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.”

Russian Trolls Promote And Politicize Story of Murdered Iowa Woman As Trump Fallout Continues

President Donald Trump is facing a scandal of epic proportions, with his campaign manager convicted of federal crimes and his former lawyer pleading guilty to charges that implicated him.

But some of Trump's supporters are desperate to swamp the story with a grossly politicized discussion of Mollie Tibbetts, the murdered 20-year-old University of Iowa student whose suspected killer is allegedly in the United States illegally. And they appear to be getting some help from an all-too-familiar source: Russian Twitter troll accounts.

Could China Be the Next Global Leader?

As the second year of Donald Trump’s presidency and sixth of Xi Jinping’s draws to a close, the world seems to be witnessing one of those epochal clashes that can change the contours of global power. Just as conflicts between American President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister Lloyd George produced a failed peace after World War I, competition between Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and American President Harry Truman sparked the Cold War, and the rivalry between Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, so the empowered presidents of the United States and China are now pursuing bold, intensely personal visions of new global orders that could potentially reshape the trajectory of the twenty-first century — or bring it all down.

UK hospitals yet to start planning for no-deal Brexit

LONDON — The majority of U.K. hospitals have yet to make plans for a no-deal Brexit, according to data provided under Britain's Freedom of Information Act.

A survey of NHS trusts carried out by POLITICO suggests that almost no formal contingency planning for a no-deal scenario has begun at the local level. Of 38 trusts in England that responded to a Freedom of Information request to disclose documents relating to preparations and impact assessments on different Brexit scenarios, 35 said they hold no such documents.

Saudi Arabia Seeks Its First Death Penalty Against Female Human Rights Activist

RIYADH (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia’s public prosecutor is seeking the death penalty against five human rights activists from the kingdom’s Eastern Province currently on trial in a secretive terrorism court, groups including Human Rights Watch (HRW) said.

Among the detainees is Israa al-Ghomgham, whom Saudi activists said was the first woman to possibly face the death penalty for rights-related work. Charges against her include incitement to protest and providing moral support to rioters.

'Our memories have vanished': the Palestinian theatre destroyed in a bomb strike

It was the deep panic of the last-minute rush known to everyone involved in theatre.

One of the playhouse’s top directors, a precocious 27-year-old who had been working in theatre since he was a teenager, was preparing his latest production – a dark comedy. Stage crew and actors had been working for months, all leading up to the Eid al-Adha performance, one of the biggest productions of the year timed for the Islamic holiday period.

More Russian Hacking Uncovered Ahead Of Midterms — This Time Targeting Conservatives

Microsoft announced Tuesday that it had uncovered — and thwarted — fresh Russian hacking attempts on U.S. political groups ahead of the November midterm elections.

The hacking attempts, which targeted two conservative think-tanks, have been described as attempts to “disrupt democracy” itself and to undermine any institution, regardless of political affiliation, that challenges the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Even More Evidence That Russia Is Still Meddling in U.S. Politics

WASHINGTON — Hackers affiliated with the Russian government have expanded their targets to include the U.S. Senate as well as two American think tanks critical of Russia. The discovery comes from a new report by Microsoft, which says it helped detect this new wave of hacking and is going public for the first time about its efforts to block future cyberattacks.

The two think tanks in question are the Hudson Institute, a hawkish organization that works on anti-corruption reforms in Russia, and the International Republican Institute, whose board of directors includes six GOP senators and many other right-leaning foreign-policy types who have spoken in favor of Russian sanctions and other punitive measures against the country.

Can the Manufacturer of Tasers Provide the Answer to Police Abuse?

Rick Smith, who made a fortune selling conducted-energy weapons—stun guns—likes to say that he is a “techno-optimist.” Human beings create problems, technology solves them, and a few bold thinkers get phenomenally rich in the process. Forty-eight years old, with a coplike, jacked physique, Smith is a co-founder and the C.E.O. of Taser International, which supplies police departments with weapons that are less lethal than firearms. “A hundred years ago in New York, they had a major problem,” he said. “Horse manure was spreading disease. You can imagine if you’d gone around New York and told people who love their horses, ‘We’re going to take your horses away.’ There’s the same dynamic with Americans and guns. What happened a hundred years ago was that we had a technology shift.” He paused, dwelling for a fraction of a second on the implication that cars had saved the world. “Now, that introduced some other problems,” he continued breezily. “And hopefully now we have some new technology to solve the carbon problem.” Solutions that create problems in need of solutions: that, he told me, is the definition of business.

Russian hackers targeting conservative US thinktanks, Microsoft says

The Russian group linked to the hacking of Hillary Clinton’s presidential election campaign has been launching fresh attacks in the US, including against two conservative thinktanks, in the run-up to the midterm elections, according to Microsoft.

The technology company, which uncovered the new attempts, said the hackers created fake websites that appeared to mimic the Hudson Institute and the International Republican Institute, two rightwing thinktanks broadly allied against Donald Trump. Three other fake domains were designed to look as if they belonged to the US Senate.

Labour's Chris Williamson Praises Vanessa Beeley, Blogger Who Called Jo Cox A 'Warmongering Blairite'

A Labour MP has said it was a “privilege” to meet and listen to a talk by a controversial pro-Assad blogger, who has previously described murdered MP Jo Cox as a “warmongering Al Qaeda advocate”.

Vanessa Beeley made the comment in a tweet almost a year after Cox’s death, and has also written that “Zionists rule France”.

Derby North MP Chris Williamson met Beeley at the Beautiful Days festival over the weekend, where she appeared on stage to discuss the Syrian conflict.