The Speaker Editors 
In the Sunni-majority city of Qatif in the Eastern Province, a large car bomb was detonated this week, the latest in a string of attacks.
Some Sunni (sometimes ISIS-linked), who make up only 15% of Saudi Arabia, have been attacking the country’s Shia for a few years now.
In a city in Alabama called Gardendale, youths who go out to mow lawns this year have been threatened by officials and landscaping companies that they have to get a business licence before starting, which brings in $110 for the city for each licence.
Adults who also cut lawns over the summer have made complaints about teens making money cutting a few lawns, and the mayor of the town, Stan Hogeland, said that people must have a business licence when operating within the city, and that he would like to have something added to the books that would be more appropriate for teens making summer cash, like “maybe a temporary licence … that targets teenagers.” He said that going after teens was not a priority, and that he wanted to find a way to deal with the situation favorably.
This year’s meeting, taking place in Chantilly, Virginia, near the White House, includes the following topics: ‘Russia in the international order,’ China, ‘The Trans-Atlantic defence alliance: bullets, bytes and bucks,’ ‘The war on information,’ ‘Direction of the EU’ and ‘Why is populism growing?’
It’s the 65th meeting of the secretive group. Kissinger, Thiel, and upper level staff of news organizations like Bloomberg, The Economist, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera and the London Evening Standard will also be among the 130 so far confirmed.
A truck bomb in the diplomatic core of Kabul wounded 400 in addition to the dead. The area is among the most secure in Afghanistan, and people are wondering how the truck got there in the middle of the day.
It may be the worst attack since 2001, although thousands are killed by terrorists every year.
According to the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, their ground-based defense system has finally shot down an ICBM on the first try.
However, what it hit wasn’t actually an ICBM, but a simulated missile shot from the Marshall Islands, and the interceptor was shot from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
Because the simulated missile doesn’t have the unpredictability, range, counter-countermeasures, or mass numbers of real ones, it isn’t representative of how well the military would be able to prevent an actual ICBM attack. Military officials still spoke highly of the event as a significant step.
The “kill vehicle” used in the test is a new kind, a 5-foot-long device that steers into the path of the oncoming missile, destroying it by the force of impact.
The original post on Facebook was about whether animal rights groups should be allowed to take part in vegan street festivals, and it became discussed heatedly.
Several people were fined by the courts for making comments it deemed defamatory, and one man was fined for “liking” some comments which accused an animal rights activist of racism and antisemitism.
That activist was Erwin Kessler, who brought the lawsuit against the participants.
According to the court, “the defendant clearly endorsed the unseemly content and made it his own,” when he hit the “like” button.
China has been harvesting organs from prisoners, including prisoners of conscience (those jailed for nothing more than practicing a religion that is not state-sponsored), for years, and despite saying they have reformed the practice in 2015, China is still doing it, according to human rights workers David Matas and Ethan Gutmann.
According to the lawyer and investigator, China “obviously has got a lot of people sitting around waiting to be killed for a transplant, and they’re just picking the right person to be killed depending on who the patient is.”
Chinese businesses profit from transplant tourism — people coming from other countries to get quick organ transplants — as well as meeting local needs. There aren’t enough organs volunteered to meet demand, so China takes them from prisoners. Prison officials coordinate with doctors in China to make this happen.
According to authorities around the world who keep track of people going to China for transplants, the numbers have markedly reduced, indicating that China has made serious efforts, but it has not stopped.
China executes thousands of people per year — around 3 times the amount of the rest of the world combined, although stats are hard to get because China blocks publication of them (it’s currently a state crime), even though Amnesty International and other groups keep track of all executions in all countries.
Many of those executed come from populations China doesn’t like very much, like religious and ethnic minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang.
20,000 “subjects of interest” posing “residual risk” plus 3,000 judged to be a threat and currently under investigation or active monitoring. That’s the most recent piece of information given by UK’s security services.
Authorities had previously reported to the public a figure of 3,000.
The new information was released following the Manchester bombing, which security services said they were expecting and were just not able to prevent because “you can’t stop them all.”
In the wake of the events of the Egyptian Arab Spring, a couple who founded an organization to work with street children found themselves charged with sex crimes and human trafficking and thrown in prison for 3 years.
According to the couple, one day a father came to them looking for a child they said they had not seen, and after the father became abusive, they went to file a report at the police station, but found themselves charged with human trafficking.
American politicians, including Obama, Ted Cruz, and most recently Trump (who met with the Egyptian president 6 weeks ago) lobbied to try to get them out of prison. Half of the couple, the woman Aya Hijazi, is American.
The acquittal came as a total surprise to the couple who heard about it from the judge as they attended a court hearing in the cage. Shortly thereafter, Hijazi met Trump in the White House.
Trump continues to not use the term he frequently challenged others to use during his campaign, “radical Islamic terrorism,” when commenting this week on the attack on Christians in Egypt that killed 25 and wounded as many others.
Attacks on Christians by Muslims are common in Egypt and other Muslim-majority countries in the area.
Trump called those responsible for the attacks “evil organizations of terror with a thuggish ideology.”
Sweden is fortifying its island against potential incursion by Russia. They are conducting military exercises on the island.
The island was demilitarized 12 years ago, assuming then that Russia had become weak or non-threatening. But in light of recent Russian military activity in Crimea and Ukraine, Sweden has stepped up defenses.
Gotland has a strategic location, near to Russian Kaliningrad and also Latvia. From the island, both air and sea can be affected by military forces.
Sweden, one of the non-NATO European countries, is going to re-introduce conscription and will increase military spending 11% over the next 5 years.
China started to claim property in Mischief Reef a few years ago, and has since been building islands there to assert its claim.
The U.S. said they’d continue to conduct navigation exercises in the area.