The Intercept: Hillary Clinton Acknowledges Saudi Terror Financing in Hacked Email, Hinting at Tougher Approach

Saudi Arabia and the U.S. have maintained their alliance for seven decades despite disagreements over oil prices, Israel, and, more recently, the Obama administration’s rapprochement with Iran. [...]

Clinton’s private comments differ from the public line taken by members of the Obama administration. Speaking at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York, John Brennan, the director of the CIA, recently called the Saudis “among our very best counterterrorism partners globally.” Last month, Obama, who long ago referred to Saudi Arabia as a “so-called” ally, acted to protect the Saudi government from litigation by vetoing the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which would allow 9/11 victims to sue the Saudi government for damages in U.S. federal court. Congress overturned Obama’s veto, leaving the door open for Saudi Arabia to be named as a defendant in future lawsuits.

The U.S. has its reasons for maintaining the Saudi alliance. The country produces 13 percent of the world’s oil and holds $117 billion of U.S. debt. During Obama’s two terms, Saudi Arabia has spent more than $50 billion on U.S.-made weaponry, far more than during George W. Bush’s two terms, and the U.S. has approved deals worth another $65 billion. [...]

The wording of Clinton’s 2014 email, attributing Saudi Arabia’s support for radical Sunni militants to the Saudi government itself, as opposed to a few radical outliers, may also emerge as a factor in the ongoing debate about the degree of Saudi Arabia’s support for al Qaeda in the years leading up to 9/11. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens. The question of whether the country’s connection to the plot reached official levels was opened up again this summer by the release of 28 classified pages from a 2002 congressional investigation into the 9/11 attacks. The document offers new information about the FBI’s investigation into Omar al-Bayoumi, a wealthy Saudi business student who had worked with the Saudi Civil Aviation Authority.

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Al Jazeera: Srebrenica tense as Bosnian Serb poised to become mayor

He seems poised to become mayor of a Bosnian town that was marked forever by the events of three days in July 1995, when ethnic Serb fighters massacred about 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys and dumped their bodies in mass graves.

Since Bosnia's war ended later that year, Srebrenica has always had a Bosniak mayor. But Grujicic is a Serb, and like many of his ethnic kin he insists that the massacre was not genocide and the number of its victims is overstated.

While Bosnian Serbs celebrate Grujicic's apparent victory in the October 2 local election, some Bosniaks are angered at the thought of being governed by a genocide denier and vow to do all they can to keep him from power - triggering a new crisis in a state that is still divided and dysfunctional after two decades of fractious peace.

Preliminary results on election night prompted Grujicic's supporters to gather for a victory party at this same cafe on the main street of Srebrenica, which is now a Serb majority town of about 7,000 residents. [...]

Grujicic says he will not interfere with the annual July 11 commemoration of the massacre, but also insists that it is time to focus on boosting the town's ailing economy and improving prospects for its residents.

It is a view shared by many Serbs and Bosniaks in Srebrenica and also, Grujicic says, by Dodik, who has told him that he hopes to visit the town soon.

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Bloomberg: Brexit to Erupt in French Race With Juppe Demanding Hard Line

The British officials preparing to negotiate their exit from the European Union should be paying particularly close attention as the French election campaign shifts up a gear on Thursday.

The candidates for the Republican party’s presidential nomination are preparing to set out their visions of Europe’s future on Thursday night during the first debate of the primary campaign, and the two leading contenders have very different views on how to handle Brexit. [...]

France’s main right-of-center party will choose its candidate for next year’s presidential election over two rounds on Nov. 20 and 27. Juppe maintained a comfortable lead in a Kantar Sofres poll published in Le Figaro Oct. 9 which showed he’d take the most votes in the first ballot and then beat Sarkozy by more than 10 percentage points in the runoff.

All seven candidates in the Republican race agree with Socialist President Francois Hollande that U.K. companies and London-based banks can’t have access to the EU single market without allowing freedom of movement for European workers. And both Juppe and Sarkozy insist the U.K. can’t keep the clearing houses for euro-denominated transactions and the European Banking Authority will have to shift its headquarters from London unless May drops her insistence on immigration curbs. Beyond that, the two main contenders have very different attitudes.

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The Creators Project: Here's How Scientists May Soon Be Able to "See" Your Dreams

Imagine waking up in the morning and being able to watch the dream you just had like it was the morning news. Well, according to Marvin Chun, the Richard M. Colgate Professor of Psychology at Yale University, this might actually be a reality in the not so distant  future. In Decoding The Mind, a short animated video from Future of StoryTelling, illustrator Matt Smithson animates a presentation wherein Chun describes how researchers are beginning to introduce tools and technologies to help visualize the insides of people’s minds. [...]

This sort of research could prove useful for preventative healthcare, like understanding and treating learning disabilities or dementia. Chun says this same methodology suggests, “a novel approach for reconstructing offline visual experiences, including dreams, memories, and imagination.” He finishes his talk with a very important question: faced with this new technology, “What will artist and storytellers do with this unprecedented access to the subconscious?” Ignite your imagination in the short video below:

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Politico: Belgian region set to block EU-Canada trade deal

The leadership of Belgium’s French-speaking community said on Thursday it would not give its authorization to the federal government to approve the EU-Canada trade deal, effectively threatening to capsize the entire agreement.

Unless Belgium’s federal government can devise an imaginative compromise, the country’s francophone Wallonia-Brussels assembly will have effectively torpedoed an agreement seen as a critical to the survival of the European Commission’s broader trade policy.

On Wednesday, the regional parliament of Brussels-Wallonia passed a non-binding resolution that the region’s government should not accept the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, which has been negotiated over the last seven years between the EU and Canada. [...]

The Belgian veto starkly reveals the dangers of the Canadian model, as any one of the EU’s 37 national and regional assemblies would be able to veto a trade agreement between Brussels and the U.K. over issues such as migration.

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