The US government has started sending asylum seekers back to Nogales, Mexico, to await court hearings that will be scheduled roughly 350 miles (563km) away in Ciudad Juárez.Authorities are expanding a program known as Remain in Mexico that requires tens of thousands of asylum seekers to wait out their immigration court hearings in Mexico. Until this week, the government was driving some asylum seekers from Nogales, Arizona, to El Paso, Texas, so they could be returned to Juárez.Now, asylum seekers will have to find their own way through dangerous Mexican border roads.About 30 asylum seekers were sent to Nogales, Mexico, on Thursday, said Gilda Loureiro, the director of the San Juan Bosco migrant shelter in Nogales, Sonora.Loureiro said the migrants hadn’t made it to the shelter yet but that it was prepared and has a capacity of about 400.“We’re going to take up to the capacity we have,” she said.Critics say the program, one of several Trump administration policies that have all but ended asylum in the US, puts migrants who fled their home countries back into dangerous Mexican border towns where they are often kidnapped, robbed or extorted.A Human Rights First report released in December documented at least 636 public reports of violence against asylum seekers returned to Mexico including rape, kidnapping and torture. Human Rights First said that was a steep increase over October, when the group had identified 343 attacks, and noted the latest figure is surely an under-count because most crime victims don’t report.Nogales is now the eighth border crossing – and first in Arizona – through which US authorities return migrants to Mexico to await court hearings. The policy was introduced in January 2018 in San Diego.More than 56,000 people were sent back to Mexico by the end of November, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Of the more than 24,000 cases that have been decided, only 117, or less than 1%, have been granted asylum or some other form relief allowing them to stay in the United States.US authorities claim the program has helped to significantly reduce illegal border crossings. The border patrol apprehended just over 33,000 people along the south-west border in November, compared to 144,000 in May, when border crossings peaked. Topics US-Mexico border US immigration Mexico Trump administration Americas news

With regard to the actions by the crowd in admiralty, pan-democratic legislators and Civil Human Rights Front make the following joint statement.Carrie Lam states today at the July 1 reception, that she would respond to people’s demands, become more open and tolerant. She has not shown any sincerity to respond or to communicate so far. She has rejected to face the society, ignored the demands of the people and pushed youngsters towards desperation.Pan-democratic legislators have requested to meet with Lam today to seek solution in this political crisis. But the request of dialogue has been rejected by Lam. We cannot be angrier at her rejection to the request, which proves her “willingness to listen” to be the ugliest political lie. Lam’s arrogance revealed by her public responses since June 9 have only poured fuel to the flame, and lead to the crisis today. Lam is the culprit.We hereby request that Lam faces the public view directly, respond to the demands of the people raised since June 9, solves the crisis that she started. She should also stop any crackdown on the public demands and avoid any injury.We reiterate the five demands of Civil Human Rights Front, Pan-democratic legislators and Hongkongers raised since June:1. Complete withdrawal of the extradition bill;2. Investigate responsibility to shoot;3. Retract the characterisation of protest as riot;4. Release arrested protesters;5. Carrie Lam, step down!

The price of bitcoin yo-yoed wildly again on Tuesday, falling 14% to $5,920 (£4,250) before bouncing back to $7,265 – up nearly 6% on the previous day. The latest gyrations came as a leading central banker described the cryptocurrency as “a bubble, a Ponzi scheme and an environmental disaster”. The new head of the Bank for International Settlements, Agustín Carstens, also said bitcoin threatened to undermine public trust in central banks and posed a threat to financial stability, and he signalled a global clampdown.“If authorities do not act pre-emptively, cryptocurrencies could become more interconnected with the main financial system and become a threat to financial stability,” he said, speaking at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany.“There is a strong case for policy intervention. Appropriate authorities have a duty to educate and protect investors and consumers, and need to be prepared to act.”Carstens, a former governor of Mexico’s central bank, said that despite the meteoric rise of bitcoin, cryptocurrencies were merely pretending to be currencies and were unsafe, potentially facilitating tax evasion, money laundering and criminal finance.As the head of the body that represents the world’s central banks, his comments are the clearest sign yet that global regulators are preparing a crackdown on bitcoin, the price of which rose by 900% last year, making it the best-performing asset of 2017. It hit a peak of almost $20,000 in the week before Christmas. However, it has fallen by more than 50% since the beginning of 2018, as investors grow increasingly fearful of intervention by regulators.Bitcoin is not recognised by any central bank. It allows people to bypass banks and traditional payment methods to pay for goods and services.Carstens said central banks should in particular pay attention to the ties linking cryptocurrencies to real currencies, to ensure the relationship was “not parasitic”. His comments follow a string of warnings on bitcoin from authorities and economists around the world, including India, the US and South Korea. Facebook has banned bitcoin and other cryptocurrency adverts on its site.On Monday Lloyds Banking Group and Virgin Money banned customers from using its credit cards to buy bitcoin, amid fears the banks could be liable if the cryptocurrency’s value implodes. Topics Bitcoin Cryptocurrencies Financial sector news

Web Standards, and fighting for those standards, are the only way that independent browsers can exist. Otherwise browsers are going to be built to serve the corporate interests, be it MS trying to maintain a monopoly, Google, trying to funnel user data, or Apple trying to provide a seamless experience and vendor lock-in. Netscape, the ancient progenitor of Mozilla, was destroyed because MS convinced everyone that the browser was an application front end, and that user could not deal with variations in the interface. So IE provided a consistent look and feel as long as you were using a PC with a relatively large screen and cycles and energy to waste of the useless overhead. IE and MS were defeated by the mobile market that demanded that we return to the standards of HTML, which were device independent. HTML did not specify how something looked, only that is was a header, a title, or content. By building and focusing on standards for everyone, in this case CSS, we achieved a internet that was not controlled by MS. By building a web that was standards based, we achieve a internet not controlled by Flash or GIF. Right now Google is pushing Chrome hard, and what will save us is that both Google and Facebook are pushing hard to control user data(an article stated that Facebook made around $130 per user in data mining). Facebook wants to lock down user to it's interface, Google to it's interface, but for Facebook to succeed it has to have a open web browser with limited user ability to block tracking, while Google wants everyone to use it's browser that will block everyone other than Goolge and the people who pay Google. It is unclear where MS is going to be in all this, but we have seen that MS its aligning itself with Google and presumable an engine that favors the developer of the web browser over third party, which is what MS has always done. They did their best to push standards that broke the web for everyone except users of their software. Apple is going to do what apple does, and the best that can be said is they do not appear to be greedy about limited user data to Apple., They limit the users ability to stay private, thus preventing the false sense of security that MS and Google provide that since the only people who can collect you data is Google and MS you are safe. But through this all, Mozilla and it predecessors hav been the ones to focus on standards that keep the web open, because that is their business model, such as it is.

The fastest-growing data center market segmentreturned to growth mode in the third quarter of 2019, with global hyperscale capex spending exceeding $31 billion, up 8 percent year over year. From a report: The $31 billion is the second-highest spending quarter in history in terms of the amount hyperscale operators -- led by Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft -- are spending on building, expanding and equipping data centers, according to IT research and market firm Synergy Research Group. "Hyperscale companies are in growth mode and revenue growth rates remain in strong double-digit territory, with aggregated third quarter revenues up 14 percent over 2018," said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research Group. "Amazon, Google, Facebook and Alibaba are all growing much more rapidly than that. These expanding companies are highly reliant on bigger and better data center operations, which will drive continued growth in capex levels." Hyperscale data centers are giant facilities containing tens of thousands of servers and other IT products such as storage, networking and UPS hardware.

By Nov. 24, 2019 9:14 am ET Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. helped lift the Dow industrials above 28000 for the first time earlier this month, a milestone that underscored how much the two largest U.S. companies influence major stock indexes. Boosted by optimism about a U.S.-China trade deal and sturdy profit growth, the companies have helped buoy the broader technology sector while they vie for the title of largest U.S. firm. Apple shares have soared 66% this year, pushing it ahead of Microsoft with a $1.16 trillion market value. Revenue growth in Apple’s... To Read the Full Story Subscribe Sign In

On Tuesday the trial for Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, began in Alexandria, Virginia. Facing a bevy of bank and tax fraud charges, prosecutors attempted to paint a picture of a man who eschewed paying taxes on tens of millions of dollars he made in lobbying work for a pro-Russia politician in Ukraine to fund a lavish lifestyle for himself. Among the expenses detailed in the indictment in February were $849,000 he spent at a clothing store in New York and another $520,000 in Beverly Hills, not to mention, as prosecutors said in an opening statement in court, multi-million dollar homes, fancy cars and antique carpets. “He got whatever he wanted,” US attorney Uzo Asonye told the jury. Perhaps anticipating that big houses and fast cars wouldn’t persuade jurors that Manafort had engaged in anything beyond normal rich guy behavior – indeed judge TS Ellis III expressed as much, interjecting: “It isn’t a crime to have a lot of money and be profligate in your spending” – Asonye also zeroed in on a few peculiar items among the litany of extravagances. One in particular stood out from the rest: a $15,000 ostrich jacket. The reveal of the ostrich jacket led to a flurry of jokes on social media, and on late night television. “That should be what he has to wear in jail,” Jimmy Kimmel said Tuesday night. “That should be his only article of clothing. Just sitting in a cell dressed up like Big Bird, waiting for the trial to start.”A number of publications tried to uncover the provenance of the jacket in question – a bit of sleuthing from Jezebel posited that the jacket might be Gucci’s ostrich leather biker jacket, which they found retailed for $14,500 back in 2012. Various politicians and celebrities such as Ted Cruz, author Buzz Bissinger and Victoria Beckham, whose Hermès Birkin bag made from ostrich leather costs tens of thousands of dollars, are devotees of ostrich garments themselves, as the Washington Post pointed out.For the average person, a $15,000 jacket of any kind indeed seems like a wild indulgence. But if you ask people who work in ostrich leather, such as Henry Slaughter – “an appropriate name for this industry,” he joked – the owner of Ostrich Alligator Market in Melbourne, Florida, a few hours’ drive across the state from where Trump held a rally last night, Manafort’s jacket sounds, well, a bit underwhelming. He may as well have bought it at a street stall in New York’s Chinatown.“That’s nothing,” Slaughter said of the price tag, noting that ostrich leather, like the alligator and crocodile skins he regularly works with to produce bags, boots and motorcycle seats, is one of the most expensive in the world. “An ostrich jacket, if it’s custom-made? Fifteen thousand dollars is pretty cheap.”“Ostrich leather, historically any of what’s called the exotic skins, are going to be expensive: python, ostrich alligator. You’re automatically paying a premium over pig skin or some cowhide,” he said. “Ostrich never goes out of style. They used to do interiors in automobiles in ostrich. Rolls Royces in the 1930s used to be all ostrich interiors, and it’s still being used on motorcycle seats.”The industry for ostrich farming has been a turbulent one, rising and falling over the decades. In the 18th century, ostrich feathers were so popular among women that the bird nearly disappeared from North America, according to the African Wildlife Foundation. Thirty years ago, the Chicago Tribune reported, an American resurgence in ostrich farmers emerged but grew too quickly, with the market for ostrich meat, believed to be a leaner, healthier alternative to beef, becoming oversaturated. “They didn’t have a clue what they were doing,” Slaughter said of the industry’s rapid collapse. “The problem is, the meat never caught on with Americans. That’s what hurt.”There aren’t many ostrich farms left in the US, he added, noting that “everybody knows South African ostrich is the best”.Processing ostrich skin is a more delicate process than other more traditional animals whose hides are used in leather production, and takes a level of patience and precision that adds to the cost in the end. When asked how the price of ostrich skin compared to other animals, Slaughter couldn’t say. “When you’re talking to any of us who sell exotic skins, you’re talking to Ferrari dealers,” he said. “If I went in a Ferrari shop I don’t think the salesman has a clue what a Ford Taurus costs.”Asked whether or not the idea of Manafort wearing such an expensive coat bothered him, as a business owner in the middle of Trump country, Slaughter demurred.“I’m surprised Manafort got that cheap a jacket, since he lives well. I’d assume he’d spend $50,000.”• This article was amended on 2 August 2018. An earlier version said a Gucci ostrich leather biker jacket was sold for $14,5000. This has been corrected to $14,500. Topics Paul Manafort news

Apple’s new AirPods Pro earphones are worth the $250 price for their impressive noise cancellation and audio quality, but those features are only great if the earphones will fit snugly in your ear canals.While the older AirPods fit loosely inside the ears (and cost $90 less), these new ones have flexible tips that form a seal at the ear canal and take control of what sound gets into the eardrum.For me, that automatically sets a high bar for the AirPods Pro. I don’t really like having something blocking my ear canal. But I’ll put up with it I’m rewarded with great sounding audio and sweet silence in the midst of a noisy world. With Apple’s latest wireless earbuds, I was. Just as important, they pack multiple clever ideas that are classic Apple—taking a good product and refining it into something even more useful and engaging.Block that noiseThe AirPods Pro have to block the ear canal to enable their biggest new feature–active noise cancellation. The technology has become common in larger, over-the-ear headphones like Bose’s QuietComfort line, but putting that kind of audio processing power into a wireless earbud design is a real engineering challenge.Noise cancellation carefully analyses the sound of the outside world, then cancels it out by emitting a sound with an equal and opposite frequency profile. But to do this, the outside sound and its opposite have to be kept separate; that’s why the AirPods Pro seal off the eardrum from the world. The seal at the ear without the negative audio processing is just passive noise cancellation. A tiny microphone is pointed at your eardrum, and based on what your ear is hearing, the earphones’ H1 processor is constantly adjusting the noise cancellation to accurately negate the ambient noise.It works. While I was sitting in a Starbucks working, the AirPods Pro blocked out a lot of background chatter, and the general ambient sound of a busy coffee shop went away. When I listened to music while driving, however, the noise cancellation didn’t do much to block the lower-frequency sound of the car and the tires moving over the road. But it’s not the lower frequencies that distract–it’s the higher-pitched sounds like human voices.The AirPods Pro offer three settings for noise cancellation: fully on, completely off, and a “transparency mode” that uses the microphones in the device to pipe the noise of the outside world into your ears. Some reviewers complained that you can’t control the exact balance between noise cancellation and transparency, but for me, that’s overkill.[Photo: courtesy of Apple]Apple does some compelling things in this product to make you feel better about having your ear canals sealed off.The silicon buds are some of the softest and most bearable I’ve worn. Some in-ears I’ve worn seem trapped inside my ear, or create an uncomfortable vacuum effect within the ear canal. These do not. In fact it’s not hard to forget they’re in there. Apple’s engineers created a new way for the silicon pieces to attach to the earphones; they snap in neatly and stay that way.Previous AirPods let you control features by tapping the post-like end of the bud that pokes out of your ear. Apple has done something far more sensible in the new AirPods. It’s not a button but rather a pressure sensor situated underneath a little oblong indention in the plastic on the side of the post. You use this to play or pause or skip songs and to choose between the noise cancellation modes. It senses the pressure from your finger and gives you a small bleep of audio feedback when you press on it. And you can customize both the left and right AirPods’ functions—if, for instance, you want pressing one of them to summon Siri.Another major improvement is the way the AirPods Pro connect via Bluetooth with other devices. I always had trouble getting my first generation AirPods to connect, and stay connected, with the phone after I put them in my ears. These new buds connect and stay connected. If I suddenly play something on my Apple Watch, the AirPods immediately begin monitoring that source. It all feels logical and automatic and way more reliable.One issue still annoys me. When my phone rings and the AirPods are anywhere nearby out of their case, the phone will redirect audio to the AirPods even if they’re not in my ears. That’s frustrating, especially when I’m on the go and the AirPods are in my pocket.A new feature in iOS 13.2 lets two pairs of AirPods monitor the same source. So you and a friend can watch a movie or listen to a podcast together. Something so basic and fun is way past due, so I’m glad iOS supports it now.The AirPods Pro case is considerably larger than that of earlier AirPods. But it does come with wireless charging—an extra-cost option for standard AirPods—as a standard feature.[Photo: courtesy of Apple]The music questionFor spoken word stuff like podcasts, some level of passive noise cancellation is good enough–if I can hear the words clearly, I’m happy; I don’t need to catch the nuance of every contralto and vocal fry. But if I’m to jam an earphone into my ear canals, the music better sound amazing.Did the AirPods Pro meet that mark? Yes, with a caveat.Whether the AirPods Pro give you great audio quality depends entirely on how well they fit into your ear canals. The silicon tips must form a seal at the opening of the canal or the whole audio experience falls apart. Apple knows this. That’s why it includes three different sizes of silicone tips in the box and why they’ve added a new feature called the “Ear Tip Fit Test” in iOS to help you pick the right size for you. It plays some audio over the AirPods Pro, then uses their microphones to detect any leakage.When I first tried the AirPods Pro, I was disappointed in the audio. It lacked the wide frequency range, clarity, definition, and spaciousness I’ve heard in other earbuds. So I went back to the fit test thing, tried the other small and large ear tips, and spent some time moving the earpieces around in my ear and until the test said I had a good seal.Once I’d done all that, the sound improved considerably. That little microphone that’s always listening to what your ear is hearing serves another important purpose, Apple told me; it helps the AirPods’ H1 processor continually tune the EQ of the music to the unique shape of your ear.I’m still having a bit of trouble getting the earpieces to maintain their seal when I’m walking, but I can live with that. The shape of my inner ear may be odd. Three colleagues told me they passed the AirPods fit test with no problem. They all said the medium-size tip worked for them, although one found success with the small tip for one of his ears.My advice: If you’re going to lay down $250 for a pair of AirPods Pro, ask to try on a pair in the store and make sure that one of the tip sizes fits your ears correctly.In just two years of existence, AirPods have become remarkably ubiquitous. But there are places where I notice more over-ear noise cancellation headphones–mainly Bose’s QuietComfort line and subsequent models. Those places are within the habitat of the Digital Nomad, the worker who spends a lot of time away from the office in a shared workspace, a coffee shop, or an airport lounge. They’re places where the ambient noise is considerable, making noise-cancelling headphones a must. Bose has dominated that market segment with its QuietComfort line and other more recent over-ear offerings.The digital nomad market and beyondPersonally, I’ve been in the habit of wearing my first generation AirPods while I’m walking or biking to the coffee shop or workspace, but after I get there, I switch to my bulkier Bose QuietComfort 35s because I need to shut out the ambient noise while I’m working. Now that AirPods have added active noise cancellation, I might be tempted to leave the Bose headphones in my bag. I wonder how many of my fellow digital nomads will make that same decision.There may be something bigger going on here, too. When you need to hear the outside world, what you hear—in transparency mode—is the sound being captured by the AirPods Pro’s tiny microphone, pumped into your ears by the tiny driver.Creative Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin thinks that this technology has implications for Apple’s future. “The more I play with AirPods Pro, the more I am convinced Apple is moving toward computational audio experiences, including better hearing,” he says. In the future, transparency mode could expand to amplifying specific aspects of the outside world–perhaps based on the frequency or direction of the sound–and the user might be able to adjust this using an app or Siri command.It’s not a new idea (An ill-fated startup called Doppler’s did something similar with its Hear One buds.) Other earbud makers have been flirting with the idea of offering hearing aid-like features in their products for several years now (see Bose’s $500 Hearphones). Apple may have the miniaturization and design chop to pull it off and the brand name to popularize it. Hearing aids, by the way, are a $7.2 billion market.The first generation AirPods were announced three years ago alongside the new iPhone 7, and I remember thinking the new earphones stole the show. AirPods were a surprising and refreshing addition to Apple’s portfolio.The AirPods Pro represent the first major variation on the AirPod theme. They’re a fairly radical departure from the second generation AirPods, drastically changing the design, adding major new features like noise cancellation, and introducing the silicon tips. This is no humdrum yearly upgrade cycle. AirPod Pro seems like the product of rapid iteration and invention and people having fun doing it. That’s in sharp contrast to the slower and more predictable evolutions of other Apple products, including iPhones. It’ll be fun to see where Apple takes the AirPods next.

If the publishers hadn't avoided the whole sales part of e-books, prices would have probably fallen quite a bit, as there would have been some actual competition.No, prices will not have fallen.The reason ebooks are expensive is because books are expensive. The actual electrons part versus having to ship deadtree around is extremely low - over the course of printing, warehousing, shipping, retailing, etc, the total cost of all that per book amounts to well under 10% - usually a couple of bucks tops.We've had centuries of experience of moving books around efficiently and cheaply that it doesn't cost too much. Most of the cost is in retailer markups - there's a reason why Amazon can offer 40% discount on books - the retailer markup is around 100% so even discounting 40% Amazon still makes money over the wholesale price (Amazon's "retail" price would be 200% of what it costs Amazon to buy it from the publisher. thus a 40% discount still means Amazon makes money. If Amazon discounted it 50%, they'd be selling at wholesale price).Since such discounts are extremely common with print books, you can't really discount the ebook any less - the wholesale price would be slightly slower due to not needing to ship or warehouse, but it's so efficient you're saving a dollar or two over the print version. So in the end, you're not saving too much more money, but getting things much worse with DRM and all that.And don't forget while Amazon is discounting 40%, that's because they're doing it on volume - they can order 100 pallets of the book and sell basically 99 of them at 40% discount making money, and the last pallet will be sold at milder discounts of 20% or so because it's off the "new list". So Amazon is moving the physical product quickly to get cashflow going and quick profits. The ebook will often not be discounted - if you're so impatient to read it you probably will just pay full price over buying the "inconvenient" paper version.It's just how the market works - Amazon doesn't need to discount the electronic version as much because people will pay the increased prices (and it costs little for Amazon), while Amazon moving 99 pallets of a book quickly generates quick profits and cashflow and frees up warehouse space. In other words, physical books are efficient, but still cost money to store and can represent money locked up in inventory. Ebooks cost barely anything to store, and Amazon doesn't buy 10 million copies of an ebook that sit on a virtual shelf - they just pay the publisher every time someone buys the book, so it's not even tying up any cash.

So I wore the new AirPods on a recent 14-hour flight. I found several downsides. For one, the noise-canceling somewhat muffled the noise of the plane engines, but not enough to allow me to sleep. And because the AirPods are wireless, I couldn’t plug them into the screen in front of my seat to watch movies.On the flight, I preferred Bose’s $350 QuietComfort 35, which are large wireless headphones worn over the ears. They significantly cut down on the engine noise, and they have a cord that could be plugged in to my seat’s audio jack to watch in-flight entertainment. But the Bose headphones are bulkier, though they have always fit fine in my carry-on bag.As for the older AirPods, I never felt they were adequate to hear music or podcasts amid the engine noise. In the past, I left AirPods at home whenever I traveled.Verdict: For frequent travelers, I recommend bigger, more effective noise-canceling headphones like those from Bose.I wore the new AirPods Pro on several trains on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. With noise-canceling turned on, the earbuds sounded good and did a fine job drowning out the conversations around me. But when the train came to a screeching halt, the earbuds were ineffective at muffling the earsplitting noise.In similar tests, my Bose headphones sounded great on the train, but they, too, couldn’t muffle loud braking. This is to be expected: In general, noise-canceling technology reduces low-frequency sounds, not high-frequency noises like screeches or babies screaming.On BART, when I wore normal AirPods, I could barely hear anything playing from the earbuds. I often didn’t bother to use them on the train.

Federal courts have prevented President Donald Trump from implementing a proclamation he signed last month that would make White House adviser Stephen Miller’s dreams of restricting legal immigration a reality.Previously scheduled to go into effect November 3, Trump’s proclamation would have made getting into the US much harder for immigrants sponsored by family members, a process Trump has excoriated as “chain migration.” It would have done so by throwing up a barrier to those coming through the diversity visa lottery — the subject of Trump’s “shithole countries” rant — which allows the US to accept 55,000 immigrants annually from countries with historically low levels of immigration. And it stated immigrants who do not have health insurance and cannot afford to pay medical care costs would not be able to move to the US permanently.But in Oregon, US District Judge Michael Simon temporarily stopped the proclamation from going into effect on November 2. And Simon solidified that block on Tuesday night, preventing the Trump administration from implementing the policy nationwide while lawsuits filed by immigrant advocates challenging it make their way through the courts.Simon found that Trump likely overstepped his executive authority in issuing the proclamation because it conflicts with provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act determining who is ineligible to apply for US visas. He cited the US Supreme Court’s decision last year in a case over Trump’s travel ban on citizens of seven countries deemed to be national security threats, in which the justices upheld the policy, but found that the president cannot “expressly override” the Immigration and Nationality Act. If courts eventually allow the proclamation to go into effect, however, researchers estimate it could keep up to two-thirds of future immigrants out who would be admitted under current law. Based on projections of data from fiscal year 2017, that means the proclamation could bar roughly 375,000 immigrants annually, according to Julia Gelatt, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. Those 375,000 immigrants won’t be affected at random. The proclamation targets immigrants who have come to the US legally under policies Trump and his advisers often attack.He has blamed the diversity visa lottery and chain migration for bringing in the perpetrators of two terror attacks in New York in December 2017, claiming during his State of the Union address the following January that “these programs present risks we can just no longer afford.”“Chain migration is a disaster, and very unfair to our country,” he said during another address in February 2018. “The visa lottery is something that should have never been allowed in the first place. People enter a lottery to come into our country. What kind of a system is that? It is time for Congress to act and to protect Americans.”Trump has already been waging a quiet and effective campaign to reduce overall legal immigration, the long-held goal of groups like the Center for Immigration Studies and the Federation for American Immigration Reform.But Trump’s proclamation could be the most drastic of those changes — reshaping the immigration system in the US during Trump’s time in office along exactly the lines restrictionists have wanted.While the proclamation is on its face about health care, even Joe Grogan, the director of the White House domestic policy council, told reporters on October 9 that it is “not part of the health care agenda,” but the immigration agenda. “This is nothing less than a legal immigration ban,” Frank Sharry, executive director of the immigrant advocacy group America’s Voice, said in a statement. Some immigrants, mostly family members of US citizens or green card holders, can apply for lawful permanent residency abroad and obtain a green card almost immediately. Otherwise, immigrants can come to the US on two types of visas: those for immigrants who intend to settle in the US permanently and eventually obtain a green card, and those that only allow an immigrant to remain in the US temporarily.In order to get a green card, an immigrant will have to prove to a consular officer that they will obtain health insurance within 30 days of their arrival in the US. If they can’t, they must demonstrate that they will be able to pay for their medical expenses. The proclamation does not lay out clear procedures for determining whether immigrants meet the proclamation’s requirements — it would be up to individual consular officers charged with evaluating visa applications and the State Department, which is expected to issue internal guidance on it if it goes into effect.But based on insurance coverage alone, the majority of adults who were granted green cards over the last three years would have been shut out under the proclamation.According to the Migration Policy Institute, 34 percent of those recent green card recipients are uninsured, and another 31 percent have other health care benefits that don’t count as insurance under the proclamation, including Medicaid or insurance purchased with subsidies on an Affordable Care Act exchange.Families don’t stop qualifying for individual insurance subsidies until they have a household income that is at least four times the federal poverty line, or over $103,000 for a family of four and nearly $50,000 for an individual. That’s a threshold that is hard to clear for all but the wealthiest immigrants: The median income for a US immigrant household was $56,000, according to the Pew Research Center.The proclamation would apply to all immigrants applying for visas at consulates abroad with the intention of living in the US permanently. There are some limited exceptions: immigrants who already have a valid visa, children of US citizens, unaccompanied children, permanent residents who have been outside of the US for more than one year, and recipients of “special immigrant visas” for Afghans and Iraqis who have aided the US government and their families. The administration can also make additional exceptions on a case-by-case basis. But parents and spouses of US citizens and the immediate family members of lawful permanent residents would be subject to the proclamation.The proclamation will fall hardest on immigrants who are sponsored by family members and those from the diversity visa lottery. Just under 84,000 people have already been selected for the diversity lottery in 2020: 38 percent from African countries, 37 percent from European countries, 19 percent from Asia, and the rest from Latin America and Oceania. Immigrants with job offers will have an easier time, as they will likely have health insurance through their employer, Gelatt said.It’s not clear at this point what income level would be sufficient to be approved for a visa under the proclamation. A State Department official said October 7 that consular officers would decide whether applicants are eligible for a visa under the proclamation based on information available when they apply for a visa, including medical and financial documentation that is already required as part of their application package. That refers to the income and asset information submitted by a “sponsor,” usually a US citizen or lawful permanent resident family member or an employer, who claims financial responsibility for a visa applicant, according to a Department of State cable message obtained by Vox.The State Department told consular officers in the cable that, when evaluating parents of US citizens over the age of 21 under the proclamation, they should rely on medical exams to “determine if there are current health issues, including acute or chronic conditions that will require extensive medical care and likely result in particularly high medical costs.”“If the applicant has such a condition, officers must determine if the applicant has either health insurance or funds that will be available to cover foreseeable medical costs,” the cable says.In general, however, the cable cautions against “speculat[ing] on applicant’s potential future health,” instructing that they should only be making determinations based on an applicant’s and “current medical state.” The cable also advises that consular officers should initially refuse visas to applicants who they believe might qualify for an exemption because their admission to the US would be in the “national interest,” and then request an exemption with their supervisors. For the immigrants who are let in, Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, said that the proclamation would likely to push immigrants to buy short-term or visitor insurance policies, which generally don’t cover pre-existing conditions, and often have caps or limits on benefits. It would also probably discourage immigrants from enrolling in insurance through Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, he added. “These new rules are going to add to the confusion and fear surrounding recent immigration policy changes, discouraging lawfully present immigrants from enrolling in programs they are eligible for,” he said. While his moves to block asylum seekers at the southern border has gotten the most attention, Trump has also taken steps to restrict legal immigration to the US. His travel ban blocking citizens of Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, and Somalia from entering the US is still in effect and has been upheld by the Supreme Court.He’s slowed down processing of legal immigrants, almost doubling average wait times for those applying for green cards, employment visas, citizenship, and other benefits by the end of 2018. And he’s slashed the refugee admissions cap to a historic low of 18,000, down from 110,000 just two years ago. Some within his administration want to go even further. Miller has been the architect of sweeping administrative changes that aim to keep out all but the wealthiest immigrants. He was behind the so-called “public charge regulation,” which would have given immigration officials much more leeway to turn away low-income immigrants based on an evaluation of 20 factors, ranging from the use of certain public benefits programs — including food stamps, Section 8 housing vouchers, and Medicaid — to English language proficiency. That regulation has been blocked by federal courts, but would have affected over 382,000 people seeking to enter the US, extend their visa, or upgrade their temporary visa to a green card. “[Immigration] touches upon everything, but the goal is to create an immigration system that enhances the vibrancy, the unity, the togetherness and the strength of our society,” Miller told the Washington Post. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner has also reportedly been working on an immigration reform plan that wouldn’t raise immigration levels, but it would move toward a points-based system under which immigrants with higher levels of education, English language skills, and job offers from US companies would be prioritized over family members of US citizens and permanent residents. Kushner’s plan would need to be passed in Congress, an unlikely prospect when immigration issues have never been so politically fraught. But Trump’s proclamation accomplishes similar goals without needing to capitulate to Democrats, so long as it survives in court.Thus far, the proclamation’s journey through the courts has not proceeded as the Trump administration would have liked. But with a Supreme Court that has already recognized this president’s broad powers to restrict immigration where the administration can provide a rationale, there’s no telling whether the justices will view this case differently when it finally comes before them.

The rate of asylum petitions denied in New York City’s busy immigration court has shot up about 17 times times faster than in the rest of the country during the Trump administration’s crackdown—and still Ana was there, a round-faced Honduran woman with a black scarf wrapped turban-like over her hair, a look of fright crossing her dark eyes as the judge asked if she faced danger in her home country.Her eyes darted over to her helper, a Manhattan lighting designer with New Sanctuary Coalition volunteers to offer moral support—she couldn’t find a lawyer to take her case for free. Then Ana turned back to the judge, or rather, to the video screen that beamed him in from Virginia, and whispered to the court interpreter in Spanish: “My spouse and my son were killed.” Tears welled in her eyes as she said a notorious transnational gang had carried out the slaying. “Yes we were receiving threats from them,” she added. And that was why, months before her husband and son were slain, she and her 5-year-old daughter had come “through the river,” entering the United States near Piedras Negras, Mexico. After ruling that she was deportable, the judge gave Ana—The Daily Beast is withholding her real name because of the danger she faces in Honduras—three months to submit a claim for asylum, a possible defense against her removal. “You should start working on that,” the judge told her. As she left the courtroom, Ana hugged the volunteer who’d accompanied her, Joan Racho-Jansen.New York’s immigration court has long been the asylum capital; it has made two out of every five of the nation’s grants since 2001, while handling a quarter of the caseload. With approval of 55 percent of the petitions in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, it still grants a greater percentage of asylum requests than any other courts except San Francisco and Guam.But New York’s golden door is slamming shut for far more asylum seekers than in the past, especially for women like Ana. The asylum denial rate in the New York City immigration court rose from 15 percent in fiscal year 2016, the last full year of the Obama administration, to 44 percent in fiscal year 2019, which ended Sept. 30. The rest of the country, excluding New York, has been relatively stable, with denials going from 69 percent to 74 percent. That is, the rate of denials in the rest of the country increased by one-ninth, but in New York they almost trebled. There are other courts where the rate of denials has shot up sharply over the same period: Newark, New Jersey (168 percent); Boston (147 percent); Philadelphia (118 percent). But because of the volume of its caseload, what’s happening in New York is driving the national trend against asylum. For now, in sheer numbers, New York judges still granted more asylum requests over the last year than those in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Arlington, Virginia, the next three largest courts, combined. An analysis of federal data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University and interviews with former immigration judges, lawyers, immigrant advocates and experts finds multiple reasons for the sharp shift in the nation’s largest immigration court as compared to the rest of the country:—Many more migrants are coming to the New York court from Mexico and the “Northern Triangle” of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, and the judges have been far more likely to deny them asylum than in the past: from two out of five cases in the 2016 fiscal year to four out of five cases in the 2019 fiscal year. —Many veteran New York judges retired, and most of the replacements have a prosecutorial, military, or immigration enforcement background. In the past, appointments were more mixed between former prosecutors and immigrant defenders. Immigration judges are appointed by the U.S. attorney general and work for the Justice Department, not the federal court system. —All the judges are under heavier pressure from their Justice Department superiors to process cases more quickly, which gives asylum applicants little time to gather witnesses and supporting documents such as police reports. New judges, who are on two years of probation, are under particular pressure because numerical “benchmarks” for completing cases are a critical factor in employee evaluations. “You have a huge number of new hires in New York,” said Jeffrey Chase, a former New York immigration judge. “The new hires are mostly being chosen because they were former prosecutors. They’re normally of the background that this administration thinks will be statistically more likely to deny cases.”Judge Jeffrey L. Menkin, who presided in Ana’s case via video hookup, began hearing cases in March. He is based in Falls Church, Virginia, the home of the Executive Office of Immigration Review, the Justice Department agency that runs the immigration courts. He’d been a Justice Department lawyer since 1991, including the previous 12 years as senior counsel for national security for the Office of Immigration Litigation.Menkin can see only a portion of his New York courtroom on his video feed and as a result, he didn’t realize a Daily Beast reporter was present to watch him conduct an asylum hearing for a Guatemalan woman—we’ll call her Gloria—and her three young children, who were not present. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took Gloria into custody at the Mexican border in March. Released on bond, she made her way to New York and had an initial immigration court hearing on June 26, one of many cases on a crowded master calendar. She was scheduled for an individual hearing four months later. At the hearing scheduled three months later on the merits of her case, she decided to present an asylum defense to deportation. Her lawyer asked for a continuance—that is, a new hearing date—while his client waited to receive documentation she’d already requested from Guatemala. The papers were on the way, Gloria said.Judges in such cases—those that the Department of Homeland Security designates as “family unit”—have been directed to complete them within a year, which is about 15 months faster than the average case resolved for the year ending Sept. 30. Down the hall, other types of cases were being scheduled for 2023. Menkin called the lawyer’s unexpected request for a continuance “nonsense” and “malarkey” and asked: “Are you and your client taking this case seriously?” The judge then asked if Gloria was requesting a case-closing “voluntary departure,” a return to her homeland that would leave open the option she could apply again to enter the United States.But Gloria had no intention of going back to Guatemala voluntarily. So Menkin looked to the government’s lawyer: “DHS, do you want to jump into this cesspool?” The government lawyer objected to granting what would have been the first continuance in Gloria’s case.And so Menkin refused to re-schedule, telling Gloria and her lawyer that they had to go ahead right then if they wanted to present an asylum defense. Gloria began testifying about threats and beatings that stretched back a decade, beginning after a failed romance with a man who was influential in local politics. Details are being withheld to protect her identity. She finally fled, she said, when extortionists threatened to hurt her children if she didn’t make monthly payoffs that were beyond her means. When she observed that she and her children were being followed, she decided to leave. After she said she had gone to police three times, Menkin took over the questioning. “Are you familiar with the contents of your own asylum application?” he asked, pointedly.“No,” Gloria responded.Menkin said her asylum application stated she had gone to police once, rather than three times, as she’d just testified. Gloria explained that she had called in the information for the application to an assistant in her lawyer’s office, and didn’t know why it was taken down wrong. When her lawyer tried to explain, Menkin stopped him, raising his voice: “I did not ask you anything.”Later, Menkin came back to the discrepancy he’d picked up on. “I don’t know why,” Gloria responded.“All right, STOP,” Menkin told the woman, who cried through much of the two-hour hearing. Again, he sought to terminate the case, asking the DHS lawyer, “Do I have grounds to dismiss this now?”“I’m trying to be fair,” she replied.“We’re all trying to be fair,” Menkin said.And to be fair, it should be noted that since October 2018, the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) has been evaluating judges’ performance based on the numbers for case completions, timeliness of decisions and the percent of rulings upheld on appeal. “In essence, immigration judges are in the untenable position of being both sworn to uphold judicial standards of impartiality and fairness while being subject to what appears to be politically-motivated performance standards,” according to an American Bar Association report that assailed what it said were unprecedented “production quotas” for judges. The pressure is especially strong on judges who, like Menkin, are new hires. They are probationary employees for two years.Denise Slavin, a former president of the National Association of Immigration Judges who retired from the bench in April after 24 years of service, said the judges’ union had tried to talk EOIR Director James McHenry out of his quotas. “It’s basically like the same problem with putting quotas on police officers for tickets,” she said. “It suggests bias and skews the system to a certain extent.” Told of the details of Gloria’s hearing, she added, “That’s a prime example of the pressure these quotas have on cases… the pressure to get it done right away.”Kathryn Mattingly, spokeswoman for the Executive Office of Immigration Review, said by email that she couldn’t comment on individual cases, but that all cases are handled on their individual merits. “Each asylum case is unique, with its own set of facts, evidentiary factors, and circumstances,” she wrote. “Asylum cases typically include complex legal and factual issues.” She also said that Menkin could not comment: “Immigration judges do not give interviews.”It’s true that each asylum case has its own complex factors. But a 2016 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office took many of them into account—the asylum seeker’s nationality, language, legal representation, detention status, number of dependents—and determined that there are big differences in how the same “representative applicant” will be treated from one court and one judge to another. “We saw that grant rates varies very significantly across courts and also across judges,” said Rebecca Gambler, director of the GAO’s Homeland Security and Justice team.Some experts say that changes in the way the Justice Department has told immigration judges to interpret the law may be having an outsize effect in New York.Starting with Jeff Sessions, the Trump administration’s attorneys general have used their authority over immigration courts to narrow the judges’ discretion to grant asylum or, in their view, to clarify existing law. Asylum can be granted to those facing persecution because of “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” In June 2018, Sessions overturned a precedent that many judges in New York had been using to find that victims of domestic assaults or gang violence could be members of a “particular social group,” especially when police were complicit or helpless. Justice’s ruling in the Matter of A-B-, a Salvadoran woman, seems to have had a particular impact in New York. “Where there’s a question about a ‘particular social group,’ judges in other parts of the country may have taken a narrower view” already, said Lindsay Nash, a professor at Cardozo Law School in New York and co-director of the Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic.Mauricio Noroña, a clinical teaching fellow at the same clinic, said new judges would be especially careful to follow the lead in the attorney general’s ruling.Andrew Arthur, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington and a former immigration judge in York, Pennsylvania, said Sessions’ decision in the Matter of A-B- would particularly affect Central American applicants, whose numbers have increased sharply in New York’s court. Data show that just 8.5 percent of the New York asylum cases were from Central America or Mexico in 2016; in the past year, 32.6 percent were. Arthur said a larger portion of the New York court’s asylum rulings in the past were for Chinese immigrants, whose arguments for refuge—persecution because of political dissent, religious belief, or the one-child policy—are fairly straightforward under U.S. asylum law. Although the number of Chinese applicants is still increasing, they have fallen as a portion of the New York caseload from 60 percent in 2016 to 28 percent in the past year. Sessions’ determination against A-B- is being challenged, and lawyers have been exploring other paths to asylum in the meantime. “It’s extremely complicated to prepare cases in this climate of changing law,” said Swapna Reddy, co-executive director of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project. But, she said, “That’s not to say advocates and judges can’t get back to that [higher] grant rate.”Gloria continued to cry; the DHS lawyer asked that she be given a tissue. The government lawyer’s cross-examination was comparatively gentle, but she questioned why Gloria didn’t move elsewhere within Guatemala and seek police protection. “He would find out before I even arrived at the police station,” she said of the man she feared. And, she added, “They’re always going to investigate and as for always being on the run, that’s no life for my kids.”In closing arguments, Gloria’s lawyer said his client had testified credibly and that she legitimately feared her tormentor’s influence. The DHS lawyer did not question Gloria’s credibility, but she said Gloria’s problem was personal, not political—that she could have moved to parts of Guatemala that were beyond the reach of the man’s political influence.Judge Menkin then declared a 20-minute recess so that he could compose his decision. In the interim, the lawyers discovered that a man sitting in one corner of the small courtroom was a reporter and, when the judge returned to the bench to rule, so informed him. Immigration court hearings are generally open to the public. There are special rules for asylum cases, however. The court’s practice manual says they “are open to the public unless the respondent expressly requests that they be closed.” “Oh, Jesus Christ!” Menkin shouted at the lawyers when he learned a reporter had been present for the hearing. “Don’t you people look around the room? What’s the matter with you?”After the judge expressed his alarm, the reporter was ejected with Gloria’s tearful assent, and so the basis for Judge Menkin’s ruling on Gloria’s asylum petition is not known. The outcome is, though: denied, 30 days to appeal.

A 23-year-old rape victim who was set on fire by a gang of men, which included her alleged rapist, has died in a New Delhi hospital, the doctor treating her said.The woman was on her way to board a train in Unnao district of northern Uttar Pradesh state to attend a court hearing on Thursday over her rape when she was doused with kerosene and set on fire, according to police.The attack, the second major case of violence against women in the past two weeks, has sparked public outrage in India.The woman died on Friday after suffering a cardiac arrest, said Dr Shalabh Kumar, head of the burns and plastic department at New Delhi’s Safdarjung hospital. “She was having 95% burns,” he said, adding that “toxic and hot fumes” had filled her lungs.The woman had filed a complaint with Unnao police in March alleging she had been raped at gunpoint on 12 December 2018, police documents showed.Having been subsequently jailed, the alleged rapist was released last week after securing bail, police officer SK Bhagat said in Lucknow.Uttar Pradesh is India’s most populous state and has become notorious for its poor record regarding crimes against women, with more than 4,200 cases of rape reported there in 2017 – the highest in the country.On Friday, Indian police shot dead four men who were suspected of raping and killing a 27-year-old veterinarian near Hyderabad city. The shooting – which police claimed happened because they tried to escape – drew applause from some quarters but many were also concerned that the lack of clarity around the incident was indicative of an extrajudicial police killing. Topics India Rape and sexual assault South and Central Asia news

Vox Sentences is your daily digest for what’s happening in the world. Sign up for the Vox Sentences newsletter, delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday, or view the Vox Sentences archive for past editions. As the 70th anniversary of NATO began this week, a spat between President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron set an unpleasant tone for the celebration. [New York Times / Katie Rogers and Annie Karni] During an interview with the Economist magazine last week, Macron lamented the “brain death” of NATO due to America’s unwillingness to work with its allies. In response, Trump called Macron’s comments “nasty” and “disrespectful” during a press conference with NATO’s secretary general. [Washington Post / Ashley Parker, Philip Rucker, and Michael Birnbaum] Trump even claimed to be a great champion of the alliance — despite his threats about potentially leaving NATO if partners don’t pay up. [Vox / Alex Ward] Curious about how much each member spends on NATO? Here’s a graph of all the member’s contributions as a percent of their total GDP. [CNBC / Amanda Macias and Nate Rattner] Macron refused to recant his statements. [CNN / Maegan Vazquez and Allie Malloy] While the riff made headlines, Trump-centered worries are not the only ones plaguing the alliance. Division and disagreements between the member states also greatly threaten the effectiveness of NATO. [NBC News / Alexander Smith] Here’s a breakdown of the factions among the 29 member countries — sorted by disagreements on China, Russia, terrorism, and more. [Politico / Ryan Heath] New Delhi, Mumbai, and several other Indian cities saw crowds take to the streets to call for justice in the case of a young woman raped and murdered last week. [AP / Sheikh Saaliq] Police believe that four men deflated the tires of a 27-year-old veterinarian, pretending to offer her assistance before raping and murdering her. Her body was found burned in a wooded area the next day. The four men have been arrested, having made full confessions. [NPR / Lauren Frayer] Violence against women has received increased attention in India since 2012, after a brutal gang-rape and murder of a woman on a bus in New Delhi. Subsequent protests and outrage have resulted in several legislations to protect women. [Bloomberg] Some women say that city safety measures won’t be enough, that there needs to be larger reform in attitudes about women in India. “We have got used to fear. Let’s fix attitudes instead of trying to blame cities,” said Samyukta, a local woman. [BBC] As evident in his resurgence in pop culture, Mister Rogers is still teaching us about how to get along— even across generations. [Vulture / Jen Chaney] Despite Trump granting states the mandate to ban refugees, one historically conservative state is asking for more of them. [Washington Post / Griff Witte] “Horrified and ashamed”: A woman says she was forced to sleep with British Prince Andrew while on a business trip with her boss Jeffrey Epstein. [CBS News] Alex Ward shines some light on the most important American foreign policy officials you’ve never heard of: Brian Hook. [Vox / Alex Ward] Internet sensation Lil Bub died Sunday, and we still haven’t gotten over it. [BuzzFeed News / Julia Reinstein] An invention that combined real motion with drawings changed animation forever. [YouTube / Phil Edwards]The future of sex ed has arrived. Is America ready? A whistleblower movie isn’t an obvious fit for Todd Haynes. That’s why he made Dark Waters.

36氪回顾2019年的新经济格局，经过数据和问卷调研，发布2019年新经济之王第三方机构榜单。包括第三方服务机构律师事务所、会计师事务所、券商，以及早期创业投资机构、创业投资机构、私募股权投资机构、企业战投和新型投行榜单。36氪从投资项目数量、投资额、项目参与度、明星项目数量等维度对创投机构综合评分，评选出2019年最具成长力的私募股权投资机构。律格资本获评中国最具成长力私募股权投资机构TOP10。律格资本是2016年设立的私募股权基金，是由数位在中国投资领域从业时间长、有丰富实战经验的专业人士发起设立。律格资本核心业务包括私募股权投资、产业投资和并购投资三大板块，在科技、教育、医疗等领域组建有专业投资团队，并成功完成对数个优质产业龙头项目的投资。截至2017年1月，律格资本已在增强现实、共享出行和社交领域等硅谷明星项目投资了数千万美元。已完成和储备的项目包括：滴滴打车、Snapchat、Airbnb、Magic Leap、Wework、Docusign等。

A reckoning has come for tech — and for the rest of us, too. Not so long ago, tech inspired optimism. It was revitalizing the economy, connecting people around the world, making our lives more convenient, innovating health care, and even helping to spread democracy. Tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon weren’t quite as big as they are in 2019, and most people seemed to think their rapid growth was a good thing. They were changing the world and they weren’t being evil as they did it, or at least that’s what their corporate slogans promised. But in recent years, there’s been a shift: Many of us have grown skeptical of tech and the multibillion-dollar companies behind it. We’re still using Google and Facebook and Amazon, but we’ve started to reconsider what we’re signing up for and what we’re giving away when we accept the terms of service for these platforms and use their products. And as this technology gets more and more embedded into our lives, it’s harder and harder to understand the real consequences when we choose between convenience and privacy, or when we consider the differences between the data we willingly share and the data we don’t know we’re giving away.That’s why Recode by Vox is launching Open Sourced, a multiplatform journalism project supported by the Omidyar Network that will expose and explain the hidden consequences of tech — the good, the bad, and the complicated. We’ll do this with written stories and explainer videos demystifying aspects of technology that are the most controversial and the least understood: artificial intelligence and personal data and privacy — and we will need your help to do it. (More on that below.)So much of what happens to our data happens inside a black box; we don’t control it and we don’t know what exactly is being collected, who has access to it, and what it’s being used for. And few of us truly understand the artificially intelligent technology that’s being introduced to our lives, from the Alexa smart assistants that are listening in our homes to the systems that are screening our job applications, surveilling our faces, and trying to influence our political discourse — and even our votes.Because most of us don’t really understand either AI or digital privacy, they’re surrounded with hype and fear. Open Sourced is going to change that. For starters, we’re making a pledge of transparency — decoding our own privacy policy and putting it in plain English. We’ll explain what cookies — those little bits of sticky data that follow you around the internet — really are. In both video and text, we’ll look at the new frontier of facial recognition and explore how surveillance is changing the way we live. We’ll dive into how AI will be used to filter your next job application, and whether it helps level the playing field or raises new barriers. We’ll look at how ad microtargeting on social media platforms and how it could influence your vote in the 2020 elections. And that’s just for starters. Almost everything in life involves trade-offs. It’s no different with technology. AI has the potential to make our lives more efficient, more convenient, even healthier — but concerns abound over how biases coded into the algorithms powering this tech could make life harder for the most vulnerable people in our society. Tech platforms that store your thousands of photos, send your emails, and seamlessly connect you with loved ones around the world may not cost a cent to use, but they aren’t free: You’re paying them with your intimate data and sacrificing your privacy. This can all get pretty confusing. Frustrating, even. Having a reflexive reaction to this new tech frontier has become all too common: Some reject the exciting possibilities tech offers us; others blame Facebook, Google, and Amazon for society’s failings; still others resign themselves to living in a post-privacy world where robots will eventually take our jobs and police us. And many of us just assume the introduction of profoundly life-changing technology is still a long way off. Open Sourced will offer another option: explaining the risks and benefits when it comes to AI and digital privacy so you can make informed decisions. Better understanding can empower us to demand more of tech companies and of our political representatives in regulating these online behemoths, which the law still hasn’t caught up with yet. And as for that life-changing technology, we think it’s already here — it’s just sometimes hard to see.That brings this all back to a bigger point that our colleagues Kara Swisher and Ezra Klein wrote about earlier this year: Every story has become a tech story. Technology might seem impersonal and impenetrable, which can make its consequences seem distant and theoretical. But what’s physically closer to you, day in and day out, than your phone? What would someone find out about you if they could sift through your email and messaging inboxes, browse all your Amazon orders, or read your Google search history (including the stuff you looked up while you were in incognito mode)? Whether you’re talking about politics, business, or culture, it’s all connected to tech. And it’s all deeply personal. Open Sourced will illuminate these connections.The deeply personal nature of data, privacy, and algorithms is often what makes these systems so difficult to understand. One person’s experience can be radically different from another’s. And that means that to report on them well, we’ll need your help. The Open Sourced Reporting Network is an email community that will keep you up to date with the latest ways you can contribute to our reporting. (We promise to never spam you.)The tasks we’ll need help with will change, as our reporting and our stories evolve. But we’re starting at ground zero: What are your biggest questions about the technologies you use every day? We want to hear your story about how Google Maps or Uber already seemed to know where you wanted to go, or how that Spotify playlist suggestion felt oddly dead-on. We want to know if you’ve been seeing particular online ads all of a sudden, or if LinkedIn seems like it’s trying to tell you something. We can’t promise all the answers, but we’ll ask the right questions and report what we find out. That’s our promise to you. Please subscribe to join us on this Open Sourced journey, as we reveal tech’s hidden consequences together.Open Sourced is made possible by the Omidyar Network. All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.

Afterward, the judge discovered that the prosecutor had unlawfully held back potentially exculpatory evidence, including medical reports indicating that the stepdaughter had been repeatedly untruthful with law enforcement. Her mother even described her as “a pathological liar” who “lives her lies.” In 2015, when the case reached the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, Ms. Harris’s prosecutors defended the conviction. They pointed out that Mr. Gage, while forced to act as his own lawyer, had not properly raised the legal issue in the lower court, as the law required. The appellate judges acknowledged this impediment and sent the case to mediation, a clear signal for Ms. Harris to dismiss the case. When she refused to budge, the court upheld the conviction on that technicality. Mr. Gage is still in prison serving a 70-year sentence.That case is not an outlier. Ms. Harris also fought to keep Daniel Larsen in prison on a 28-year-to-life sentence for possession of a concealed weapon even though his trial lawyer was incompetent and there was compelling evidence of his innocence. Relying on a technicality again, Ms. Harris argued that Mr. Larsen failed to raise his legal arguments in a timely fashion. (This time, she lost.)She also defended Johnny Baca’s conviction for murder even though judges found a prosecutor presented false testimony at the trial. She relented only after a video of the oral argument received national attention and embarrassed her office. And then there’s Kevin Cooper, the death row inmate whose trial was infected by racism and corruption. He sought advanced DNA testing to prove his innocence, but Ms. Harris opposed it. (After The New York Times’s exposé of the case went viral, she reversed her position.)All this is a shame because the state’s top prosecutor has the power and the imperative to seek justice. In cases of tainted convictions, that means conceding error and overturning them. Rather than fulfilling that obligation, Ms. Harris turned legal technicalities into weapons so she could cement injustices.

The director of the N.S.A. at the time, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, never approved the move and Huawei was blocked.In July 2018, with these decisions swirling, Britain, the United States and other members of the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing alliance met for their annual meeting in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where Chinese telecommunications companies, Huawei and 5G networks were at the top of the agenda. They decided on joint action to try to block the company from building new networks in the West.American officials are trying to make clear with allies around the world that the war with China is not just about trade but a battle to protect the national security of the world’s leading democracies and key NATO members.On Tuesday, the heads of American intelligence agencies will appear before the Senate to deliver their annual threat assessment, and they are expected to cite 5G investments by Chinese telecom companies, including Huawei, as a threat.In Poland, the message has quietly been delivered that countries that use Chinese telecommunications networks would be unsafe for American troops, according to people familiar with the internal discussions.That has gotten Poland’s attention, given that its president, Andrzej Duda, visited the White House in September and presented a plan to build a $2 billion base and training area, which Mr. Duda only half-jokingly called “Fort Trump.”Col. Grzegorz Malecki, now retired, who was the head of the Foreign Intelligence Agency in Poland, said it was understandable that the United States would want to avoid potentially compromising its troops.“And control over the 5G network is such a potentially dangerous tool,” said Mr. Malecki, now board president of the Institute of Security and Strategy. “From Poland’s perspective, securing this troop presence outweighs all other concerns.”

Lindsey Port was one of the most unusual cases of Me Too backlash. In 2017, as a Democratic candidate for the Minnesota state House, she spoke out about the sexual harassment she faced from a state legislator in her own party. The man, Dan Schoen, resigned from the state Senate, and Port received significant support for coming forward. But then the finger-pointing began. Port somehow ended up getting blamed for the downfall of Al Franken, Minnesota’s U.S. senator who resigned in January 2018 amid allegations of groping from multiple women. Port didn’t know Franken, and she never called on him to step down. But the backlash was so severe that she ended up dropping her bid for public office and faced financial repercussions at her company. Now, she is trying again. Port, 37, has announced that she is running for Minnesota state Senate, hoping that what she went through since 2017 will help her flip this district next year. “Over the last two years in the challenges that I faced in speaking truth to power, it became really clear to me that we need voices who are not afraid to challenge leadership and the status quo,” she told HuffPost. “We need those people running at all levels of government.”Port was one of the most visible faces of the Me Too movement in 2017. She and Erin Maye Quade, who was then a Democratic member of the state House, accused Schoen of harassment, and he resigned shortly thereafter. Port initially received an outpouring of goodwill. But then, the Franken allegations surfaced. Franken was one of the most beloved figures in the state, and many Democrats didn’t want him to resign, even after a number of women accused him of groping them.Suddenly, people in the party began questioning not only the Me Too movement, but also Port. Her willingness to call attention to sexual harassment went from being applauded to being scrutinized. Members of her own party said she had “softened the ground” for Franken’s resignation. Others even wondered if she was secretly a conservative operative who had planned to take down the popular senator all along.This backlash cost Port significantly. About a week after Franken resigned, Port dropped her bid for the Minnesta state House because donors began pulling their contributions. Blueprint Campaigns, Port’s nonprofit that helps progressive individuals from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds run for office, also lost donations.“We had $70,000 pulled the week that Al Franken said he was going to resign,” Port told HuffPost at the time. “In that same window, I also lost $6,000 from my own campaign.”One person asked that her contribution to the campaign be returned. The rest of the unhappy donors, to both the campaign and the nonprofit, pulled their pledges. One donor told Port that she was “too controversial” to support at that time.Since launching her state Senate campaign last week, Port said she received an outpouring of support. She raised $10,000 in the first 24 hours ― and not a single voter has brought up the Franken issue. “I think the Me Too movement in general, the conversation has shifted a bit from specific cases and people ― feelings about any particular case ― to how are we going to have this conversation moving forward,” Port said. “I’m not super interested in relitigating any particular case that has come out through the Me Too movement, but I’m really interested in figuring out what is the path forward?” But reporters have asked about it, and donors could. After all, it was donors who withdrew their support in 2017. “I think the donors in Minnesota know that there’s not a path to Democrats winning the majority in the Senate without this district,” Port said. “So I don’t expect it to be a huge issue. I haven’t heard it yet.” State Senate District 56 is a top target for Democrats in 2020. It’s currently held by a Republican, Dan Hall, although Hillary Clinton carried it in 2016 with 52 percent of the vote. Port is in a primary against Robert Timmerman, 37, who is vice chair of the Burnsville Planning Commission. Port said she’s planning to focus her campaign on issues like health care. Her family has purchased health care off the public exchange for years, so she knows the challenges of finding affordable, accessible care. Education ― making sure the state holds up its end of the bargain so that communities don’t have to foot the entire bill ― is another major topic, along with gun violence prevention. But she also knows that her experience speaking out against Schoen ― and the blame she faced for Franken ― could come up. And while it won’t be her focus, she believes what she went through made her a stronger candidate. “The thing that I learned the most through that process is while there is a cost for being loud and calling out bad behavior and issues when you see them, I’m not afraid to do that. I don’t regret speaking out,” she said. “And I will continue to push my party and Republicans to do the right thing and make sure that we are standing up for our community. That’s the thing that folks can take away from that is that I’ve already shown that I am not afraid to do what’s right even if there’s a cost to me.”

When Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, slashed public funding for the arts earlier this year, the director of the country’s top film festival knew her event was in trouble.“We realized we wouldn’t have the funding to put together a festival … We were hit really hard,” said Ilda Santiago, who has been running the Rio international film festival for two decades and had faced years of eroding local government support.A public plea for support and months of desperate campaigning followed – including a crowdfunding drive that helped earn the festival a stay of execution. After a one-month delay, Brazil’s premiere film expo will open on Monday – albeit with a slimmed-down program of just 190 films, compared with up to 400 before.But the festival’s fight for survival is symptomatic of a wider crisis engulfing Brazilian cinema under an ultra-conservative president who has identified the arts as a key source of opposition to his administration and declared the state has “bigger priorities” than culture.“The consensus is that the destruction of the Brazilian film industry is in full joyful swing by this far-right government,” Kleber Mendonça Filho, one of Brazil’s most celebrated directors, wrote on Facebook last week.“What the government is doing is strangling Brazilian cinema,” said Eduardo Valente, a film director and critic. “They are making it harder and harder for this sector to exist.”Brazilian cinema – put on the map by global hits such as City of God and Aquarius – has suffered a succession of blows since Bolsonaro took office in January, from a general lack of interest in the arts to more pointed attacks on films dealing with themes such as sexual diversity and race.In September, Brazil’s national cinema agency, Ancine, withdrew financial support helping film-makers promote their work at overseas festivals, affecting several works with racial and LGBTQ+ themes.Diego Paulino was among those whose funding vanished. A week before the 28-year-old was due to fly to Lisbon to promote his short film Negrum3 at an LGBTQ+ festival, Ancine withdrew the 4,600 reais (£883) grant slated to fund his trip.“I was left with nothing,” said Paulino, whose film deals with “blackness and queerness” and was produced last year with public funding.With the help of a crowdfunding campaign Paulino made it to the festival – but, to him, the government’s message was clear. “They say it’s about the money but we know that’s not what it’s about. It’s about making a statement.”In its most symbolic and explicit blow to the film sector, the Bolsonaro government in August also suspended a 70m reais (£13.5m) public television grant scheme slated to finance several series focusing on LGBTQ+ issues, sexual diversity and race.The president personally attacked four projects earmarked for funding. “It’s money thrown away,” Bolsonaro said in a social media broadcast. “There’s no point in making a movie with this theme.”The assault on cinema exploring issues of diversity has struck a particularly sinister chord in Brazil, where censorship was a key tool of the 1964-1985 military dictatorship for which Bolsonaro often expresses admiration.Maurício Macêdo, whose project Sexo Reverso was among those lambasted by the president, believes cinema is being persecuted and has been “chosen as the enemy” by Bolsonaro’s government.“This was undoubtedly censorship,” said Macêdo, whose project explores the curiosity of the Metis indigenous people in the sexual preferences of a white anthropologist studying the tribe. “The government isn’t interested in discussing themes that try to give visibility to indigenous people, to LGBT people.”Ancine, which many see as a crucial support structure for Brazil’s nascent independent cinema, has also been dramatically weakened under Bolsonaro. The institution saw its budget slashed by nearly half and its financing activities have largely ground to a halt.Three of the four seats in the agency’s directorial board are currently vacant, making it impossible for funding to be distributed or decisions made about future projects, said Valente, who worked there until 2016.“That’s the most cruel and, in a way, invisible hand that is being played right now. The government is killing this industry through inaction,” said Valente. “Because I’m pretty convinced it’s a conscious decision and not something that’s just happening by chance.”In an industry where long-term planning is central, the uncertainty has been crippling. Valente said the result would probably be a decline in the number of Brazilian films being produced.Ancine’s gradual dismantling also poses a particular threat to independent film-makers and small production companies, said one film director who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation.“What’s going on is going to destroy the independent film industry that was built with funding from Ancine,” he said. “A newcomer, someone with no experience, coming out of college – they’re not going to be able to make movies anymore.”Bruno Victor and Marcus Azevedo, whose project Afronte was also hit by the cancellation of the Ancine television grant, have found this out the hard way. The film-makers have yet to secure financing to produce their series.“We need public support to produce our projects because here in Brazil, it’s the only option we have,” said Victor, 28, whose film tells the story of a gay black man in suburban Brasília.For many Brazilian film-makers, the future remains uncertain. Some are turning to streaming services such as Netflix for help producing work tackling LGBTQ+ issues or diversity themes. Others are leaning on more supportive municipal or state governments that still champion cinema.Others, however, are training their cameras on topics less likely to offend the government.“I think we’re all scared,” the director said. “So we are self-censoring in the things we want to talk about – and that’s the most dangerous part.” This article was amended on 9 December 2019 to clarify that Ancine withdrew Diego Paulino’s grant. Topics Brazil Americas LGBT rights news