A million hacked Facebook accounts isn’t cool. You know what’s even less cool? Fifty million hacked Facebook accounts.

A Friday morning press release from our connect-people-at-any-cost friends in Menlo Park detailed a potentially horrifying situation for the billions of people who use the social media service: Their accounts might have been hacked. Well, at least 50 million of them were “directly affected,” anyway. 

The so-called “security update” is light on specifics, but what it does include is extremely troubling. 

“We did see this attack being used at a fairly large scale.”

“On the afternoon of Tuesday, September 25, our engineering team discovered a security issue affecting almost 50 million accounts,” reads the statement. “[It’s] clear that attackers exploited a vulnerability in Facebook’s code that impacted ‘View As’, a feature that lets people see what their own profile looks like to someone else. This allowed them to steal Facebook access tokens which they could then use to take over people’s accounts.”

That’s right, almost 50 million accounts were vulnerable to this attack. As for how many were actually exploited? 

“Fifty million accounts were directly affected,” explained Facebook VP of product management Guy Rosen on a Friday morning press call, “and we know the vulnerability was used against them.”

The statement provides additional information. 

“We did see this attack being used at a fairly large scale,” added Rosen. “The attackers could use the account as if they are the account holder.”

The statement itself didn’t provide much additional insight. 

“Since we’ve only just started our investigation, we have yet to determine whether these accounts were misused or any information accessed,” continues the statement. “We also don’t know who’s behind these attacks or where they’re based.”

Facebook says it’s fixed the vulnerability, and that 90 million people may suddenly find themselves logged out of their accounts or various Facebooks apps as a result.  

So, yeah, this is big. 

“Security is an arms race,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dryly noted on the press call. 

Facebook is working with law enforcement, and, at least for now, says you don’t need to change your password. But maybe go ahead and log out of your account, everywhere, just to be safe. 

“[If] anyone wants to take the precautionary action of logging out of Facebook, they should visit the ‘Security and Login‘ section in settings,” advises the warning. “It lists the places people are logged into Facebook with a one-click option to log out of them all.”

So yeah, click through that link and log out of your account on every service at once. After that, maybe think long and hard about whether it’s even worth logging back in. 

UPDATE: Sept. 28, 2018, 10:34 a.m. PDT This story has been updated with additional comments from Guy Rosen and Mark Zuckerberg. 

On Sunday, almost 1.8 million voters in former Yugoslav Macedonia will decide whether to change the country’s name to Northern Macedonia.

The proposal stems from an agreement last June – the Prespes Agreement – with the Greek government aiming to normalise relations between the two countries.

Athens and Skopje have been at odds since the fall of Yugoslavia when its six republics declared independence, the southernmost calling itself the Republic of Macedonia.

Greece objects on the grounds that this implies territorial claims on its northern region of Macedonia.

In return for adding the qualifier “Northern” to its name, Greece will lift its standing veto on its neighbour’s membership in the European Union and NATO.

The question put to voters is: “Are you in favour of NATO and EU membership, and accepting the name agreement between the Republic of Macedonia and Greece?” 

Polls will open at 7am (05:00 GMT) and close at 7pm (17:00 GMT).

1. Which way is the referendum likely to go?

Opinion polls show that a large block of voters supports the Prespes Agreement – a survey on August 8 showed 41.5 percent in favour and 31.5 percent against the name change. An August 29 survey showed 57 percent in favour, and 38 percent against.

But the crucial question is: How many will vote?

To be constitutionally valid, the referendum requires a majority of 50 percent plus one from a turnout of 50 percent of eligible voters plus one.

The opposition VMRO-DPMNE party has increasingly encouraged people to boycott the vote rather than voting No – so as not to put the party on the wrong side of history should the Yes vote have the majority and taking into account that it is easier to persuade people to do nothing than something active.

A survey released this month suggests that this tactic may be working. By its count, only 58 percent of voters will cast ballots on Sunday.

Even though that doesn’t invalidate the result, it reduces the yes vote to 40.9 percent – not enough to win, and below the 41.5 percent of yes voters polled in July.

In comments made to Al Jazeera earlier this week, Chris Deliso, an American journalist based in Skopje since 1992, is even less optimistic. “The perception that a legitimate ‘no’ vote exists is false, as the Boycott movement has repeatedly emphasised. This is because the referendum is meant to be valid only with a 51 percent turnout, meaning that whoever opposes the deal but votes ‘no’ is actually bolstering the turnout and legitimizing the process,” he said.

“In the end, there is only a ‘yes’ vote and a boycott … Thus, the two scenarios that would embarrass the government would be either a very low turnout, or a massive discrepancy between the Yes and No campaign. At the moment, it appears realistic that at least 40 percent will turn out,” Deliso added.

Another benchmark to compare these polls is the fact that on September 8, 1991, shortly after independence, 72 percent of citizens voted ‘yes’ in a referendum on the question: “Do you support a sovereign and independent state of Macedonia, with the right to enter into a future union with the other sovereign states of Yugoslavia?”

2. What are the main arguments for and against?

The strongest argument for a Yes vote is clearly that it removes Greece’s veto on the country’s path to European Union and NATO membership.

Those who favour joining the European Union (83 percent) and NATO (77 percent) are roughly double the number polling in favour of the Prespes Agreement. 

Some object to the very fact of a referendum, pointing out that no other former Yugoslav republic had to undergo this process.

Others object to the qualifier “Northern”, saying that it changes their identity. According to the agreement, their passports will henceforth list their nationality as “Macedonian – citizen of the Republic of Northern Macedonia”.

When talks with Greece began in January, US special envoy Matthew Nimetz handed the two sides a list of five suggested names:

• Republika Nova Makedonija (Republic of New Macedonia), 
• Republika Gorna Makedonija (Republic of Upper Macedonia), 
• Republika Severna Makedonija (Republic of Northern Macedonia), 
• Republika Vardarska Makedonija (Republic of Vardarska Macedonia) and 
• Republika Makedonija (Skopje). 

Greece was prepared to accept any of the first four. The government in Skopje selected “Republic of Northern Macedonia” as the least objectionable.

Some voters also object to the stipulations of Article 7, whereby: “The official language and other attributes of [former Yugoslav Macedonia] are not related to the ancient Hellenic civilisation, history, culture and heritage [of Greece].”

This means that those who self-identify as ethnic Macedonians abjure all claim to Greece’s Hellenistic heritage – the empire of Alexander the Great and its aftermath – which is a component of the Greek sense of nationhood.

These cultural distinctions were included on Greece’s insistence, to sweeten the pill of sharing Macedonian identity with their Slav neighbours, something most Greeks still object to.

They want it made clear that non-Greek Macedonians are so named by virtue of shared geography, not ethnicity or heritage.

Despite the fact that the agreement officially only addresses the issue of the country’s name, it is the separate issue of identity that could sink it.

This is underscored by the fact that ethnic Albanians, who comprise one-third of the population of former Yugoslav Macedonia, support the agreement to the tune of 88 percent.

Unaffected by the identity issue, they simply want the country to press ahead with EU and NATO membership.

3. What are NATO and the EU saying?

Both blocs are strongly encouraging the Yes vote.

“I sense a real political will to move on with your country’s Euro-Atlantic integration,” said European Council President Donald Tusk when he visited Skopje in April.

The Sofia Declaration, which the EU signed in May, lends “unequivocal support for the European perspective of the Western Balkans”.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, in a joint statement with Tusk after the Prespes Agreement was signed, said: “We hope this unique opportunity to re-launch the wider W Balkan region’s European and Euro-Atlantic integration will not be wasted. This agreement sets an example to others on how to consolidate peace and stability across the region.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, US Defence Secretary James Mattis, NATO’s Stoltenberg and Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurtz, who currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency, all visited Skopje this month to support the Yes vote.

4. Why is this referendum important to the EU and NATO?

European Union expansion stalled after the addition of Croatia in 2013 and was reversed with the 2016 Brexit vote which saw the United Kingdom decide to leave the EU. The Western Balkans have languished in a slow accession process for over a decade.

NATO enlargement has remained alive with the accession of Montenegro last year, but it has faced Russian military incursions in larger aspiring members Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014). These have appeared to define the alliance’s limits and the limits of American hegemony. 

Both institutions appear to want to keep alive the momentum of expansion and integration as a way of reaffirming the Euro-Atlantic post-war order.

5. Yugoslavia fell apart in 1991. Why is the issue being decided now?

Athens and Skopje failed to find a solution in the 1990s because Greece did not want to accept a name that included the word Macedonia.

In 1995, after four years of failed diplomacy, the two sides settled for an Interim Accord whereby Greece recognised its northern neighbour as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM).

In the mid-2000s, Greece signalled its willingness to compromise on a composite name that included the word Macedonia, but the nationalist government of the VMRO-DPMNE under Premier Nikola Gruevski in Skopje ruled this out.

It went a step further than its predecessors and laid claim to ancient Macedonian heritage in addition to the Macedonian name, putting up giant bronze statues of Alexander the Great and his father Philip in the capital.

The Gruevski government fell from power in December 2016 and Zoran Zaev’s Social Democrats formed a government on May 31, 2017. They immediately sent Foreign Minister Nikola Dimitrov to Athens to signal readiness to re-open talks with Greece.

6. If former Yugoslav Macedonia says yes, will Greece ratify the deal?

Greece is contractually obliged to ratify the agreement if its neighbour ratifies it and passes a number of constitutional amendments in parliament.

7. If there is a ‘No’ vote, what will happen?

This referendum is consultative, so its result is not binding. The Zaev government has suggested that it may try to ratify the agreement in parliament. It holds a majority of 68 in the 120-seat chamber, so it would need to attract 12 votes from the opposition to form a two-thirds majority.

Alternatively, it could declare a general election to increase its parliamentary majority, which could be a gamble.

“It’s a bit odd that the government has taken such efforts in terms of public-relations outreach and visits of high-profile dignitaries to bolster support for the referendum, since they’ve already said the voting is just consultative,” said Deliso.

“It’s rather paradoxical that on the one hand the government is keen to get public approval and turnout, but on the other states it will proceed in parliament regardless of how the people vote.” 

Shortly after announcing he would vote in favor of confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Sen. Jeff Flake was cornered in an elevator by a sexual assault survivor who pleaded with him to do the right thing. Visibly shaken, he left for the hearing room.

“I think it would be proper to delay the floor vote for up to but not more than one week in order to let the FBI do an investigation limited in time and scope to the current allegations,” he said. “And I will vote to advance the bill to the floor with that understanding.”

President Trump said this week he was unhappy the vote wasn’t taken two weeks ago. 

Asked just now how the nomination was going, Trump said: “Going good.”

He was greeting the president of Chile at the door of the West Wing, and it’s unclear if he knows what’s going on.

Kavanaugh’s nomination was forwarded to the full Senate on an 11-10 party line vote.

Flake said he would be comfortable moving ahead on a full vote only with an FBI investigation.

As fellow members of the Judiciary Committee spoke, Flake, an Arizona Republican, tapped his friend, Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., on the shoulder. Coons had just asked for a delay in the vote and for a fuller investigation into the allegations. 

“It’s about the court’s legitimacy,” Coons said.

If his nomination goes through without nonpartisan investigation, “his service may well have an asterisk. Litigants coming to the court will have reason to question the fairness of the institution.”

That set off a flurry of quiet conversations outside the room, as senators continued to deliver remarks, suggesting they were discussing a delay.

Now, with the scheduled 1:30 p.m. vote past, several senators are still huddling in an adjacent room, an indication that the anticipated 11-10, party-line result was not guaranteed.

More: Yale Law joins American Bar Association in request for FBI probe

More: Prosecutor who questioned Ford says she wouldn’t prosecute Brett Kavanaugh

As the conversations continue, Capitol Police have increased their presence in the hall of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, where protesters gathered again Friday. They were present all day Thursday, as Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford testified.

Friday’s maneuvering began as Sen. Cory Booker, D-NJ, defend Ford’s Thursday testimony and attacked Kavanaugh’s, specifically criticizing Kavanaugh’s reluctance to call for an FBI investigation.  

“He’s refused to call for this committee to hear even live testimony from witnesses that could corroborate his testimony,” Booker said. 

What viewers of the feed couldn’t see was members of the committee gathering and walking – Flake and Coons first.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., followed. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, got up soon after through the same door. Minutes later, the Democrats who stepped out to chat with Flake were back, without Flake. The Democrats then began to huddle in whispered conversation as Booker continued to speak.

More: Protester shouts at Sen. Jeff Flake in elevator : ‘Tell me it doesn’t matter’

“A seat on the Supreme Court is not an entitlement,” Booker said. “We should listen to women and thoroughly investigate this before doing any other thing. 

Booker then walked out with Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., who returned to suggest a rebuilding would be needed after “words were spoken” during the Thursday hearing. 

“I’m here to make a last appeal before we make a rush to judgment,” Blumenthal said.

After speaking, Blumenthal said he would oppose Kavanaugh then left the room. A group of senators then gathered in a separate room, forcing a suggestion of delaying the vote. Senator Chuck Grassley, the committee chairman, said there would be no delay, for now. 

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SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook says the accounts of nearly 50 million users were breached, the latest in a string of security lapses that have shaken public confidence in the social media giant. 

Attackers exploited a feature in Facebook’s code that allowed them to take over users’ accounts. The breach was discovered Tuesday afternoon.

The extent of the massive breach — whether Facebook users’ personal information was accessed by the attackers — is not yet known. 

Facebook says it is in the early stages of its investigation. It has not identified the attackers nor does it know the origin of the attack. The Silicon Valley company notified the FBI on Wednesday and patched the vulnerability Thursday night. 

“We are still in the early phase of investigating this,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told reporters Friday. “We do not yet know if any of the accounts were actually misused.”

 

Zuckerberg says Facebook has invested heavily in security measures but will step up efforts to lock down Facebook users’ accounts.

“The reality here is we face constant attacks,” he said. “We need to do more to prevent this from happening in the first place.”

More than 90 million of Facebook’s users were forced to log out of their accounts Friday morning as a security measure. They will be notified why at the top of their News Feed, the Facebook CEO said.

Attackers exploited a vulnerability in Facebook’s code that affected “View As,” a feature that lets people see what their own profile looks like to someone else, allowing them to steal Facebook access tokens they could then use to take over people’s accounts. 

These access tokens are like digital keys that keep people logged in to Facebook so they don’t need to re-enter their password every time they use Facebook. Facebook has reset the tokens of nearly 50 million accounts that were affected and, as a precaution, it has also reset the tokens for another 40 million accounts that have used “View As” in the past year. 

“So far our initial investigation has not shown that these tokens were used to access any private messages or posts or to post anything to these accounts. But this, of course, may change as we learn more,” Zuckerberg said.

When these 90 million people log back into Facebook or any apps that use Facebook login, they will be notified at the top of their News Feed, Guy Rosen, vice president of product management, said.

Facebook says there’s no need for users to reset their passwords.

The breach marks the latest privacy mishap for Facebook, which has been hammered for the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the unchecked spread of Russian propaganda during and after the 2016 presidential election. Confidence in the giant social network used by more than two billion people around the world has been shaken by the troubling revelations. And the breach is likely to trigger more calls for oversight of Facebook and the other tech giants.

“This is clearly a breach of trust and we take this very seriously. We are working with lawmakers and regulators to let them know what happened,” Rosen told reporters.

Sen. Mark Warner, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called for a swift and public investigation into the breach.

“Today’s disclosure is a reminder about the dangers posed when a small number of companies like Facebook or the credit bureau Equifax are able to accumulate so much personal data about individual Americans without adequate security measures,” Warner said in a statement. “This is another sobering indicator that Congress needs to step up and take action to protect the privacy and security of social media users.”

 

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Like its competitors, Bank of America Merrill Lynch is spending a colossal amount of money to stay competitive in the financial tech race: Its $10 billion annual tech budget sits just behind JPMorgan’s $10.8 billion and ahead of Citigroup’s $8 billion.

A large chunk of that spending goes to the firm’s profit-driving consumer-banking operation, which accounts for $34.5 billion in revenue and $8.2 billion in net income, which is 38% of the firm’s total.

As the head of digital banking, Michelle Moore is responsible for wisely deploying a chunk of that budget to fuel the consumer bank’s lofty tech ambitions. That partly entails building out cutting edge new features for the bank’s customers, whether that’s tricked-out ATMs that can perform cardless transactions or the AI-backed virtual banking assistant Erica rolled out in April and has been used by 3 million customers through early September.

And it also entails luring top tech talent that can help in creating and maintaining such features, and Moore has had success in recent months landing top hires away from companies like Apple and Disney.

What’s Moore’s strategy for getting recruits to ditch sexy tech and entertainment companies for Bank of America?

She told Business Insider she woos potential hires by pitching them on the scale of impact they can have on individual customers — Bank of America has 67 million of them — but also on the company’s tech savvy and growing list of innovations that she says make clear they “are not a boring, stodgy bank.”

“This is an opportunity for you every day to help make a difference in someone’s life,” Moore said.

She added that recent hires have “left massive jobs and massive companies … to come here” in part because “they could see the vision, they could see the opportunity.”

The pitch worked on Tommy Elliott.

As a senior program manager on Apple Pay since 2014, Elliott had a front-row seat working with banks across the US, Europe, and Asia. He saw enough that he never wanted to work for one.

So how did he end up joining Bank of America as head of digital payments this June?

After a gauntlet of roughly a dozen interviews, he came away impressed not only by Moore’s vision, but also by the bank’s engineering talent, the loose and customer-focused culture, and the scale of the firm.

The impact he could have wasn’t lost on him, either. While the number is growing, only 25 million customers actively use the mobile app, and only 4 million use Zelle, the peer-to-peer payments platform that launched to customers in 2017.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch

“The biggest thing is just the potential,” Elliott said. “When I look at the scale of the products I’m responsible for, we have so much room to grow.”

Nikki Katz joined in August from Disney, where she was a VP of technology, to run the mobile apps team as head of Digital Strategy and Emerging Experiences, and she said she was persuaded in part by the tangible results that had sprung from the firm’s massive tech budget.

Even before she’d been recruited, Katz was pleasantly surprised by the innovations and upgrades she found in the firm’s branches, including the fancy, new cardless ATMs as well as video monitors that let you speak remotely to financial experts.

“Here was a bank that was clearly investing significant capital in experimenting,” Katz told Business Insider. “This is actually proof in the pudding.”

To be sure, others big banks are also spending billions on tech and it remains unclear how BoA’s strategy will pay off in the long-run as it competes head-to-head with rivals to attract and retain customers.

A chatbot like Erica isn’t just cool toy to show off — “We don’t go run around chasing shiny objects,” Moore told BI — it’s goal is to make customer’s lives simpler, as well as to automate processes and trim costs, like encouraging paperless e-statements or answering questions before a customer has to dial up a call center.

As Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan explained while highlighting the company’s digital bank investments in a second-quarter earnings call: “By investing in client capabilities, we make our clients’ lives easier, more efficient for them, more effective for them, and their satisfaction goes up. Our costs then, in turn, go down and because our process become more automated.”

A product that increases customer satisfaction while stripping out costs makes a gaudy $10 billion tech budget justifiable.

Getting the best talent to imagine, construct, and execute such features will be key to Bank of America getting the best bang for its buck.

What’s the most valuable thing inside an EV? It’s not the motor. It’s the battery.

Electric vehicle batteries can power entire homes for days. Those batteries could become the powerhouses of future cities. Listen to more here. 

This video was sponsored by Shell Global’s Future Cities initiative.

A landmark peace deal which for two decades allowed Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region to be an island of stability in an otherwise turbulent Middle East is unravelling today.

In 1998, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) reached a power-sharing agreement after nearly four years of civil war. Now 20 years later, the KDP is on its way to renege on its obligations and exclude the PUK from the next Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).

The outcome of these renewed tensions between the KDP and the PUK will be determined by the upcoming parliamentary elections in the KRG. If the KDP wins the majority of votes on September 30 and decides to sideline the PUK, the region might witness another wave of instability or even a violent conflict.

Personalised power and armed militias

On September 17, 1998, Jalal Talabani, leader of the PUK, and Masoud Barzani, head of the KDP, came together in Washington, DC, to sign a US-brokered agreement to end hostilities.

Under the provisions of the deal, the two were to share political power and revenue, while the US was to provide military protection for the Iraqi Kurdish region as a whole. Then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called the agreement a “new and hopeful chapter”.

While the deal indeed provided hope and stability for the millions of Kurds living in northern Iraq, it failed to bring unity. Barzani and Talabani treated the power-sharing agreement as just that – there was no attempt at integration or unification.

With the help of the revenue that started flowing in through the UN-sponsored oil-for-food programme, the two built their own clientelistic networks, rendering the institutions of the KRG completely divided between the two parties.

Essentially, the KDP-PUK agreement helped create a highly corrupt system of cronyism where the two parties divided virtually all of the oil-rich region’s resources among themselves while putting their sons, daughters and extended families in senior government positions.

After the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the deal extended to central Iraqi institutions, which the Kurds could now participate in. Thus Talabani was allocated the largely symbolic position of president of Iraq (reserved for an ethnic Kurd), while Barzani took the presidency of the KRG.

More importantly, the two Kurdish leaders kept their armed militias, the Peshmerga, separate, making no effort to establish a unified armed force.

The war against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group further strengthened these militias thanks to the unconditional military support of the US-led coalition. The necessary and immediate goal of defeating ISIL meant overlooking the danger that could arise from arming irregular armed groups.

So while the KDP and PUK fought with AK47s in the 1990s, today they have a myriad of heavy weaponry available, including tanks and German-made anti-tank Milan missiles. While we, Kurds, are surely thankful for the weapons, which helped save us from ISIL, we would’ve been more appreciative if the US had used the existential threat to the KDP-PUK rule as an opportunity to pressure them into unifying the Kurdish militias.

The problem with personalised power – both political and military – is that its stability depends on one person; when that person is gone, a power vacuum and instability ensue. And this is what is happening in Kurdistan right now. Talabani died in October last year and his former deputy, Nawshirwan Mustafa, passed away five months earlier.

Now the weakened PUK is practically run by Talabani’s widow and his sons, including most notably Bafel Talabani, who heads a well-trained and equipped armed group which is loyal only to him and his party. PUK has not named a new official leader yet.

Meanwhile, KDP’s leader, Barzani, remains alive and well at 72, leading the strongest armed force in Kurdistan. And he has his eye on PUK-controlled areas. On September 23, just a week before the vote, he paid a rare visit to Sulaymaniyah, the “capital” of the PUK, and told a cheering crowd, “Whoever agrees with us, we would agree and share a home with them. But those who are against this doctrine and goal, it’s difficult for them and us to be united and share a home.”

Escalating rhetoric and threats

While Barzani opted for innuendos at the Sulaymaniyah rally, this election season has seen a rhetorical war break out between his camp and the PUK. “Treason” is one word that has been doing the rounds in press statements by both sides.

Barzani has said that Kurdish unity has already been “destroyed” by what some PUK leaders, including its top commander, Bafel Talabani, did a year ago when they helped Iraqi forces and Iran-backed Shia militias take the oil-rich city of Kirkuk from the Kurds in the wake of the independence referendum. The PUK, on the other hand, has accused the KDP of “monopolising power”.

Such harsh rhetoric may sound like regular political vitriol used to rally voters during the election campaign season, but in the Iraqi Kurdish region, these are real threats. In such a conservative and highly militarised society, no matter the circumstances, KDP and PUK have never accused each other of “treason” after they concluded peace. To me, this rhetoric is an eerie reminder of the civil war.

Today we have a dangerous situation in which one party feels stronger and more popular and therefore more entitled to rule the whole region while the other lacks leadership and leverage to negotiate.

The KDP has already taken steps to curb its rival’s power. Having declared the peace treaty dead, Barzani’s party is refusing to back PUK’s candidate Barham Salih for the Iraqi presidency and has nominated its own candidate, Fuad Hussein.

It is in this tense atmosphere that Kurds will be going to the polls on Sunday. The 111 parliamentary seats will be contested by 21 parties, but none is expected to win 51 percent of votes to form a government on its own. Instead, the KDP may choose to forge an alliance with some of the new parties such as Gorran (Change Movement, established by former PUK members) and the New Generation Movement (founded by Shaswar Abdulwahid, a Kurdish Donald Trump-like real estate developer).

In Iraq’s May election these two opposition parties, which draw support from areas under PUK jurisdiction, got half as many seats in the Iraqi parliament as the PUK.

If these results repeat in the September 30 vote, would the PUK accept electoral defeat or a new political reality in which it no longer holds power? PUK leaders have made it clear that the answer is a categorical “no”.

“Even if we win only one seat, we are the PUK. We are armed. Nobody can disarm us,” warned senior PUK leader Mullah Bakhtyar in a recent interview with the Kurdish Rudaw channel.

The situation is so dangerous that even the Americans are worried. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, has had three phone calls with KDP leaders over the past month and a half to discuss Iraq’s government formation including the position of the presidency. While PUK has been historically close to Iran, its candidate Salih, who was educated in the West, seems acceptable to the US.

While no one wants to see another Kurdish civil conflict break out in a region still recovering from the devastation of the war with ISIL, there are no guarantees that hostilities will not erupt after the elections.

We are undoubtedly entering a new era of politics in the KRG, marked by the demise of the two-decade-long power-sharing agreement between the PUK and the KDP. In this sense, the September 30 election will be the first real litmus test for Kurdish democracy and its capacity to resolve political conflicts peacefully. 

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance. 

WASHINGTON – Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley disputed accusations from Democrats that he and his staff have tried to brush away allegations against Brett Kavanaugh from a second accuser, Deborah Ramirez.

During Friday’s committee meeting, the Iowa Republican said he “acted immediately” to investigate her charges and that his staff “repeatedly” tried to accommodate Ramirez as long as she provided evidence to back up her claim.

Ramirez, 53, studied sociology and psychology and graduated from Yale University in 1987, along with Kavanaugh.

She alleged in an interview with The New Yorker posted Sunday that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at a dorm party when they were both freshmen. She said that she and Kavanaugh and a small group of other students were playing a drinking game and were both intoxicated. Kavanaugh then exposed his penis and shoved it in her face, Ramirez alleges.

Ramirez told The New Yorker that she hesitated coming forward because she was drunk when the alleged incident took place and “her memories contained gaps.” 

Kavanaugh has vehemently denied Ramirez’ account, as well as allegations leveled by Christine Blasey Ford, who told the committee Thursday that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her while they were both in high school more than 30 years ago.

A separate article in the New Yorker posted Friday morning disclosed a series of emails that showed the back-and-forth between Republican staff of the committee and Ramirez’ lawyer, John Clune. Clune requested that the committee interview his client where she would discuss evidence and witnesses, and Republicans requested more evidence before they would agree to talk with her. 

Speaking at Friday’s committee hearing, Grassley defended his staff’s conduct, giving a day-by-day account of what they did to reach out to Ramirez while accusing Democrats of hiding Ramirez’ allegations until the last minute.

“My staff repeatedly made clear that it welcomed the receipt of Ms. Ramirez’ or anyone else’s evidence,” he said. “Miss Ramirez’ counsel has still not provided any evidence to committee staff. If evidence emerged, we, of course, would proceed as a appropriate.”

Grassley also said his staff “acted swiftly” to interview Kavanaugh, who “unequivocally” denied the allegations.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the panel, said she’s not sure whether sexual misconduct allegations leveled by Ramirez and a third accuser, Julie Swetnick, are true because there hasn’t been an opportunity hear them.

“It seems the Republican strategy is no longer attack the victim. It is ignore the victim,” Feinstein said at Friday’s hearing. “It is, in fact, a real test for the United States Senate and for our country to see how we treat women – especially women who are survivors of sexual assault. I believe we can do better.”

 

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