war Changing Minds: NPR series on people who’ve rethought convictions in an era of polarization and extremism Xeni Jardin

religion Ancient Israelites got high in temple David Pescovitz

tabloids The Man Who Knew Too Much! Why China murdered its own ambassador, in this week’s highly dubious tabloids Peter Sheridan

Business Facebook accuses Israel's NSO Group of exploiting U.S. servers to infect 100s of devices via WhatsApp Xeni Jardin

Wonderful vintage clip of mod girls dancing to Desmond Dekker's "Israelites" David Pescovitz

tabletop games The codebreaking game Mastermind is 50 years old Mark Frauenfelder

Business In this email scam, Iran-linked hackers pose as journalists Xeni Jardin

israel Jared Kushner says Palestinians screw-up every opportunity they've ever had, in celebration of a proposed two-state deal that he left them out of Thom Dunn

fbi The FBI doesn't need Apple to give it a backdoor to encryption, because it already has all the access it needs Thom Dunn

security Forensics team accuses Prince Bone Saw of hacking Jeff Bezos's phone to obtain kompromat and force Washington Post silence on Khashoggi Cory Doctorow

brazil Brazilian authoritarian Bolsonaro fires his culture minister for giving a speech plagiarized from Joseph Goebbels Cory Doctorow

Business Amnesty vs. NSO Group Israel spyware lawsuit goes behind closed doors Xeni Jardin

alt-right The Alt-Right's White Nationalist Poster Boy is very upset about US interference in Iran Thom Dunn

guns The Alpha Gun Angels are Israeli gun influencers John Struan

authoritarianism Cops and spooks all over the world rely on a junk-science "walking polygraph" method to steer their investigation Cory Doctorow

picks American warship seizes what U.S. says are Iran missile parts headed to Yemen Xeni Jardin

law NSO Group employees kicked off Facebook for spying for brutal dictators are suing Facebook for violating their privacy Cory Doctorow

crime Terabytes of data leaked from an oligarch-friendly offshore bank Cory Doctorow

Technology Microsoft hires former AG Eric Holder to audit facial recognition tech used on West Bank Xeni Jardin