Politics

In the wake of the terrorist attacks that left nearly two dozen killed and some 100 people injured, officials in Brussels (not to mention presidential candidates in the US) are wondering whether police in Belgium should have tortured Salah Abdeslam last weekend.

To let Donald Trump and others tell it, torturing Abdeslam would likely have yielded valuable information that may well have prevented the attacks that left some 34 people dead last week. 

The U.S. military are going to deploy thousands of troops to the Russian border in an effort to protect NATO’s eastern borders from “aggressive Russia”. Around 4,500 soldiers armed with 250 tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Paladin self-propelled howitzers, and over 1,700 vehicles will station themselves at the border in the biggest deployment of its kind since the end of the Cold War. Vice News reports: They will conduct military exercises across Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, according to a statement from US European Command.

China have invoked Article 9 of the Sino-Russian Treaty of Friendship (FCT) notifying Russia that they have begun offensive/defensive military movements to protect national interests – including the deployment of a flotilla of attack submarines to the west coast of America.  China’s announcement comes just one day after President Xi Jinping warned President Obama that the two countries were perilously close to war: “China will firmly safeguard the sovereignty and related rights in the South China Sea and will not accept any freedom of navigation as an excuse to undermine China’s sovereignty

A Colombian hacktivist named Andrés Sepúlveda has revealed to the U.S. media how easy it is to rig the presidential elections, after having hacked political rivals to engineer results in elections across nine Latin American countries.  Sepúlveda is currently serving a 10-year prison sentence after being caught hacking Colombia’s 2014 presidential race. Engadget.com reports: Perhaps the most ostentatious allegation he makes is that he was paid to ensure Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party’s (PRI) candidate, Peña Nieto, won the country’s election in 2012.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has warned the public that he will sue anybody who dares to insult him or his regime in Turkey.  The President has vowed to strengthen already strict rules where opponents, critics and journalists are imprisoned if they speak out against his regime.