French officials now say that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the Tunisian who murdered 84 people in Nice, had accomplices in preparing his assault.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
“The new evidence appears to contradict claims made by top French officials immediately after the rampage that Lahouaiej Bouhlel was radicalized in a matter of weeks, leaving security services little chance of stopping him when he plowed through throngs of revelers on Bastille Day with a 21-ton truck.
Instead, prosecutors, now say, Lahouaiej Bouhlel may have done surveillance on his target a year before he acted and communicated more than a thousand times with suspected accomplices, the paper reported.
U.S. and other NATO forces, working with an increasingly well trained and effective Afghan military, are making considerable progress against the Taliban insurgency.
The Washington Post reports: “The operations are part of a broader effort by Afghan forces, backed by increasing U.S airstrikes, to treat the Taliban more as a foreign enemy than as a domestic insurgent group worthy of some military restraint, according to Afghan officials and analysts. As a result, they say, there are signs the Taliban is under strain this summer while Afghan security forces, at least the elite ones, are finally becoming a battle-ready force.”
This Reuters report looks at where money stolen by Bangladesh Bank hackers went. Much of the money disappeared into the Manila’s casino industry, where it has been so far impossible to track.
Republican Party presidential nominee Donald Trump says that if he is elected U.S. president, America will not necessarily come to the aid of a NATO ally under attack {most likely by Russia}. He said that such aid might depend on how much that ally has contributed to the alliance.
He has long said that other countries should start sharing more of the NATO’s collective-defense costs, much of which has long been borne by Washington And he threatened to move to cancel treaties he believes place too great a burden on the U.S.
The real-estate/reality TV mogul Mr. Trump also said that he would not pressure Turkey or other authoritarian allies to end crackdowns on political foes or the suppression of civil liberties.
Contrary to the long-accepted assertions of officials who served in the Nixon administration, President Nixon’s “secret” diplomacy to establish ties with Mao Zedong’s China was well known to Taiwanese officials as the diplomacy, mostly conducted from the U.S. side by Henry Kissinger, progressed. This bombshell comes from Jay Taylor, an author and former U.S. diplomat, and University of Pennsylvania historian Arthur Waldron.
This Bloomberg story looks at how a man trains computers to find future criminals through algorithms.
The article says:
“Risk scores, generated by algorithms, are an increasingly common factor in sentencing. Computers crunch data—arrests, type of crime committed, and demographic information—and a risk rating is generated. The idea is to create a guide that’s less likely to be subject to unconscious biases, the mood of a judge, or other human shortcomings. Similar tools are used to decide which blocks police officers should patrol, where to put inmates in prison, and who to let out on parole. Supporters of these tools claim they’ll help solve historical inequities, but their critics say they have the potential to aggravate them, by hiding old prejudices under the veneer of computerized precision. Some people see them as a sterilized version of what brought protesters into the streets at Black Lives Matter rallies {in the U.S.}”
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says that the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union has “thrown a spanner in the works” of its global economic growth forecast.
The IMF’s 2017 growth forecast for the U.K. has been slashed to 1.3 percent from 2.2 percent and this year’s has been cut to 1.7 percent from 1.9 percent.
The IMF’s global growth forecast for 2017 has also been revised down, to 3.4 percent from 3.5 percent.
China’s state media said the government plans to put offshore nuclear-power platforms to promote development in the South China Sea. Such a development could make it much more difficult to militarily stop the increasingly aggressive and expansionist regime in Beijing because of the threat to the environment. China could essentially hold the entire sea and its neighbors hostage.
The announcement came only a few days after an international court ruled that Beijing had no historic claims to most of the waters of the sea, which most of the world considers international waters and through which 30 percent of global trade passes.
Sovereignty over the South China Sea is contested by China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan.
Dictatorships tend to support other dictatorships in order, in part, to discourage democracy. Thus it was no surprise that the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad sides with China’s claim to virtually the entire South China Sea — in opposition to the decision of a nonpartisan international tribunal in the Hague that essentially said that China’s claim was bogus.
