Skripals poisoned from front door of Salisbury home, police say | UK news | The Guardian
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Category: International Affairs,
Ecuador blocks Julian Assange internet access, bars visitors
Julian Assange is now completely isolated from the world after the Ecuadorean embassy cut off his internet access and banned him from receiving visitors.
Ecuador announced over night that it had cut off the WikiLeaks founder’s internet connection at its London embassy after his recent activity on social media decrying the arrest of a Catalan separatist politician and calling a British MP a “snake.”
In a statement, officials said Mr Assange’s recent posts “put at risk” the good relations Ecuador maintains with nations throughout Europe and had decided as of Tuesday to suspend his internet access “in order to prevent any potential harm.”
Ecuador blocks Julian Assange internet access, bars visitors
Cambridge Analytica is an ‘example of what modern day colonialism looks like’
The firm’s work on Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta’s successful 2013 and 2017 election campaigns was described in the report.
“We have rebranded the entire party twice, written their manifesto, done two rounds of 50,000 (participant) surveys,” Mark Turnbull, managing director of Cambridge Analytica Political Global, said in the undercover video.
“Then we’d write all the speeches and we’d stage the whole thing — so just about every element of his campaign,” Turnbull added.
Cambridge Analytica is an ‘example of what modern day colonialism looks like’
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Parts of the Amazon thought uninhabited were actually home to up to a million people
Parts of the Amazon previously thought to have been almost uninhabited were really home to thriving populations of up to a million people, new research shows.
…Archaeologists have uncovered evidence that there were hundreds of villages in the rainforest away from major rivers, and they were home to different communities speaking varied languages who had an impact on the environment around them.
…People had assumed ancient communities had preferred to live near these waterways, but the new evidence shows this was not the case.
The discovery fills a major gap in the history of the Amazon, and provides further evidence that the rainforest—once thought to be untouched by human farming or occupation—has in fact been heavily influenced by those who lived in it.
Parts of the Amazon thought uninhabited were actually home to up to a million people
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Jeremy Corbyn, the U.K. Labour Leader, Was In Three Secret Anti-Semitic Facebook Groups
The left-wing leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has been condemned as “a figurehead for anti-Semitism” by Jewish leaders after a steady drip of reports over the past weeks revealed that he was a member of three secret Facebook groups where people shared anti-Jewish conspiracies and propaganda, including one post where Corbyn directly criticized the removal of anti-Semitic graffiti.
…At the beginning of March he was revealed to have been in a group where terms such as “ZioNazi” were used and conspiracy theories about Jewish involvement in 9/11 were shared among members. U.K. politics blog Guido Fawkes has since revealed Corbyn’s membership of two further groups where people shared offensive anti-Semitic content.
Jeremy Corbyn, the U.K. Labour Leader, Was In Three Secret Anti-Semitic Facebook Groups
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Cambridge Analytica misled MPs over work for Leave.EU
Cambridge Analytica conducted data research for one of the leading Brexit campaign groups and then misled the public and MPs over the work the company had undertaken, according to a former employee who has spoken to the Guardian.
In an exclusive interview, Brittany Kaiser, Cambridge Analytica’s business development director until two weeks ago, said the work with Leave.EU involved analysis of data provided by Ukip.
Cambridge Analytica misled MPs over work for Leave.EU, says ex-director | News | The Guardian
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Former Brexit volunteer alleges campaign ‘cheated’
Shahmir Sanni told Channel 4 that the organization “Vote Leave” coordinated spending over the legal limit, using a Canadian data firm called Aggregate IQ, otherwise known as AIQ. British election law enforces a spending cap on donations, which includes when groups coordinate donations.
…Sanni claims a donation of £625,000 by Vote Leave to another Brexit group, “BeLeave,” was funneled to AIQ.
…Channel 4 says it has seen documents that it claims show multiple ties between AIQ and Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL.
Former Brexit volunteer alleges campaign ‘cheated’ – CNNPolitics
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The Fall of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Future of Israel
Nir Hefetz, a former journalist, has been described as “Netanyahu’s spin doctor,” the man responsible for massaging press coverage of the first couple. But after Hefetz’s arrest in February, he agreed to turn state’s evidence and hand over recordings of the Netanyahus discussing an alleged criminal conspiracy. He is the third confidante of the prime minister known to have cooperated with the authorities in recent months.
The Fall of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Future of Israel
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Investigators raid Cambridge Analytica’s London offices
Elizabeth Denham, head of the ICO, sought the warrant after a whistleblower said Cambridge Analytica had gathered private information of 50 million Facebook users to support Donald Trump’s 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.
Britain is investigating whether Facebook, the world’s largest social media network, did enough to protect data.
…U.S. and European lawmakers have demanded an explanation of how the British consulting firm gained access to the data in 2014 and why Facebook failed to inform its users, raising broader industry questions about consumer privacy.
Investigators raid Cambridge Analytica’s London offices | VentureBeat
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Escaping Kakuma: How women find freedom through soccer in a refugee camp
The refugee camp is the third largest in the world, but it has been around for so long that it has lost any pretense it is supposed to be temporary.
…The refugees that reside there come from nations with prominently conservative cultures — primarily South Sudan and Somalia — where women are expected to stay in their homes and handle traditional household duties, like cooking, cleaning, and child-raising. The women you do see in the market are often carrying heavy loads of firewood. Every duty related to maintaining a homestead almost exclusively fall on women, while men — people who in a better world would be working — talk away their days.
…Unless you seek them out, refugee women are largely invisible in Kakuma. To be a refugee man is to feel ignored by the world. To be a refugee woman, then, is to be erased from it.
…There were still many more stories to tell within the world’s third-largest refugee camp, however, a place where sports have greater meaning as a way to combat idleness within an oft-forgotten population. This is a story about the women of Kakuma.
…Angelina Jolie Primary School stands apart from Kakuma’s hatchet-shaped cartography. It was opened in 2005 — funded by the actress and special envoy to the UNHCR — as a boarding school for bright or at-risk girls. There, they can be nurtured in a safer environment, away from the problems within Kakuma’s traditional borders. The girls are given a more focused education — the classrooms are much smaller than in the coed schools that pack upwards of a 100 students in one room — and they perform, on average, much better than the rest of Kakuma on Kenya’s standardized testing for secondary schools.
Escaping Kakuma: How women find freedom through soccer in a refugee camp – SBNation.com
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Zimbabwe’s Emmerson Mnangagwa pardons 3,000 prisoners
All women, except those with life sentences, and all juvenile prisoners under the age of 18 were granted amnesty, the Zimbabwe Prisons and Correctional Services (ZPCS) announced on Wednesday at a press conference in the capital, Harare.
Prisoners with sentences under 36 months who have served a quarter of their term and terminally ill inmates who are unlikely to survive their term would also be freed, local media reported.
Inmates on death row for more than 10 years also had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment.
…Zimbabwe’s prisons currently hold about 20,000 inmates but have a capacity of only 17,000.
Zimbabwe’s Emmerson Mnangagwa pardons 3,000 prisoners | Emmerson Mnangagwa News | Al Jazeera
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