Enlarge this image A mother and her three daughters at the border crossing dividing Juárez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas, on April 9. The family traveled from Guatemala to reach the U.S. David Peinado/NurPhoto via Getty Images hide caption toggle caption David Peinado/NurPhoto via Getty Images A mother and her three daughters at the border crossing dividing Juárez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas, on April 9. The family traveled from Guatemala to reach the U.S. David Peinado/NurPhoto via Getty Images A plan under consideration by President Trump to transfer detained immigrants to "sanctuary cities" should be viewed as an overture to Democrats, not political retribution, a White House spokesman said on Sunday. "It's not political retribution," Hogan Gidley, the White House deputy press secretary, told NPR. "If anything, you should consider it on the Democrat side to be an olive branch."But according to a report published by The Washington Post on Thursday, the plan to send detained immigrants who are in the country illegally to sanctuary cities was seen by some White House officials as a way "to retaliate against President Trump's political adversaries." Initially, White House and Homeland Security officials said the plan had been scrapped, but on Friday, President Trump confirmed the report, telling reporters, "We'll bring them to sanctuary city areas and let that particular area take care of it." On Sunday, White House officials sought to turn the focus on Democrats. Speaking on ABC News' This Week, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said the preferred solution would be for Democratic leaders in Congress to work with the White House to "stop this awful crisis that is taking place at our border." Cracking down on illegal immigration has been a central theme of the Trump presidency, and in his interview with NPR, Gidley said Trump is trying to make good on that promise through the sanctuary cities plan. Gidley said the White House has put forward multiple proposals to stem the flow of illegal immigration, but Democrats have not "come to the table." "So the logical answer is to give them something they want," said Gidley. "Democrats say that if you even think about rejecting people into this country illegally, that you are somehow racist. So the question then becomes, do Democrats want to allow these people to be shipped into their communities?" Gidley specifically singled out House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco district as one potential destination. "We looked at it and said, where are the logical places to kind of spread the wealth, if you will, and places like San Francisco, for example, or a sanctuary city, they are designed and set up specifically to have people there who aren't here legally," he said. "That's what their stated goal is, so there is no reason we shouldn't be looking at a way to give them exactly what they want." Last week, Ashley Etienne, a spokeswoman for Pelosi, told The Washington Post, "The extent of this administration's cynicism and cruelty cannot be overstated. Using human beings — including little children — as pawns in their warped game to perpetuate fear and demonize immigrants is despicable."The proposal has already faced questions about its cost and legality. Responding to those questions, the president tweeted on Saturday that the U.S. government "has the absolute legal right to have apprehended illegal immigrants transferred to Sanctuary Cities." On Sunday, Democrats denounced the proposal as a political tactic. Speaking on Fox News Sunday, Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., said the president was using the plan to energize his base. "My understanding is that it is not legal. There is no budget for that purpose," Cardin said. "This is clearly a political move for the president. He is using the immigrants as pawns in a political game of chess."

Enlarge this image Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said a proposed rule being submitted for public comment is designed to ensure that immigrants "are not likely to become burdens on American taxpayers." Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said a proposed rule being submitted for public comment is designed to ensure that immigrants "are not likely to become burdens on American taxpayers." Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Updated at 11:13 p.m. ET Immigrants who benefit from various forms of public assistance, including food stamps and housing subsidies, would face sharp new hurdles to obtaining a green card under a proposed rule announced by the Trump administration on Saturday. Federal law has historically sought to exclude immigrants who are likely to become a "public charge," but the proposed rule would expand the government's ability to deny immigrants residency or visas if they or family members benefit from aid programs, such as Medicaid Part D, a prescription drug program for the elderly and disabled; the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP); and Section 8 housing vouchers.The Department of Homeland Security said in a press release that the proposal was aimed at protecting taxpayers, but advocates for immigrant rights say they would force thousands to choose between staying in the country and receiving public assistance. "Under long-standing federal law, those seeking to immigrate to the United States must show they can support themselves financially," said Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen in the statement. Nielsen said the proposed rule "will implement a law passed by Congress intended to promote immigrant self-sufficiency and protect finite resources by ensuring that they are not likely to become burdens on American taxpayers." The regulation would consider immigrants who use public benefits a "heavily weighed negative factor" to determine those applying to remain in the country permanently "generally ineligible for change of status and extension of stay," according to the DHS news release.For months, the Trump administration has been taking steps to limit immigrants' access to welfare programs, as NPR's Joel Rose reported in August. "For at least a century, U.S. law has sought to exclude immigrants who are likely to become a 'public charge.' And the Trump administration says it is simply enforcing that law," Rose said. National Trump Administration Moves To Penalize Immigrants For Using Government Benefits U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data show that immigrants benefit from public assistance at nearly the same rate as non-immigrants, according to a draft version of the new rule, distributed by The Washington Post."Out of the 41.5 million immigrants living in the United States, 3.7 percent received cash benefits in 2013, and 22.7 percent accepted noncash benefits including Medicaid, housing subsidies or home heating assistance," the newspaper reports.As for native-born Americans who get the same forms of assistance, the Post says, "In 2015, 3.4 percent of 270 million nonimmigrant Americans received cash welfare payments, USCIS research found, and 22.1 percent received noncash subsidies."Previous administrations have only applied the "public charge" rule to cash assistance. But under President Trump, that rule would include a vast range of non-cash aid.Rose tells NPR's newscast unit that public health officials warn about the rule's lasting impact on families, with "many immigrants dropping out of benefit programs even before the rule was officially proposed." DHS officials say that once the proposed rule is published in the Federal Register "in the coming weeks," the clock will start on a 60-day public review period in which the public can comment on the proposal.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic presidential contenders Beto O’Rourke and Cory Booker slammed U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday for promoting unfounded conspiracy theories about the apparent suicide of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein in his New York jail cell. After the death on Saturday of Epstein, a millionaire charged with sex trafficking who once counted Trump and former President Bill Clinton as friends, Trump retweeted a baseless claim from a conservative comedian that Clinton was involved in the death. “This is another example of our president using this position of public trust to attack his political enemies with unfounded conspiracy theories,” O’Rourke, a former congressman from Texas, said on CNN’s State of the Union. O’Rourke said Trump was trying to shift the public’s focus away from last weekend’s two deadly mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, which have led to new calls for gun restrictions and criticism of Trump’s divisive anti-immigrant and racially charged rhetoric. “He’s changing the conversation, and if we allow him to do that then we will never be able to focus on the true problems, of which he is a part,” O’Rourke said from his hometown of El Paso. Related CoverageFrench minister demands investigation into Epstein's activities in FranceNew York coroner 'confident' Epstein's death was suicide: New York TimesBooker, a U.S. senator from New Jersey, said Trump’s retweet was “just more recklessness.” “He is giving life to not just conspiracy theories but really whipping people up into anger and worse against different people in this country,” he said on CNN. The FBI and the Department of Justice’s Inspector General have opened investigations into the death of Epstein, who a source said had been taken off suicide watch. Last month, Epstein was found unconscious on the floor of his jail cell with marks on his neck, and officials were investigating that incident as a possible suicide or assault. U.S. Attorney General William Barr said he was “appalled” to learn of the apparent suicide in federal custody. “Mr. Epstein’s death raises serious questions that must be answered,” Barr said in a statement on Saturday. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic congresswoman from New York City and a leading progressive voice, tweeted: “We need answers. Lots of them.” Democratic presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke crosses the Paso del Norte International border bridge to attend the funeral services for one of the victims of last weekend's mass shootings at a Walmart store, in El Paso, Texas, U.S., as seen from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico August 8, 2019. REUTERS/Jose Luis GonzalezWhite House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway said investigation of Epstein should continue despite his death. “Jeffrey Epstein has done some very bad things over a number of years, so let’s continue to investigate that,” she said on Fox News Sunday. “I don’t think that somebody’s crimes and the accountability for that necessarily perish with them.” More than a decade ago, Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida to state charges of solicitation of prostitution from a minor in a deal with prosecutors that has been widely criticized as too lenient. Then in July, Epstein was indicted, federal prosecutors in New York accusing him of knowingly recruiting underage women to engage in sex acts with him, sometimes over a period of years while paying the women for each encounter. He pleaded not guilty. O’Rourke and Booker are among two dozen candidates seeking the Democratic nomination to challenge Republican Trump for the White House in 2020. Nearly all of those Democrats have condemned Trump’s incendiary rhetoric for inflaming racial tensions and anger. “We’ve seen people’s lives being threatened because this president whips up hatred. This is a very dangerous president that we have now,” Booker said. FILE PHOTO: Geoffrey Berman, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, points to a photograph of Jeffrey Epstein as he announces the financier's charges of sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors, in New York, U.S., July 8, 2019. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton/File PhotoTrump had retweeted on Saturday a message from conservative comedian and commentator Terrence K. Williams, who said in part that Epstein “had information on Bill Clinton & now he’s dead.” Clinton spokesman Angel Urena blasted Trump for making the suggestion. “Ridiculous, and of course not true - and Donald Trump knows it. Has he triggered the 25th Amendment yet?” he said, referring to the procedures for replacing the president in event of removal or incapacitation. Trump has a history of promoting conspiracy theories about political rivals. Even before he was a presidential candidate, Trump repeatedly questioned whether former President Barack Obama was born in the United States, even after Obama produced a birth certificate proving that he was. During the Republican presidential nomination race in 2016, Trump spread an unfounded conspiracy theory linking the father of rival U.S. Senator Ted Cruz to the assassination of former President John Kennedy, a claim Cruz denounced as a lie. Reporting by John Whitesides; Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Mary Milliken and Grant McCoolOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

The new rule would potentially withhold permanent residency from someone who has used social services like Medicaid; Medicare Part D, which helps the elderly afford prescription medicines; food stamps; and Section 8 housing vouchers. Even immigrants who received relatively small amounts of assistance for short periods might now be deemed “public charges” and be ineligible for green cards. In the worst case, legal immigrants who have built lives in this country could be denied permanent legal status and be separated from their families. The proposal could become final after a 60-day public review period.Treating immigrants as public charges is based on the unfair principle that income and wealth determine one’s value to society. Immigrants who play by the rules, pay taxes and contribute to their communities could now risk deportation if they did not have enough savings to survive unanticipated emergencies. They could be forced to choose between health care and food for their children and a chance to stay in this country.A huge number of immigrant families could be affected by this change. An estimated 3.8 million Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders and 10.3 million Hispanics live in families in which at least one member has used one of these services. And there are 10.5 million children in the United States in families receiving public benefits who have at least one noncitizen parent, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Nine out of 10 of these children are natural-born citizens, and their families could be torn apart if a parent is considered a public charge and no longer able to stay in the country.Fear of the proposed regulation, which had been rumored for months, may have already dampened the demand for services. Community urgent-care clinics have had patients asking to have their records removed, and some immigrants have refused to sign up for food assistance programs, citing worries about deportation and family separation. Without screenings and access to treatments, they will be vulnerable to asthma, vision problems, high blood pressure, cancer and mental health disorders.

Part of the problem is stigma and a profound lack of awareness. Methadone and buprenorphine are opioids. They are weaker than drugs like OxyContin, fentanyl and heroin that have fueled the current crisis, but many law enforcement and medical professionals still see them as trading one addiction for another. Or they mistakenly believe that the medications should be used only temporarily, to help wean patients off stronger opioids. Or they see them as an optional complement to behavioral interventions instead of an essential component of opioid addiction management.None of these perceptions is supported by the balance of scientific evidence. There’s also a logistical barrier to getting these drugs into the hands of people who need them. Doctors are allowed to give methadone only at specialized clinics where patients must report every day for their dose. Lines at such clinics are often long, and according to the report, which came from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, Medicaid does not cover the treatment in at least 14 states.Buprenorphine is available by prescription, but health care professionals must obtain a special license to write those prescriptions, a process that requires them to complete hours of additional training, grant the Drug Enforcement Administration access to all of their patient records and agree to strict limits on the number of patients they can treat with the medication. In many states, would-be buprenorphine prescribers also must submit to stringent criteria for insurance reimbursement. These restrictions also are not justified by scientific evidence. They are not employed by other countries, and they are not used to manage the treatment of other chronic medical conditions in the United States.Fewer than seven percent of the nation’s doctors have gone through the trouble of clearing these hurdles. As a result, more than half of all counties have no licensed buprenorphine prescriber at all. That’s too bad. According to the national academies report, just about anyone with opioid use disorder — teenagers, pregnant women, people with other serious medical conditions — can be treated safely and effectively with the medication.President Trump declared a public health emergency to respond to the opioid crisis in 2017, but so far that declaration has led to very little meaningful action. Congress passed a suite of opioid bills in the fall, but that legislation contained almost no funding. And in most states, strategies that might truly mitigate the disaster — from evidence-based addiction treatments like methadone and buprenorphine to proven harm-reduction approaches like needle exchanges and safe injection sites — remain vastly underutilized or outright illegal.

Enlarge this image A Philadelphia police officer holds a package of the overdose antidote naloxone while on patrol in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia in April 2017. Dominick Reuter/AFP/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Dominick Reuter/AFP/Getty Images A Philadelphia police officer holds a package of the overdose antidote naloxone while on patrol in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia in April 2017. Dominick Reuter/AFP/Getty Images On a 90-degree afternoon in July, under the shade of a tree in Philadelphia's McPherson Square Park, I watched a couple sit down, prepare syringes and inject drugs.The man injected in his arm, the woman in her neck.I observed them from about a hundred feet away, where I was getting ready to film an interview with someone else.After they had finished, the woman rested against the man. She was splayed out on top of the man with her neck tilted back, her mouth open.The next time I glanced over, her skin looked pale. The man supported her head, rubbing her breastbone, and checked her pulse.The city has cleaned up the park — which used to be known as "Needle Park" — and ramped up the police presence there. There was even a group of kids playing on a nearby Slip 'N Slide that day. But drug use remains commonplace in the park and in Kensington, the surrounding neighborhood.The woman I was there to interview, Jasmine Johnson, is in recovery now. But she was in active addiction on the streets of Kensington for six years.I looked to her face for cues, to see if my rising concern about the couple was warranted. Shots - Health News Poll: Most Americans Know About Opioid Antidote And Are Willing To Use It I had done enough reporting on overdoses that I thought I would know how to respond when I saw one. Plus, the city's health department makes it sound simple. In Pennsylvania, anyone can pick up naloxone (also known by the brand name Narcan) at a local pharmacy without a prescription.Billboards in subway stations and along the highway advertise naloxone, the overdose-reversal drug: "Saving a life can be this easy."But in the face of a possible emergency, it seemed more complicated to me.Johnson, who carries naloxone in her purse, went over to check on the woman and offer her the antidote.The man angrily refused it.Johnson tapped the woman lightly on the cheek, to see if she would wake up. She didn't.The man insisted again that she was fine. "She's breathing!" he yelled. He told Johnson he didn't need Narcan, and that he already had some. "Do not give her Narcan," he mumbled. "She would be so mad."To understand why someone who uses drugs might not want naloxone during a suspected overdose, it helps to understand how the medicine works.The antidote quickly blocks the effects of opioids — both the euphoria and dangerous side effects, such as slowed breathing that cuts off oxygen to the brain.In the process, it can send someone into instant withdrawal. Many people who use drugs say withdrawal is like having the worst flu of your life, complete with cold sweats, shakes and vomiting.The man likely didn't want the woman to suffer Narcan-induced withdrawal and end up mad at him.While I knew all of this in theory, it hadn't registered with me until that moment that someone would risk death to avoid withdrawal.As Johnson and I wrapped up our interview, the woman still looked pale and unconscious. I didn't know what to do, and Johnson could tell."That's all you can do, is ask and keep moving," she said with a shrug.But was that really all we could do?"It's not easy," said Allison Herens, the harm-reduction coordinator at Philadelphia's Public Health Department.She conducts regular training sessions about naloxone and how to administer it. She started a recent session for about two dozen people at the South Philadelphia Library on Broad Street by describing naloxone as "as harmless as water."But Herens said the overdose antidote can be a little tricky to use. "There are lots of different kinds of emergencies that happen on the street in any moment, and it can be hard to discern if it's actually an emergency or not," she told the group.It's important to make sure someone is actually overdosing before giving naloxone, she said.A person might be nodding out, coming in and out of consciousness. "The big thing to keep in mind with that person is, are they breathing?" she said. "How does their color look? So they'll start to get pale, gray – depending on the complexion, blue."Now, with the increased presence of fentanyl in the drug supply, Herens said the signs of an overdose are even more varied. Fentanyl often causes muscle spasms, or locked jaws in addition to the traditional signs she described.She also confirmed that sending a drug user into withdrawal is a real concern. "If they wake up in full-blown withdrawal, they are not going to the hospital. They just are not," Herens said. "They are going to go run as fast as they can to try to use again, and I know because I've seen it happen."If you suspect someone is overdosing, call 911 right away, Herens said.Jeremiah Laster, a deputy chief at the Philadelphia Fire Department, agreed. "Sometimes you have people that when you administer Narcan to them, they become combative because they're upset because you sort of blew their high," he said. "You have to be prepared to protect yourself."There are other reasons to call for help. Narcan, a nasal spray, starts to wear off after about 30 minutes, and nearly dissipates after 90, depending on a person's metabolism and the strength of the drugs used.By then, most people will probably have metabolized enough of the opioids so that they are unlikely to stop breathing again. But fentanyl, which is particularly potent, makes that less of a guarantee.It can take multiple doses of Narcan to reverse a fentanyl overdose. And once you've given the nasal spray to someone who has stopped breathing, it helps if you perform rescue breathing to hasten the flow of oxygen to the brain.For these reasons, Herens said it's important to know from the start that you have paramedics coming to help. Shots - Health News Reversing An Overdose Isn't Complicated, But Getting The Antidote Can Be Ultimately on that day in McPherson Square Park, I called 911.Once I did, another woman nearby told the woman who was passed out that the police were on their way with Narcan. Hearing this, the woman bolted straight upright and started to leave with the man. They got angry with the woman who told her the police were coming — there was some pushing and shoving — but soon all three were gone.Herens estimates she has given Narcan about seven or eight times — mostly during a recent spike in overdoses this summer, not long after the day I was in the park.She said she understands it can be hard to wrap your head around the fact that someone might get angry with you for trying to prevent them from dying of an overdose."I always just try to remember that in this moment I am saving this person's life," she said. "They don't have to like me."Herens tries to keep it in perspective. Irritating people is a small price to pay if it means they survive, she said. Nina Feldman covers health for WHYY. She's on Twitter: @ncannellf.

The investigation, by the Texas secretary of state’s office, said that 95,000 people who were registered to vote in the state had at some point told a law enforcement agency that they were not citizens. Out of that number, 58,000 had voted at some point since 1996.Politicians and voters’ advocates are asking officials to investigate both figures.“Because we have consistently seen Texas politicians conjure the specter of voter fraud as pretext to suppress legitimate votes, we are naturally skeptical,” Representative Rafael Anchia, a Democrat in the state House, told The New York Times.Even if the numbers are deemed accurate, those 58,000 voters could have become citizens before casting ballots. More than 50,000 people were naturalized in Texas in 2017, according to the Department of Homeland Security.“We have a reason to distrust these numbers,” said Andre Segura, the legal director for the A.C.L.U. of Texas. “There’s a long history of these numbers being inaccurate. Voter fraud is extremely rare.”In Florida, the administration of the former governor, Rick Scott, had tried to purge noncitizens from voter rolls in 2012. It started with a list of 180,000 voters based on driver’s license data, according to The Tampa Bay Times. Ultimately, 85 people were removed from the rolls, according to the newspaper.

A fire aboard a Virgin Atlantic flight headed to London has forced the plane to make an emergency landing in Boston.Massachusetts state police said that the crew extinguished the fire caused by a suspected faulty battery charger on board the A330 Airbus plane on Thursday night local time.All 217 passengers on flight 138 from JFK airport in New York to Heathrow were safely evacuated after landing along with the crew. One passenger refused treatment for a smoke-related complaint.An external phone charger appears to have caused the fire.Massachusetts state police bomb disposal officers examined the aircraft after it landed and found a device between the cushions of a seat which had ignited. “Preliminary investigation suggests it is a battery pack consistent in appearance with an external phone charger,” a police spokesman said.Virgin Atlantic said it was “investigating” what led to smoke appearing in the cabin. “The safety and security of our customers and crew is always our top priority and we are currently investigating to fully understand the circumstances,” a company spokeswoman said.“We’d like to thank our customers for their patience as we work with them to provide local accommodation or to rebook alternative flights to their final destination.”It was the second unusual landing at Boston’s Logan international airport on Thursday. Earlier, an American Airlines jetliner from Chicago declared an emergency as it approached the city but landed without incident.The airline says the pilot of Flight 1172 called in an emergency when a cockpit light indicated an unspecified potential mechanical problem as the plane approached Boston. Topics Virgin Atlantic Airline industry Air transport Boston news

Andrew Yang doesn’t mince his words: He doesn’t think the robots are coming; he knows they are already here. And he wants to take his concerns about this all the way to the White House.“I’m Andrew Yang, and I’m running for President as a Democrat in 2020 because I fear for the future of our country,” reads the first sentence of the website for his long-shot campaign.As a former corporate lawyer and founder of Venture for America, a fellowship program to help entrepreneurs start businesses in cities like Detroit and Cleveland, he brings a jobs-first approach to tackling many of the country’s social and economic problems. UBI isn’t the only tenet of his campaign. There are more than 70 policy recommendations on his website, including ideas like hiring a White House psychologist to closely monitor the mental health of White House staff and creating a “digital social currency” to reward (and gamify) altruistic behavior.Yang chatted with Quartz about robots, UBI, and the stakes if we don’t take automation seriously. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.Quartz: Why are you running for president?I’m running for president because I’m convinced that we are in the third inning of the greatest economic transformation in the history of the world.Yang: I’m running for president because I’m convinced that we are in the third inning of the greatest economic transformation in the history of the world. And the third inning has brought us Donald Trump. He’s our president because we automated away 4 million factory jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and the other swing states he needed to win and did win. My friends in Silicon Valley know that we’re about to do the same thing to millions of retail workers, call center workers, fast food workers, truck drivers, and on and on through the economy. So I’m running for president to wake up America to the fact that it’s not immigrants or globalization but this technology that is transforming our way of life. We need to make big, dramatic moves as a society to move forward.What do you consider the first two innings? The first inning was the deregulation of the financial services industry, which led to a cascade of winner-take-all economics. The second inning was the elimination of millions of manufacturing jobs. Now we’re going into the third inning, which is the disruption of brick and mortar retail, which will include 30% of American malls and main street stores closing in the next four years.What’s your worst-case scenario if we don’t take this problem seriously?The worst-case scenario is the disintegration of our society. You can see the red flags right now. Our labor-force participation rate is down to 62%, the same level as El Salvador and the Dominican Republic. Right now is year 10 of an expansion and one in five prime working-age men haven’t worked in the last 12 months. Our life expectancy is declining for the last three years, with eight Americans dying of drug overdoses every hour. And our political and social dysfunction is only worsening. So the worst case scenario, unfortunately, is chaos, violence, and a disintegration of our way of life.So, what’s the best-case scenario?The best-case scenario is that we evolve to a better, more sophisticated, more human definition of both work and value.What does that look like from a policy standpoint? My plan is for every American adult between the ages of 18 to 64 to receive $1,000 a month, free and clear, no questions.Well, the single biggest change we would need to make would be to add a universal basic income. My plan is for every American adult between the ages of 18 to 64 to receive $1,000 a month, free and clear, no questions. This would improve Americans’ nutrition and health, mental health, relationships, stress levels. It would create millions of jobs around the country. It would be a catalyst for entrepreneurship and creativity. It would compensate women for work that is too often unrecognized and uncompensated or under-compensated by the market. It would help provide people who are in marginalized groups more meaningful access to economic opportunities.One example I use is that my wife is at home with our two young boys, one of whom is autistic. And right now GDP values her work as zero and the monetary market also values her work at zero. UBI would help balance the scales for people who are doing some of the most important work in our society which right now is getting ignored.How would you expect to pay for a UBI?It’s much more affordable than most people think. A basic income would generate wealth for tens of millions of American families. But the trap that we are in right now is that the big winners from artificial intelligence, big data, autonomous vehicles, and robotics are going to be the biggest tech companies who are great at not paying a lot of taxes. Google’s move is to say it all went through Ireland. Amazon’s move is to say we didn’t make any money this quarter—no taxes necessary. And so the American public is in a trap because more and more work and value is going to get soaked up by a handful of mammoth companies, and the public is going to be looking around wondering how to pay for anything.What’s a common misconception people have about the robot apocalypse?People don’t think if their local mall closes that it’s the result of robots and AI. But the fact is, that mall is closed because of Amazon soaking up $20 billion in commerce every year. And you better believe that Amazon is investing billions of dollars in robots, automation, and AI to have a package on your doorstep the next day. So the biggest misconception is that we’re going to see [the apocalypse] coming because some robot is going to walk into your office, and until the robot walks into your office, we’re still just talking about some speculative future.Some critics have said that you’re an alarmist. How would you respond?If you agree we’re dealing with historic, nation-scale problems, then you would need historic, nation-scale solutions.One thing that I find very interesting is that many people look up and say, “Yes, Bain, McKinsey, MIT, the White House—or at least the Obama White House—all agree and are correct that this is the greatest economic and technological transformation in the history of the world. We need a Marshall Plan-scale set of solutions to help manage this transition.” And then when you look at their solution set, it tends to be a bunch of hand-waving and fantasies about retraining and re-skilling Americans for the jobs of the future.To me, that’s the confusing element: If you agree we’re dealing with historic, nation-scale problems, then you would need historic nation-scale solutions like universal based income. I find it frustrating when someone else is like, “Oh yeah, he’s right about the problem, but the solution is too big,” and then they don’t offer any alternative.Some people have called me a futurist, and I say I’m a present-ist because it’s 2018 and these things are all real, and it’s just that our political conversations are decades behind the times. It’s not useful anymore just to have a conversation about it as if it’s an abstract exercise. If anyone wants to make a more evolved, human-centered economy real, we’re going to have to fight for it.If you had the choice between becoming president and universal basic income being passed, which would you choose?I’m running for president to solve what, to me, are the biggest problems of this time, and if I generate a ton of energy and attention towards meaningful solutions, I’m going to be thrilled. I think becoming president will be the fastest way to make things happen, but if I help speed these things up and don’t become president, that is certainly something I’d be very excited about.

WASHINGTON—The U.S. is looking to enlist Brazil’s newly elected right-leaning president in its trade battle with China and its efforts to isolate Venezuela’s leftist government.Secretary of State Mike Pompeo plans to press U.S. concerns about Chinese trading practices during a visit to Brazil to attend the inauguration of Jair Bolsonaro on Tuesday, a State Department official said.The...

By Oct. 2, 2018 8:00 am ET Investors know bitcoin’s violent mood swings well. What they often don’t know is that unscrupulous traders, wielding purpose-built software, can be behind them. Manipulation in cryptocurrencies is a growing concern for regulators—and even for some proponents of the digital coins. The Securities and Exchange Commission cited that risk in August when rejecting several bitcoin-based exchange-traded funds. The office of New York Attorney General Barbara D. Underwood highlighted the issue last month in a report warning that crypto... To Read the Full Story Subscribe Sign In

transcriptAn Interview With Andrew Yang, an Outsider at Tonight’s Democratic Debate Hosted by Michael Barbaro, produced by Eric Krupke, Andy Mills and Theo Balcomb, and edited by Paige CowettMr. Yang, a former tech executive, has qualified for a spot when several better-known lawmakers did not. What has made his campaign so unexpectedly compelling?Thursday, September 12th, 2019michael barbaroFrom The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”Today — even as well-known Democratic lawmakers failed to qualify for tonight’s debate, Andrew Yang did. Kevin Roose on what has made Yang’s campaign so compelling.It’s Thursday, September 12th.Kevin, tell me how you know Andrew Yang.kevin rooseSo I met Andrew Yang a few years ago when he was running this organization called Venture for America, which he had had a couple of careers. He was a corporate lawyer, did some startups. He actually sold one of his startups and made a decent chunk of money from that. And then he was trying to do this thing where he would essentially turn recent college graduates into entrepreneurs — set them up with some money and supporting them as they went off and started companies.michael barbaroSounds like Teach for America for business.kevin rooseExactly. That’s, I think, the pitch that he made. And so I was covering technology at the time. We talked about Venture for America. And I found it interesting but not really all that newsworthy. I didn’t end up writing about it, but we kept in touch. And then he e-mailed me sort of out of the blue in October of 2017. And it was a very cryptic email. He just said, let’s get together. I’ve got a story to tell you. And I don’t know — I like to go on goose chases, so I invited him out. We went to Dean and Deluca right downstairs from The Times building. And he told me that he was planning to run for president. And at first, I was very confused — I was like, president of the food co-op? The homeowners association? What could you possibly mean by running for president? He’s never held political office before. I didn’t even know he was particularly interested in politics. And he says, no, no, no, I’m for real running for president in 2020 as a Democrat against Donald Trump. This is not a joke or a stunt. And he’s written this book talking about some of the big ideas of his campaign. And then I kind of forgot about him for a few months. And then he came back one day in 2018 and said hey, I’ve filed my paperwork and I’ve got my first campaign video.archived recording (andrew yang)Hello, I’m Andrew Yang. And I’m running for president as a Democrat in 2020.kevin rooseSo I watched the video, and it was interesting. It was kind of homemade. It was not particularly high budget.archived recording (andrew yang)We are experiencing the greatest technological and economic shift in human history.kevin rooseIt was basically him talking about his sort of central message of his campaign.archived recording (andrew yang)I came to realize that technology has already wiped out four million manufacturing jobs in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and other states. And it’s about to do the same thing to people who work in retail, food service and food prep, customer service, transportation.kevin rooseAnd I thought it was sort of interesting. I hadn’t heard a presidential candidate talk about issues like A.I. and automation — and certainly not make it the centerpiece of their campaign. And so I was intrigued. Here was a guy who was talking about an issue that you hear about a lot in Silicon Valley, but it hadn’t really become a mainstream concern yet. And so I wrote this story. I called him a longer than long shot candidate, which I thought I was kind of being generous at that point. And then I kind of expected that he would sort of fade away into obscurity and that I probably wouldn’t write about him again.michael barbaroAnd it turned out you were kind of wrong.kevin rooseI was a little bit wrong.archived recordingPlease welcome Andrew Yang. I would like to welcome to Crooked Media HQ Andrew Yang. His supporters call themselves the Yang Gang. They chant “PowerPoint” at his rallies and wear ball caps with MATH on the front for Make America Think Harder. Can I must say of all the candidates I’ve seen on the trail, you seem to be having the most fun. Are you?archived recording (andrew yang)Well, it’s a very low bar you set, Trevor.archived recordingOne candidate who will perhaps be a surprise on the stage for the next month’s debates, entrepreneur Andrew Yang who made the cut ahead of several other Democrats with far more experience. [CHANTING] U-S-A. U-S-A.archived recording (andrew yang)Are you chanting U-S-A or U-S-Yang? I couldn’t even tell.archived recording[CHANTING] Andrew Yang. Andrew Yang. Andrew Yang.kevin rooseSo I wanted to catch up with Yang again. Obviously his situation has changed quite a bit since our first meeting in Dean and Deluca.andrew yangHey, Kevin.kevin rooseHow are you?andrew yangI’m doing great.kevin rooseSo I flew to Houston where he was spending the week preparing for the presidential debate.kevin rooseThings are a little different.kevin rooseAnd he pulls up in his big S.U.V. with his campaign staff trailing behind him.kevin rooseAnd now you’ve got travel with an entourage.andrew yangSuch a big entourage.kevin rooseYou’re in the debates. You’ve probably got an armored S.U.V. out there waiting for you.andrew yangWe actually just rented it — Hertz.kevin rooseAnd we sit down for this interview. And I asked him kind of straight up — where did I go wrong? What did I miss here?michael barbaroWhat did he say?andrew yangWell, I think what people missed — and unfortunately Democrats are still struggling to pick up on this — is a genuine explanation for why Donald Trump won in 2016. Where if you turn on cable news, the message seems to suggest that he’s our president because of some combination of Russia, racism, Facebook, the F.B.I., Hillary Clinton emails. And so you’re like, all right, I guess that’s why. But the numbers — and I’m a numbers guy — the numbers tell a very clear and distinct story that the reason why he’s our president is that we automated away four million manufacturing jobs in your home state of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, Michigan — all the swing states he needed to win.kevin rooseHe sort of said, well, it’s not actually that hard to understand. You don’t need to know a lot about computer programming or artificial intelligence to grasp that technology is having a huge influence on the labor market and the workforce.andrew yangYou don’t need to be into technology to see the self-service kiosk at the McDonald’s or at the airport or at the CVS or at any of the other places you frequent.michael barbaroSo Yang’s diagnosis of the Trump election — and by extension what’s going on in this country — is it stems mainly from technology — from automation basically knocking people out of their jobs. And that his candidacy is compelling, in his opinion, because it directly confronts that.kevin rooseRight. And I think if you’ve heard one thing about Andrew Yang over the course of this presidential campaign, it’s probably related to his idea for what’s called universal basic income.andrew yangUniversal basic income, or what I’ve rebranded the Freedom Dividend because it tests better, is a logical next step.michael barbaroWhich is what?kevin rooseSo universal basic income is not a new idea. It’s really an idea that goes back decades.andrew yangWhere if we put money into people’s hands, it has so many positive effects because it would create hundreds of thousands of jobs around America. But it also recognizes the kind of work my wife does who’s at home with our two boys, one of whom is autistic.kevin rooseAnd the basic idea is every American adult gets $1,000 a month in cash, no strings attached. Doesn’t matter if you’re a billionaire or you’re unemployed, you get the same $1,000 a month regardless.michael barbaroAnd how is that paid for?kevin rooseSo he’s proposing to pay for it through what’s called a value added tax — which is a European-style tax that he thinks would most directly tax the companies that are profiting from automation.michael barbaroAnd how exactly does that solve for the problem he’s diagnosed of automation and its consequences?kevin rooseWell, he believes that it doesn’t solve the problem of automation, but it does give people a cushion. So if you lose your job because your company decides to replace you with A.I., having $1,000 a month will allow you to meet your most basic needs while you figure out what to do next while you look for a new job, learn a new skill, go back to school. Basically that having $1,000 a month guarantee as the floor would make it easier for people to adapt to this sort of unprecedented technological change. And he uses this example of a truck driver.andrew yangSo if you’re a trucker and making $50,000 a year and then a robot truck comes and takes your job, now you are worth $0.kevin rooseSo truckers you know obviously are threatened by automation if self-driving trucks come onto the roads. Millions of people would stand to lose their jobs as a result. And those people wouldn’t just be able to immediately find something else that paid them as well as trucking that was suited to their skills. A lot of them would need some time to figure out how to adjust and what to do next. And to make that easier, we would give them and everyone else $1,000 a month. It’s not — $12,000 a year is not enough to live on, but it is enough to kind of serve as a net so that they’re not experiencing the most extreme financial hardship.michael barbaroWhere does Yang say that we are in this process of automation?kevin rooseSo he thinks we’ve basically only seen the tip of the iceberg. He cites these studies from think tanks and academics that say one out of three or one out of four jobs in America could be at risk of automation within the next decade. And he’s sort of using that to predict a mass unemployment crisis. He’s not saying this is going to be tough for a few people or a few people are going to have to find new jobs. This is really about millions and millions of people being automated out of work.andrew yangIt’s going to zero out not just the truckers or the warehouse shelvers or the retail workers. I was an unhappy corporate attorney for five months, which is long enough to know that A.I. can do that job. It can edit contracts more quickly and accurately and inexpensively than the smartest human lawyer.michael barbaroAnd why this? Why $1,000 a month to people and not what we hear most candidates — and a lot of policymakers — talking about when it comes to automation, which is retrain workers whose skills have been supplanted by technology?kevin rooseWell, Yang talks about this a lot. He believes that basically reskilling programs don’t work.andrew yangWhen I dug into the studies around the retraining programs for displaced manufacturing workers in Ohio and Michigan, you found abysmal success rates of those programs that were federally funded. The success rates hovered between 0% and 15% generally. Half of those workers left the workforce and never worked again. And of that group, half then filed for disability. And you then saw surges in suicides and drug overdoses in those communities to the point where now our life expectancy has declined for the last three years in a row. So if you say, as a politician, we’re going to retrain everyone. And then you come with me to the truck stop and you actually have a clipboard and say, who here wants to be retrained? You will see how dumb an idea that is in real life in many, many contexts.michael barbaroDoes that feel right to you?kevin rooseWell, there have been some interesting studies about these retraining programs. I mean, I wouldn’t say that they don’t work, but they are definitely not a cure all. I mean, there have been some estimates that only sort of one out of four people can be retrained profitably by the private sector. That, essentially, the government has to play some major role in trying to help people transition out of their old jobs and into something new.kevin rooseAnd what is it that having $1,000 a month would allow these people to do? Let’s take the trucker — the 50-year-old trucker loses his job, probably a he, to automation. Now $1,000 a month shows up in his mailbox — what, in your mind, does that allow him to do that he couldn’t otherwise do?andrew yangSo first, when you’re looking at something like trucking, the $1,000 a month is not enough. But I’ve been giving the freedom dividend, as you know, to several families around the country right now for the last number of months. And I just saw one of the recipients, Kyle Christensen, in Iowa. So Kyle is living in Iowa Falls, Iowa with his ailing mom who’s recovering from cancer. So he’s been getting $1,000 a month from me for a number of months. I just saw him a few weeks ago in Iowa, and he seemed like a different person. And he came to me and he said, I used some of the dividend on a guitar. And I’ve been playing shows for the first time in years. And this band now it wants me to perform with them next week. And he was so proud and he was beaming when he told me this. The $1,000 a month is, in many ways, about everything but the money. It’s about our humanity and what we would actually value. It’s car repairs going from a crisis to an inconvenience. It’s home repairs and going back to school. So when you translate what the money means in people’s lives, it means the things that make us human.kevin rooseRight. And his argument is essentially that this would radically reshape society.andrew yangIf we had an economy that was based upon making us happy, then we would do this yesterday, clearly. Let’s imagine I’m president in 2021, freedom dividend goes out. There’s a town of 10,000 people in Missouri, so that means it’s another $10 million in spending power every month. And then one person there decides to open a bakery, which might have been a really dumb idea before the freedom dividend but now it’s a good idea. They open a bakery. It sells muffins. People like the muffins. Were there cheaper ways to get those muffins to those people? Probably, yes. Is the new bakery somewhat economically inefficient? Perhaps, but does it make the community happy? Doesn it make the bakers happy? Does it make everyone its life better despite its economic imperfections? Yes. So that is the vision of the economy we have to move towards. And that certainly applies to creative and artistic and cultural endeavors too.kevin rooseAnd the way that he’s talking about it is essentially as something that would change the way we value work in the first place. So he brings up the example of G.D.P. — gross domestic product — which is the sort of benchmark measurement we use to determine how well the economy’s doing.michael barbaroProductivity.kevin rooseProductivity, essentially. And he thinks that’s the wrong measurement.andrew yangAnd so the goal should be to try and optimize not for this G.D.P. measurement or stock market profitability and prices, it should be to optimize for how we’re doing — our health, our mental health, our childhood success rates, how clean our air and water are. And if we had those as goals, then we could harness our energies towards actually trying to improve our own lives instead of improving the bottom line of a company that is just going to proceed to automate more and more work as it’s able to. And I think one of the biggest misconceptions around me and the campaign and the freedom dividend is that people think it’s somehow going to mitigate work. It will not. It will recognize the kind of work that so many of us are doing and want to do. It will create more opportunities for the most human-centered work — the caring, the nurturing, the artistic, the entrepreneurial aspirations. The question is, what do we mean by work? I know my wife is working harder than I am, and I’m running for president. And right now, the market values her work at zero. So we have to think bigger about what we mean by work and value. And if we succeed in that, then we can create a society where more people who are going to be automated out of their jobs are going to go on to fulfilling lives that they’re excited about, as opposed to right now we’re essentially kicking them to the curb, pushing them into the void, and then expecting that to go all right. And I hate to say it, but over time, them is us. And so we need to get our acts together and wake up to the bigger problems.michael barbaroAnd universal basic income would theoretically make all that possible.kevin rooseYeah, that’s what he’s arguing.michael barbaroWe’ll be right back.OK so that’s the logic of how this should work — if it works according to plan. I wonder how giving $1,000 to every American actually would work practically.kevin rooseSo there are Yang skeptics out there. There are people who just either don’t think this is a good idea, don’t think it’s necessary, or don’t think it would actually work in practice. So I wanted to ask him about that.kevin rooseGiving people $1,000 a month — this would have unintended consequences. Something would go wrong somewhere. Maybe it’s that landlords start jacking up people’s rent by $1,000 a month so the money all ends up going to landlords. Maybe it’s that there is inflation.andrew yangWell, I have plans and counter measures for those things, but go on.kevin rooseHow do you imagine government under a Yang presidency working to make sure that this actually works as intended — that people actually get to go buy their guitars and pay their car repair bills and pay their medical bills and have the kind of security that they need and that it doesn’t end up just sort of getting taken up by some other part of the economy?andrew yangWell, first, we need to try and make sure that you don’t have rent seeking and gouging behaviors. But if you have a passive income of $1,000 a month and your landlord tries to stick it to you, you’re much more portable and hard to push around now, because you’re like, wait a minute, I’ve got two adults in this house. We’ve got another $2,000 a month coming in.kevin rooseAlmost every other landlord has done the same thing.andrew yangBut then you get six people together and you say, you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to buy that fixer upper. You actually end up turning people into much more flexible decision makers than it’s like if you can barely make your month’s rent and so you just have to suck up whatever the landlord is telling you. There are so many positive effects on that side. And one of the comparisons I make is that mature companies like Verizon and Coke and Microsoft declare dividends all the time. And everyone applauds management and says good work. And you know what no one ever asks? What are the shareholders going to do with the money? Are we going to go around and say, what is this Verizon shareholder going to do with the dividend? We better make sure they spend it on the quote unquote “right things.”kevin rooseIf he’s making repairs to his yacht, that is not OK.andrew yangSo when people talk about it like, oh, what are you going to do with our money? It’s your money. You’re an owner and shareholder of the richest country in the history of the world that can easily afford $1,000 a month for each person. The problem is that people have, frankly, a very paternalistic attitude towards the poor. Where it’s like, all of a sudden, if you make a decision, then we have to somehow police it like you’re an infant. It’s ridiculous.kevin rooseOr they have a cynical view about rent seeking under capitalism that if there’s all this extra money floating around, that landlords or health care companies or investment banks or some other — someone will come along to try to take that $1,000 a month out of people’s pocket.andrew yangCorporate predations are real. That’s for sure. But one of the reasons why this dividend is so powerful is it makes people much harder to exploit. If you imagine a waitress at a diner getting harassed by her boss and she has no choice but to keep that job to make ends meet. If she’s getting $1,000 a month, she can be like, you know what? I’m going to quit this job, and then I’ll find another one. And I can survive for a month or two. So it empowers people. It does not make us more subject to predations.kevin rooseSo as I’m listening to Yang talk, I’m kind of thinking that there’s this sort of bizarre coexistence in his campaign message of extreme pessimism and extreme optimism. So his pessimistic part is he believes that there’s, essentially, this asteroid heading toward Earth. That there are these robots. They’re coming to take millions of jobs. They’re going create mass unemployment. It’s going to be a total societal collapse if we don’t do something about it, which is a very bleak vision of the future. That’s the part that sounds kind of like sci-fi. And then there’s this sort of extreme optimism — that if you just do the thing that he says — if you just give people $1,000 a month, humans are creative. They are ambitious. If you just satisfy their needs, they will find amazing things to do. They will start businesses. They will essentially make the decisions that you would hope they would make. And that humans really are at their core good.andrew yangI’m optimistic about the fact that there’s nothing stopping a majority of citizens of a democracy from rewriting the rules of our economy to work for us — the people, the owners, the shareholders of this country. That’s the source of my optimism.kevin rooseAnd the other thing I’m thinking is, yes, in a vacuum, this makes a lot of sense. But we’re not in a vacuum. In fact, we’re in an incredibly polarized political environment. And it’s not all about automation. There’s a culture war. There are people who believe that immigrants are threatening the future of Western civilization. And the core of Donald Trump’s appeal, a lot of it has been about culture and about values and about identity. And that’s the piece that you don’t really hear Yang talking about as much. And so I wanted to ask him about some of that too.kevin rooseNow, I know you have said over and over again that the reason that Donald Trump was elected is because we automated away these millions of manufacturing jobs in swing states in the Midwest. There’s also a cultural aspect of this. I mean, that was not the only reason that Donald Trump was elected.andrew yangAgreed.kevin rooseHow do you campaign in that environment while trying to make the story about jobs and automation and robots and basic income but knowing that there’s this whole other group of people who are motivated by cultural issues?andrew yangThe fact is if people feel like their own future’a insecure and their kids’ future is insecure, then they become more subject to xenophobic appeals, to racist appeals. And so if you’re dealing with a society of deprivation, then unfortunately those appeals become more powerful.kevin rooseSo it’s not just that people are wrongfully blaming job loss on immigrants when they should be blaming automation. It’s that actually you think that the automation in some ways causes people to be more biased against immigrants?andrew yangWell, so the automation — I’m just going to try and take a very —kevin rooseSorry, I’m just trying to wrap my head around it.andrew yangPlease, please. So let’s take a town in Ohio that had its plant close and thousands of people lost their jobs. And it’s rough. So people are struggling economically. And then your executive functioning erodes because you’re just trying to make ends meet.kevin rooseExecutive function meaning decision making ability.andrew yangYes — discernment, decision making, information processing. And then you have someone pop on your TV and say, hey, blame immigrants. Then you’re more likely to be like, yeah. Especially if that’s the main story you’re being told. Studies have shown that if you can’t pay your monthly bills, it imposes a mindset of scarcity that constrains your bandwidth and reduces your functional I.Q. by 13 points, which is what you’d expect in a country where 78 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and almost half can’t afford an unexpected $400 bill. So if you want us to become more reasonable and rational and proactive around things like climate change, then you would need to lift this mindset of scarcity that is weighing down so many of our people and replace it with at least some sort of relative abundance. And there’s no realistic way to do this except through something like a basic income.michael barbaroAnd, Kevin, what do you make of that answer? Because on the face of it, it’s compelling, but it’s also kind of confusing.kevin rooseWell, yeah, I mean — I think to a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. To Andrew Yang, every problem can be explained as a function of automation and stress introduced by technology.michael barbaroAnd solved with U.B.I.kevin rooseAnd solved with $1,000 a month. Because he’s basically saying that, yes, racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, gender bias — these things are problems, but they’re not the root problem. The root problem is that people are stressed out because their jobs are changing. They’re worried about becoming obsolete. They don’t have money to fulfill their basic needs. And they’re really stressed out. And that if you just solve that problem, that will kind of solve all of the rest of the problems too. And so I don’t know how persuasive people are going to find this. There are a lot of people who are stressed about paying rent, and they’re not all clamoring for the wall at the border. But I think the way that all of this ties together is part of the reason that I think he’s been able to attract and maintain this sort of devoted audience. I think when we talked in 2017, this was essentially an argument about economics and labor. I mean, he was essentially approaching this as a math problem. But in the years since then, he’s been able to sort of turn it into a discussion about what it means to be a human — about what we would do if we weren’t so worried about making ends meet. And I think that’s the part that I didn’t see when I first met him was that this argument — this sort of wonky economics argument about automation and U.B.I. and G.D.P. and all these other three-letter acronyms — that he could make it appeal to people on an emotional level by saying this is not just about giving you free money. But instead, he’s saying it’s not about the money. It’s about what the money can allow you to do. And that’s the part that I think I missed.andrew yangI found that the more human I am, the better the campaign goes. And I enjoy it more. And people around me enjoy it more. So it’s just a win all the way around. And I think you know this about me — it’s not like I’m obsessed with becoming president.kevin rooseAndrew, you’re running for president. I’m just going to remind you.andrew yangI’m running and everyone knows I’m running. But everyone also knows that I’m not running because of some deep, native, long-standing burning desire to become the President of the United States. I’m running because we’re facing some of the biggest existential problems in our history, and our government does not have its shit together.kevin rooseAnd one of the last questions — we’ve got a debate coming up. In the last debate, I think you maybe got a couple questions off. You were given a little bit of speaking time, but you didn’t get off any made for TV zingers. So what’s your game plan going into this debate? Are you taking a different strategy or are you kind of going to try to play the game more in terms of having these soundbites that are made to be clipped and replayed?andrew yangIt’s probably not in my interest to try and compete with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for airtime. I just need to make the most of the time that I have. But I’m very confident that the airtime I have will be impactful. And that if it goes like the last debate in terms of hundreds of thousands, millions of Americans finding out about my campaign and exploring the ideas more fully, then that’s going to be a big win for us.kevin rooseAndrew Yang, thank you for talking with us. I am very glad to be able to upgrade you from longer than long shot to medium long shot.andrew yangDark horse. Dark horse is my preferred term. Thanks.kevin rooseThanks a lot.michael barbaroWe’ll be right back.Here’s what else you need to know today.archived recording (donald trump)We have a problem in our country. It’s a new problem. It’s a problem nobody really thought about too much a few years ago and it’s called vaping — especially vaping as it pertains to innocent children.michael barbaroOn Wednesday, the Trump administration said it would ban the sales of most flavored e-cigarettes after hundreds of people became sick with vaping-related illnesses and as the use of e-cigarettes by minors surges.archived recording (donald trump)There have been deaths and there have been a lot of other problems. People think it’s an easy solution to cigarettes, but it’s turned out that it has its own difficulties.michael barbaroDuring a meeting in the Oval Office, the president and his aides described vaping as a dangerous new problem that required government intervention and flavored e-cigarettes as a major reason why minors take up vaping. And the Supreme Court said it would allow the Trump administration to enforce new rules that would forbid migrants from seeking asylum in the U.S. if they traveled through a different country without seeking asylum there first. A federal appeals court had blocked the controversial policy which is designed to reduce asylum applications. But the Supreme Court said it could go into effect, even as legal challenges move forward. Finally, under a tentative legal settlement reached on Wednesday, Purdue Pharma, the company that created OxyContin and played a major role in the opioid crisis, will file for bankruptcy, dissolve, and reemerge as a new organization devoted to helping victims of the crisis. The settlement, made with 22 states and more than 2,000 cities, will include $3 billion in payments from the Sacklers, the family that owns Purdue Pharma. But it does not include an admission of wrongdoing.That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

I’m sitting in a meeting with 17 other Quartz editors. Everyone else is typing away (or staring blankly) at their Apple laptops. After the meeting is over, they’ll carry these large, metal machines back to their desks, building up to tennis elbows and strained shoulders over a lifetime of office work. I, on the other hand, have joined the future. I’m writing (and definitely paying attention to the meeting) on my new iPad Pro, a lightweight marvel that has pretty much replaced my laptop in most situations.I’ve been traveling a lot the last few months, usually dragging with me my laptop and its weighty charger, as I have for years. It’s an annoying reality of working on the road. But for my last few trips, I left my laptop at home and relied solely on my 1-pound iPad Pro. There are minor hurdles to overcome, but it’s really been quite simple.Since the iPad Pro was first introduced in 2015 (or maybe even since the first iPad came out in 2010), debates have raged over whether the tablet represented the future of computing, or just a nifty distraction. In the intervening years, the reality is that it’s been somewhere in the middle. The iPad has been a robust business for Apple, generating around $19 billion in sales over the last four quarters, but it hasn’t been a growing one. Perhaps because people don’t tend to use their tablets like their phones, they don’t seem to have replaced them as often.The last iPad I bought (before this Pro) was 2013’s iPad Air. Back then, I viewed the new slim iPad as a great device to take on vacation to read books and watch movies, browse the web, and leave in my living room. That’s where it sat for years, until the battery life got so poor that I had to leave it plugged in at all times (which is still useful, as it now serves as a hub for my smart-home devices).I’ve wanted to replace my laptop with an iPad for years—I have a bad back, hate carrying a bunch of chargers, and I like touchscreens—but nothing Apple has released has really been able to replace the simplicity of a laptop for work. I thought last year’s iPad might, but it wasn’t quite there. Seeing as Apple seems strangely resistant to putting touchscreens on its laptops when all its competitors already have them, I gave up a couple years ago and just bought a MacBook.But then I used the new iPad Pro. It was fast, tiny (especially the 11-inch model), and surprisingly fine to type on. I hesitated purchasing one because I didn’t want to fall into that whole “is-it-or-isn’t-it-a-computer-what-even-is-a-computer” debate again. But then I felt a twinge of pain in my back and considered that there’s a 14-day return policy at Apple.After using the new iPad Pro as my main travel, living room, and office-meeting computer, I’ve generally realized that the iPad Pro really can handle just about everything I need to do.I’ve written features, lightly edited photos, and even made charts from my new iPad—although that last one was kind of difficult. I have full versions of Word, Excel, Slack, Gmail, and just about everything else I need to get work done. Some things are still frustrating—for some reason, on any iOS device, it’s impossible to highlight text properly in WordPress, which makes editing very difficult—but I’ve found that any tradeoffs are worth it for a device that I can fit in every bag I own.There are other limitations, such as the fact that you can only have two apps running on-screen at once (or three, if you count the weird floating app thing Apple introduced in iOS 11), you can’t have the windows overlapping, and apps will go to sleep if you don’t use them for too long. Then there’s the Pencil stylus, which is still pretty pointless unless you’re an artist. Other than to show people how it works or to highlight something in the odd screenshot, I’ve barely used it in the month I’ve had the tablet. It’s pretty nifty how it just magnetically snaps to the iPad to charge, though.But, honestly, I don’t care. It’s a simple-to-use device that lets me browse Tweetdeck, answer all my emails, and even take handwritten notes, with relative ease. The battery feels like it lasts forever—Apple says it will last up to 10 hours of web use, but I feel as if I’ve gotten longer out of it. The FaceID cameras, used to unlock the device, are lighting-fast, and seem to work however I’m holding the machine. Apple even changed the charging connector from its Lighting port (found on iPhones and older iPads) to USB-C, which is what its laptops and many other new devices use, which lets you use all your computer accessories, and even hook the tablet up to an external monitor.This is not going to be the thing that replaces your work computer—if you need to crunch a ton of data, or edit videos with pixel perfection, get a Mac. But I’m not sure I can see myself buying another normal laptop in the future. The only real sticking point (which is pretty common with Apple products) is the price. The 11-inch model starts at $800, and with the (completely necessary) $179 keyboard case and the (less necessary) $129 Pencil, you’re looking at dropping over $1,100 for the base model. “You could buy a MacBook for that price!” I hear you cry. You’re right, and you probably should, if you only ever use your computer on desks and tables and don’t move around too much.But if you’re a frequent traveler, or if want something for your home that doesn’t weigh a ton and is easy to use at pretty much any age, the new iPad Pro is likely the device for you. I don’t really care whether it’s the future of computing or what a computer actually is, philosophically (I think we all have powerful computers in our pockets these days, and many have ones on our wrists, too!). I just care that after eight years of trying, it feels like Apple has made an iPad that I actually want to use other than in a few spare minutes on the couch.

Donald Trump’s trade war with China and fears over rising interest rates triggered stock market losses worth $2tn (£1.6tn) for the world’s super-rich last year.After seven years of steadily rising wealth, the richest people on the planet saw the combined value of their assets slide by 3% from a year earlier to stand at $68.1tn as financial markets plunged against a backdrop of rising tensions, with China hit the hardest by the decline.The US-China trade war and the US Federal Reserve raising interest rates against a backdrop of rising concerns over the global economy sent stocks into a tailspin last year, hitting the investments of pensions funds and the global elite.According to the annual world wealth report from the consultancy firm Capgemini, which surveys the global elite, the number of “high net worth individuals” (HNWI) dropped by about 100,000 to stand at 18 million.A high net worth individual is defined as anyone with $1m (£641,000) or more in “investable assets”. The definition excludes the value of a main home and of any consumer durables such as cars.Asia accounted for about $1tn of the decline in the total wealth of the world’s super-rich, with China accounting for more than a quarter of the fall in total HNWI wealth against a backdrop of plunging Chinese stock markets.HNWI wealth declined across nearly all other regions: Latin America declined by 4%, Europe by 3% and North America by 1%, while wealth rose by 4% in the Middle East. The total wealth of the US super-rich declined by 1%, despite US GDP rising and the rate of unemployment dropping to the lowest level since the 1960s.In the worst annual performance since the financial crisis, the widespread turmoil dragged the FTSE All-World index down 11.5%. More than £240bn was erased from the value of London-listed shares, while the Shanghai composite index crashed by 25%, leaving investors suffering heavy losses.“Global stock markets started 2018 with a strong note, but as the year progressed, momentum was lost, and the year ended on a low note – primarily because of growing interest rates and trade concerns,” Capgemini said.While the world’s wealthy were left nursing large losses, their position still sharply contrasts with the rest of the planet. The 18 million HNWI individuals have at least $3m each, on average, while the total wealth pile of $68.1tn is almost worth as much as the total output of the world economy each year.Oxfam warned earlier this year that the rising concentration of the world’s wealth meant 26 billionaires own as many assets as the 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of the planet’s population.According to research from the International Labour Organization last week, nearly half of all global pay is scooped up by the top 10% of workers, while the lowest-paid 50% receive only 6.4%.Although the wealth of the super-rich declined last year, stock markets have raced back into life in 2019 after the US Fed and the European Central Bank stepped back from raising interest rates, likely reinflating the portfolios of HNWI investors.Hopes have also risen for a deal between Washington and Beijing in the trade war between the world’s two largest economies, which has served as a brake on global economic growth over the past year. Topics The super-rich Rich lists Inequality Stock markets Federal Reserve news

The Trump administration’s decision to place the MS-13 street gang at the centre of its immigration enforcement has helped the organization bolster its fearsome reputation and risks handing it further political capital, according to a groundbreaking study on the crime group. La Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13 – formed in the 1980s by Salvadoran immigrants on the US west coast before spreading through Central America and the US – has been the subject of intense focus by the administration.Trump used his State of Union address in January to call on Congress to legislate hardline immigration reform in order to “close the deadly loopholes that have allowed MS-13 and other criminal gangs to break into our country”.But a new research project, published on Monday by the Insight Crime thinktank, warns that the politicisation of the gang will only serve to embolden it.“In the United States, the federal government has made the MS-13 a center-point of its immigration policy, which has bolstered the gang’s image as the most feared gang in the region. The gang will take advantage of this political capital when it is handed to it,” the study cautions.The study – based on interviews with more than 100 gang members and other experts – describes the group as a complex, nebulous organization, made up primarily of teenagers that is both social and criminal in nature, and has no single leader or leadership structure.Héctor Silva Ávalos, an InSight Crime investigator who helped compile the report, said he and other researchers spent time with dozens of gang members over a three-year period in the US and El Salvador. Researchers met MS-13 members at prisons and in the neighbourhoods they operate in.Ávalos cautioned that the Trump administration was employing the same criminal enforcement strategy that has failed to work in Central America. “Most of the responses in Latin America came out of politics and were not policy-based,” Ávalos said, adding the Trump administration was employing “the same narrative we’ve been hearing for 25 years – all of which has ended in failure.“They operate within a limited understanding of the gang, that does not recognize it is first and foremost a social organization.”The report also finds the gang takes advantage of existing migration patterns rather than coherently sending members from El Salvador to create new cells.“MS-13 members migrate for the same reasons that other migrants do, and they go to the same places. They also face many of the same risks such as indigence, isolation, victimization, detention and deportation,” the report says. The gang has been responsible for a number of brutal murders that have captured national attention in recent years. In Brentwood, Long Island – a community with a large Salvadoran immigration population – local police say the gang is responsible for at least 27 murders in the area since 2013, including a gruesome quadruple homicide last year. Trump visited the area in 2017 and branded MS-13 members “animals” who have “transformed peaceful parks and beautiful quiet neighborhoods into blood-stained killing fields”. During the same speech Trump also encouraged law enforcement to resort to violence in dealing with gang members. The Guardian found last year that many residents accused local law enforcement of significantly over-reaching during a clampdown on gang activity and uncovered that immigration enforcement had relied on memos that included no documentary evidence to allege gang membership during deportation proceedings. The Insight Crime report found that the gang has significantly expanded in recent years, with an estimated 50,000–70,000 members around the world. The report identified about 10 MS-13 groups (known as “cliques”) in Long Island, about 20 in Los Angeles and close to 250 in El Salvador. The gang has also appeared in urban areas of Spain and Italy, the study notes. But these cliques operate in a semi-autonomous manner, giving them “wide latitude in terms of size, purview and criminal economy”. As such, combating the gang requires a “multi-party solution”, the report argues, saying: “Solutions to this problem need to address social exclusion and lack of opportunity as much or more as they do the law enforcement challenges posed by the gang.” Topics US immigration Gangs Americas El Salvador US crime New York news

If you were seeking to be positive about the likely premiership of Boris Johnson – which is absolutely not my intention – you might liken him to one of his predecessors as foreign secretary and prime minister, Lord Palmerston, who dominated British politics in the 1850s and 60s and, for all his foibles (and sexual excesses), was much loved by the public.The similarities in their worldviews are striking. Palmerston was popular because his politics were founded on foreigner-bashing. His vision of the world was simple: Britain had perfected the art of democracy and was entitled to impose its views on everyone else. As one historian has noted, the “ideological strand to Palmerston’s diplomacy … appealed to the aggressive national chauvinism that was such an important component of the mid-Victorian psyche”.That foreigner-bashing finds its modern parallel in Johnson, who has spent much of his career being beastly about those who had the misfortune not to be born British. This despite his own Turkish ancestry – a severe case of over-compensation perhaps. His rude poem about Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan having sex with a goat (“There was a young fellow from Ankara / Who was a terrific wankerer”) certainly seems to bear out this psychological interpretation.Johnson’s far-from-sunny view of the French has also now been revealed. He thinks they are “turds”, a remark disgracefully pulled from a BBC documentary on the Foreign Office last year because it threatened to derail the Brexit negotiations – what self-respecting news organisation censors its greatest scoop? – but now exposed by the Daily Mail.Calling the French “turds” for being intransigent on Brexit is a sign of Johnson’s vulgarity and stupidity. As his second-class degree suggests, his is a second-rate mind trying desperately to persuade us it is a first-rate one by using Latin tags and improper jokes. His useless, vapid books are the measure of the man. Everything that Johnson has ever said about the world is jokey, insensitive, stupid and needlessly provocative. His racism is well-rehearsed. Where does one begin? Perhaps in 2002 when he discussed a visit to Africa by Tony Blair in an article in his mouthpiece, the Daily Telegraph: “What a relief it must be for Blair to get out of England,” he wrote. “It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies.”One racist allusion was, however, not enough. He went on: “They say he [Blair] is shortly off to the Congo. No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and their tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird.”In 2006 Johnson had to apologise when he suggested that the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea were cannibals. “For 10 years we in the Tory party have become used to Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing,” he wrote (in the Telegraph again, of course), “and so it is with a happy amazement that we watch as the madness engulfs the Labour party.” During the 2016 referendum campaign, Johnson suggested that President Obama’s view of the UK was attributable to his “part-Kenyan” heritage and “ancestral dislike of the British empire”.Johnson, who once referred to Africa as “that country”, would agree with Palmerston that colonialism is a jolly good thing. “The problem is not that we were once in charge [in Africa],” he wrote in the Spectator in 2002, “but that we are not in charge any more. The best fate for Africa would be if the old colonial powers, or their citizens, scrambled once again in her direction; on the understanding that this time they will not be asked to feel guilty.”Johnson and his supporters usually claim he is being quoted out of context, or put his statements down to Johnsonian wit and love of rhetorical hyperbole. “Boris is Boris,” they chortle. Will that really wash if he becomes prime minister? Johnson is a classic example of arrested development: he remains the eternal privileged 15-year-old having everything done for him at Eton, devoid of empathy, failing to understand that words have consequences, useless with money (as his current inamorata has noted), utterly self-centred, childlike. You can see this play out once again in l’affaire turd, as the foreign office is left to clean up Johnson’s diplomatic mess with the help of an acquiescent broadcaster.Arrogance and lack of emotional intelligence no doubt explain many of his remarks but, as others have noted, beneath the endless layers of bluster there is a yearning for empire and a kernel of nationalism that ultimately led him to support Brexit in 2016. Reciting fragments of Rudyard Kipling’s poem Mandalay on a visit to a Buddhist temple in Myanmar in 2017 suggests that a nostalgic imperial vision still lurks in that atrophied adolescent brain.The words of Mandalay are almost guaranteed to cause a war on the spot – and especially on this sacred spot: “An’ I seed her first a-smokin’ of a whackin’ white cheroot, / An’ a-wastin’ Christian kisses on an ’eathen idol’s foot: / Bloomin’ idol made o’ mud / Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd / Plucky lot she cared for idols when I kissed ’er where she stud! / On the road to Mandalay …” Yes, our foreign secretary really did think referencing that poem was appropriate.Johnson’s racist remarks – set alongside equally outrageous examples of sexism and homophobia – should disqualify him as prime minister. Instead, they appear to endear him to the Tory membership, who feel an urgent need to out-Farage Farage, perhaps even to trump Trump. The US president gets away with it by being the leader of the world’s most powerful country, as Palmerston did when Britain was top dog in the 1860s. A Johnsonian UK will just look ridiculous. Xenophobia and gunboat diplomacy only really work if you have enough gunboats. Someone needs to tell Johnson that we no longer do.• Stephen Moss is a feature writer at the Guardian Topics Boris Johnson Opinion Conservative leadership Conservatives France comment

(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the sign-up.)Good evening. Here’s the latest.ImageCredit...Al Drago/The New York Times1. The White House has stripped the security clearance of John Brennan, above, the former C.I.A. chief and a vocal critic of President Trump. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, indicated that the reason was that he is among a group of former officials who have “transitioned into highly partisan” people.And closing arguments in the bank and tax fraud trial of Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, began today, with prosecutors calling the evidence against him “overwhelming.”Separately, newspapers across the U.S. are publishing editorials rejecting Mr. Trump’s repeated verbal attacks on the news media. Here is The Times’s essay._____2. For years, Viktor Orban, Hungary’s strongman leader, has craved validation from Washington. With President Trump in office, his government may be on the road to getting it.The Obama administration punished Mr. Orban for his creeping authoritarianism and crackdown on civil society. But Mr. Trump has thawed the relationship, and his administration is engaging with Hungary and nearby Poland.The White House’s embrace of Mr. Orban has many worried: Some European diplomats and analysts see it as part of a move to divide the European Union._____3. A bleak record: Drug overdoses killed about 72,000 Americans in 2017, according to C.D.C. estimates.That’s about a 10 percent rise. Strong synthetic drugs like fentanyl may be partly to blame, along with the growing number of Americans who use opioids.But there’s some room for optimism. The monthly C.D.C. numbers suggest that deaths might have begun leveling off by the end of the year._____4. It was a night of firsts and upsets in Tuesday’s primaries.Democrats delivered groundbreaking victories for a transgender woman in Vermont, a Muslim woman in Minnesota and an African-American woman in Connecticut. Here are four main takeaways, and the full results.And nationwide, the Democratic Party is trying out a new tactic: letting candidates determine their own messages.It’s a risky strategy, essentially putting off answering one of the most immediate questions facing the party after its losses in 2016: What does it stand for?_____5. “Every single person that has died, I do it for them.”The students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., know exactly what they are standing for. For months, they have traveled across the country to rally for stricter gun control laws.Our reporter spent three days on the road with them as they connected with local activists and registered voters.It’s the first day of school, but nothing is the same._____6. Starting in Los Angeles, body scanners are coming to subways and buses across the country.The portable devices are designed to help foil attacks in transit hubs, like the faulty pipe bomb in New York’s Times Square and Port Authority subway stations last year.New York is testing out the technology this week, too.“We’re looking specifically for weapons that have the ability to cause a mass casualty event,” a Los Angeles official said.The scanners will not slow down riders or create the snaking, slow lines you find at airports, officials say. The scanners are expected to be rolled out in Los Angeles later this year._____7. The Tesla fallout continues.On the heels of Elon Musk’s tweet last week saying that he was considering taking the company private, the S.E.C. has served Tesla with a subpoena, according to someone with knowledge of the investigation.The claim, which several people said was more of a flip remark from the chief executive, has created headaches for the company’s board, which is scrambling to rein in its erratic leader.It has become clear since then that neither Mr. Musk nor Tesla had actually lined up the necessary financing for the move, aside from having preliminary conversations with some investors._____8. A bloody day in Afghanistan.Dozens were killed in the north after Taliban insurgents overran an Afghan Army base and a police checkpoint, killing at least 39 soldiers and police officers.Separately, in Kabul, a suicide bomber carried out an attack inside a classroom, leaving at least 48 dead.The attacks cap a tense period, which began on Friday with a Taliban assault on Ghazni City, in the east. President Ashraf Ghani said the Taliban control of that area had been contained, but residents said the fighting continued. Here’s what’s at stake._____9. When it comes to dating, women want brains. Men care less about that.That’s just one takeaway from a new study about the desirability of men and women who use online dating apps. Researchers determined that while men’s sexual desirability peaks at age 50, women’s starts high at 18 — and falls from there.The study is not an anomaly. It echoed a conclusion that OkCupid reached after releasing some of its data: “The male fixation on youth distorts the dating pool.”_____10. Finally, the late-night hosts focused on the new memoir from Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former White House aide — and President Trump’s furor over the book.“Yeah, Trump called Omarosa a dog,” Jimmy Fallon said. “Then he rolled over for Putin, barked at his staff and ate a bunch of paper.”And Jimmy Kimmel put it bluntly: “Only Donald Trump would defend himself from being racist by saying something sexist.”Have a great evening._____Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p.m. Eastern.And don’t miss Your Morning Briefing. Sign up here to get it by email in the Australian, Asian, European or American morning.Want to catch up on past briefings? You can browse them here.What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at [email protected].

In identifying the response to the women who have gone public with accusations against Kavanaugh as misogynist rather than sexist, I refer to a helpful distinction made by the philosopher Kate Manne in her book “Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny.” Whereas sexism justifies patriarchal social arrangements by differentiating between women and men, she points out, misogyny works by differentiating between “good women” and “bad women,” by rewarding the good ones and punishing the bad. It “should be understood,” Manne writes, “primarily as the ‘law enforcement’ branch of a patriarchal order, which has the overall function of policing and enforcing its governing norms and expectations.” A central mechanism for enforcing these determinations is the deployment of misogynist attacks against women who have stepped out of line by stepping forward to intervene in national politics. These attacks take the form of an attempt to annihilate the women as epistemic subjects. Every stupid remark (“She admits she was drunk,” “She’s mixed up,” “Why didn’t she report at the time?”) is designed to dismantle her status as a knower. Structuring the hearing as if the accuser were on trial by hiring a sex-crimes prosecutor to question her discloses the real purpose of the process.Misogynist attacks on the one giving testimony also take on the temporal structure of a typical sexual assault, in which time is sped up and pressure to hurry up and do it right now is applied incessantly (“Drink this,” “Drink faster,” “I’ve gotta have it now,” “You’re holding out on me,” “I don’t wait, I just start kissing,” “Shove her in the room quick before she knows what’s happening,” “Get her drunk,” “O.K., get in line”). This is typical of all manner of sexual violence against women. While the Republicans made a show of giving Dr. Blasey “all the time she needs” during the hearing itself, the entire process has involved a pitched a battle over time, in which the Republicans’ determination to rush the Kavanaugh decision and their outrage over delays echoes and repeats the hurry-up temporality of sexual assault. Kavanaugh himself was enraged by having to wait. “I wanted a hearing the day after the allegation came up,” he shouted. “I wanted to be here that day!” I am a 57-year-old full professor of philosophy tenured at a well-respected research institution, who might be tempted to engage in an abstract analysis of these dynamics and leave it at that. This is what we are told “doing philosophy” entails. But in this case, I must evoke my own experience to get at the deep meaning of such events. So, #MeToo.I was gang raped by my sister’s boyfriend and his friends at what was supposed to be a party. I was 19, a sophomore in college. They were in their 30s, graduate students at another institution. My sister’s boyfriend, whom I considered a trusted friend, and his roommates had invited us to their home. They immediately started pushing shots of tequila on us (“hurry up,” “drink more”). I had so little experience with alcohol at that point, I had no idea how fast I could be incapacitated.When we were drunk enough, my sister was escorted away to sleep and I remember the image of her departure and the fear that cut like a knife through the fog. My memories are broken and choppy after that. They are mostly still photographs, even today in sharp focus. At certain points there is a short video burned into my brain; these memories are surrounded by periods of blackness. I don’t know everything that happened that night. I know enough. (This kind of assault is not shocking, to allege such an assault is not outrageous. Julie Swetnick’s claims are not from the “twilight zone,” they are from a typical American college campus.)

Lack of diversity in the artificial intelligence field has reached “a moment of reckoning”, according to new findings published by a New York University research center. A “diversity disaster” has contributed to flawed systems that perpetuate gender and racial biases found the survey, published by the AI Now Institute, of more than 150 studies and reports.The AI field, which is overwhelmingly white and male, is at risk of replicating or perpetuating historical biases and power imbalances, the report said. Examples cited include image recognition services making offensive classifications of minorities, chatbots adopting hate speech, and Amazon technology failing to recognize users with darker skin colors. The biases of systems built by the AI industry can be largely attributed to the lack of diversity within the field itself, the report said.“The industry has to acknowledge the gravity of the situation and admit that its existing methods have failed to address these problems,” Kate Crawford, an author on the report said. “The use of AI systems for the classification, detection, and prediction of race and gender is in urgent need of re-evaluation.”More than 80% of AI professors are men, and only 15% of AI researchers at Facebook and 10% of AI researchers at Google are women, the report said. The makeup of the AI field is reflective of “a larger problem across computer science, Stem fields, and even more broadly, society as a whole”, said Danaë Metaxa, a PhD candidate and researcher at Stanford focused on issues of internet and democracy. Women comprised only 24% of the field of computer and information sciences in 2015, according to the National Science Board. Only 2.5% of Google’s workforce is black, while Facebook and Microsoft are each at 4%, and little data exists on trans workers or other gender minorities in the AI field.“The urgency behind this issue is increasing as AI becomes increasingly integrated into society,” Metaxa said. “Essentially, the lack of diversity in AI is concentrating an increasingly large amount of power and capital in the hands of a select subset of people.”Venture capital funding for AI startups reached record levels in 2018, increasing 72% compared to 2017 to $9.33bn in funding. Active AI startups in the US increased 113% from 2015 to 2018. As more money and resources are invested into AI, companies have the opportunity to address the crisis as it unfolds, said Tess Posner, the chief executive officer of AI4ALL, a not-for-profit that works to increase diversity in the AI field. This lack of diversity must be addressed before AI reaches a “tipping point”, she said.“Every day that goes by it gets more difficult to solve the problem,” she said. “Right now we are in an exciting moment where we can make a difference before we see how much more complicated it can get later.”The report released on Tuesday cautioned against addressing diversity in the tech industry by fixing the “pipeline” problem, or the makeup of who is hired, alone. Men currently make up 71% of the applicant pool for AI jobs in the US, according to the 2018 AI Index, an independent report on the industry released annually. The AI institute suggested additional measures, including publishing compensation levels for workers publicly, sharing harassment and discrimination transparency reports, and changing hiring practices to increase the number of underrepresented groups at all levels.Google disbanded an artificial intelligence ethics council meant to oversee such issues just one week after announcing it in March. The Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (ATEAC) was attracted backlash inside and outside the company after it appointed the anti-LGBT advocate Kay Coles James.Posner noted that additional efforts to increase transparency around how algorithms are built and how they work may be necessary to fix the diversity problems in AI. This month, the US senators Cory Booker and Ron Wyden introduced the Algorithmic Accountability Act, a bill that would require algorithms used by companies that make more than $50m per year or hold information on at least 1 million users to be evaluated for biases.“The core of the problem is whether market forces are going to be sufficient for this to be fixed,” Posner said. “It’s going to take effort at all stages of AI and take change at cultural and procedural levels to solve this.” Topics Artificial intelligence (AI) Computing Race Gender Silicon Valley news

They fall out of trees. They fly into windows. They stumble along branches and wobble their small feathered bodies as if they have had one marg too many.Have the drunk birds come early this year?In Gilbert, a city of about 1,800 people in northeastern Minnesota, the police chief sent out a lighthearted notice to residents this week informing them that there was no need to call the police on local birds that appeared to be inebriated.The birds seemed to have been munching on berries that fermented as a result of an early frost, Chief Ty Techar wrote in a Facebook post, and some had gotten “a little more ‘tipsy’ than normal.”But bird experts are skeptical that this public debauchery was really the product of drunkenness. It is too early in the season for many berries to have fermented, they say, and birds may be slamming into windows at unusual rates because of a large seasonal migration through the area.Laura Erickson, a bird expert who lives in the nearby city of Duluth, Minn., said it was possible that a small number of robins or other species had gotten themselves intoxicated on berries, but those fruits typically require a longer period of cold weather to ferment on a large scale. Robins could also be fleeing “helter skelter” after spotting hawks, which are also in the peak of their migration season, she said.Despite her doubts, Ms. Erickson does not blame people for delighting in the viral story that drunken birds were wreaking havoc in the city.“I think this week everybody is yearning for something that we can all laugh at together,” she said. “Drunken birds sound funny, and they are funny.”Chief Techar said in an interview that there were multiple reports of robins and other small birds acting confused, crashing into car windshields and generally “flopping all over the place.” In one case, he said, a bird had flown through a resident’s window and lay dead on the floor.Another behavior of drunken birds — a condition most commonly seen in robins and other thrushes, as well as cedar waxwings — is an atypical willingness to stay put when a human approaches, rather than fly away.There’s no definitive proof that the birds are drunk, Chief Techar said, but they sure are acting that way. “I didn’t have a chance to give them a Breathalyzer test,” he said. “But you can tell.”Kenn Kaufman, a bird expert who is a field editor for Audubon, said he was more convinced by the explanation that yellow-rumped warblers, which migrate en masse through the area at this time of year, were adding significantly to the number of birds plowing into windows.But Mr. Kaufman, who lives in Ohio, said drunken birds were certainly a real phenomenon. Apart from berry eaters, drunkenness can also befall yellow-bellied sapsuckers that feed on fermented tree sap.Unlike some other observers, Mr. Kaufman finds it more difficult to laugh at the plight of these potentially drunken creatures. He compared this widespread glee to the reaction to YouTube videos of loopy children after oral surgery.In one documented episode of drunken birds from 2010, about 50 dead birds were found near a roadside in Texas, according to a report from the National Wildlife Health Center. The report stated that nearby berries had high enough ethanol levels to intoxicate the birds and result in “compromised behavior,” which may have caused them to be struck by vehicles.“Fermentation toxicity,” as the report called it, is most common in late winter and early spring, when thawing berries promote yeast fermentation of the sugars in the fruit.Ms. Erickson, the bird expert from Minnesota, said drunken birds could be taken to wildlife rehabilitation centers, where they would be given food and water to help sober up. A home remedy for a drunken bird that has been stunned, she said, is to place it in a box with holes poked in or a loosely fitting cover (and check on the patient every 10 to 15 minutes until it is ready to fly away).So yes, there may be some drunken birds in Gilbert, and there may be some more getting plastered later in the winter. But ornithophobics do not have to fear a terrifying horde of divebombing creatures like the ones in the 1963 Alfred Hitchcock film.Chief Techar said on Friday that people might have taken his Facebook notice more seriously than he intended.“It has kind of gotten blown out of proportion,” he said. “It sounds like every bird in our town is hammered, and that’s not the case.”