THE SMARTEST PEOPLE HAD ALL ASSURED ME THAT SUNNI AND SHIA WOULD NEVER COOPERATE LIKE THIS: More evidence emerges of Iran-Al Qaeda ties.

Said Qasemi, a now-retired spokesperson for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), told Al Arabiya that IRGC deployed undercover soldiers to Bosnia-Herzegovina during its conflict in the 1990s under the pretense that they were members of Tehran’s state-endorsed Red Crescent.

This is alleged to have been in cooperation with an Al Qaeda unit operating in the region, as confirmed by another IRGC official, whereby the two groups were able to engage in joint weapons training.

IRGC has long and persistently denied long-running claims by the international community, however, of any associations between the two factions — who view the U.S. as a staunch enemy – even as more claims and documents to the contrary have piled up over the years.

They go way back — the enemy of my enemy and all that.

YOU DON’T SAY: Electric Cars Are Still, Generally, a Plaything of the Wealthy.

Even in the Europe Union, members of which punish drivers of fossil fuel-powered vehicles with high taxes, EVs amounted to just 2 percent of new vehicles registered last year. And yet the EU plans to drastically cut down on greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years.

New data from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA) shows that the EU’s green dreams will be hard to realize without some sort of massive incentive for the purchase of electric vehicles, as right now those vehicles are only marginally popular in extremely wealthy countries. The EV “people’s car” is still a dream.

The report shows an EV take rate of less than 1 percent in half of the EU’s member states. The lower a country’s per capita GDP, the lower the take rate.

Only two European countries that boast an EV market share above 5 percent are Sweden and the Netherlands. Finland clears the 3.5 percent mark. What all three countries have in common is a per capita GDP greater than $47,000. Those sub-1-percenters? They all have per capita GDPs below $32,500.

ACEA’s findings show that more than 80 percent of the EU’s electric vehicle sales originate in just six countries, all of them wealthy.

Plus: “If governments try to legislate away the existence of ICE-powered vehicles, they just might find themselves facing an angry, carless society. The solution, according to the ACEA, is more government intervention.“

The solution to big, stupid government is always more big, stupid government.

THEN I’D WAGER IT’S FOR NOTHING GOOD: NY State Using Facial Recognition Tech but Won’t Say for What.

BAN ALL THE THINGS! Beverly Hills Could Become First City in U.S. to Ban Sales of Tobacco Products.

I HAD BEEN ASSURED BLOCKCHAIN MADE THIS KIND OF THING IMPOSSIBLE: Bitcoin hackers steal over $40M in ‘well-orchestrated’ cyber breach.

LARRY ELDER: Trump’s ‘Infrastructure’ Plan Versus Obama’s ‘Stimulus’: What’s the Difference?

UNEXPECTEDLY: Disney’s ‘Tolkien’ Movie Cuts Out the Christian Faith That Inspired His Life and Work.

MEH. LEAVE IT UP. SUNSHINE IS STILL THE BEST DISINFECTANT. It Took Facebook Nearly A Month To Remove The Video Of Brian Sims Trying To Doxx Teenage Girls.

MAY I SEE YOUR LICENSE AND REGISTRATION AND ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE, PLEASE? A couple shot a porn film in a Tesla on autopilot while there were ‘a lot of cars driving by.’

BOOM: Facebook co-founder says Zuckerberg ‘not accountable,’ calls for government break up.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Mayor Pete Is the Golden State’s New Golden Boy. “So does a 37-year-old mayor of a not-major midwestern berg have real staying power? That’s the question donors don’t seem to be asking, at least not yet. Like Obama in ’08, Buttigieg is running less on policy & experience and more on biography & minority status. That proved twice to be a potent mix.”

UGH: In Venezuela, The Arrests Of The Coup Leaders Have Begun. “Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro is sending out the goon squad this week to quietly begin rounding up the people who participated in the attempted coup last week. While he’s not yet going after the person who actually sent out the call to revolt, his secret police force started with someone very close to the top.”

FACE, MEET PALM: Facebook auto-generates videos celebrating extremist images.

The animated video begins with a photo of the black flags of jihad. Seconds later, it flashes highlights of a year of social media posts: plaques of anti-Semitic verses, talk of retribution and a photo of two men carrying more jihadi flags while they burn the stars and stripes.

It wasn’t produced by extremists; it was created by Facebook. In a clever bit of self-promotion, the social media giant takes a year of a user’s content and auto-generates a celebratory video. In this case, the user called himself “Abdel-Rahim Moussa, the Caliphate.”

“Thanks for being here, from Facebook,” the video concludes in a cartoon bubble before flashing the company’s famous “thumbs up.”

I think maybe we’ve reached the point of diminishing returns on social media automation.

IT ISN’T ALWAYS NICE TO MAKE TWITCHY: Gun-control group Brady apologizes to students at STEM School Highlands Ranch for politicizing vigil.

KRUISER: California Dems Legalizing Soviet-Style Reporting of Legal Gun-Owning Co-Workers.

Colorado, too.

TYLER O’NEIL: Meet the Hero from the Robotics Team Who Died Rushing the Colorodo STEM Shooter.

DAVID HARSANYI: Everything Seth Meyers Said About Ilhan Omar Is Wrong. “Claiming Meghan McCain put the congresswoman in danger by criticizing her is just a way to bully Omar’s critics.”

The first part of this rhetorical question is setting up a destructive standard to undermine debate. For one thing, a public figure—an elected official, no less—has no dispensation from criticism merely because some nut sends her a death threat. Nor is there any indulgence for being a Muslim woman or black women or white middle-aged man, or anyone else. Omar is a 37-year-old educated woman who was elected to the U.S. Congress, not a middle schooler playacting in the Model U.N.

McCain condemned Omar’s words. She didn’t concoct a smear.

But for America’s protected classes, that is a smear.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Army Rapid Equipping Force Fast-Tracks Enemy Drone-Destroying Weapon.

The systems, called “Drone Busters,” use Electronic Warfare (EW) to interfere with the GPS signal or Command and Control technology of enemy drones, disabling them or throwing them off course.

“We are assisting currently deployed and front line forces to disrupt and deter drone operations on a much larger scale,” Col. Joe Bookard, Director of the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, told Warrior in an interview.

The Drone Busters use various currently available technical innovations to help counter individual or massive swarming drone attacks.

I just love that they’re calling them Drone Busters.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Clowns Vote to Hold Barr in Contempt. “Nadler announced that America now has a constitutional crisis. Notably, he did not think we were in a constitutional crisis when Eric Holder was held in contempt of congress after refusing to turn over documents on Obama’s Fast and Furious operation. Obama’s Fast and Furious operation sold weapons to Mexican narco-terrorists and one of those weapons killed border patrol agent Brian Terry.”

HMM: Uber gambled on driver arbitration and might have come up the loser.

As the ride-hailing titan prepares to go public this week, in a listing that could value Uber at almost $84 billion, the number of U.S. drivers who have filed arbitration demands against Uber has swelled to more than 60,000, according to the company’s prospectus. The figure surprised legal experts, who said resolving that many cases would take decades and cost Uber at least $600 million — with no end in sight.

Uber’s pending listing this week, on the heels of a planned strike by drivers, has brought the legal tactic into sharper focus. From Uber’s perspective, arbitration prevents drivers from banding together in class actions in open court, and from possibly winning a ruling with the power to threaten a linchpin of the company’s business model: treating drivers as independent contractors, avoiding the costs of full-time employees.

Arbitration decisions, whether for or against the company, don’t set any legal precedent, and the results are confidential. “Uber kind of picked its poison in that regard,” said Nancy Cremins, general counsel at Globalization Partners in Boston.

But while the choice might have initially deterred lawsuits, 60,000 arbitrations are “a death by a thousand cuts,” Cremins said. “The volume is impossible to deal with from an administrative and legal perspective.”

We live in a remarkable age, when the union option might be the easier and cheaper one.

CYBERCRIME: Amazon hit by extensive fraud with hackers siphoning merchant funds. “Amazon said it was still investigating the compromised accounts and believed that hackers managed to change details of accounts on the Seller Central platform to their own at Barclays and Prepay Technologies, which is partly owned by Mastercard, according to the filing.”

No word how much was stolen, and it could be that not even Amazon knows at this point.

GOOD QUESTION: How Will China Take Its Venezuela Lesson?

Beijing proceeded in Venezuela much as it has in East Asia and elsewhere along its Belt and Road route. The China Development Bank (CDB) extended loans. At their peak in Venezuela they amounted to over $50 billion. The funds seemed to be at Caracas’ discretion but were tied explicitly to sales of specific volumes of oil to China at a fixed price. The arrangements state that Venezuela’s state oil company Petrolos de Venezuela (PDVSA) will sell to mostly state owned Chinese companies, at market prices. According to the terms, these buyers, rather than sending the money to PDVSA, deposit the sums into an account at the CDB, which then withdraws the amount needed to service the debt. When market prices fall below the fixed price, Venezuela has had to deliver more oil. If, as has been the case for some time now, Venezuela cannot deliver the required volumes, the CDB has extended what it calls “forbearance arrangements” on which Venezuela accrues a further obligation on the delayed payments.

As Venezuela has fallen into chaos, some $25 billion in such loans remain outstanding. The forbearance China already extended between 2016 and 2018 was pegged to the rate on U.S. Treasuries and hardly compensates Beijing for the risks involved. Venezuela pumps so little oil these days that it cannot possibly meet its obligations. Even if Maduro were to remain in power, and that is far from a sure thing, Venezuela will fail to meet its obligations to the CDB. If Juan Guaido secures power, the fate of these arrangements would become even more ambiguous. At the very least, China will have to take a haircut on what remains outstanding. Though $25 billion is a manageable sum for the CDB and certainly for the cash-rich People’s Republic of China, there is a larger lesson for Beijing in this turn of events. China will also lose all the influence the loans were meant to buy. Even if Maduro prevails, he might see China as a weak partner who insisted on legalities when he was in jeopardy. If Guaido wins, China will not just lose influence, it will have incurred considerable hostility for its support of Maduro.

Read the whole thing.

BUY IN BULK AND SAVE: Price Drop: Lockheed Pitches $80M F-35A to Pentagon.

DAVID FORSMARK: Brennan and Clapper Are Still Working as Agents of Influence for Russian Military Intelligence.

INTERNET OF THINGS: The end of Works With Nest could be trouble for smart homes.

Google’s integration of the Nest brand may have some downsides for smart home enthusiasts. The company has revealed that it’s phasing out its Works With Nest program in the summer in favor of a Works With Google Assistant framework. The new program will allow data sharing between connected devices and apps, but only for a handful of tightly screened partners, Google’s Rishi Chandra told Variety. While that’s potentially helpful for security and privacy, it’s also likely to break a number of smart home tie-ins — including some you may miss.

The change “will break IFTTT,” Chandra said. You couldn’t use the automation service to automatically turn up your Nest thermostat when you get home, for instance. Google Assistant’s routines are intended to fill the gaps, but this won’t help if you have a device or functionality that routines won’t address.

These kinds of changes aren’t always avoidable, and might be important when smart home privacy is becoming an important issue.

If privacy is a primary concern, you probably aren’t using Google IOT products, anyway — but the company is getting a nasty reputation for leaving users of its products in the lurch.