Kurds Vote To Seek Independence But Face Big Backlash: Yesterday we reported that Iraqi Kurds were poised to vote Monday in a referendum on independence, and that other countries were, to say the least, not pleased. The vote went overwhelmingly in favor of Kurdistan, the semi-autonomous region in northern Iraq, starting the process for the region to become an independent nation. It is an aspiration the Kurdish people have held since the Middle East borders were redrawn after World War I, and they were denied a homeland.

Israel, understandably, was the only nation to have supported this dream. Neighboring countries of Iran and Turkey, along with Iraq, threatened serious repercussions if the vote was held. On Sunday, the day before the vote, Iran closed its airspace to the Kurdistan region, and Tuesday, Iraq’s prime minister gave the country’s Kurdish region until Friday to surrender control of its two international airports or face a shutdown of international flights. The Kurdish regional government has its own parliament and military force, but there is no domestic Kurdish airline in the autonomous region.

Should an independent Kurdistan come to fruition, Iraq would lose a third of its country, and a major source of oil. Iranian officials said the referendum is unconstitutional and destabilizes the region, and have refused to negotiate with Kurdish leadership. Meanwhile, military exercises are being conducted by Turkish and Iraqi troops on both Iraq’s northern and eastern borders, and Iraqi troops may soon be sent to disputed areas controlled by the Kurds but claimed by Baghdad, including the multiethnic, oil-rich city of Kirkuk, seized by the Kurds in 2014.

Saudis About To See Their Car Insurance Raised: Saudi Arabia’s King Salman has given the men of his fundamentalist kingdom something long denied–the chance to crack jokes about women drivers. The King ordered the reform in a royal decree delivered on Tuesday night, requesting that drivers licenses be issued to women who wanted them. Now women will no longer need permission from a legal guardian to get a license, nor be required to have a guardian in the car when they drive. It is the most significant change yet to a rigidly conservative social order that has severely limited the role of women in public life, and it only took about 10 years of activism, complete with women being arrested for sitting behind the wheel on the country’s roads.

Saudi Arabia had been the last nation on earth that banned women from driving, a fact that was frequently cited by critics as proof that female citizens of the kingdom were among the world’s most repressed. The driving decision comes amid a broad reform program that led to women being allowed into a sports stadium last week for the first time. Everyone just needs to get on board, including the Saudi cleric who was banned from preaching earlier this month after saying that women should not be allowed to drive because their brains shrink to a quarter the size of a man’s when they go shopping. Is he kidding?

Global Progress Against Tetanus, HIV, and Malaria: Last week, the Pan American Health Organization announced that infant and maternal tetanus was officially eliminated from the Americas this year. Haiti was the last country in the Americas to eliminate neonatal tetanus, which means that less than one case occurs per 1,000 live births. This week, the US President’s Malaria Initiative said it would expand its work to new countries in West and Central Africa, protecting 90 million more people. The initiative, founded in 2005, has been instrumental in decreasing worldwide malaria deaths by about 40 percent in the past decade. In his speech to the UN last Tuesday, President Trump praised the malaria initiative and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) as examples of leadership in humanitarian assistance by the United States. A consortium of aid agencies, drug companies, and governments also announced that a new three-in-one antiretroviral cocktail to treat HIV would soon be available to 92 countries, including virtually all of Africa, for about $75 a year.

President Trump Slow To Address Crisis In Puerto Rico: The September hurricane season left a trail of destruction stateside in the US, but nowhere has the devastation been worse than the American island territory of Puerto Rico, which was directly hit early September 20 by the powerful Category 4 Hurricane Maria. President Trump was johnny-on-the-spot dealing with storm aftermaths in Texas and Florida, but not so with Puerto Rico. Trump sent an initial tweet to the island a few hours before the hurricane hit, saying  “we are with you.” Then, the president took an additional five full days to tweet again, this time seemingly blaming the population, all US citizens, for their own misfortune, pointing a finger at what he called “broken infrastructure & massive debt,” and an electrical grid that was already “in terrible shape” before the storm. He acknowledged that “much of the island was destroyed,” but then said Puerto Rico owed billions of dollars to Wall Street and the banks “which, sadly, must be dealt with.”

Tuesday the president spoke to reporters in the White House Rose Garden, saying he planned to visit the island in a week, and that federal authorities were landing relief supplies there “on an hourly basis.” But the administration has refused to waive federal restrictions on foreign ships carrying life-saving supplies to Puerto Rico, a concession it readily made for Texas and Florida in the cases of hurricanes Harvey and Irma.

China Blocks WhatsApp Ahead of Communist Party Meeting This Fall: China has now almost fully blocked the use of the WhatsApp messaging app, the latest move by Beijing to step up surveillance ahead of the Communist Party’s Congress, which starts October 18. Facebook and Instagram are already both banned in the country. WhatsApp was the only Facebook-owned service still operating in China. The censorship has prompted many in China to switch to the WeChat messaging app of Chinese internet company Tencent. WeChat has some similarities to WhatsApp, but two crucial differences. WeChat has close ties to the Chinese government and no end-to-end encryption (which means that even Facebook does not know what is being said in the text, voice, and video conversations that take place on WhatsApp).

By blocking the heavily encrypted WhatsApp service while making less secure applications like WeChat available to the public, the Chinese government has “herded” its internet users toward methods of communication that it can reliably monitor. China has effectively weaponized technology to further its political goals. (Additional read: A list of the 68 things you can’t say when using internet in China (they aren’t just the political police, the government is also the morality police). Additional 2x read: What ACLU’s lawyers rebut when people say “they have nothing to hide.”)

• Macron sets out grand plan to relaunch ‘weak and slow’ European Union (CNN)
• Trump Plans 45,000 Limit on Refugees Admitted to U.S. (NYT)
• Chad’s Inclusion in Travel Ban Could Jeopardize American Interests, Officials Say (NYT)
• The Misunderstood Roots of Burma’s Rohingya Crisis (The Atlantic)
• US Defense Secretary Mattis arrives in Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN)
• Four graphics that explain how a far-right party won third place in Germany (CNN)
• Twitter Is Testing Out 280-Character Tweets (TIME)

Please support Daily Pnut!