Ten Things You Need to Know Today: 15 August 2023

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1. Trump charged over Georgia
2. Support grows for second ref
3. Grooming worry during bill delay
4. Israel compared to Nazi Germany
5. Terror fears over leaked data
6. Apps to offer slimming jabs
7. ‘Argentina’s Trump’ tipped for office
8. UK ‘obliged to help Afghans’
9. Parents warned on TikTok trends
10. Institute to return stolen brains

published 15 August 2023

1. Trump charged over Georgia

Prosecutors in the US have charged Donald Trump and 18 others in a 41-count indictment for attempting to overturn his election loss in Georgia. A leaked phone call, during which the former president asked Georgia’s top election official to “find 11,780 votes”, was at the heart of the investigation, which has led to Trump’s fourth criminal indictment. “Out of all indictments, Georgia is the most perilous threat to Trump”, said the New York Post. Trump lost the state of Georgia to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

Some 46% of Britons want a second Brexit referendum in the next 10 years, according to a new YouGov poll. More than a quarter of people support such a referendum by the end of 2023. Less than a third of people (30%) said they thought Brexit is “done”, while almost half (49%) said it is not complete. The figures “suggest that if a referendum were to be held now, Britain rejoining the EU would come out on top”, said Beth Mann, political researcher at YouGov.

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Grooming cases are at a record high against the backdrop of a delay in updated online safety laws. The NPSCC said 34,000 online grooming crimes had been recorded by UK police forces since it first called for tougher laws in 2017, and campaigners are now calling on tech companies and MPs to back the Online Safety Bill, which has faced repeated delays and amendments. Some tech platforms have threatened to leave the UK altogether rather than comply with the new rules.

A retired Israeli general has accused his country’s government of “total apartheid” and compared the occupied West Bank to Nazi Germany. Amiram Levin, who was also deputy director of Mossad, told Israeli broadcaster Kan that “there hasn’t been a democracy” in the West Bank for 57 years. “There is total apartheid,” he said. “Walk around Hebron and you will see streets where Arabs cannot walk, just like what happened in Germany”, he added. Israel’s government vehemently denies the charge of apartheid and “has suggested that applying the label to Israel is anti-Semitic”, said the Daily Telegraph.

Republican paramilitaries have acquired the information that leaked in a Police Service of Northern Ireland data breach, said the force’s chief constable. Claiming that dissident republicans had the dataset that mistakenly disclosed the personal details of more than 10,000 officers and staff last week, Simon Bynre told a press conference that it’s the force’s “planning assumption” that the Republicans will “use this list to generate fear and uncertainty, as well as intimidating or targeting officers and staff”.

Obese Britons will be told to download weight-loss apps to get quicker access to slimming jabs. Injectable weight-loss drugs “offer new hope for tackling the UK’s obesity crisis”, said The Times, but they have usually only been handed out at specialist hospital clinics with long waiting lists. But now, up to 50,000 people could benefit from new online clinics after the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence approved four online platforms — Liva, Oviva, Roczen and Second Nature — to offer the medication along with support to increase healthy eating and exercise.

A self-confessed “anarcho-capitalist” and “tantric sex instructor” who has been compared to Donald Trump has a “serious shot” at becoming president after winning the most votes in his country’s primary election, said The Times. Javier Milei, 52, said he would close Argentina’s central bank, replace the peso with the US dollar, relax gun ownership laws and legalise the sale of human organs. The primary, in which presidential candidates from all parties take part, is seen as a “key indicator” for the presidential election in October, said the BBC.

Britain has an obligation to Afghan refugees who helped its forces over two decades, said the UK’s former ambassador to the country. In his first newspaper interview about the fall of Kabul, Laurie Bristow, Britain’s most senior diplomat in Kabul when it fell to the Taliban two years ago, told The Telegraph that helping vulnerable Afghan refugees who worked alongside British soldiers and doing so is no act of “generosity”. Only 54 of 5,000 Afghan refugees who stood by the British have been resettled under one scheme.

A policing leader has told parents to “get a grip” and stop their children joining dangerous TikTok crazes. Donna Jones, chairman of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, spoke out after teenagers in Southampton took paracetamol over the weekend in a social media challenge to see who could stay in hospital the longest. Last week also saw flash-mob looting in London’s Oxford Street, sparked by a trend on the social network that encouraged youngsters to rob JD Sports and other stores.

The Smithsonian Institution is to return human brains that were stolen from ethnic minorities as part of a plan to “demonstrate the superiority of white brains”. A major investigation by the Washington Post has revealed that tens of thousands of human remains, including 255 brains, are being stored by the US institution. Lonnie Bunch, the natural history museum’s director, said this was “really unconscionable”, adding that “all the remains, all the brains, need to be returned if possible” and “treated in the best possible way”.

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