Saudi crown prince to visit U.S. with defense, AI and nuclear energy on agenda In his upcoming visit to the White House, the crown prince is seeking security guarantees and wants access to artificial intelligence technology and progress toward a deal on a civilian nuclear program. RIYADH/WASHINGTON - A visit by Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler to the White House for talks on Tuesday with U.S. President Donald Trump aims to deepen decades-old cooperation on oil and security while broadening ties in commerce, technology and potentially even nuclear energy. It will be the first trip by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the U.S. since the 2018 killing of Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents in Istanbul, which caused a global uproar. U.S. intelligence concluded that the crown prince approved the capture or killing of Khashoggi, a prominent critic. The crown prince, widely known by his initials MBS, denied ordering the operation but acknowledged responsibility as the kingdom's de facto ruler.

While Jamal Khashoggi was being carefully slaughtered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, a (clumsy and not much alike) man was trying out his shoes and clothes. The plan was for the imposter to appear on CCTV cameras while exiting the consulate and walk back to Khashoggi's residence. The plan eventually blew up, because the Turkish intelligence had already bugged the consulate and recorded exactly what had happened. This was one of the first attempts by state actors to manipulate other states (or publics) through CCTV footage. However, recent actions of the Iranian state television have taken this type of information warfare to a different level.

In June, Embracer's resources were further strengthened through a controversial $1 billion investment by Savvy Gaming Group (SGG), an arm of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund which in turn is owned and operated by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The investment was met with backlash due to Saudi Arabia's history of human rights abuses and the prince's suspected role in the assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi (Khashoggi was also a columnist for The Washington Post). Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors that the financial support from SGG would not influence how Embracer is run in any way, stating that the company is "built on the principles of freedom, inclusion, humanity and openness," in a subsequent press release.

The energy consumption from crypto mining has been increasingly exponentially with the increasing adoption of crypto. This increasing becoming of concern as it should be. Large parts of the world suffer from energy deprivation due to unaffordability and inadequate energy generation. At the same time climate change goals will require the world to reduce net emission much of which is produced from electricity generation. Supporting the world's growth and generating the and while reducing emissions when large populations suffer from energy deficiency is a very difficult issue requires trillions is capital over the coming 2 decades.

Mr. Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi government who wrote for The Washington Post and was a resident of Virginia, was brutally murdered in October 2018 after he entered a Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The C.I.A. has concluded that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, ordered the journalist's killing. As Axios journalists noted in their interview with Mr. Khosrowshahi, Saudi Arabia is Uber's fifth-largest shareholder, and Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and the recently named chairman of the state-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco, sits on Uber's board. In the interview, Mr. Khosrowshahi compared the death of Mr. Khashoggi to the death of a woman who was struck by one of Uber's autonomous vehicles last year. Karen Attiah, an opinions editor for The Washington Post who worked with Mr. Khashoggi, said in a series of tweets on Monday that Mr. Khosrowshahi was "running cover for the Saudi government" and comparing the murder to a technology glitch.

NEW YORK – Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is being criticized for calling the murder of a Washington Post columnist "a mistake" and comparing it to the death of a pedestrian struck by one of the company's autonomous vehicles. Khosrowshahi later said he regretted his comments, made during an interview with Axios on HBO. He tweeted Monday that there's no forgiving or forgetting what happened to the journalist Jamal Khashoggi and he was wrong to call it a mistake. Critics say Khosrowshahi is downplaying Khashoggi's grisly murder to placate one of the company's biggest investors. Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, known as The Public Investment Fund, holds about $1.9 billion worth of Uber stock, making it the company's fifth-largest stakeholder.

Dara Khosrowshahi, the chief executive of Uber, has attempted to limit the damage after calling the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi "a mistake" similar to a fatal accident that occurred during tests of his company's self-driving car. Khashoggi, a Saudi national resident in the US, and a severe critic of the Saudi regime who wrote for the Washington Post, was murdered in Istanbul last year after visiting the Saudi Arabian consulate there. His body was dismembered and disposed of. His death has been described by Agnès Callamard, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, as a "deliberate, premeditated execution" that warrants further investigation into the responsibility of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. The prince is a key US ally close to Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law and chief adviser.

WASHINGTON – Several U.S. lawmakers urged caution Tuesday in countering recent attacks on Saudi oil installations, but Trump loyalist Sen. Lindsey Graham branded the incident an "act of war" that merits a decisive response. Graham said it was "clear" that such a sophisticated attack -- drones firing missiles into the world's largest processing plant and an oilfield in Saudi Arabia -- could only have originated with direction and involvement from the "evil regime in Iran." "This is literally an act of war and the goal should be to restore deterrence against Iranian aggression which has clearly been lost," Graham said in a statement. The Republican lawmaker and trusted Trump ally tweeted that Washington should consider an attack on Iran's oil refineries in response, a move that he said "will break the regime's back." Graham has been a defense hawk for years, and he noted that Trump's "measured response" to Iran shooting down an American drone in June "was clearly seen by the Iranian regime as a sign of weakness." A classified briefing book on the attacks was made available to U.S. senators in a secure location in the U.S. Capitol. Other Republican senators, including Marco Rubio and Ron Johnson, said they fully believe Iran was responsible for the Saudi strike.

The right to privacy has become a pressing human rights issue. Big data -- combined with artificial intelligence and facial recognition software -- has the capacity to intrude on people's lives in unprecedented ways, in some cases on a massive scale. While much of the discussion has focused on how social media and tech companies use the data they collect about their users, more attention needs to be paid to the wider relationship between violations of privacy and other types of human rights abuses. Mass invasions of privacy can undermine the rights of millions, if not billions, of people around the world as governments gain a greater capacity to discriminate -- or worse -- across gender and sexuality lines, and stifle dissent, including through violence. So what can be done to limit the human rights fallout?

Donald Trump's commitment to "remain[ing] a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia," despite the regime's gruesome torture and murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey, is clearly symptomatic of the malignantly self-serving nature of US foreign policy, which has long propped up dictatorships and enabled atrocities around the world for the sake of profit and power. However, many of Trump's most vocal critics on the Saudi file show signs of an equally dangerous pathological condition: a profound historical amnesia that permits some of the most prominent proponents of the US' own torturous and murderous policies to now parade as champions of human rights, without any apparent sense of irony. Obama-era CIA Director John Brennan, for instance, has insisted that "the US should never turn a blind eye to this sort of inhumanity [referring to the murder of Khashoggi] … because this is a nation that remains faithful to its values" - a curiously self-righteous stance for a man who not only repeatedly turned a blind eye to the inhumanity of past and present CIA practices such as extraordinary rendition, torture, and drone assassination, but actively defended and (in the case of drone use) expanded them. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decried the brutal murder of Khashoggi as "completely abhorrent to everything the United States holds dear and stands for in the world". Yet he praised another perpetrator of abhorrent deeds, CIA "black site" torture prison manager Gina Haspel, as an "excellent choice" for Director of the CIA.