I am currently away for a few days and so haven't been able to study the interview of Petrov and Boshirov in any great detail, though I have read the transcript and seen something of the reaction from a number of different quarters. I don't really want to comment much on the credibility or otherwise of their claims, but rather on something far more important, which seems - not for the first time in this case - to have been largely forgotten (please do forgive any rough formatting on this piece - I've had to do it on an iPhone as I don't have my laptop with me).

For some time now, I have been concerned that our generation has been busy burying some of the most cherished legal concepts that many of our forebears seemed to instinctively understand, and which were enshrined into English Common Law. Concepts such as innocent until proven guilty, and that the burden of proof rests with the prosecution to prove its case against the accused, rather than on the accused to prove his or her defense against the accusations.

My biggest initial gripe in the Salisbury case was that the British Government completely discarded these concepts and simply presented unsubstantiated accusations as if they were fact. Not only did this prejudice the investigation from the outset, but it went a long way towards poisoning the wells of justice. So much for their much vaunted "British Values".

More recently, the same has been done again. The Metropolitan Police, The Crown Prosecution Service and Her Majesty's Government (TMP/CPS/HMG) named two suspects in the case, stating that they had enough evidence to prosecute the men. They then presented at least some of that evidence, before - at least in the case of the Government and the media - then going on to treat the suspects as if it had been proven that they had brought something called "Novichok" into the country and had carried out an assassination attempt on 4th March at the home of Sergei Skripal at 47 Christie Miller Road, Salisbury.

But it has not been proven. Very far from it. Accusations are not convictions. Suspects are not culprits. And if we are going to pretend that the extraordinarily flimsy evidence against the two men - at least that presented in public - is enough to claim "case closed; culprits caught", then we have basically torn up 1,000 years or so of legal history, and are pretty well lost as a nation.

GCHQ's methods for bulk interception of various online communications violated privacy rights and failed to provide sufficient surveillance safeguards, the European court of human rights ruled in a 5-2 ruling

The court found that GCHQ's "bulk interception" violated article 8 of the European convention on human rights, which guarantees privacy due to "insufficient safeguards" relating to the "communications data."

Feeding youngsters with our own convictions or giving them national platforms is problematic for several reasons.
Be it municipal children's councils or national youth organizations: the effort to promote children in politics is ongoing. To nobody's surprise, the kids reach the exact conclusions that the adults want them to reach.

The next presidents

"You are the decision makers of the future. You are the ambassadors of your generation."

These words still echo in my own ears. I've personally participated in a large number of youth and student councils, as well as events dedicated to "give a voice to young people". There isn't anything wrong with the idea of involving children in the decisions that affect them on a daily basis, but that doesn't seem to be what we do at all. In reality, children's parliaments are there for our mere entertainment, so that we can smile at the cuteness of youngsters in suits and call them our future presidents.

A Facebook post by a German satire magazine ridiculing a right-wing politician and Hitler received a solid like from a Munich student. Despite being among thousands of users who also liked the post, he was scrutinized by police.

Law enforcement has now launched an inquiry into Johannes Koenig, a 27-year-old student from Munich, local media reported, saying the case has been passed on to the local police department, Commissariat 44, which deals with far-right offences.

But the situation is tricky, considering where the post was made, namely Postillon, a popular satire magazine which frequently mocks public figures and ridicules national controversies. Their articles contain fictional characters and sometimes describe fictitious events - which the magazine says in their disclaimer.

A multi-agency operation in Mesa, Arizona, has resulted in the arrest of 24 suspects, all tied to child and human trafficking.

The Mesa Police Detectives, partnered with Chandler, Gilbert and Tempe police Departments as well as the Attorney General's Office for Operation Degrossting - an undercover operation targeting the demand for child and human trafficking.

In the span of six days, undercover detectives placed several ads on websites that are commonly used by suspects who wish to seek out illegal sex acts. The 24 suspects who were arrested solicited and/or brokered deals for various sex acts and were subsequently arrested, according to Fox 10.

The trial into the murder of Kazakh figure skater Denis Ten is expected to begin by the end of September, according to officials.

"Two culprits have been charged with theft, mugging and murder, while a woman has been accused of withholding information about the crime. I think that by the end of the month the case will be brought to court," Kazakh Minister of Internal Affairs Kalmukhanbet Kasymov was quoted as saying by RIA Novosti.

Ten, a 2014 Olympic bronze medalist, was stabbed to death in July after an altercation with two men who were attempting to steal rear-view mirrors from his car in Almaty.

There's no conclusive evidence that US diplomats stationed in Cuba were injured by a futuristic weapon, Kenneth R. Foster, a professor of bioengineering, told RT, adding that theories involving microwaves were "science fiction."

NBC published an explosive report earlier this week claiming that several anonymous US officials suspect that Russia was behind a series of unexplained "attacks" on US diplomatic personnel in Cuba and China, leaving the victims with injuries ranging from hearing loss to "problems with cognition."

But Foster, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studied microwave phenomena while working at the Naval Medical Research Center in Bethesda, told RT that the evidence that these purported injuries were caused by some kind of microwave weapon - which the NBC article alleges - is "science fiction."

"The kind of effect that has been talked about with the embassy is purely a fairy tale," Foster said. He noted that while non-lethal microwave weapons exist, they require high-power transmissions and are only able to cause "thermal pain" in people. "I can't conceive of a microwave weapon as it's being thought about in this case. And it's not clear that the symptoms are real."

It started with the arrest of 36-year-old woman in Sydney on suspicion of laundering more than $480,000 gained by hacking multiple business emails; within a week, police had taken down a $3 million international crime syndicate.

"We can't establish at this stage who it's gone to or what it's being used [for]," Detective Superintendent Arthur Katsogiannis told reporters in Sydney on Friday, adding that an international investigation to track the money down was already under way.

After interrogating the woman for several hours, police launched multiple raids on several properties across the city, seizing a Land Rover, several computers, phones, SIM cards, stolen financial and personal identification documents as well as methamphetamine. Two additional suspects were taken into custody on suspicion of identity theft and money laundering among other charges.

Members of Strike Force Woolana had managed to locate the crew behind the spate of identity theft, romance scams and phishing email schemes, but had yet to zero in on the ringleader. However, evidence gathered soon led investigators somewhere they may never have considered: a high-security immigration detention center.

Facebook on Thursday announced the expansion of their fact-checking army to send "photos and videos to all of our 27 partners in 17 countries around the world," after using an artificial intelligence which will use "various engagement signals, including feedback from people on Facebook, to identify potentially false content."

The company says that because people share millions of photos and videos on Facebook each day, it creates an "easy opportunity for manipulation by bad actors."

"The same hoax can travel across different content types, so it's important to build defenses against misinformation across articles, as well as photos and videos," said Facebook.

Facebook categorizes photo / video "misinformation" into three categories: "(1) Manipulated or Fabricated, (2) Out of Context, and (3) Text or Audio Claim. These are the kinds of false photos and videos that we see on Facebook and hope to further reduce with the expansion of photo and video fact-checking."

Anjem Choudary, the Islamist hate preacher is to be released from jail in a matter of weeks, despite a stark warning from the prisons minister that he remained "genuinely dangerous."

Choudary, who was jailed in 2016 for terrorism offences, after being found guilty of encouraging Muslims to join Islamic State (formerly ISIS/ISIL) is to be released from prison next month, having only served half his five-and-a-half-year sentence.

The UK government's prisons minister, Rory Stewart, conceded on Tuesday that they were powerless to prevent Choudary from being freed on licence, despite his assessment that the cleric remained "a genuinely dangerous person."

Stewart told the Evening Standard that the preacher was "a deeply pernicious, destabilising influence", adding: "He is somebody that I would put into the category I have just mentioned - somebody who was not given a sentence of enormous length but somebody who is a genuinely dangerous person.

"We will be watching him very, very carefully."