10 things you need to know today: August 26, 2016

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1. Clinton and Trump escalate harsh attacks
2. U.S. patrol boat fires warning shots at Iranian vessel
3. 11 killed in car-bombing of Turkish police checkpoint
4. Striking miners kill Bolivian deputy interior minister
5. Orlando hospitals decline to bill nightclub shooting survivors
6. Aftershocks hit in Italy as rescuers search for earthquake survivors
7. Homeland Security investigates hack against comedian Leslie Jones
8. Georgia man gets 40 years for attack on sleeping gay couple
9. National Park Service celebrates 100th anniversary
10. Brazil charges Lochte with filing false report

published 26 August 2016

1. Clinton and Trump escalate harsh attacks

Hillary Clinton said Thursday that the "radical fringe" has taken over the Republican Party under its 2016 presidential nominee, Donald Trump. Clinton said Trump's recent hiring of Stephen K. Bannon, executive chairman of hardline online news and opinion outlet Breitbart News, cemented his campaign's ties with the website and its fans in the white nationalist and anti-immigrant "alt-right." "The de facto merger between Breitbart and the Trump campaign represents a landmark achievement for the alt-right," Clinton said. Trump called Clinton's remarks "smears and lies about decent people," and repeated his branding of Clinton as a "bigot."

A U.S. Navy patrol boat, the USS Squall, fired three warning shots into the water near an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps vessel that had harassed it. The harassment was the latest in a series of provocations by Iran that threaten to escalate, U.S. defense officials said Thursday. The Iranian craft also came dangerously close to another U.S. patrol boat, and a Kuwaiti naval ship. The incident came a day after an Iranian military vessel made a high-speed approach toward a U.S. Navy destroyer in the Strait of Hormuz in what a U.S. official called an "unsafe and unprofessional" maneuver.

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An apparent car bombing killed 11 people and injured at least 70 others at a police checkpoint and headquarters building in Cizre, Turkey, on Friday. Four of the wounded were hospitalized in critical condition. The attack came two days after Turkey sent tanks and special operations into Syria in a bid to drive Islamic State fighters out of a Syrian border town, one of the Islamist group's last strongholds on the border. State-run media blamed the attack on the Kurdistan Workers Party, but no group immediately claimed responsibility.

The Bolivian government said striking miners kidnapped and killed the country's deputy interior minister, Rodolfo Illanes, on Thursday. The government was unable to immediately retrieve Illanes' body, but Defense Minister Reymi Ferreira said it appeared that Illanes had been "savagely beaten" to death after he and his body guard were kidnapped on a highway miners have blocked since Tuesday. The miners are demanding better union representation and the right to work for private companies. Illanes was on his way to talk to the protesters. Two miners were fatally shot in clashes with police, and 100 have been arrested.

Orlando hospitals that treated survivors of the Pulse nightclub massacre, which left 49 victims dead, are not charging the patients for out-of-pocket expenses, according to Thursday news reports. Orlando Regional Medical Center, one of the two hospitals that treated most of the 53 people injured, said it plans to turn to a victims' fund and patients' insurance plans to cover the costs. The other facility, Florida Hospital, said it would not even bill victims' insurance companies. The bills they will absorb total more than $5.5 million.

Strong aftershocks rattled central Italy's Apennine Mountains early Friday as rescuers continued trying to reach possible survivors from rubble left by this week's 6.2-magnitude earthquake. The biggest aftershock, measured at 4.7 or 4.8 magnitude, opened new cracks in some crumbling buildings in the devastated town of Amatrice. The first funerals for the 267 people killed in the quake were scheduled for later in the day.

The Department of Homeland Security has launched an investigation into the hacking of comedian Leslie Jones' iCloud account, department officials said in a statement released Thursday. The hackers on Wednesday posted nude photos of the Ghostbusters star, along with personal information and a racist video tribute to the dead gorilla Harambe on Jones' website. A month ago, Jones faced a barrage of online abuse that led her to briefly leave Twitter. She returned after the site banned Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos, whose fans heaped insults on Jones after he wrote a scathing review of the new Ghostbusters film.

A judge this week sentenced a Georgia man, Martin Blackwell, to 40 years in prison for throwing scalding water on two gay men sleeping on a mattress. The attack, which the judge called "soulless," burned the men so badly that both needed skin grafts. One had to be put into a medically induced coma. Blackwell saw his girlfriend's son, Anthony Gooden, and his boyfriend, Marquez Tolbert, in Gooden's mother's apartment. He then boiled water, and returned to the room to throw it on the couple. "You had so many outs where the voice of reason could have taken over," Superior Court Judge Henry Newkirk told him.

The National Park Service celebrated its centennial on Thursday, offering free admission to all 412 parks in the system through Aug. 28. The first National Park was actually designated in 1871, with President Ulysses S. Grant signing the legislation in 1872 to preserve Yellowstone National Park. Then, President Woodrow Wilson signed the law creating the National Park Service "to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and... wildlife therein." Last year, more than 300 million people visited national parks.

Brazilian police on Thursday charged American swimmer Ryan Lochte, a 12-time Olympic medalist, with filing a false crime report. The charge stems from a drunken incident in which Lochte and three teammates were detained by armed security guards at a gas station and made to pay for damaging an advertising poster outside a restroom. Lochte later claimed he had been robbed at gunpoint by men claiming to be police. Lochte, who returned to the U.S. last week before the Rio Olympics closed, got some good news when cough drop maker Pine Bros. signed him to an endorsement deal after he was dropped by Speedo, Ralph Lauren, and two other sponsors.

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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.