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a trend of former U.S. intelligence officers going to work for foreign governments with questionable human rights records

“Pickaxe,” which promised to capture “personal information and biometrics” of migrants working in Qatar. A project called “Falconeye” was described as a plan to use drones to provide surveillance of ports and borders operations, as well as “controlling migrant worker populations centers.”“By implementing background investigations and vetting program, Qatar will maintain dominance of migrant workers,” one GRA document said.

Chalker declined requests for an interview or to answer detailed questions about his work for the Qatari government. Chalker also claimed that some of the documents reviewed by the AP were forgeries.

After Iranian lawmakers suggested last year that face recognition should be used to police hijab law, the head of an Iranian government agency that enforces morality law said in a September interview that the technology would be used “to identify inappropriate and unusual movements,” including “failure to observe hijab laws.” Individuals could be identified by checking faces against a national identity database to levy fines and make arrests, he said.

Iran’s government has monitored social media to identify opponents of the regime for years, Grothe says, but if government claims about the use of face recognition are true, it’s the first instance she knows of a government using the technology to enforce gender-related dress law.

Mahsa Alimardani, who researches freedom of expression in Iran at the University of Oxford, has recently heard reports of women in Iran receiving citations in the mail for hijab law violations despite not having had an interaction with a law enforcement officer. Iran’s government has spent years building a digital surveillance apparatus, Alimardani says. The country’s national identity database, built in 2015, includes biometric data like face scans and is used for national ID cards and to identify people considered dissidents by authorities.

The Saudi woman who was sentenced to 34 years in prison for using Twitter appears to have been denounced to Saudi authorities through a crime-reporting app that users in the kingdom can download to Apple and Android phones.

The user told Shehab that he had reported her on the Saudi app, which is called Kollona Amn, or All Are Safe. It is not clear whether the Saudi officials responded directly to the report, but the 34-year-old mother was arrested two months later.

Her alleged crimes including using a website to “cause public unrest” and “assisting those who seek to cause public unrest and destabilise civil and national security by following their Twitter accounts” and by retweeting their tweets.

Iran’s foreign minister said that his country is ready to work with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to resolve questions about uranium found at three undeclared sites, as long as the agency addresses these questions “technically,” rather than politically

Once there is agreement on a return to the nuclear deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Iran will be ready to grant access to the IAEA “beyond safeguards,” Amir-Abdollahian said.

“We are not afraid of having face-to-face talks with the United States, but we should feel that it is going to be a game changer, that there is going to be some kind of gain for us.”  “If the Americans are serious, and they are willing to show their willingness and desire to get back to the JCPOA, these [indirect] messages will suffice."

In public speeches, President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi has repeatedly scolded families for having more than two children, calling the population crisis a national security issue that has hindered progress on development goals.

More than one billion people already live in Africa. By 2050, the populations of at least 26 African countries are expected to double.

rising temperatures increasingly threaten the country’s food and water supplies

Adel Abdullah cultivates a subsistence living off of six acres of peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, tomatoes, wheat, corn, and pomegranates. He is one of millions of smallholder farmers working in the Delta. He walks barefoot in his farm as a show of reverence to the land. The soil is pale and thin, almost as sandy as the beach, and choked by mounting concentrations of salt, left behind by periodic coastal flooding and pushed into underground aquifers by the rising sea.“This is the first place to be affected by climate change,” Abdullah says. “The barriers help a bit with flooding, but the salty soil is still really killing us.”

he takes irrigation water from the nearby Kitchener Drain, one of the largest and most polluted canals in Egypt that aggregates wastewater from the farms, businesses, and households of an estimated 11 million people in the Delta. By the time water reaches Abdullah’s farm, it may have been reused half a dozen times since entering Egypt in the Nile, each time accumulating more salts and pollutants and losing beneficial nutrients.

Abdullah is forced to douse the farm in fertilizers, pesticides, and salt-suppressing chemicals, all of which further degrade the soil. Those inputs, on top of the rising costs of irrigation systems and machinery, eat up any potential income Abdullah might earn

representatives from the Polish Film Institute, which provided Heymann with a grant of NIS 188,000 [$54,500] to make the film several years ago, suddenly insisted upon seeing the film, stormed out in the middle of the screening, and demanded their money back, since the film includes experts who claim it was uncommon for Poles to save Jews during the Holocaust.

Poland finds itself firmly in the grip of an ultra-nationalist right-wing government. Embedded in this regime is a desire to retell the story of the Holocaust by portraying Poland and the Polish people in a better light — and the most effective way of going about this is to clamp down on critics, police the public discourse, and control the historical narrative.

I’m in the throes of an artistic, political, financial, and international crisis. I didn’t know that my film, “High Maintenance,” would create such drama. How could one know? Dani’s work was never executed because of the political situation in Poland. The commissioner of his work, an American Polish Jew living in the United States, was supposed to pay for this big monument. He decided in the end to cancel the project because he realized that the Polish government would take advantage of Dani’s work to convince everybody that Poland was one big righteous nation during World War II, and that everyone was busy risking their lives to save Jews.