Tangier, Morocco – A forest in a poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of Tangier, a tourist town in Morocco‘s northeast, acts as a last stop for African migrants before they attempt the perilous journey into Europe.

Here, they sleep on discarded, stained mattresses, cook a meal a day using firewood and wash their clothes from rainwater collected in metal cans.

However, with no roof over their heads, there is no place to hide from the rain.

In the middle of all this, Amale ponders his next move, sitting on a log. He is almost 4,500km from home, but fewer than 25km from Spain, which was his dream destination when he left Sierra Leone a year ago.

There are more than 20 other African migrants taking shelter in the forest with him. Some of them are excited to be so close to Europe. Others, after hearing about the risks associated with crossing the Mediterranean, are re-evaluating their options.

More than 2,000 migrants have died while attempting to cross the Mediterranean this year. The risk, along with the lack of money and fear of the authorities, forced Amale to change his mind.

“It’s too dangerous. I’ve already spent more than eight million leones ($930) and more than 12 months on this trip. I want to go home,” Amale told Al Jazeera.

Nature is not the migrants’ only nemesis. The police routinely raid the forest and take them to the south of the country, where they beg on the streets to save up just about enough to return to this forest.

Once they are back under the trees, the migrants start saving again. This time for a spot on the boat that will take them to Spain.

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Ariana Grande is, once again, whipping up a storm of excitement on social media. 

The Sweetener singer has been posting a series of photos from the shoot of her next music video, and it would appear that she is going to be serving up some serious millennial nostalgia. 

On Tuesday, Grande spread clues all over her Twitter and Instagram pages, and if you’re into iconic teen movies from the early ’00s (who isn’t?), you’re in for a treat.  

On Twitter, Grande shared a serious of photos captioned “meet the plastics,” a reference to iconic 2004 teen movie Mean Girls.

On her Instagram story, Grande delivered even more Mean Girls vibes. 

Just check out this teasing shot that reeks of North Shore High – be careful not to fall into a trash can, Ari. 

Image: @arianagrande on instagram

Thank you for including this legendary quote from North Shore’s Jason. You can go shave your back now. 

From one iconic flick to the next; Grande also got busy channeling our favourite sorority girl-turned -lawyer Elle Woods from the 2001 Reese Witherspoon classic Legally Blonde. 

Doing some serious studying while getting in those steps is classic Woods.

Grande even had the original Paulette, Jennifer Coolidge, on set with her. 

Though Grande promised in an Instagram story that her video will feature references from four films. 

In an Instagram story, she hinted that the third is going to be 13 Going on 30 and she showed a photo of herself recreating one of Jennifer Garner’s Jenna Rink looks. 

If Mark Ruffalo is guest starring in the video, we’re going to scream. 

Image: @arianagrande  on instagram

At this point, all we can do is guess what the fourth film reference will be. Although Grande has confirmed that it’s not going to be the obvious choice; the Alicia Silverstone classic Clueless.

Grande pointed out to a fan that Clueless had been done before – probably in reference to Iggy Azalea’s video for her hit song “Fancy.” 

Please do 10 Things I hate About You, Ari. 

Vientiane – This year’s Thanksgiving celebration marks 50 years since the American military embarked on the biggest bombing campaign in history, decimating the small Southeast Asian country of Laos by dropping more than two million tonnes of bombs on it at the height of the Vietnam War. 

Half a century on, innocent lives are still being lost as the country struggles with the leftovers of the conflict.

On Thanksgiving Day in November 1968, the United States escalated its war against North Vietnam in Laos.

Then-US President Lyndon B Johnson had ordered traditional turkey dinners to be helicoptered in to US troops who were secretly deployed in the quiet, landlocked country to sever the North Vietnamese supply lines that ran through the east.

At the same time, the US began dropping millions of tonnes of bombs – they “fell like rain” on the supply lines in Laos, a network of paths and tracks known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and most of the east of the country.

That hugely redoubled effort to shut down the trail saw a planeload of bombs dropped on Laos every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years.

Now, some 80 million unexploded bombs and air-dropped cluster munitions left over continue to maim and kill Laotian men, women and children.

Manixia Thor is a Laotian operations manager at the UK-based Mines Advisory Group (MAG), one of several NGOs trying to clear the land of unexploded ordnance (UXO).

“About 75 percent of injuries from cluster munitions involve children,” she tells Al Jazeera, referring to the tennis-ball sized fragmentation bomblets that have acquired the local name “bombies”. 

They were dropped in their millions on Laos. Thousands of children have been killed or severely wounded by them, and Thor says they are “everywhere”.

Unexploded cluster bombs are found in particularly large numbers in the northern province of Xiengkhouang, where Thor works, and where MAG focuses its survey and clearance efforts. 

They look attractive to children; anything shaped like a ball is tempting for a child in a country as poor as Laos, where toys and other amusements are few and far between.

Calum Gibbs, a 26-year-old Scot working in the southern province of Savannakhet for HALO Trust, a UK-based NGO focused on bomb clearance, says data suggests there have been 50,000 casualties since the war ended. 

Although the number of deaths has fallen from the 200 to 300 annually in the 1990s to around 50 today, all uncleared land is potentially dangerous. 

Gibbs believes education is critical to avoiding death and injury among young children.

“We get out and try and educate as much as possible, and show pictures of these things to kids,” says Gibbs. “They have a UXO song, and the kids sing it so they remember that UXO are dangerous.” 

But it’s not just children at risk. Most of Laos’ predominantly rural population are involved in rice cultivation, and even on land that has been tilled, the “bombies” are a threat.

Two decades ago in Xiengkhouang Province, unexploded cluster bombs lay scattered on the ground in rice fields, and farmers were careful to sow only the land around them. Many have since been destroyed by clearance teams, but others lurk beneath the surface.

“In some places where people plant rice, every year some pieces will come up,” Thor says. “It still happens, even on cultivated land.”

On forested land, the problem is worse, and as more vegetation is cleared to grow rice for Laos’ expanding population, more people are at risk.

“In January 2000, about 4km from Phonsavan, a villager was digging and found a big bomb,” says Kongkeo Phanthaborivat, an entrepreneur from the Xiengkhouang provincial capital of Phonsavan. “They tried to open it by themselves, and the bomb exploded. Two people were killed at the same time.”

We need as many resources as we can get. There’s no limit.

Manixia Thor, Mines Advisory Group 

And it’s not only humans that trigger the explosives, but also animals. 

Despite the challenges, however, some say the battle against the bombs is being won, albeit at a slow pace. By one estimate, it will be 200 years before Laos is safe again.

Survey and clearance efforts received a boost when former US President Barack Obama, in his final months in office, pledged to double his country’s $45m, three-year contribution to dealing with the bombs.

But some are not convinced of funding promises that can be cut short by the stroke of a pen in Washington.

One staff member at a bomb disposal NGO, who requested anonymity, said one of the organisation’s US government donors has set unrealistic targets for land clearance, which if not met, could result in the withdrawal of its funding.

A local man, who also requested anonymity citing political sensitivities, says that at least 40 percent of donors’ cash disappears into the pockets of “corrupt” officials and foreign NGO managers.

But Thor, the NGO worker, holds on to optimism.

“The situation with UXO in Xiengkhouang is going to get a lot better because Obama gave more money for survey and clearance, and in the near future we’re going to get some money from DFID [the UK’s Department for International Development] as well,” she says.

“We need as many resources as we can get. There’s no limit.”

Every week, thousands of referees oversee grassroots matches – for the love of football and the reward of enjoying the match, but often for little financial return and a risk to their safety.

While many will encounter no serious problems, others face verbal or even physical abuse by players and spectators.

Republic of Ireland Combined Counties League referee Daniel Sweeney was assaulted last week after an amateur game – an attack that left him with a broken jaw.

This prompted us to ask an open question: “Are you a referee? Tell us your experiences.”

The vast majority of replies were not positive – perhaps skewed by the recent assault on the Irish referee.

These are your stories…

‘Club manager came to attack me’

I was an amateur referee until 2010 when I stopped because the risk is too high and there is no protection from anyone. Not even the league. I was harassed and almost beaten three times – twice from the same team and once from another team.

My size probably stopped them from real physical attacks. On one occasion the club manager was coming from behind to attack me, but thank God for my intuitiveness.

Ronald, London

‘Girl ran up and slapped ref’

I dismissed a player for his violent conduct. The game finished a few moments later and as I walked to collect my flag with my assistant, a girl came running up behind us shouting. He [the assistant] turned around and asked: “€œDid you want to speak to me?”€

With that she slapped him with the palm of her hand, which really shocked him. Is it any wonder that it is proving very difficult to encourage people to take up refereeing?

Name withheld

‘Trouble with two sets of parents’

This kind of behaviour does not surprise me. l have given refereeing up now, but during my time l found that the parents were the worst.

The only game that l was scrutinised on turned into a mass riot between two sets of parents. l was only asked to do the game because the manager of one of the teams assaulted a woman at a match the previous week.

I had been involved in the game up to that point for 40 years, as my playing days were over and l thought l would give something back to stay involved. But after repeats of players and parents alike reacting like this, l walked away from the game completely.

Stephen, West Midlands

‘How can this be acceptable?’

The manager began to question my decisions from the sideline, I spoke to him and asked him to stop, but it continued and when I confronted him about it the second time he kept trying to argue. As a result, I sent him to stand with the parents. At the end of the game, I had to caution one of the players as he had been questioning my decisions and committing fouls throughout the match. Shortly after, his father came and confronted me.

I decided to bring out my card holder so I could write down what he had said. However, he presumed I was going to show him [the parent] a card, so he threatened me. I genuinely feared for my safety and at no point did anybody come and offer me any support.

How can this be acceptable for a 16-year-old referee to be confronted and threatened by two fully grown men?

Ali, Suffolk

‘Respect for grassroots referees?’

I’€™m a referee who has not re-registered with the Sheffield and Hallamshire County FA. I was assaulted during an adult Sunday League game. I had sent off a player for violent conduct and he was the player who assaulted me.

There is no respect for grassroots referees at all, whether that be from spectators, players or managers. The FA’s Respect Campaign, in my opinion, has been an absolute failure.

Verbal abuse is the most prevalent, but this is something that is seen week in and week out in the Premier League, yet the referees do not sanction any of the behaviour. Grassroots players, therefore, see this as acceptable.

Thomas, Sheffield

‘Part and parcel of the job?’

Referees get verbal abuse on a weekly basis, I guess it is part and parcel of the job. Physical abuse is on the rise and it is just unacceptable. I have been put in headlocks, punched, treated and even had my car vandalised after games.

The FA has a Respect programme and I see it work very well in youth games, and it is improving in adult grassroots football. But I feel more needs to be done within the professional game that will feed down to grassroots.

Abuse, whether verbal or physical, would not be tolerated in any other sport – why is it in our national sport?

Connor, Derbyshire

‘A 22-woman brawl’

I once refereed a game as a 16-year-old where 22 ladies started fighting over nothing and afterwards proceeded to threaten me.

A few weeks later, I was refereeing a game at a park when on the pitch next to me a fight broke out. Three police vans arrived as a result of one player and his father being chased by 10 lads to the car park. This was all somewhat a ˜baptism of fire€™ to my refereeing career.

Daniel, West Midlands

‘Threatened nine months after red card’

While trying to get a player to come to me so I could speak with him, he refused so I issued a yellow card. He immediately went into a tirade of foul and abusive language directed towards me.

I then produced a red card, at which point he came at me (he was built like a bodybuilder). Players from his team were trying to restrain him but he continued to come towards me in a threatening way. The match was abandoned and the player was banned by the county FA.

Nine months later, I was in a petrol station and he was there and as we passed each other he said: “If you think I have forgotten, well I haven’t”.

Allan, Hampshire

‘Players tried to kick door down’

After refereeing a youth football match in Belfast where three players were sent off, I was forced to lock the door of my changing room after a number of players attempted to gain entry by forcibly kicking the door down.

Later, upon leaving the changing room, I was met with a hail of verbal abuse and told that if I were to referee one of the teams again I would get my head kicked in.

Chris, North Yorkshire

‘My wife was targeted’

I retired from refereeing after officiating a cup match back in the early 1990s. I was threatened and jostled after the game, but it was five days after the game when two of the players threatened me and abused my wife when we were out for a night on the town.

I was aware of the risk of abuse from players, but when my wife was targeted, that was the line that could never be crossed. The county FA were just not interested in anything that happened away from the field of play. I did referee again, but not in that county.

Anti, Brisbane

‘Threatened to rape my wife, kill my children, then kill me’

I was a referee. A player who had injured himself, while trying to make a violent tackle on another player, threatened to come to my house, rape my wife, kill my children then kill me.

When I reported him to Wiltshire FA they asked if I’d booked or red carded him at the time, I said no as I was alone and he was with his team-mates.

They said in that case they would take no action but should he [the player] make contact with me or my family to let them know. I never refereed again.

Peter, Wiltshire

Welcome to , an ongoing series at Mashable that looks at how to take care of – and deal with – the kids in your life. Because Dr. Spock is nice and all, but it’s 2018 and we have the entire internet to contend with.

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You’re at a barbecue, or maybe a birthday party in the park. Someone, let’s say a friend of yours, takes out a phone and snaps a pic of your kids all playing together. The picture is adorable, and it’s posted to Facebook before you even realize what happened. 

This doesn’t bother you, of course. You, and hundreds of millions like you, have already uploaded scores of photos of your children to the online platform — all the way from the delivery room to the moment they uttered their first word. As social media continues to work its way progressively deeper into our everyday lives, this near constant-documentation of our kids has become normalized. 

But perhaps it shouldn’t be. Instead, perhaps it’s past time we reevaluate our relationships with the platforms working to monetize an indelible record of those we love.  

The big questions

Concerns over Facebook’s, and by extension Facebook-owned Instagram’s, handling of personal information are long past the point of academic. Massive slip ups, followed by scandals, followed by breaches serve to constantly remind us that the Mark Zuckerberg-helmed behemoth is unable to protect the reams of personal data it has collected on its users, even when it professes a desire to do so. 

And then, of course, there are all the cases where what’s good for Facebook explicitly doesn’t line up with what’s in you or your child’s best interest. 

What is happening with those photos once they’re uploaded?

But this is not a story about shady third-party apps scraping Facebook for your personal data, or even Facebook intentionally manipulating users’ News Feeds to see if it will make them sad. Rather, this is a look at what it means when untold amounts of personal information about your child is posted to the service — with or without your consent. 

What does it mean for you kid’s present and future wellbeing when thousands of photos showing every stage of their development have been handed over to a company that brushes off an acknowledgement its service may directly contribute to literal deaths before those same kids are even old enough to have a Facebook account? 

And how does Facebook protect those children from being categorized, monetized, and exploited by the same algorithms designed to track and profile its users — the company’s entire raison d’être? Is the company that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, very publicly denies knowledge of the shadow profiles it actively creates, really the right corporate entity to which you should entrust to safeguard your child’s life story? 

These are just a few of the questions we posed to privacy advocates, childhood development experts, and Facebook itself. What we found wasn’t exactly reassuring. 

First, the unsurprising part: Over the course of reporting this article we reached out to multiple specific individuals at Facebook with likely knowledge of the company’s policies on safeguarding minors’ data, as well as Facebook PR and the lead spokesperson on issues relating to facial recognition tech. 

Despite an initial offer to discuss the general concerns raised by our reporting, Facebook stopped responding to our emails after we posed specific questions. None of the Facebook employees we reached out to directly returned our requests for comment. 

Photographs and Privacy

According to Facebook’s stated policy, children under the age of 13 are not allowed to have an account with the service. The most obvious reason for this is the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, commonly referred to as COPPA. Passed in 1998, the act created strict requirements for “operators of websites or online services” that collect information from children under the age of 13. 

Simply put, it’s meant to protect kids. Notably, COPPA applies to information collected from said children, not about them. That’s one of the reasons why it’s perfectly fine for Facebook’s servers to be full of kids’ pictures uploaded by their parents. 

But what is happening with those photos once they’re uploaded? Unfortunately, it’s not 100 percent clear, and Facebook isn’t inclined to say. However, we do know at least one thing Facebook does with photos: train its AI.

Facebook offers a facial recognition service that can determine who is in a picture and suggest corresponding name tags. So, if you upload a photo from your high school reunion, Facebook is able to prompt you to tag your old pals. Users can opt out of this feature, but that doesn’t change the fact that the company has the tech to analyze photos and recognize individuals by their faces. 

“We think most parents would object to their children’s information being used to make profits for Facebook.”

In order to perfect this tool, Facebook required a large set of photos on which to train and test its algorithms. And we do mean large. A 2017 study from the University of Maryland specifically notes the number of images we’re talking about — “about 500 million images over 10 million identities.”

Where oh where could Facebook get its hands on 500 million images? Oh, right. 

A 2015 paper published by Facebook researchers notes that, in addition to using a public dataset containing 13,233 photos of 5,749 celebrities to test and refine its facial recognition tech, they “also validate [their] findings on an internal dataset, probing 100K faces among 10K subjects with a probe-gallery identification protocol.”

Privacy researcher, and creator of anti facial-recognition fashion CV Dazzle, Adam Harvey told Mashable that it’s “possible and likely that [Facebook’s] training dataset of 10M identities contains at least one person under 13.” 

He was quick to note that, at present, he can’t prove this. But still, it holds to reason that if Facebook has 500 million photos — likely culled from its users — in the service of testing or training its facial recognition tech, then at least some children are going to be found in there. That’s because, as Associate Professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information Sarita Yardi Schoenebeck told Mashable, at present, facial recognition tech doesn’t do a great job of identifying individuals’ ages — hence, it would require a herculean effort to manually weed out photos of children in that data set. 

“So far,” noted Professor Schoenebeck over email, “I haven’t seen any evidence that Facebook is doing something different with children’s photos (i.e., trying to protect them more than adult photos), outside of sensitive contexts like nudity.” 

James Graves, of the Georgetown University Law Center, echoed Professor Schoenebeck. 

“According to Facebook, its algorithm ‘learns for itself what distinguishes different faces and then improves itself based on its successes and failures, using unknown criteria that have yielded successful outputs in the past,’” wrote Graves — quoting from a court decision in a class action suit regarding Facebook’s use of facial recognition technology. “Based on that description, I would guess that Facebook’s algorithm analyzes children alongside adults, does not attempt to classify children as children, and does the same thing with non-user children as it does with non-user adults (whatever that might be).”

In other words, it’s possible that your precious child’s face is already being studied and analyzed by Facebook in its efforts to build better facial recognition algorithms. What those algorithms could be used for in the future is anyone’s guess, as even Facebook won’t confirm they will just stick to suggested photo tags. 

“Can I say that we will never use facial recognition technology for any other purposes,” mused Facebook chief privacy officer Erin Egan in a 2013 interview with Reuters. “Absolutely not.”

Whether or not this bothers you in many ways depends on whether or not you trust Facebook to be a good steward of your child’s privacy. History suggests caution. 

Messenger Kids

As your children age, but before they are old enough to have a Facebook account of their own, Facebook provides them with some brand loyalty imprinting in the form of Messenger Kids. The app, designed for kids aged six to 12, differs from Facebook at large in that it functions essentially as a bare-bones version of the company’s Messenger app. 

There’s no News Feed, no public groups, and hopefully no Russian influence campaigns. 

But should you create an account for your kid?

“When you sign your child up for Messenger Kids, it doesn’t mean you are signing them up for a Facebook or Messenger account,” the company tells parents. “Messenger Kids is a separate, standalone app just for kids.”

This, of course, hasn’t assuaged the scores of childhood development and privacy experts that have come out in opposition to the app. 

“Adults can weigh those risks against the benefits of using Facebook and Facebook Messenger. Children cannot.”

In January of this year, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood publicly opposed Messenger Kids — publishing a letter signed by 118 public health advocates demanding the app be shut down.

“Younger children are simply not ready to have social media accounts,” read the letter in part. “They also do not have a fully developed understanding of privacy, including what’s appropriate to share with others and who has access to their conversations, pictures, and videos.”

In the approximately nine months since the letter’s publication, the CCFC has only become more strident in its warnings about the potential harm caused by signing your children up for Messenger Kids. 

On October 3, the group submitted a letter to the Federal Trade Commission stating that Messenger Kids does not comply with COPPA and requesting an investigation as a result. 

“Facebook is encouraging young children to use Messenger Kids as the channel for relationships with friends and family,” David Monahan of CCFC explained to Mashable over email. “So Facebook is clearly collecting sensitive information — the contents of kids’ conversations. Their privacy policy is vague, but it appears to give Facebook wide latitude to use the information they collect for broad business purposes.”

And Monahan wasn’t done. “We think most parents would object to their children’s information being used to make profits for Facebook.”

Future risk

These concerns are not limited to uploading photos of your young children, or even Messenger Kids. Facebook itself, of course, is a minefield for 13-year-olds — and posting your child’s early life on Facebook, only to have them later join Messenger Kids and then Facebook, primes them for very unique form of trouble. 

Common Sense, a nonprofit “dedicated to helping kids thrive in a world of media and technology,” has advocated extensively on behalf of children’s privacy and healthy development. Ariel Fox Johnson, Common Sense’s senior council on policy and privacy, sees Facebook as fundamentally at odds with those core values. 

“Minors joining Facebook, or any social media company, should be aware that nothing they do on a site is truly private,” she told Mashable in an emailed statement. “You can set certain limits on who can see a post, or a photo — and you should, but the company is still going to see all of it. And how they use that information is often up to them.”

“Minors joining Facebook, or any social media company, should be aware that nothing they do on a site is truly private.”

And the concern is not just what Facebook is going to do with kids’ data today, but what it’s going to do with it tomorrow. As anyone who spent any time online since Facebook’s launch can attest, the company has repeatedly changed its privacy settings and core features after the fact — often leaving users to deal with the fallout on their own. 

What’s more, the company’s services and use of data has aggressively expanded in its 14 years. What was once a way to connect with likeminded college students is today a global network facilitating age discrimination, political influence campaigns, and possibly even ethnic cleansing. 

Who knows what it will be a year from now. 

Adam Harvey, the aforementioned privacy advocate, notes that keeping your kids — photos and all — off Facebook is, in light of this future uncertainty, a reasonable precaution. 

“From a long-term security perspective,” noted Harvey, “by using social networks you can provide potential adversaries with information that could eventually be ‘weaponized’ against you either for reputation damage or personal information verification.”

And as the recent hack of approximately 50 million Facebook accounts painfully reminds us, it’s not just Facebook’s potential use or misuse of your data that you have to worry about. Whatever information you hand over to the company could one day be used against your kids by anyone who finds a way, legal or not, to access it. 

“[Even] if Facebook promises not to make use of all the data it is collecting,” emphasized Graves, “and even if whatever third parties to whom it discloses that information also refrain from using the information for building profiles on children and tracking them, there is always a risk of involuntary disclosure of that information. Adults can weigh those risks against the benefits of using Facebook and Facebook Messenger. Children cannot.”

So what now 

The desire to take and share photos of our kids’ cute, and possibly not so cute, moments isn’t going anywhere. So, in a world where the main service we rely on to share those pictures is fundamentally problematic, where does that leave us?

It’s unrealistic to just tell people to stop. Despite its numerous flaws, Facebook does offer the real ability to easily broadcast important life moments to friends and family. This, obviously, has resonated with the billions of people who rely on the service.  

Extended family and friend networks also create a problem, as Facebook considers images of you or your children taken and uploaded by someone else to be their property, governed by that person’s privacy settings. Even if you opt out of image tagging and lock down your profile, you have no control over what other people upload. In the real world, do you bow out of that big family photo because you know it’s going to end up on Facebook? Are you willing to be the squeaky wheel that asks for it not to be posted for the faraway relatives to see? Would the rest of your family abide by that request even if you did make it? There aren’t easy answers.

In the end, there needs to be a sea change in the public’s understanding of the privacy risk services like Facebook create. This is not out of the realm of possibility. Calls to break up the social media giant are growing, and following the Cambridge Analytica scandal Facebook is on its heels doing everything it can to convince people that it takes privacy seriously. 

It’s the job of parents, as well as elected officials, to hold Mark Zuckerberg to account. 

In the meantime, consider the advice that Zuckerberg gave his own newborn daughter: “The world can be a serious place,” he wrote in a 2017 Facebook post. “That’s why it’s important to make time to go outside and play.”

And the next time, while you and your family are outside playing, you feel inclined to take a picture, consider sharing it via group text. 

Read more great stories from Small Humans:

A United Arab Emirates court has sentenced British academic Matthew Hedges to life in prison after he was convicted of spying and supplying sensitive security information to external actors.

Abu Dhabi’s Federal Court of Appeal handed the verdict on Wednesday, according to a family spokesperson. 

“We can confirm that he was sentenced to life in prison. The hearing lasted less than five minutes, and his lawyer was not present,” the spokesperson told AFP news agency.

Hedges, a 31-year-old PhD student at Durham University, was arrested on May 5 at Dubai airport after a two-week research visit.

He was researching the UAE’s foreign and internal security policies after the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011 when he was detained

Hedges was formally charged in October with spying on the Gulf state, where he has been held in solitary confinement for the past six months.

British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said he was “deeply shocked and disappointed”, adding that the sentencing was not what London expected from an ally. 

“Today’s verdict is not what we expect from a friend and trusted partner of the United Kingdom and runs contrary to earlier assurances,” Hunt said in a statement. 

“The handling of this case by the UAE authorities will have repercussions for the relationship between our two countries, which has to be built on trust.

“I regret the fact that we have reached this position and I urge the UAE to reconsider.” 

More to follow….

Manager Martin O’Neill and his assistant Roy Keane have parted company with the Republic of Ireland.

The pair took over the reins in 2013 and guided the Republic to the last 16 of the 2016 European Championships.

However, they did not win a game in 2018 and were relegated from Nations League Group B4 after finishing bottom.

“I thank Martin, Roy, and the management team for the impact they had,” said Football Association of Ireland (FAI) chief John Delaney.

“There have been many highlights during Martin’s reign – none more so than Euro 2016 in France, which will live long in the memory of all Irish supporters.”

Speaking after Monday’s scoreless draw in Denmark, 66-year-old O’Neill indicated that he wanted to remain in the job.

“I always have enthusiasm for the job but I’ll speak with John and we’ll see,” he said.

“I speak to him after games. I think I’ll probably be sharing the same flight home with him.

“If I don’t do that there I’ll have a conversation with him in the next few days or whenever it may be and it’s always been the case.”

The 0-0 draw in Aarhus means O’Neill’s team has now gone four matches without scoring a goal and the Republic, ranked 33rd in the world, failed to win a competitive match in 2018.

O’Neill handed international debuts to 12 players this year as the former Leicester, Sunderland and Celtic manager looked to build his squad for the start of the Euro 2020 qualifying campaign.

The Republic will be among the third seeds for the European qualifiers following their relegation to Nations League C and it appears that the team’s poor form and the dwindling attendances at the Aviva Stadium have prompted the FAI to take action.

More to follow.

A lot of Game of Thrones fans are still slightly upset that George RR Martin took time to write a 700-page book of Targaryen history, when he should be spending all waking hours finishing The Winds of Winter. 

But, we now know that Fire and Blood does contain important information relating to GoT. And Martin just emphasized again that Fire and Blood is not just a bone he’s throwing his fans to get them to leave him alone for a while. 

In an exclusive video published on Esquire, Martin said that even Daenerys herself should probably give the book a read to better understand how to play the game of thrones. 

“This is a book that Daenerys might actually benefit from reading,” Martin said. 

Fire and Blood is Martin writing as Archermaester Gyldayn, resident of the citadel in Oldtown, Westeros. And though Daenerys is busy elsewhere getting people to bend the knee, she would really benefit from a reading trip to the citadel. 

“She has no access to Archermaester Gyldayn’s crumbling manuscripts,” Martin told Esquire. “So she’s operating on her own there.” 

But he says that this text holds important information for the Mother of Dragons. “Maybe if she understood a few things more about dragons and her own history in Essos, things would have gone a little differently,” he adds. 

If we all promise to read Fire and Blood, will you please finish the other one already, George?

A United States tourist is believed to have been killed by an isolated Indian island tribe known to fire at outsiders with bows and arrows, Indian police said.

Seven fishermen have been arrested for facilitating John Allen Chau’s visit to North Sentinel Island, where the killing apparently occurred, police officer Vijay Singh said.

Visits to the island, which is part of the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, are heavily restricted by the government.

The fishermen told the police they last saw Chau being attacked with bows and arrows and then dragged onto the beach till he disappeared from sight, NDTV news channel reported citing police sources.

“The 27-year-old tourist took a canoe from a boat that dropped him near the island. The fishermen who dropped him have been arrested and investigations are on,” police spokesperson Jatin Narwal said.

In a 2015 interview with The Outbound Collective, an online community of adventure travellers, Chau was asked what was on the top of “his must-do adventure list right now”.

“Going back to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in India is on the top – there’s so much to see and do there!” Chau replied.

Indian media suggested that Chau had a desire to meet the tribes in order to preach Christianity, and that his body was found by the fishermen. However, Singh said police were in the process of recovering the body.

Authorities in the Union Territory launched helicopter search teams to look for Chau’s body but said the helicopters were unable to land at the island as the Sentinelese were hostile to any attempt at approaching them.

Hostile to outsiders

The Sentinelese people live on their own small, forested island and are known to resist all contact with outsiders, often attacking anyone who comes near.

Taking videos of the Sentinelese people is prohibited. In 2017, the government clarified that the Sentinelese are identified as an “aboriginal tribe” and that videos showing them cannot be uploaded on social media or the internet.

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are a group of islands at the juncture of the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. In addition to the protected tribes, the islands also host a large presence of the Indian Navy with sensitive installations.

The US consulate in Chennai, the capital of southern Tamil Nadu state, was aware of the reports concerning a US tourist in the islands, but spokesperson Kathleen Hosie declined to comment further due to privacy considerations.

Shiv Viswanathan, a social scientist and a professor at Jindal Global Law School, said the North Sentinel Island was a protected area and not open to tourists. “The exact population of the tribe is not known, but it is declining. The government has to protect them.”

Poachers are known to fish illegally in the waters around the island, catching turtles and diving for lobsters and sea cucumbers. Tribespeople killed two Indian fishermen in 2006 when their boat broke loose and drifted onto the shore.

SOURCE:
Al Jazeera and news agencies