MOSCOW (AP) — Russia has withdrawn parking privileges for U.S. diplomats, an apparent continuation of a diplomatic tit-for-tat between Washington and Moscow. 
 
 State-owned television channel Rossiya 24 reported on Wednesday that parking spaces outside the U.S. consulate in St. Petersburg had been painted over with a pedestrian crossing, and special parking signs had been removed outside the U.S. consulate in Yekaterinburg, near the Ural Mountains. 
 
 Diplomatic tensions between the U.S. and Russia are at their lowest level since the Cold War and have been marred in recent months by a series of expulsions of diplomats and closures of diplomatic missions. 
 
 Maria Olson, a spokeswoman at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, declined to comment on the loss of parking spaces. 
 
 Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Monday that Russia would reduce U.S. diplomatic missions to "full parity" with their Russian counterparts on U.S. territory. As well as canceling parking privileges, Russian media has reported that U.S. diplomatic missions could be hit with staff reductions and fewer approved diplomatic entry points. 
 
 The U.S. ordered Russia to close its consulate in San Francisco and two annexes in Washington and New York on Aug. 31 in response to an order from Moscow to reduce the U.S. diplomatic presence in Russia by 755 staff members. Those actions followed the U.S seizure of Russian compounds in Maryland and New York and the expulsion of dozens of Russian diplomats in retaliation for Moscow's alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election. 
 
 ___ 
 
 This story has been corrected to give the U.S. spokeswoman's name as Maria, instead of Mariya. ||||| Donald Trump may be a world of chaos all by himself, but the world beyond Trump is changing in dramatic ways, often with little notice. We’d like to tell you about it and we’re keeping track of these global changes, from the incremental to the monumental, so that you don’t have to. 
 
 Sign up for our weekly newsletter of the biggest news in the world delivered to your inbox every Sunday. 
 
 Philippines — September 12, 2017 
 
 Duterte’s congress chops human rights budget from $14.7M to $20 
 
 $0.05 
 
 per day 
 
 That’s how much the lower house of Congress in the Philippines just voted to allocate the state office charged with investigating human rights violations by the police. 
 
 Coincidentally, those are the same police carrying out President Rodrigo Duterte’s infamously brutal anti-narcotics crackdown. At least 7,000 have died in a campaign featuring summary executions, falsified evidence and the “deliberate” targeting of children, according to groups like Human Rights Watch. Most of the victims are small-time users and peddlers. 
 
 Public anger has been rising as the death toll climbs, especially after CCTV recently captured police dragging a 17-year-old boy into an alley, telling him to run and then shooting him three times. 
 
 Duterte himself has chafed under criticism of his government’s own watchdog group, known as the Commission for Human Rights. He once called for the office to be abolished, only to later claim he was joking. 
 
 Now, Duterte’s allies in Congress have a new plan for responding to the criticism: slash the watchdog’s budget to almost nothing. 
 
 In a vote Tuesday, lawmakers in the lower house approved cutting the commission’s annual budget to just $19.63. 
 
 By contrast, the 2017 budget was $14.7 million. 
 
 Laughter could be heard in the chamber during the vote as the final tally reached 119 lawmakers in favor of the reduction, 32 opposed. 
 
 “If you want to protect the rights of criminals, get your budget from the criminals,” speaker of the house, Pantaleon Alvarez, said in an interview after the vote. “It’s that simple. Why should you get budget from the government and yet you are not doing your job?” 
 
 “Just when you thought Duterte’s murderous war on drugs couldn’t get any worse, it does.” 
 
 The Philippines Commission for Human Rights was enshrined in the country’s 1987 constitution following the ouster of the notoriously corrupt and brutal dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. The intention was to prevent similar abuses of power in the future. 
 
 “We are saddened by this whimsical and capricious display of vindictiveness,” said the chairman of the commission, Jose Luis Martin Gascon. 
 
 The agency vowed to continue its work. 
 
 “Despite these circumstances, we will not turn our backs on our Constitutional duty to render justice for all,” the agency said in a statement. “We shall seek means to move forward.” 
 
 International rights groups slammed the vote, calling it one more step in Duterte’s campaign to eviscerate internal opposition to his violent tactics. 
 
 “This move by lawmakers to deny funding to the commission is a very sinister development,” Phelim Kine of Human Rights Watch told VICE News Tuesday. “Just when you thought Duterte’s murderous war on drugs couldn’t get any worse, it does.” 
 
 —Greg Walters 
 
 Myanmar — September 12, 2017 
 
 “They struck us until we were lifeless”: A Rohingya refugee recalls her escape from Myanmar 
 
 COX’S BAZAR, Bangladesh — “They beat me and slit my throat,” said Rashida, 25. She was sitting on a plastic chair, weak and waiting for an ambulance. We were a few feet from the border where she’d just crossed into Bangladesh after fleeing her village in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine state eight days earlier. 
 
 “My baby is dead, my husband is dead,” she said. Her breath came in rasps that echoed from her throat. Two deep lacerations that cut across her neck appeared infected. She had not yet received medical attention since being brutally assaulted by a mob of armed men. 
 
 In Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, tens of thousands of refugees flee over the border from Myanmar. Kathleen Prior 
 
 With their mass exodus into Bangladesh, Rohingya refugees like Rashida are bringing with them stories of murder, rape and torture at the hands of Myanmar’s security forces and ultranationalist buddhists. Myanmar’s military says it’s conducting a “clearance operation” against Rohingya insurgents behind a series of deadly attacks in late August, but accounts from survivors like Rashida tell a decidedly different story. 
 
 Rashida’s village, Tula Toli, was subject to one of the most gruesome military attacks to be recorded since Rohingya Muslims began flooding into Bangladesh by the tens of thousands two weeks ago. 
 
 — Kathleen Prior 
 
 Read more: A Rohingya refugee recalls her escape from Myanmar 
 
 Saudi Arabia — September 12, 2017 
 
 Saudi Arabia accused of war crimes in Yemen over airstrikes 
 
 Abdulrahman al-Dhurafi had just finished his morning prayers in Yemen’s northwestern city of Saada on August 4, when a blast from an almighty explosion shook his house. Minutes later, a friend called to tell him his nephew’s home had just been destroyed in an airstrike from the Saudi-led coalition that has been bombarding the country since 2015. 
 
 Al-Dhurafi, general director of the Education Ministry’s office in Saada, rushed to the scene to find a neighbor running from the rubble of the flattened house, the body of a young girl in his arms. It was two-year-old Batool al-Dhurafi, his nephew’s youngest daughter. The blast had killed her and her five siblings – the eldest just 12 – as well as her mother, grandmother, and 17-year-old cousin. In total, nine civilians were killed. 
 
 The bloody assault on the al-Dhurafis’ home is one of five recent Saudi-led strikes in Yemen since June that amount to war crimes, Human Rights Watch alleged in a statement Tuesday. 
 
 The memo, from which the account of the al-Dhurafi deaths is taken, documents 39 civilian deaths – 26 of them children – in five recent airstrikes which the human rights group says caused such indiscriminate loss of life that they are in violation of the rules of war. 
 
 “We had repeatedly heard that the (Saudi-led) coalition would tighten its rules of engagement, so we looked at these strikes since the promise was made,” Kristine Beckerle, Human Rights Watch’s Yemen researcher, told VICE News. 
 
 — Tim Hume 
 
 Read more: Saudi Arabia accused of war crimes in Yemen over airstrikes 
 
 North Korea — September 11, 2017 
 
 U.N. approves toughest sanctions yet against North Korea 
 
 The United Nations Security Council approved its toughest sanctions yet against North Korea Monday, responding to the hermit kingdom’s latest and largest nuclear test last week, though not as strongly as the Trump administration had once set out to do. 
 
 The sanctions ban natural gas imports as well as textile exports. It also bans countries from giving North Korean workers new work permits. But the sanctions don’t ban all oil imports, nor do they freeze the North Korean government’s and Kim Jong Un’s assets — both conditions the Trump administration had vehemently argued for a week earlier. 
 
 The weaker resolution received the approval of all 15 security council countries, including Russia and China, both of whom have been especially critical of using sanctions to quell the escalating tensions with North Korea. 
 
 Russian President Vladimir Putin last week called additional sanctions against Pyongyang “useless and ineffective,” emphasizing that diplomacy was the only way to resolve North Korea. 
 
 Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang has repeatedly emphasized that China would seek to “resolve issue through dialogue and consultation.” 
 
 “Today, we are saying the world will never accept a nuclear-armed North Korea,” said Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. “And today the Security Council is saying if North Korea does not halt its nuclear program, we will act to stop it ourselves.” 
 
 Though Trump once said that “talking is not the answer,” Haley emphasized Monday that diplomatic options were still very much on the table. “North Korea has not yet passed the point of no return,” she said after the sanctions were passed. 
 
 North Korea has repeatedly threatened to inflict “pain and suffering” on the United States in retaliation for additional sanctions. 
 
 “The forthcoming measures to be taken by the DPRK will cause the US the greatest pain and suffering it had ever gone through in its entire history,” the foreign ministry said in a statement by the state’s official news outlet, KCNA. 
 
 — Alexa Liautaud 
 
 Germany — September 11, 2017 
 
 “Real Nazis” poised for a comeback, German foreign minister warns 
 
 Supporters of the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party shout slogans during an election campaign rally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a top candidate of the Christian Democratic Union Party (CDU) for the upcoming general elections in Torgau, Germany, September 6, 2017. REUTERS/Reinhard Krause 
 
 Godwin’s Law states that the longer an argument goes on online, the more likely it is someone will accuse someone else of being a Nazi. A common extension holds that whoever makes that charge first will lose the argument. 
 
 Germany’s Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel threw caution to the wind Monday when he slapped the label on his country’s ultra-nationalist party, Alternative for Deutschland, or AfD. He added an extra adjective so there was no confusion, warning the public that “real Nazis” are poised to return to Germany’s parliament for the first time since Hitler’s defeat. 
 
 When it comes to “real Nazis,” Gabriel should know. His own father remained an unrepentant Nazi until the day he died in 2012. 
 
 Recent polls show the AfD is poised to win 8 percent to 11 percent of the vote in the Sept. 24 election, enough to make it the third-biggest group in parliament. Gabriel said the AfD is taking advantage of Germans’ unaddressed concerns about immigration, security, and jobs, especially in depressed eastern Germany. 
 
 “If we’re unlucky, then these people will send a signal of dissatisfaction that will have terrible consequences. Then we will have real Nazis in the German Reichstag for the first time since the end of World War Two,” Gabriel said in an interview with the internet provider t-online.de. 
 
 The AfD has attracted plenty of criticism for its vitriolic stance on race, religion and immigration, while also winning support from a vocal minority, especially after Prime Minister Angela Merkel’s controversial decision to throw open Germany’s doors to Syrian refugees in 2015. 
 
 On Monday Germany’s justice minister warned that several of the planks in AfD’s electoral manifesto appear to be outright illegal, such as the party’s promise to ban Muslim minarets if it wins power. 
 
 Meanwhile, the AfD’s top candidate, Alexander Gauland, is facing possible charges of incitement from the prosecutor’s office in the small central German city of Mühlhausen after Gauland told a campaign event there that German Integration Minister Aydan Özoguz needs to be “disposed of.” 
 
 While comparisons to Hitler’s party are rare in modern German politics, Gabriel has tip-toed up to that line before with regard to the AfD, telling the Funke Media Group in June: “Everything that they are saying, I’ve already heard — just to be clear — from my own father, who was a Nazi to his last breath.” 
 
 Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives are leading in the polls with 37 percent. Gabriel’s own Social Democrats are second, with 22 percent. 
 
 — Greg Walters 
 
 Read more: Germany is trying to get neo-Nazis out of its military 
 
 Myanmar — September 11, 2017 
 
 Abuse of Rohingya is a “textbook example” of ethnic cleansing 
 
 Nearly 300,000 of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims have been driven from their homes by an indiscriminate military campaign of mass killings, rapes, and arson that the United Nations has likened to ethnic cleansing. Now even their escape route has been compromised, after Myanmar’s army allegedly planted landmines at crossing points used by refugees fleeing the bloodshed, according to one human rights group. 
 
 Amnesty International reported two new mine injuries Sunday at crossing points along the border with Bangladesh, where hundreds of thousands of desperate Rohingya have fled in the past two weeks. 
 
 “All indications point to the Myanmar security forces deliberately targeting locations that Rohingya refugees use as crossing points,” said Tirana Hassan, Amnesty International’s crisis response director. 
 
 “This a cruel and callous way of adding to the misery of people fleeing a systematic campaign of persecution.” 
 
 The latest injuries, one of which blew off a Bangladeshi farmer’s leg and another which wounded a Rohingya man, followed a death and serious injuries to at least three civilians, including two children, linked to landmines in the area in recent weeks, according to Amnesty. Myanmar’s military is one of only a few national armies around the world, along with North Korea and Syria, to openly use anti-personnel landmines. 
 
 The current crisis in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state began Aug. 25 after a Rohingya insurgent group launched deadly attacks on security posts. Myanmar’s army, backed by Buddhist mobs, responded with a brutal and indiscriminate military offensive that the U.N.’s human rights chief said Monday “seems a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”
– It appears US diplomats in Russia will be spending less time trying to smooth relations with that country and more time circling the block after Moscow revoked diplomatic parking privileges in two cities, the AP reports. According to a report from Russian state-owned TV, officials painted over parking spots outside the US Consulate in St. Petersburg, turning them into a pedestrian crossing. They also removed special parking signs from outside the US Consulate in Yekaterinburg. Vice, citing a Russian newspaper, reports Russian officials are also considering removing special diplomatic parking spaces near the US Embassy in Moscow. Moscow is said to be the third worst city in Europe for drivers, and New York reports St. Petersburg isn't far behind at seventh. The removal of diplomatic parking spots follows Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov saying on Monday that Russia is seeking "full parity" between Russian and US diplomatic missions. The Russian envoy in the US doesn't get reserved parking. But really this is just the latest volley in a diplomatic spat that started with Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election, following which the US seized Russian compounds in New York and Maryland and booted dozens of Russian diplomats. Russia retaliated by reducing US diplomatic staff by 755 positions. Last month the US closed a Russian consulate and two annexes. In addition to making US diplomats hunt for parking, Russia is considering domestic travel restrictions, staff reductions, and fewer points of entry into the country for US diplomats.