San Francisco is one of the wealthiest cities in the US, but its high housing prices and strict zoning have contributed to a homelessness crisis. The city has declared war on its rough sleepers - because housing them is too easy.​

The latest offensive in the city's "war on homelessness" is sidewalk boulders - giant rocks placed along the sidewalk to deter homeless encampments. San Franciscans in the Mission Dolores neighborhood raised $2,000 to line their sidewalk with 24 large boulders to stop the homeless from setting up camp, using and selling drugs, and otherwise lowering the quality of life.​

The plan, so far, has made matters worse - the homeless set up tents anyway, forcing those who actually want to use the sidewalk for its intended purpose to walk on the street, and some locals have taken it upon themselves to remove the rocks - either by pushing them onto the street or (in the case of one enterprising woman) by listing them on Craigslist.​

A documentary tracking the rise of conservative figure Jordan Peterson has faced hurdles getting to the big screen in his home country of Canada, with the creators telling RT the difficulties signal deeper problems in the West.

A psychology professor and author, Peterson first rose to international prominence for his vocal and unapologetic opposition to extreme political correctness and identity politics. The firm stance won him quite a few supporters worldwide - and at least as many critics, who see him as a transgender-hating custodian of the patriarchy, whose 'archaic' views don't deserve any platform in the woke modern world.

Filmmaker Patricia Marcoccia knew Peterson before he became an international phenomenon and she witnessed his meteoric burst into the public consciousness and watched as his profile grew exponentially in recent years. Her observations form the basis of the documentary 'The Rise of Jordan Peterson' which expands on an earlier film aired by Canadian public broadcaster CBC last year.

'Bulletproof hoster' gets shot down

German investigators shut down a "criminally operated data center" in a former NATO bunker that they claim was used to host sites selling drugs, child pornography and illegal botnets.

More than 600 police officers stormed the 'CyberBunker' data center in Traben-Trarbach, western Germany, where they seized roughly 200 servers. Seven people were arrested.
Bunker mentality

Prosecutor Juergen Bauer told reporters that alongside the seven arrests, the long-running investigation has thirteen people aged 20 to 59 under investigation. None of the suspects was at the data center at the time, with the arrests taking place at a local restaurant and in Schwalbach, outside Frankfurt.

There were separate raids in the Netherlands, Poland and Luxembourg.

Among the illegal services allegedly hosted at the German data center were Cannabis Road, Fraudsters, Flight Vamp 2.0, orangechemicals, and the world's second largest narcotics marketplace, Wall Street Market. Police also claim that a large-scale attack on approximately one million Telekom routers at the end of November 2016 was operated via a server in the bunker.

The former NATO facility was acquired in 2013 from the Office for Geoinformation of the Bundeswehr, by an unidentified Dutchman, who is the chief suspect. Press reports at the time describe the site as a multi-story protective structure with a floor space of 5,500 square meters. It has two adjacent office buildings with a total floor space of 4,300 square meters and is set on 13-hectares of land.
A 2012 article in Immobilien Zeitung reveals that the site was already being used as a data center by the military, and has four underground stories reaching a depth of 25 meters.

The Dutchman, now 59, upgraded the bunker "in order to make it available to clients, according to our investigations, exclusively for illegal purposes," regional criminal police chief Johannes Kunz said. "I think it's a huge success... that we were able at all to get police forces into the bunker complex, which is still secured at the highest military level," Kunz added.

"We had to overcome not only real, or analog, protections; we also cracked the digital protections of the data center."

When the bunker was purchased in 2013, the buyer was not identified, but said that he was also involved with CyberBunker, the alleged operator of a Dutch data center in its own Cold War bunker. In 2013, now-defunct data center company 'Bunker Infra' claimed CyberBunker was using images of its bunker, and was not based in the Dutch site.

CyberBunker previously said it would host "services to any Web site 'except child pornography and anything related to terrorism.'" The company's website is now unavailable.

The location of the Traben-Trarbach facility matches that of Calibour, a company that said it operated a NATO-bunker based secure data center. Its website is now also unavailable. The CEO and MD of Calibour, Herman-Johan Xennt, claimed to own CyberBunker as of 2010.

The case against those charged is still developing, and there are as yet no formal identifications or charges. While 200 servers were seized, some reports suggest that there could be as many as 2,000 at the facility. Kunz told reporters the analysis of the data could take years to complete.

Sunday's mass protests in Hong Kong featured a remarkable collection of foreign flags, as activists presumably thought the US and the UK may not be the only world powers that can back them in their raging fight against Beijing.

The anti-government protests in the autonomous Chinese city -once ruled by Britain- went along the usual lines of the past months. Some of the marches went peacefully while, in some spots, more aggressive activists caused disruption with street barricades, Molotov cocktails and acts of vandalism.

Hong Kong police responded with tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannon spraying hard-to-wash-off blue paint, and arrested many of the protesters.

Two former US soldiers, once hailed as "heroes" for fighting alongside Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitaries, have been charged with double murder and robbery in the US, allegedly committed to fund a "freedom-fighting" Venezuela tour.

Craig Lang and Alex Zwiefelhofer, both former enlisted soldiers, have been charged with a double homicide, according to documents released by the US Justice Department this week. They stand accused of murdering a middle-aged couple in Florida during a firearms purchase in April 2018.

The Florida couple intended to buy several weapons from Lang and Zwiefelhofer, but instead got gunned down and robbed of their cash.

While the crime may not sound that unusual for the US, it is the suspects' background that makes the whole affair jarring. It tells a disturbing story of insatiable hunger for killing people all over the world, all that based on a backward ideology.

Greek authorities are scrambling to deal with unrest at a heavily overcrowded migrant camp on Lesbos after a fire there left at least one person dead.

Officials said they had found the charred remains of an Afghan woman after the blaze erupted inside a container used to house refugees at the Moria reception centre on Sunday. The fire was eventually extinguished by plane.

More than 13,000 people are now crammed into tents and shipping containers with facilities for just 3,000 at Moria, a disused military barracks outside Mytilene, the island's capital, where tensions are rising.

"A charred body was found, causing foreign [migrants] to rebel," said Lefteris Economou, Greece's deputy minister for citizen protection. "Stones and other objects were hurled, damaging three fire engines and slightly injuring four policemen and a fireman."

The University of Edinburgh has allowed a 'Resisting Whiteness 2019' event to proceed at its venue, even though there was outrage over organizers' rules, which limited white people's access to a microphone and to certain rooms.

The conference, aimed at raising awareness about "the importance of anti-racist action in the UK" took place at Pleasance Theater, owned by the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, on Saturday.

It was organized by a group tellingly named 'The Resisting Whiteness Collective,' which describes itself as a "not-for-profit grassroots organization of QTPOC [Queer and Trans People of Color] activists." While touting the event, the group said that it wants to make it "as accessible as possible and therefore have free tickets available for those who would like to attend."

However, it seems not everybody was welcome. The rules published on the conference's official website state that if an attendee is white, they will have no right to ask questions, at least publicly. The rule, introduced to "amplify the voices of people of color" said that "priority will be given to questions from people of color in the audience."

Thousands of people have taken to the streets of Manchester to protest against austerity and Brexit, as the Conservative Party holds its annual conference in the northern English city.

The anti-austerity protest, organized by the People's Assembly Against Austerity group to "demand an alternative to austerity" and an end to the Tory government, started at noon local time and the 'Reject Brexit, Defend Democracy' march started two hours later.

Addressing his party's conference on Sunday, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson pledged to stay put in his post and to deliver Brexit come the October 31 deadline, even if he fails to secure a deal with the EU.

It's not clear how Johnson intends to tackle a new law which compels the prime minister to request another extension of the UK's exit date if no deal has been reached by a mid-October EU summit.

Several contenders for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination have promised a nationwide ban on fracking. How viable is that proposal and do they really want to do it - or is it just a campaign promise they can never fulfill?

Banning 'fracking' - the process of extracting oil and natural gas via hydraulic fracturing - is popular among environmentalists and activists who are increasingly concerned about climate change. Among the candidates who have backed a ban are the current frontrunner Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), as well as her colleagues Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Kamala Harris (D-California).

Yet, the fracking boom of the past decade has transformed the US from an energy importer to an exporter, impacting the economy in a major way - and even giving Washington a certain amount of foreign policy leverage that Democrats might find difficult to abandon.

Clean or deadly?

Hydraulic fracturing involves horizontally pumping water, sand and a mixture of chemicals into rock at extremely high pressure, creating fractures that release trapped oil and natural gas.

Rating agency Fitch has downgraded Saudi Arabia's credit rating from A+ to A citing geopolitical risks and a downturn in the kingdom's fiscal position. Riyadh called Fitch's decision "somewhat speculative."

"The downgrade reflects rising geopolitical and military tensions in the Gulf region, Fitch's revised assessment of the vulnerability of Saudi Arabia's economic infrastructure and continued deterioration in Saudi Arabia's fiscal and external balance sheets," the New York-based agency said in a statement on Monday. The firm put the kingdom's long-term foreign currency issuer default rating from A+ to A, while stating that the outlook remains stable.