, Bianca Lewis, who is eleven years old, was wearing a T-shirt printed with the words “No time for Barbie, there’s hacking to be done” and sitting in front of a computer at the annual Def Con hacking conference, in Las Vegas, meddling with a replica of the Florida Secretary of State’s election Web site. She’d already surreptitiously entered the site’s database through what is known as an SQL injection. “First, you open the site,” she explained, “then you type a few lines of code into the search bar, and you can delete things and change votes. I deleted Trump. I deleted every single vote for him.”

Food August 24, 2018 Farmworkers Are Dying from Extreme Heat

On June 16, Miguel Angel Guzman Chavez arrived in Georgia from Mexico. He was 24 years old and went right to work picking tomatoes. The Georgia heat was consistently more than 90 degrees, and on June 21, the temperature soared to 95 degrees. That day, Chavez collapsed in the field, suffering from heat stroke, which then led to cardiac arrest. Less than two hours later, he was pronounced dead at the Colquitt Regional Medical Center.

What’s Missing From the Medicare for All Debate

Medicare for All is no longer just a left-wing pipe dream. With polling increasingly in its favor and a record number of Democratic senators and representatives onboard, the idea of expanding Medicare—a government health insurance program for people 65 and older—to all Americans seems like a viable proposal. The case for it was bolstered recently, albeit inadvertently, by a working paper last month from the libertarian, Koch-funded Mercatus Center, which concluded that Senator Bernie Sanders’s plan would save the American public more than $2 trillion over a ten year period.

Sweden’s indigenous Sami reindeer herders are demanding state aid to help them cope with the impact of this summer’s unprecedented drought and wildfires, saying their future is at risk as global warming changes the environment in the far north.

The Swedish government this week announced five major investigations aimed at preparing the country for the kind of extreme heatwave it experienced in July, when temperatures exceeded 86 degrees Fahrenheit and forest fires raged inside the Arctic circle.

Row deepens over alleged police brutality at Bucharest protest

Clouds of tear gas floated above and around Victoriei Square in Bucharest on August 10 as a large anti-government demonstration devolved into clashes between protesters and “jandarmi”, or military police officers.

As tensions escalated in the Romanian capital, pockets of protesters hurled rocks and plastic water bottles at rows of heavily-equipped police.

Ioana Moldovan, a Bucharest-based photographer, followed a group of rally participants to a side street.

Russia plans monster military exercise as Trump’s strategy on Moscow remains vague

Russia’s military right now is on high alert, in the middle of a five-day snap-inspection in the lead up to next week’s massive war games there with Mongolia and China — the largest such military exercise involving Russia since the end of the Cold War.

Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu called the upcoming Vostok-2018 war games “unprecedented in scale, both in terms of area of operations and numbers of military command structure, troops and forces involved.”