Before his links to the world were cut by his Ecuadorian hosts, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange gave an interview on how technological advances are changing humankind. He said global surveillance will soon be totally unavoidable.

Just hours after Beijing called off trade talks with the US in the biggest escalation of the trade feud between the two nations, the war of words between China and the US ratcheted up on Saturday, when Beijing lashed out again at Washington, saying that China’s decision to buy fighter jets and missile systems from Russia is "a normal act of cooperation between sovereign countries" and the United States has "no right to interfere", defense ministry spokesman Wu Qian said on Saturday.

GOOGLE BOSSES HAVE forced employees to delete a confidential memo circulating inside the company that revealed explosive details about a plan to launch a censored search engine in China, The Intercept has learned. The memo, authored by a Google engineer who was asked to work on the project, disclosed that the search system, codenamed Dragonfly, would require users to log in to perform searches, track their location — and share the resulting history with a Chinese partner who would have “unilateral access” to the data.

At least 25 people are dead and 53 wounded after an army parade in the southwestern Iranian city of Ahvaz came under attack by militants on Saturday, according to state media. Nearly half of the dead are members of the Revolutionary Guards, according to state news agencies, making this one of the worst attacks ever on the elite force.

A school district in Clark County, Indiana, will soon be randomly drug testing students who want to participate in extracurricular activities like sports, band, and driving to school. “Henryville High School and Borden High School will randomly select ten students each quarter and test them for ten drugs that teenagers are most likely to use,” local ABC 13 reported.

A woman who runs a North Carolina nonprofit called Crazy’s Claws n Paw saved over two dozen pets during Hurricane Florence, but now she is facing charges because she didn’t have a permit. Hedges was in the process of building a shelter when Florence hit the coast, so she offered the space to pet owners in the area.

Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Russia has revealed his hope that the US will not impose sanctions on his country for its plans to buy the S-400 missile defence system from Moscow, AlKhaleejonline.com reported on Friday.

Earlier this month, Jackson County Deputy Zachary Webster was fired after an investigation revealed that he planted drugs on multiple suspects. Now, prosecutors are dropping a least two dozen different cases that he was involved with after his own body camera showed him framing innocent people.

A heavily-armed convicted felon under FBI investigation for a hate crime was killed during a massive gunfight with police on Thursday night (video below). Alexander Carballido, 40, was just released from prison in July, after serving nearly a decade behind bars for aggravated assault on a police officer, carjacking, and fleeing and eluding police, the Miami Herald reported. Cell phone footage captured the moment that Alexander Carballido opened fire on police in Florida.

It looks like we’re headed for a brave new world where all citizens are rated on their loyalty to the state and are punished for wandering from its narrative. 

Following in the footsteps of corporate giants Apple, Facebook, Google and Spotify, on Friday PayPal said it was is terminating its relationship with Alex Jones and his website, Infowars. In a statement, PayPal said that after an extensive review of Infowars and its related sites the company "found instances that promoted hate or discriminatory intolerance against certain communities and religions, which run counter to our core value of inclusion" although it declined to cite specific examples of Infowars’s problematic behavior.

Colombia is producing more cocaine now than it ever has, according to a new report by Bloomberg. The amount of land planted with coca shrubs is up 17% last year, rising to 171,000 hectares, which surpasses levels prior to US president Bill Clinton’s "Plan Colombia" counter-narcotics program.

Like Facebook (and the Chinese Communist Party) before it, Apple is now assigning users of its products a "trust" score that is based on users' call and email habits, the Sun reports. The new ratings were added as part of the latest iOS 12 update, as VentureBeat explains.

This is what happens if you go up against the state and you have a degree of notoriety—you get framed, or set-up for a fall and a lifetime of shame. That’s what happened to Cody Wilson, the guy who invented the 3-D printed gun. He was arrested in Taiwan, accused of “sexual assaulting” a 16-year old girl in Texas.

Hurricane Florence floodwaters have breached the dam at a retired Duke Energy coal power plant near Wilmington, North Carolina, likely causing a spill of coal ash into Cape Fear River.

Delta Air Lines is set to introduce what it’s calling the “first biometric terminal in the U.S.”

Internet banking has become a crisis-prone business in the UK, as the online platforms of big banks suffer regular outages and other forms of IT disruption. Friday morning, the online systems of the Royal Bank of Scotland, Ulster Bank and Natwest — all part of the RBS Banking Group — crashed in unison, leaving millions of customers unable to pay bills or view their balance on their online and mobile accounts. The group has 19 million customers in the UK and Republic of Ireland and 5.5 million active mobile app users.

Foreign government hackers have targeted the personal email accounts of a number of U.S. senators and their aides, Google confirmed to CNN on Thursday. A day earlier, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., sent a letter to Senate leadership to inform them of the incident and call for a change in how the Senate approaches cybersecurity. Wyden wrote a "major technology company" informed him that he was being targeted. Google has admitted that it is the company in question. The tech giant declined to say when they detected these threats and which senators were targeted, however. CNN also reported that both Republicans and Democrats were targeted.

Three months after an Ecuadorian court requested that Interpol issue a “red alert” to detain, imprison, and extradite former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, the former head of state remains free and has continued to wage his legal defense against charges emanating from officials in the government of President Lenin Moreno. According to Correa’s legal team, this will remain the case after Interpol suspended the Andean nation’s extradition request in an “exceptional” manner, having considered the merits of his defense argument, which maintains that the prosecution of Correa on charges of conspiracy and kidnapping are of a politicized nature.

On rare occasion a story is unearthed in the mainstream media which demonstrates in stunning clarity how major foreign policy decisions are really made in Washington, especially when it comes to waging perpetual war in the Middle East often under the official rhetorical guise of “protecting civilians”. A bombshell Wall Street Journal report details a leaked classified memo which shows Secretary of State Mike Pompeo decided to continue US military involvement in the Saudi war on Yemen in order to preserve a massive $2 billion weapons deal with Riyadh.