Week in Review: America to Give Up Control of Internet, Developments in Syria, Insecure Nukes in Turkey, and Much More

Week in Review: America to Give Up Control of Internet, Developments in Syria, Insecure Nukes in Turkey, and Much More

Getty Images, Amanda Slater/Flickr, SAFIN HAMED/AFP/Getty Images, GEORGE OURFALIAN/AFP/Getty Images

Week in Review: America to Give Up Control of Internet, Developments in Syria, Insecure Nukes in Turkey, and Much More

All you need to know about everything in the news this week

August 20, 2016

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Highlights:

Relinquishing control of the Internet

  • The Obama administration seems determined to hand over control of the Internet to an international agency before the presidential election.
  • According to the Washington Examiner, officials have confirmed that the Department of Commerce is “set to hand off the final vestiges of American control over the Internet to international authorities” on October 1.
  • The Internet could lose more of its freedom from the control of foreign dictators and European Union-style micromanagers.

    • Germany resumes arming Kurds

  • Germany supplied weaponry to an active war zone for the very first time when it armed Kurdish fighters in Iraq earlier this year.
  • That weapons supply was halted when media reports revealed that some of those weapons were sold on the black market.
  • Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that the German Army resumed its weapons shipments on Tuesday when it supplied 1,500 G-36 assault rifles, 100 antitank missiles and 3 armored vehicles, among other supplies.
  • As we wrote in February 2015, there clearly are no more taboos for the German Army.

    • Russian and Chinese involvement in Syria

  • On Tuesday, Russia began using a base in Iran to launch air strikes against Islamic extremists in Syria.
  • This marked the first time Russia has used a base from a nation other than Syria during its anti-terror campaign in the Middle East. The development is a sign of Russia’s deepening involvement in the Middle East and its growing ties with Iran.
  • Meanwhile, China announced Thursday that it will step up personnel training and humanitarian assistance to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government.
  • How will the Syrian crisis end?

    • Loose nukes in Turkey?

  • Dozens of American nuclear weapons could be captured from an air base in Turkey close to the Syrian border by “terrorists and other hostile forces,” warned the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan Washington-based think tank.
  • It’s so bad that the U.S. is preparing to move some of those weapons from Turkey into Romania, reports have said.

    • Race riots in Milwaukee

  • On August 13, a black police officer shoot a 23-year-old black man who refused to lay down the stolen semiautomatic handgun he was carrying.
  • What followed was an explosion of violent race riots instead of demonstrations against family breakdown—the proven, surest predictor of poverty and crime.

    • Other news:

  • In a speech on Wednesday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel once again defended her decision to allow immigrants into her country.
  • Between 1985 and 2010, “7,700 square kilometers of coastal wetlands—about the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined—were lost to land reclamation projects” along China’s coastline, wrote Hakai magazine.
  • Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn has tracked his Labour Party “so far left that the supposedly moderate [Owen] Smith has become anything but moderate,” wrote Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.

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