Blue Origin launches its first crew onboard its New Shepard rocket to outer space. The mission was crewed by American billionaire and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark Bezos, pilot and Mercury 13 candidate Wally Funk and Dutch student Oliver Daemen. Funk and Daemen respectively become the oldest and youngest people ever to travel to space. 2021-07-20
UN special rapporteurs Agnès Callamard and David Kaye demand an investigation into claims made by "The Guardian" yesterday that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman ordered the 2018 hacking of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos's phone. The hack was allegedly done months before the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, who was employed at Bezos's newspaper "The Washington Post" and was a fierce critic of the Saudi government. The Saudi Foreign Ministry dismisses the allegations as "absurd". 2020-01-22
"The Washington Post" publishes raw interviews and notes taken for the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction's "lessons learned" initiative. The difference with the previously published reports reveals that senior U.S. administration officials misled the public by painting "a rosier picture of the state of the war than they knew to be true". 2019-12-9
Amazon files a lawsuit against the United States Department of Defense for awarding a US$10 billion cloud computing contract to Microsoft. The company had previously accused the Department of bias in their decision, given CEO Jeff Bezos has been a vocal critic of U.S. President Donald Trump. 2019-11-22
Citing unnamed U.S. officials, "The Washington Post" reports that U.S. President Donald Trump berated Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Trump claimed it was "the worst call by far" and criticized a refugee settlement deal organised between the Turnbull Government and the Obama administration in late 2016. 2017-02-2
The United States Department of Defense says that last month's airstrikes in Kunduz hit three locations, mistakenly including the Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) (MSF) hospital where at least 30 were killed. Afghan commanders, whose forces were actively engaged with the Taliban, requested the attacks. "The Washington Post" reports a warehouse and a mansion in two densely populated residential areas were "pulverized" without loss of civilian lives. According to residents, earlier their neighborhoods had been conflict zones, but no militants were there the time of the attacks. "Together, the three attacks raise questions about the quality and reliability of the intelligence that Afghan security forces are providing to their American partners, as well as U.S. decisions to act on that intelligence," writes the Post. 2015-11-4
The European Court of Justice decides an international agreement, generally known as a Safe Harbor rule, used by thousands of companies for moving people’s digital data between the European Union and the United States is invalid, effective immediately. The decision throws into doubt how global technology giants like Facebook, Amazon and Google can collect, manage, and analyze online information from their millions of users in the 28-member bloc. Decisions by this court, the highest legal authority in the EU, cannot be appealed. 2015-10-6
"The Washington Post" reports that an FBI informant so frightened Muslim worshippers by referring to violent jihad while spying on an Islamic community centre in Irvine, California, that they reported him to the authorities. The FBI spy, a convicted fraudster, sues the FBI. 2010-12-6
"The Washington Post" reports that Gizab villagers in Afghanistan overturned their local Taliban movement during April, with some members putting down their weapons and being welcomed back into their local community. The United States did not hear of this before now as it happened in a remote part of the country ignored by the military. 2010-06-21
Two retired generals tell "The Washington Post" that, with more than 25 per cent of young Americans being "too fat to fight", obesity is threatening the future of the United States military. 2010-05-1