Clouds of tear gas floated above and around Victoriei Square in Bucharest on August 10 as a large anti-government demonstration devolved into clashes between protesters and “jandarmi”, or military police officers.

As tensions escalated in the Romanian capital, pockets of protesters hurled rocks and plastic water bottles at rows of heavily-equipped police.

Ioana Moldovan, a Bucharest-based photographer, followed a group of rally participants to a side street.

Police followed them and the demonstrators ran, but she stayed put.

With a press badge around her neck, she held up her camera to identify herself as a journalist. But as the officers passed her, one sprayed tear gas at her face.

“As I was trying to leave, I just passed them and said, ‘You sprayed gas directly in my eyes’,” she told Al Jazeera by telephone.

“One of them replied, ‘And what did you want? For me to f*** you? You stupid girl, who told you to come here and take pictures?’”

She was one of an estimated 450 people treated on site for injuries sustained during the rally, and she joined around 300 others who lodged official complaints with the general prosecutor’s office.

The event was the latest in a series of demonstrations charging the government, currently led by the left-leaning Social Democrat Party (PSD), with corruption and what critics say are attempts to undermine the judiciary.

The apparent crackdown on demonstrators has drawn criticism from rights groups, prompting authorities to launch an investigation into the incidents that took place nearly two weeks ago.

Moldovan, who says it was her first time to be ostensibly targeted during a rally, added: “It was obvious that they didn’t like me being there and taking pictures.”

PSD leader Liviu Dragnea, who was in June sentenced to three and a half years in jail over a fake jobs scandal, has denounced the latest protests.

Late on Tuesday, he told the Antena 3 channel: “I saw an attempted coup to overthrow the government.”

Platform Romania 100, an NGO in Bucharest, has joined 16 other civil society groups in filing a complaint that alleges abusive behaviour by police during the protests, including disproportionate force and threats.

In a press release, the group said police had “violated the constitutional principles of freedom of assembly and freedom of speech.”

‘Right to protest’

On Monday, the dispute deepened when a 62-year-old man who was reportedly treated for a nosebleed during the clashes was pronounced dead in a hospital in southern Romania.

A day earlier, he had checked himself into the hospital and was treated for internal bleeding.

The hospital director called for a probe into the causes of his demise, while local media speculated whether there was a link between his death and the tear gas.

Late on Tuesday, local media reported that Raed Arafat, head of the Department for Emergency Situations, said he did not see a link, adding that an autopsy will provide more information.

Carmen Dan, the interior minister, apologised on Sunday to the police officers and demonstrators who were injured. She claimed that 1,000 people attacked police with stones and bottles.

Neither the interior ministry nor military police replied to Al Jazeera’s request for additional comment.

Days after the protest, military prosecutors launched an investigation into allegations of excessive force.

“For the moment, we have requested documents on how the mission was organised,” Ionel Corbu, the military prosecutor leading the probe, told reporters at the time. “We will also call gendarmes (military police officers) to the hearings.”

Lydia Gall, a Balkans and Eastern Europe researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW), said investigations into the August 10 events must be “effective” and “impartial”.

“It’s quite clear there were elements of excessive force,” she told Al Jazeera, pointing to “the fact that hundreds of protesters ended up with various degrees of injuries”.

“It’s a basic right to be able to protest,” Gall added.

More protests expected

The rallies kicked off in January 2017, when Romanians took to the streets to protest against the newly-inaugurated government’s plans to decriminalise certain corruption offences and make abuse of power punishable by prison only if the sums involved exceed $47,500.

By January 22, the number of demonstrators swelled to around 30,000, and they peaked at more than half a million in early February.

Although the justice minister resigned, and the decrees were revoked, demonstrations were held throughout the year and into 2018.

The rallies have gained the backing of President Klaus Iohannis, a member of the National Liberal Party, and many opposition politicians.

After previous protests, the European Union and the United States condemned what they viewed as efforts to stymy anti-corruption measures.

The government has defended its positions, accusing opposition politicians, among them President Iohannis, of attempting to undermine its rule.

PSD leader Dragnea has denounced Iohannis as a coup plotter. With an appeal pending, Dragnea still has yet to go to jail and still heads the ruling party.

The August 10 rally was dubbed “Diaspora at Home” and was attended by Romanians who returned to the country to participate.

Their demands included the resignation of the current governing cabinet.

More protests are expected to take place in September and October.

Elena Calistru of the Funky Citizens advocacy group said the protests follow in a tradition of anti-corruption rallies stretching back to 2013.

Calistru said that although many Romanians are suffering from “protest fatigue”, she expects upcoming rallies to draw broad participation.

“The movement in itself is largest than just protests,” she told Al Jazeera. “They are about more than the gesture of taking to the streets.”

“It’s a place where you really feel on the limit and that’s pretty awesome in an F1 car.”

That was Lewis Hamilton’s take on the Belgian Grand Prix in 2011. Back then, he was entering his final years with McLaren and only one championship trophy nestled in the cabinet.

As the summer break draws to a close and the second half of the season begins, the Briton holds a 24-point lead over rival Sebastian Vettel and has a fingertip on a fifth world title.

One of the most historic circuits on the calendar, the majestic Spa-Francorchamps is the perfect setting for battle to reconvene.

Long straights mixed with the challenge of fast, sweeping corners, this track located in a valley of the Ardennes mountains is as picturesque as a wish-you-where-here postcard, yet as brutal a test as any Formula 1 driver will face.

One year ago the roles were reserved between Hamilton and Vettel as the title battle rocked up in Belgium, with the German flying high with a 14-point advantage after victory in Hungary.

But it was the Mercedes man who seemed most recharged after the holiday recess. Equalling Michael Schumacher’s career record of 68 pole positions was the first strike, then a tense afternoon of cat-and-mouse on race day ended in a Hamilton win.

That victory was the first of three in a row for Hamilton

Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen could be one to keep an eye on after five consecutive podium finishes since the French Grand Prix in June. He also has the honour of being joint third in the all-time winners’ list at Spa, with four victories.

Is it time for the Iceman to step in and shake up a two-horse championship race?

Flashback quiz

One of the most memorable F1 races ever – the 1998 Belgian Grand Prix – is 20 years old this month. You can read all about the rain-soaked carnage, pile-ups and bust-ups of that eventful day here.

Out of the 22 drivers who started that day, only eight were classified finishers.

We want you to name those drivers.

There are two minutes on the clock to get guessing on this one.

Previously in F1: Round 12 – Hungary

The track

Back pocket facts

• Belgian Antoine-Joseph “Adolphe” Sax invented the saxophone in the early 1840s. Although the popular instrument didn’t immediately impress his peers, the musician also went onto to create the saxotromba, saxhorn and saxtuba.
• The Smurfs hail from Belgium. Comics artist Peyo came up with the original concept in 1958 after he couldn’t remember the word for salt, so instead jokingly referred to it as “schtroumpf.” “Les Schtroumpfs” was translated to “The Smurfs” for the American audience.
• Belgium’s dense road network is visible from space. The glowing highways have near-total streetlight coverage, with around 2.2 million bulbs illuminating the roads.
• The highest point in Belgium is smaller than the world’s tallest building. The Signal de Botrange on the High Fens plateau is 694 metres high, 134 metres shorter than the tallest building in the world – Dubai’s Burj Khalifa – which stands at an impressive 828 metres.

Holiday social

How to follow on BBC Sport

BBC Sport has live coverage of all the season’s races on BBC Radio 5 live and BBC Radio 5 live sports extra, plus live online commentary on the BBC Sport website and mobile app – including audience interaction, expert analysis, debate, voting, features, interviews and video content.

All times BST and are subject to change at short notice.

Hurricane Lane intensified to a Category 5 on Tuesday night, threatening to become the first landfalling hurricane in Hawaii in nearly three decades.

With maximum sustained winds of 160 mph, Lane was upgraded to the highest level on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale as it surged westerly across the Pacific Ocean toward the Big Island. Unlike Hurricane Hector, which skirted the Hawaiian Islands earlier this month, Lane is projected to veer north-northwest and drench the Aloha State’s most populated areas.

While Lane is likely to weaken as it moves closer to Hawaii, Accuweather Senior Meteorologist Mike Doll told USA TODAY that the hurricane will deliver a combination of torrential rainfall, high winds and dangerous surf as early as Wednesday.

“Regardless of what happens in the eye of the hurricane, there’s going to be the potential for a lot of rain – 10-15 inches, perhaps even higher than that,” Doll said. “The problem with that, you get that much rain and you’re going to be seeing damage to property. It’s certainly going to be a threat to lives, as well, especially in areas that are prone to flooding.”

The hurricane’s escalation to Category 5 status motivated the Central Pacific Hurricane Center to issue a Hurricane Warning for Hawaii County, indicating that damaging winds and surf and flooding rains are possible within 36 hours.

“Hurricane Lane is a very serious storm that has the potential to do damage and cause harm,” said Tom Travis, who heads the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency.

Also Tuesday, Hawaii Gov. David Ige signed an emergency proclamation to put the state in position to lend support to county emergency responders.

“We encourage all the people across the state to pay attention for this storm. It is different. It’s not your typical hurricane that tracks south and goes away,” Ige said.

Indeed, Lane is forecast to turn north-northwest, or toward Honolulu, making it a threat to reach landfall – though in a weaker state.

“We expect it to be a Category 2 hurricane (then),” said Doll. But, he added, “That’s still a dangerous hurricane. Heed local warnings.”

A Category 3 hurricane at its peak, Hector followed a similar path toward Hawaii earlier this month but stayed south of the islands, causing “very little if any impact,” Doll said.

The last hurricane to make landfall in the island state was Iniki, a Category 4 that barreled into the island of Kauai on Sept. 11, 1992, and resulted in more than $3 billion in damages. Six people were killed.

 

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I had a chance to play Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, the new ninja game from the developers of Dark Souls, and wow did that game wipe the floor with me.

At a hands-on event ahead of Gamescom, I watched Activision’s Miles Winzeler play through a chunk of Sekiro and then got to try it for myself. As someone who’s played a fair amount of Dark Souls games and Bloodbourne, I was pretty confident in myself after seeing Winzeler defeat a handful of enemies and a couple mid-bosses with relative ease. 

Once the controller was in my own hands, I quickly found out I was wrong.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice kind of looks like a Souls game that was transplanted to 16th century Japan and brightened up a bit. But the second I started moving, I noticed that this game felt much different.

First of all, the weight of the character Sekiro feels much lighter than the typical Souls character and his movement feels much more free. He’s so light, in fact, that he can grapple up onto tree limbs, roof tops, and various other advantageous precipices to get the jump on enemies, escape danger, or just enjoy the view.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice forced me out of my Dark Souls comfort zone

As a shinobi (a.k.a. ninja), Sekiro is adept with his blades, so sword arts (special moves that do more damage) pop up pretty frequently, like when he launches down on unsuspecting enemies and pins them to the ground with his sword.

The crux of the game, combat, is where I had the most trouble. My tried and true method of dodging and blocking enemy attacks that I learned from Dark Souls didn’t prove to be as useful in Sekiro.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice forced me out of my Dark Souls comfort zone with its focus on breaking down enemies’ stances with well-time parries and cuts, opening them up finishing moves to take away large chunks of their health. Rolling and hacking wasn’t working.

And so I died to the first mid-boss. But lucky for me, the mechanic that makes Sekiro unique lies in its subtitle: you get to revive once and try again, effectively allowing you to die twice.

Even with that crutch, I was still unable to defeat the first mid-boss and move onto the second section of demo. I tried four times and I just couldn’t do it. With the limited amount of time I had to play, I was more focused on rushing through the fight than taking my time to figure out the nuances of the mechanics, which is clearly what I needed to do in order to succeed.

It reminded me of the first time I played Dark Souls, in which it took me a few hours to really become confident in myself. It also seems to be just as engrossing, and I am excited to sink more time into it and figure out how to beat that mid-boss.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice slices its way onto PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on March 22.

An Indonesian court sentenced a woman to 18 months in jail under a blasphemy law for complaining that a mosque near to her home was creating too much noise during its call to prayer.

Meiliana, 44, an ethnic Chinese Buddhist, was found guilty on Tuesday of “insulting Islam” and has been jailed for 18 months, a spokesperson for a district court in North Sumatra told reporters.

The court in the city of Medan said her comments, made in 2016, triggered riots that saw Muslims attack Buddhist temples, AFP news agency reported.

Meiliana’s lawyer said she would appeal the verdict. Amnesty International urged the court to reverse its ruling.

“This ludicrous decision is a flagrant violation of freedom of expression,” Amnesty’s executive director for Indonesia, Usman Hamid, said in a statement.

“Sentencing someone to 18 months in prison for something so trivial is a stark illustration of the increasingly arbitrary and repressive application of the blasphemy law in the country.”

In 2015, a review into practices employed by Indonesia’s estimated 800,000 mosques led by Vice President Jusuf Kalla concluded places of worship should turn down their sound systems and not broadcast lengthy sermons to avoid agitating people living nearby.

Blasphemy

Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago of thousands of islands, has a larger Muslim population than any other country in the world, comprising about 220 million people.

While the country is officially pluralist, with six major religions recognised by the state, a recent rise in conservative interpretations of Islam prompted fears the blasphemy laws were being used to subjugate minorities and violate religious freedoms.

According to Indonesia’s 1965 criminal code, any person who “deliberately” abuses a religion in public may be sentenced to up to five years in prison.

Last year, the former ethnic Chinese governor of Jakarta was jailed for two years on blasphemy charges after several Muslim groups accused him of insulting Islam.

The ruling was widely condemned as politically motivated. 

SOURCE: Al Jazeera and news agencies

British number one Kyle Edmund progressed to the last 16 of the Winston-Salem Open with a straight-set win over Argentina’s Leonardo Mayer.

Third seed Edmund won 6-3 6-3 in one hour and 13 minutes in North Carolina.

The 23-year-old, who has been named in the European Laver Cup team, did not face a single break point and won 93% of points on his first serve.

Edmund will face Spain’s world number 89 Roberto Carballes Baena in the next round on Wednesday.

Steve Reilly and Brad Heath, USA TODAY
Published 9:27 p.m. ET Aug. 21, 2018 | Updated 9:29 p.m. ET Aug. 21, 2018

President Donald Trump’s onetime personal attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to eight federal crimes on Tuesday.

Cohen’s abrupt plea caps one of the criminal investigations of members of Trump’s inner circle. Cohen admitted to charges of lying about his income to evade income taxes, lying to banks to obtain loans, and making illegal contributions to benefit Trump’s campaign.

Here are five things to know from the court filings and from Cohen’s own words. 

The charges against Cohen implicate others in Trump campaign

Prosecutors charged Cohen with two counts of violating campaign finance laws by arranging payoffs to silence two women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump. The payoffs followed the release of video from an Access Hollywood outtake in which Trump had boasted about sexual assault. 

Prosecutors said Cohen worked to secure a $150,000 payment from the National Enquirer to former Playboy playmate Karen McDougal, who claimed to have had a relationship with Trump years earlier. They said he also made a $130,000 payment to a Stephanie Clifford, a pornographic actress better known as Stormy Daniels. 

Prosecutors said the payments were illegal because they were made by a corporation, and because they exceeded the maximum allowable donation to a federal candidate. 

Cohen stunned a federal courtroom in New York on Tuesday by declaring that he made those payments “at the direction of the candidate,” by whom he plainly meant Trump. He also said he did so specifically to influence the outcome of the election. 

Additionally, the Justice Department alleged in a court filing that Cohen had “coordinated with one or more members of the campaign, including through meetings and phone calls, about the fact, nature, and timing of the payments.” Cohen pleaded guilty to that allegation. 

While the court record doesn’t name names other than Cohen’s, it provides sufficient detail to identify individuals and organizations involved in the public record of the widely-reported chain of events.

Trump’s company was behind one of the payments

Prosecutors also alleged that Trump’s private company, The Trump Organization, agreed to reimburse Cohen for the $130,000 he paid to Clifford through a Delaware shell company, and the $35 it had cost him to wire the money. The company also reimbursed him $50,000 for what he described as “tech services.”

Then an executive at the Trump Organization doubled his payment and threw in a $60,000 bonus. Prosecutors said an unnamed executive told an employee to pay it and to falsely describe the payment as a retainer for legal services.

“Please pay from the Trust. Post to legal expenses. Put ‘retainer for the months of January and February 2017’ in the description.”

President Trump’s two adult sons and a third Trump Organization executive are in charge of a revocable trust which holds the president’s business assets.

The charges detail Cohen’s hidden sources of income

Five of the eight charges outlined by the Justice Department allege that Cohen “engaged in a scheme to evade income taxes by failing to report more than $4 million in income” between 2012 and 2016. Prosecutors charged that meant he failed to pay about $1.3 million in federal taxes.

More: Cohen says Trump ‘directed’ the payments

More: What we know about the Cohen tapes

The income came from a diverse array of sources which Cohen allegedly hid from his accountant and the Internal Revenue Service, including a $6 million loan to a business partner in the taxi industry at more than 12 percent interest which resulted in $2.4 million in interest payments which was not reported to the IRS.

Other income sources prosecutors said Cohen hid from tax authorities included:

• $100,000 for brokering the sale of a piece of property in a private aviation community in Ocala, Florida in 2014.
• More than $200,000 from an assisted living company “purportedly for Cohen’s ‘consulting’ on real estate and other projects” in 2016.
• $30,000 for brokering sale of a French handbag, which retails for $11,900 to  $300,000 “depending on the type of leather or animal skin used.”

Tabloid media payments were to influence the election

One of the payments Cohen acknowledged violated campaign finance laws wasn’t made by him.

Instead, prosecutors charged that he helped arrange an agreement for another woman to sell the story of her affair with Trump to The National Enquirer. The magazine paid Karen McDougal $150,000 for the rights to any story involving her relationship with “any then-married man.” 

The magazine was not named in court documents, but prosecutors’ description matches the Enquirer. McDougal is referred to as “Woman-1.” 

Prosecutors said that although the agreement was ostensibly to pay her for writing for the magazine, “its principle purpose … was to suppress Woman-1’s story so as to prevent it from influencing the election.”

The court records allege the chairman and chief executive of the magazine’s parent company had agreed to help the campaign “deal with negative stories about [Trump’s] relationships with women, by, among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided.”  

The court records describe a method known as “catch and kill” whereby a tabloid media company pays an individual for exclusive rights to a story, but never publishes it.

There is no cooperation agreement, but Cohen could still cooperate

Despite the details provided in the plea agreement, questions remain about the broader implications for people other than Cohen who prosecutors have said took part in the payment.

Cohen’s legal deal struck as part of his plea agreement Tuesday does not include any explicit promises to cooperate with authorities as part of any broader investigation. (Cohen also has testified to congressional investigators examining Russian interference in the 2016 election.) 

George Washington University Law School lecturer Randall Eliason, a former federal prosecutor, said Cohen “could certainly implicate at a minimum other members of the campaign.”

“The biggest unanswered question in my mind is: Is he now going to seek to cooperate in additional investigations against trump or other members of the campaign?” he said. “Or, his he going to plead guilty, stay silent and just walk away from it all?”

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Image: Dominic Lipinski – PA Images/getty

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. 

On Tuesday afternoon Facebook released yet another detailed look at an elaborate political influence campaign taking advantage of its platform. According to the social media giant, this time around Iranian state media attempted to use the power of Facebook to shape political opinions around the globe. Oh, and there was some more Russian stuff, too. 

This, of course, is just three weeks after Facebook revealed in another blog post a separate campaign run by so-called “inauthentic” accounts with the goal of influencing U.S. politics.  

But don’t let this newfound focus on Iran trick you into thinking that the Russia-linked Internet Research Agency has stopped attempting to use the power of Facebook to influence foreign elections. According to Facebook, it probably hasn’t.

“[We’ve] removed Pages, groups and accounts that can be linked to sources the US government has previously identified as Russian military intelligence services,” read the company’s blog post. “This is unrelated to the activities we found in Iran.”

Speaking of Iran, Facebook noted the removal of scores of accounts and pages that it claims exhibited “coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook and Instagram” — at least some of which the company claims were tied to Iranian state media. 

“We’ve removed 652 Pages, groups and accounts for coordinated inauthentic behavior that originated in Iran and targeted people across multiple internet services in the Middle East, Latin America, UK and US,” read the blog post, which gave credit to cybersecurity firm FireEye for helping Facebook uncover a network of bad actors. 

“Based on FireEye’s tip, we started an investigation into ‘Liberty Front Press’ and identified additional accounts and Pages from their network,” continued the announcement. “We are able to link this network to Iranian state media through publicly available website registration information, as well as the use of related IP addresses and Facebook Pages sharing the same admins.”

Basically, every shady government or quasi-government agency is attempting to get in on the Facebook-enabled misinformation fun. 

Maybe keep that in mind the next time you check your News Feed.

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook says it foiled political influence campaigns originating out of Iran and Russia that targeted U.S. users ahead of the midterm elections.

The campaigns, which mimicked previous Kremlin-linked efforts to stir political discord around hot-button issues, also targeted users in the U.K., the Middle East and Latin America in a bid to sway world politics. 

This marks the first time Iran was implicated in a political influence campaign on Facebook. The social media giant says it has not found a connection between the Iranian and Russian campaigns but the campaigns deployed similar tactics.

“We believe these pages, groups and accounts were part of two sets of campaigns,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, said in a conference call with reporters late Tuesday. “First a set of activity from Iran, including some with ties to state-owned media, and second a set of activity that the U.S. government and others have publicly linked to Russian military intelligence services.”

The revelation underscored the difficult task of protecting elections from foreign interference on social media, an effort that began after it was discovered that Russia waged a campaign to influence voters during the U.S. presidential election in 2016. After heavy criticism from lawmakers for failing to detect and purge election meddling, Facebook has made safeguarding elections around the world one of its top priorities. 

Facebook says it started investigating coordinated activity by a network of Facebook pages linked to Iran after being alerted by a cybersecurity firm FireEye. Facebook said it linked the network to Iranian state media using website registration information, as well as IP addresses and Facebook pages which had the same administrators. It removed 652 pages, groups and accounts for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” on Facebook and Instagram.

“Our systems have been able to find a lot of fake accounts that were attempting potentially to do bad things on the system and we feel like each time we get better at identifying this kind of activity upfront and putting barriers in place to those who would try to abuse these systems,” Zuckerberg said. 

According to FireEye, the Facebook content promoted Iranian political interests including anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian themes and advocated for U.S. policies favorable to Iran such as the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal but did not appear to be a “dedicated attempt” to influence the midterm elections. 

The growing activity on social media worldwide demonstrates how nation states are increasingly experimenting with online campaigns to influence and shape political discourse, FireEye said.

Twitter said late Tuesday that it removed 284 accounts for engaging in “coordinated manipulation.” The accounts in question also appeared to originate from Iran.

A 2018 report from the Oxford Internet Institute found disinformation campaigns on social media in 48 countries, up from 28 in 2017, despite efforts to combat the spread of false information.

Zuckerberg hinted more revelations of nation-state disinformation campaigns may come to light in coming months. “I think it’s safe to say we have a number of investigations going on, and we’ll update you when we know more,” he said.

Facebook told reporters it worked closely with law enforcement in the U.S. and the U.K. on the investigation, and briefed the State Department and the Treasury Department because of U.S sanctions against Iran.

Facebook was tipped off by FireEye in July to an organization called the “Liberty Front Press.” Facebook connected the group to Iranian state media and found it operated 147 pages, accounts and groups on Facebook and 76 on Instagram, reaching more than 200,000 followers. The group purchased more than $6,000 of ads and organized three events. The group also engaged in hacking accounts and spreading malware.

Facebook tied another set of accounts to Russian military intelligence. A third group, which Facebook did not identify but said it believed originated in Iran, shared information on Middle East politics in Arabic and Farsi.

 

The Facebook accounts and pages typically posed as news or other organizations which shared information in multiple countries without revealing their true identity.

The accounts which attempted to conceal their location were created in 2013. In 2017, they increased their focus on the U.S. and the UK. 

Sen. Mark Warner, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the discovery underscores that other foreign governments are “following the Kremlin’s playbook” in targeting Facebook users to disrupt U.S. elections.

“This is further evidence that foreign adversaries are actively using social media to divide Americans and undermine our democratic institutions,” Warner said in a statement. “I’ve been saying for months that there’s no way the problem of social media manipulation is limited to a single troll farm in St. Petersburg, and that fact is now beyond a doubt.”

During and after the U.S. presidential election, Facebook unwittingly hosted hundreds of pages and accounts later connected to the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Kremlin-linked operation also bought thousands of ads targeting Americans with politically divisive messages. Federal prosecutors indicted 13 Russians involved with the Internet Research Agency for their involvement in election meddling.

Last month Facebook detected and removed 32 pages and fake accounts which raised divisive social issues ahead of the midterms. Facebook did not definitively link the campaign to Russia, but said the tactics were similar those of the Internet Research Agency.

Facebook, Twitter and Google are scheduled to testify at a Senate hearing next month on foreign interference on social media.

“Russia is not the only hostile foreign actor developing this capability, and…addressing this threat requires technology companies, law enforcement, Congress, and the intelligence community working together,” Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement. “There is still much that needs to be done and I look forward to discussing it further at the committee’s Sept. 5th hearing.”

More: We read every one of the 3,517 Facebook ads bought by Russians. Here’s what we found

More: Russian Facebook ads inflamed Hispanic tensions over immigration after Trump election

More: Russia exploited race divisions on Facebook. More black staffers, diversity could have have helped.

 

 

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Image: Paul Zimmerman/WireImage

Look, we’re all hoping there’s some truth to the possibility of romance between two main characters in Stranger Things Season 3 — and so is Millie Bobby Brown.

Brown, who plays Eleven in the beloved Netflix series, fully supports co-star David Harbour’s teased idea of characters Chief Jim Hopper and Joyce Byers falling in love, telling Variety she “would love for them to get together.”

Talking to the publisher at an Emmy nomination event for Stranger Things in New York on Tuesday, Brown said she was in full support of a love story between her onscreen counterpart’s guardian, Hopper, and friend Will’s mum, Joyce.  

“Listen, I would love for them to get together. Jopper is like my inspiration in life,” she said.

“Winona Ryder and David Harbour are like my parents. On set, they’re like, ‘Stop running, what are you eating, why are you eating that?’ David is like, ‘Another boy?’ And in the show, if they rekindle, that means Will and Eleven will be step-siblings. I would love that because Noah [Schnapp] is my boy best friend.”

Harbour teased fans about the undeniable chemistry between his character and Winona Ryder’s Joyce during a Q&A at a similar Emmy nomination celebration on Friday.

“It’s the summer of love in Hawkins, Indiana,” he said during the event at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

“It’s a really fun season where you’re gonna get to see these characters experience summer in Indiana, and there’s this sense of new relationships. It’s sort of a big celebration of love. That’s all I can say.”

Back in NYC, Brown also offered up a few thoughts on Season 3, confirming Harbour’s assertion that the next chapter will be more serious than the first two seasons. “It’s definitely going to get darker,” she said in a Q&A hosted by MTV’s Josh Horowitz after the screening.

Image: Paul Zimmerman/WireImage

“I think Eleven should sacrifice herself in some way,” she said, according to the publisher. “That’s how I kind of want that situation to go. I want to have her really sacrifice her powers. 

“If Eleven loses her powers, is she as powerful just as a character? I think that would be very cool. I want to build her to be a strong person without her powers…But right now it’s very about her powers and I think taking that away slowly could be cool.”

Stranger Things Season 3 will be dropping on Netflix in summer 2019. Now, back to dreaming about Joyce and Hopper, sittin’ in a tree. 

Additional reporting by Jess Joho.