This is a 360 film. Click to play then follow the story as the illustration is drawn.To commemorate the second anniversary of the death of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned while attempting to reach Greece in 2015, the author Khaled Hosseini, a UNHCR goodwill ambassador , has written Sea Prayer. This imagined letter is written in the form of a monologue, delivered by a Syrian father to the son lying asleep in his lap, on the eve of their sea crossing to Europe. Hosseini is the author of The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns and And the Mountains Echoed. Sea Prayer is the first narrative animated virtual reality film created using Tilt Brush, a tool for painting in a 3D space with VR. Using this tool, the Guardian’s in-house VR team, in collaboration with the acclaimed VR artist Liz Edwards, has brought Hosseini’s sensitive imagining of this letter to life. Narrated by the Bafta-winning actor Adeel Akhtar, who takes the role of the father, Sea Prayer reflects on the city of Homs, a devastated war zone where he grew up and which he is being forced to leave behind with his son. Hosseini’s piece also meditates on the dangerous sea crossing that lies ahead. Sea Prayer is accompanied by a score specially composed by Sahba Aminikia, an Iranian-American contemporary classical music composer, and performed by the US-based string musicians Kronos Quartet and the musical saw player David Coulter.People continue to attempt this journey, many losing their lives in the process. Since Alan’s death, at least 8,500 refugees and migrants have died or gone missing trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea.This piece was made in collaboration with the UNHCR. Topics Khaled Hosseini Syria Middle East and North Africa features

Fatal wildfires scorching eight Northern California counties this week have dealt a devastating blow to the important wine and tourism industries, destroying several historic wineries and threatening the remaining grape harvest in the Napa and Sonoma valleys.Although the seasonal harvest is nearly complete, the conflagration threatens to disrupt tens of thousands of jobs and destroy valuable stores of grapes and wine in bins, barrels and bottles. The extent of the damage will be unclear for days because the fires are blocking many worried owners from reaching their wineries.Tourism in the region — a multibillion-dollar economic machine that includes high-end hotels, wine-tasting tours and upscale cuisine — is suffering as the flames have claimed a number of establishments and forced many others to shutter for the rest of the week.“It has been a devastating fire,” the Sonoma County Winegrowers group said in a Facebook post. “Reports of fire damage to wineries, businesses and homes continues to grow.”The blazes — which have left at least 17 people dead — continued to rage on Tuesday. Seventeen separate fires, across 115,000 acres, have forced more than 20,000 people to evacuate.California is the fourth-largest wine producer in the world, according to the Wine Institute advocacy group, and generates $15.2 billion in taxes annually.Among the damaged wineries:■ White Rock Vineyards, established as a winery at the foot of the Stag’s Leap area of Napa Valley in 1871 and owned by the Vandendriessche family since 1977, burned to the ground on Monday.■ Signorello Estate, a family-owned, ivy-draped winery along the scenic Silverado Trail in Napa, was also engulfed in flames.ImageThe Paradise Ridge winery in Santa Rosa, Calif., before and after the fire.CreditLeft, Josh McNair/California Through My Lens; right, Paradise Ridge■ Paradise Ridge posted photos of the charred rubble and blackened hillside where its Santa Rosa winery — just shy of its 40th anniversary — had stood.■ Ancient Oak Cellars in Santa Rosa said in a Facebook post that the fire had destroyed a house, two redwood barns and the tasting counter on the property. But it said the majority of the company’s bottled wines and all of its wine barrels were safe in other locations.The fires also destroyed several Santa Rosa establishments, including the Fountaingrove Inn, the Hilton Sonoma Wine Country hotel, Willi’s Wine Bar, the Cricklewood steakhouse and more.The French Laundry, a restaurant in Yountville with three Michelin stars, was closed Monday night because of power failures.Some wineries in the fire’s path escaped serious harm.Darioush Winery, in Napa, lost half of its Persian-inspired landscaping to the flames, but the winery was still standing and the wines were in good condition, said Dan de Polo, president of the winery.“It’s dynamic and messy right now,” he said of the fires. “There are still a lot of dangerous zones.”At the James Cole Winery, in Napa, the co-owner James Harder and his family evacuated Sunday night after the fire demolished the eight-foot fence surrounding the vineyard. Neighboring homes were burning to the ground, as was the nearby Signorello winery.“We thought our property was gone,” Mr. Harder said.But then the winds shifted. He and several friends returned to James Cole and formed a “bucket brigade” to put out remaining flames, saving all but a few small outbuildings.On Tuesday, Mr. Harder returned through “very dangerous smoke and haze” with a rented truck to rescue grapes that had been waiting in bins and barrels to ferment. The winery still had five acres of unpicked grapes and 10 tons of the fruit in the cellar.ImageDamage at Signorello Estate. Wineries could lose vast reserves of wines aging in barrels and bottles, said Karissa Kruse, president of the Sonoma County Winegrowers.CreditJim Wilson/The New York Times“We tasted some, and they were still pretty good,” Mr. Harder said. “But we smell like smoke, so we don’t know what we’re really tasting.”The wine industry in Napa County supports 46,000 jobs locally through the 700 grape growers and 475 wineries operating in the area, the vast majority of them family owned, according to the Napa Valley Vintners trade group.For now, wineries are trying to hook up generators for electricity and will most likely be out of operation for four or five days, said Pete Richmond, who runs Silverado Farming Company, a vineyard management firm.“The biggest issue is trying to reach out to people to contact them to come back to work, because a lot have evacuated and cell service is miserable,” he said. “And we’re trying to reach places, but the roads are still closed and we don’t know when we’ll have access to them.”Last year, California wineries drew 23.6 million visits and $7.2 billion in tourist expenditures, according to the Wine Institute. The area is known for its cabernet sauvignon grapes, which currently fetch more than $8,000 a ton, according to an annual report from the Silicon Valley Bank.Wineries that lost vineyards will have to wait three to five years to nurse the soil back to health and coax out a viable crop of grapes, said Karissa Kruse, president of the Sonoma County Winegrowers.Surviving grapes may suffer smoke taint — a smoky flavor that makes them unusable for fine wine, she said. Wineries damaged or destroyed by the fire could lose vast reserves of wines aging in barrels and bottles. The repercussions of the fire on wine stored in barrels and tanks is unclear.Still, Ms. Kruse pointed to some silver linings. In most cases, the flames destroyed the brush planted between the rows of grapes, and not the resilient vines themselves. And record-breaking temperatures in September meant that fewer grapes were left exposed to the fires.“For the most part, the vintage is in, and we should still have a viable wine community as we move forward,” Ms. Kruse said. “We all grumbled that the Labor Day heat was going to define the 2017 vintage, but it expedited the harvest, which we now look at as such a blessing.”

The company has done a good job creating offshoots of its flagship game, like Bad Piggies and Angry Birds Match. The company has also introduced several non-Angry Birds titles in recent years, including a puzzle game called Fruit Nibblers and a game tied to the pop singer Shakira.“The hardest part in the app market is to find the users, to get people to download your game,” said Tero Kuittinen, chief strategist at Kuuhubb, a Finnish company focused on lifestyle and mobile video game applications. “If you have a well-known intellectual property — you have something that is instantly recognizable, James Bond, ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ any kind of property like that — it helps you a lot. Why wouldn’t they leverage Angry Birds?”But it is still unclear whether Rovio has the framework or model to fuel innovation and expand beyond its main brand. The mobile gaming environment is especially competitive.“At a certain stage, you will need a formula for more efficient innovation success,” said Mark DiMassimo, the chief executive and chief creative officer at the advertising agency DiMassimo Goldstein. “You’re going to need to get to winners faster than other folks, more efficiently than other folks. If you don’t, you’re going to be on the losing end of the category.”The announcement of the public offering marks a turnaround for Rovio, which struggled financially in the years after the initial release of Angry Birds. The company, which started out by selling its games, was caught flat-footed as consumers gravitated to games offered through a so-called freemium model, in which players download the game for free and pay for additional features. Rovio has since switched from paid apps to free downloads of its games.Mikael Hed, a co-founder, stepped down as its chief executive in 2014, and the company announced plans to cut nearly 40 percent of its work force the next year. (Mr. Hed is still executive chairman of Rovio Animation, which helped bring “The Angry Birds Movie” to the big screen last year.)Rovio returned to a profit in 2016 and reported revenue of 191.7 million euros, or about $228 million, last year.

Even more, the hearings were a painful flashback to 2016, when Democratic women were shocked not only that Hillary Clinton lost, but that a man whose unapologetic embrace of swagger and sexual entitlement could be elected president.That explains a lingering intensity that has taken many of these women by surprise.“I had no idea that these hearings would affect me so deeply,” wrote Keirsten Hamilton, an attorney who said she was raised in a fairly conservative Christian home in small-town Texas, votes Republican in some local races but more often for Democrats. “It does feel, in many ways, like meaningful change is out of reach. But I’ve never felt so enraged in my life. I refuse to let men keep telling this narrative that I know is wrong.”As with both sides in this intensely partisan moment, Sarah Orlando of Houston evoked an apocalyptic future: “This is the worst thing that’s happened to women in my lifetime, I fear the worst is far from yet to come. I’m not just worried for women though. I’m worried for every marginalized community in America. When my son asked if everything was going to be O.K., I answered with my filter temporarily disengaged, ‘Just be glad you’re not a woman, honey.’”Some women reproached themselves as well as men in power, turning anger inward for somehow failing to do enough. “Honestly this makes me realize how inactive I have been,” wrote Raphaela Weissman of Seattle, who said she was voluble on social media but had not taken direct action. “I did not call any senators before this vote, so in a way this is my fault, too.”Allison Butz of Texas offered a vivid glimpse into modern-day juggling many women must navigate. She wrote that she had always voted, protested, written letters and volunteered for campaigns when she could. “But sweet Jesus, I’m the underpaid director of a severely underfunded community food pantry in a service area that has some of the highest rates of food insecurity in the entire nation. My husband and I own a print shop. I have two small children who are in school, in soccer, in other activities … and the birthday parties, constantly … and that doesn’t even touch on how I manage to keep the plates spinning in every other aspect of my life.”“I can’t add another commitment beyond what I’m already doing, and I feel like I’m letting the entirety of society down as a result,” she continued. “Moral of the story? Right now is bad.”Yet for many who responded, the prospect of more women in office remains alluring and hopeful.Magaly Marques, who described herself as a manager, mother and immigrant, wrote: “To expect that all women will vote the same way is naïve. But when women are in at least equal numbers in the Senate and their committees, the conversations will be different, the questions asked will be different, the ability to hear and not deflect will be there, the bullying tactics will be in check.”

MUMBAI, India — More than 1,000 people have died in floods across South Asia this summer, and as sheets of incessant rain pummeled the vast region on Tuesday, worries grew that the death toll would rise along with the floodwaters.According to the United Nations, at least 41 million people in Bangladesh, India and Nepal have been directly affected by flooding and landslides resulting from the monsoon rains, which usually begin in June and last until September.And while flooding in the Houston area has grabbed more attention, aid officials say a catastrophe is unfolding in South Asia.In Nepal, thousands of homes have been destroyed and dozens of people swept away. Elephants were pressed into service, wading through swirling waters to rescue people, and aid workers have built rafts from bamboo and banana leaves.But many people are still missing, and some families have held last rites without their loved ones’ bodies being found.“This is the severest flooding in a number of years,” Francis Markus, a spokesman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said by phone from Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital.Nepal’s flooded areas are the poorest parts of the country, where most families live in bare mud houses and rely on subsistence farming, he said. Those farms are now underwater, and thousands of people are stuck living under plastic tarps in camps for displaced people where disease is beginning to spread.ImageCrossing through flood water in Tilathi, Nepal, last week.CreditPrakash Mathema/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAsked how the situation in Nepal compared with that in Houston, Mr. Markus said, “We hope people won’t overlook the desperate needs of the people here because of the disasters closer home.”India has also suffered immensely. Floods have swept across the states of Assam, Bihar, Odisha, West Bengal and other areas.This weekend, Prime Minister Narendra Modi flew over the devastation in Bihar, where more than 400 people are believed to have died in floods in recent weeks. He pledged millions of dollars in assistance and urged insurance companies to send in assessors as soon as possible to help farmers cope with their losses.ImageFlood-affected people sleeping by a highway toll plaza in the Indian state of Bihar last week.CreditAftab Alam Siddiqui/Associated PressAnd the rain keeps coming.On Tuesday, Mumbai, the sprawling financial capital, was soaked to the bone. Nearly all day, the rain drummed down. As people scurried up the sidewalks, the wind tore umbrellas out of their hands.The sky seemed to fall lower and lower, pressing down on the building tops, cutting visibility to a few blocks, then a few yards. By midafternoon, it was so dark it felt like nightfall.ImageFloods in Mumbai led to thigh-high water on the streets on Tuesday.CreditShailesh Andrade/ReutersBusy intersections were deluged, and cars struggled to part the muddy, greenish waters. Several Mumbai television channels reported that more rain had fallen on the city in the past several days than any other time since July 2005, when severe flooding killed more than 1,000 people in this part of India.Many trains and flights were delayed or canceled, marooning countless people. The authorities urged people to stay home and keep the roads clear for emergency vehicles. (Many did not heed that advice, leading to traffic snarls throughout the city on Tuesday evening.)ImageFloods covered the streets last week in Agartala, the capital of Tripura State in India.CreditArindam Dey/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSchools and colleges were shut. Rising water spilled into hospitals and sloshed across the floors.Police officials warned people to leave their cars behind if they were caught in a flash flood.The Mumbai police, writing on Twitter, urged people to abandon their cars if they encountered high water.The monsoons have battered Bangladesh as well. A low-lying and densely populated country of 165 million, Bangladesh is chronically ravaged by flooding. This year’s monsoons have left roughly a third of its terrain submerged.The International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent said on its website that more than eight million Bangladeshis had been affected by the flooding, the worst in 40 years. At least 140 people have died, and nearly 700,000 homes have been damaged or destroyed.ImageBangladeshi commuters use a rickshaw to cross a flooded street amid heavy rainfall in Dhaka on July 26, 2017.CreditMunir Uz Zaman/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCorinne Ambler, a Red Cross spokeswoman in Bangladesh who had just taken an aerial tour of the devastation, said she was stunned.“All I could see was water, the whole way,” she said in a telephone interview from Dhaka, the capital. “You have tiny little clumps of houses stuck in the middle of water.”After visiting some of the afflicted villages by boat, she said that many Bangladeshis had told her, “We’re used to flooding, but we’ve never seen anything like this in our lives.”

Over the past week, horrified Indians have protested vigorously on social media and in some cities. The disgust and the fury at the complicity of politicians, and the federal government’s silence, grew into a thunderous chorus demanding that the prime minister speak up and fire the ministers backing the Hindu Ekta Manch.Belatedly reacting to popular outrage, Mr. Modi finally said: “Incidents being discussed since past two days cannot be part of a civilized society. As a country, as a society, we all are ashamed of it.” He promised justice. His vague statement delicately alluded to another case in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where a lawmaker from Mr. Modi’s party is accused of rape. Mr. Modi stayed away from his party’s involvement in both cases.Yet instead of uniting India in horror, the incident has deepened religious, political and ethical divides. It has also made clear that there is no automatic political cost to crime or falsehood if it furthers the hegemonic political narrative. The politicians involved were sacked only after a huge public outcry. Government ministers, officials, right-leaning media and right-wing supporters have been perfectly sanguine about using the dead child to polarize society with whataboutery, fake news and wild conspiracy theories.A spokeswoman for Mr. Modi’s party, Meenakshi Lekhi, attacked opposition protests, suggesting that they were selective and opportunistic. “You see their plan,” she said. “First shout ‘minority minority’, then ‘Dalit Dalit’ and now ‘women women’ and then try to somehow fix blame of state issues on the center.” An influential ex-editor tweeted that Muslim Rohingya refugees were to blame for the crime. A B.J.P. youth activist posted a comment, now deleted, on his Facebook page saying that the rape must have been fun. A pornography site reported a surge in searches for videos using the raped and murdered girl’s name.The sense of national crisis today is because Indians feel a rising urgency to either counter this ethical collapse or to capitalize on it in the run-up to the next election.Mr. Modi came to power in 2014, and four years into his term, religious and cultural bigotry stands mainstreamed in Indian society.Many who voted for Mr. Modi’s economic promises are disappointed by his failure to deliver, and impatient with his deliberate silences around sectarian and sexual violence and hate speech by his party colleagues and ministers. The systematic destruction of democratic institutions is hard to ignore.

In the Arizona case, conservatives insisted that respect for state sovereignty required letting states play a leading role in controlling immigration within their borders. But Mr. Sessions, a longtime conservative himself, disavowed that position in his speech on Wednesday. “Immigration law is the province of the federal government,” he said.Justice Antonin Scalia, the conservative jurist who died in 2016, took a different view of the Arizona case. In an impassioned partial dissent, he wrote that “it is easy to lose sight of the states’ traditional role in regulating immigration — and to overlook their sovereign prerogative to do so.”There is no doubt that the California lawsuit is at odds with some of the Trump administration’s usual positions. “It’s a fascinating suit on a number of levels,” Professor Vladeck said, “not the least of which is the aggressive assertion of federal enforcement power directly against states by those, like Attorney General Sessions, who have historically been ardent defenders of states’ rights in the deeply analogous contexts.”Cristina Rodriguez, a law professor at Yale, said she detected political parallels between the two suits.“Both administrations claim that the state laws they challenge impermissibly interfere with the executive branch’s ability to enforce the immigration laws,” she said. “But both lawsuits are also clearly designed to take on visible and politically powerful local officials whose vision of immigration policy conflicts with the president’s and his supporters’.”In a news conference on Wednesday, Xavier Becerra, the California attorney general, said he was ready for the fight. The state’s laws, he said, were “fully constitutional and provide for the safety and welfare of all our people.”“California is in the business of public safety,” he said. “We are not in the business of deportations.”

A coven of witches will gather in an occult bookstore in Brooklyn, New York, on Saturday to place a hex on the supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh. Tickets to the event, which cost $10, with half the proceeds going to women’s and LGBT charities, have already sold out.The event is not out of the ordinary for Catland Books, which describes itself as “Brooklyn’s premier metaphysical boutique and event space”. They have previously held ceremonies to hex Donald Trump as well as a “hex your ex” ceremony on Valentine’s Day.Dakota Bracciale, co-owner of the store, told the Guardian the event will be an important act of protest and community outreach, even if some attendees are skeptical.“The whole thing is going to be really cathartic, whether you believe it or not. The right has churches but the left is scattershot. The left is where you’re going to find atheists, secularists, humanists, people who follow non-traditional religions. So how are you going to get all of us together in times of trouble? That’s what we’ve been doing.”The ceremony has become a talking point for some rightwing commentators, who see it as part of a pattern of leftwing attacks on leading Trump allies. On Fox News last Friday, Tucker Carlson discussed the coven’s plans, taking particular umbrage with their idea to donate 25% of proceeds to Planned Parenthood, which he said would “help them continue to fund their human sacrifice rituals”.Amy Kremer, the co-founder of the Women Vote Trump Pac, brought the event up in a roundtable on MSNBC, describing it as an escalation of attempts to publicly shame Republicans. “It is a scary time right now. Sarah Sanders has been run out of restaurants. I mean, there’s a list of things going on. Now you’ve got witches that are placing a hex on Brett Kavanaugh.”The event’s Facebook page has also been flooded with comments opposing the event, many of them proclaiming it an affront to Christianity. “Kavanaugh is a Christian. True Christians have the protection of our heavenly father against others that desire a demon attack against them,” wrote one commenter.Bracciale says that the store also organises more traditional protests and voter registration drives, but using the language of occult has been more effective in riling up their opponents. “It strikes fear into the heart of Christian fundamentalists. That’s one of the reasons that we do it. Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire. We don’t subscribe to this bullshit, pacifist, love and light, everybody just get along thing. If you want to hijack the country, if you want to steal the election, if you want to overturn Roe v Wade, if you want to harm people who are queer, well guess what, we’re not doing civility. If you’re going to be these awful bullies, you have to understand someone is going to punch you back and it might as well be a bunch of witches from Brooklyn.”The actual event will involve two rituals. The first will be putting a hex on Kavanaugh. Everyone in the room will focus on an image of the judge while passages are recited and candles burned. Graveyard dirt, coffin nails and effigies will also feature.The second is the rite of the scorned one, created by Bracciale, which is about welcoming rage. “It’s saying that constant, absolute pacifism only leads to you getting harmed more. Sometimes there has to be an allowance for rage as your ally.”Some have been critical of those declaring themselves witches, claiming that the subculture is based more on consumerism than spiritualism. But Bracciale differentiates what happens in the bookstore from more basic witches.“I don’t recognise the supposed witchcraft of $80-Lulu-Lemon-Yoga-pant-wearing white women with chai lattes who rub crystals on themselves, read The Secret and send out good thoughts into the universe. To me that’s not witchcraft. Witchcraft has a deeply rooted history as a tool of resistance and resilience, to survive oppression, disenfranchisement, and being an outcast of society.”Despite the news network’s negative coverage of the event, Bracciale has agreed to appear on Fox News over the weekend to discuss the event. “I grew up in a house where Fox was blaring 24/7, full volume, I know how they try to derail and distract. If you don’t rise to it then they fall flat.” Topics Brett Kavanaugh Protest Republicans news

Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee is off to a rocky start, with Democrats demanding the hearing be halted because regular order isn’t being followed.On Sunday night, 42,000 pages of documents related to Kavanaugh were released by the National Archives; Democrats say the hearing should stopped because they have not had sufficient time to review them. Chuck Grassley, the Republican committee chairman, initially refused the request, at some points talking over shouts from the audience.You can watch the entire hearing here. It will continue through the week, and is also viewable on the committee’s web page.Meanwhile, outside the proceedings, women lined the hallways dressed as handmaids from The Handmaid’s Tale.

Every Indian election throws up several independent candidates who, despite the odds stacked against them, take a chance on democracy. Omkar Khandekar reports on one man who has lost two dozen times but refuses to stop trying.Vijayprakash Kondekar is now a familiar face in Shivaji Nagar in the western city of Pune. For the past two months the 73-year-old has been going around the neighbourhood trying to drum up support for his election campaign."I just want to show people that party politics is not the only way in the largest democracy in the world," he says. "I plan to give the country independent candidates like myself. It's the only way we can clean up all the corruption."Mr Kondekar is contesting a parliamentary seat that will go to the polls in the third phase of voting on 23 April. India's mammoth general election kicked off on 11 April and is taking place over seven stages, with votes being counted on 23 May. Mr Kondekar is running as an independent candidate. One day, he hopes to become prime minister. If that happens, he says he will give every Indian citizen 17,000 rupees ($245; £190). He says doing so would be "easy enough" if the government reduced other expenses. Until the late 1980s, he used to work for the state electricity board in Maharashtra. Now, he can often been seen walking around Pune, pushing a steel cart on wheels with a signboard attached to it. Previously, locals say, the board carried a request for donations - but not much, less than a dollar.Now the signboard says "Victory for the boot" - a reference to the election symbol allotted to Mr Kondekar by India's Election Commission. It makes for an amusing sight in the city's streets. While many people ignore the aspiring politician, others request selfies. Mr Kondekar happily obliges, hoping to benefit from free publicity on social media. Others openly scoff at what they see: a frail man with long white hair and a beard, walking in the hot April sun to canvass for votes while wearing only cotton shorts. And that's before they find out that Mr Kondekar has contested - and lost - more than 24 different elections at every level of the Indian political system, from local polls for municipal bodies to parliamentary elections.He is one among hundreds of independent candidates trying their luck in this year's national election. In 2014, just three of the 3,000 independent candidates who contested won. India Lok Sabha election: 11 things you need to know The debunked fake news that won't go away Narendra Modi: The man who wants 900m votes Why jobs are dominating the Indian election Although there is precedent for independent candidates to succeed en masse - in the 1957 election, 42 of them were elected as MPs - it very rarely happens. Since the first election in 1952, a total of 44,962 independent candidates have run for parliament, but only 222 have won. Independents rarely win because parties have far more money and better resources available to them. And there's no shortage of parties, with 2,293 registered political parties, including seven national and 59 regional parties. The governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and opposition Congress are the two major national parties but in many states they trail strong regional parties with hugely popular leaders. But Mr Kondekar says he has found a novel strategy to gain an advantage.As per election rules, candidates from the national parties are listed first, followed by those from state parties. At the bottom are the independents. "My appeal [to the public] is vote for the last candidate, the one listed before the none-of-the-above option. In all probability, it will be an independent candidate," he says. For Tuesday's vote, he has changed his surname to Znyosho, so that his name appears last on the candidate list.Despite the disadvantages they face, independent candidates jump into the fray every election for myriad reasons. For some it's a vanity project, while many are fielded by political parties hoping to divide votes. Others, like K Padmarajan, contest the polls as a stunt. He has taken part in - and lost - more than 170 elections only to earn a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. Mr Padmarajan, who is competing against Congress leader Rahul Gandhi in the southern seat of Wayanad this Tuesday - recently said, "If I win, I will get a heart attack."Such candidates have even prompted India's law commission to recommend a ban on independent candidates contesting state or national parliamentary elections. That never happened. And although more and more independents are taking part, their success rate is not increasing."Political parties have a stranglehold on the Indian political system," says Jagdeep Chhokar, founder of election watchdog the Association for Democratic Reforms.There are several systemic problems stymieing independent candidates' election campaigns, Mr Chhokar adds. For one, there are limits on how much can spent by individual candidates but not the political parties backing them. Independent candidates also don't enjoy the income tax exemptions that political parties do. "There are candidates who genuinely want to make a difference but funding limitations, lack of influence and public perception in favour of big parties often constrains their chances."Mr Kondekar is aware that he's unlikely to win. Over the years, he has sold ancestral land and a house to raise money for his campaigns. His only source of income - as per the disclosures he made while filing his nomination - is a monthly pension of 1,921 rupees ($28; £21).But while admitting that his fight is mostly symbolic, Mr Kondekar refuses to give up hope. "It's a contest between their [political parties'] iron sword and my paper cut-out," he says. "But I want to keep trying. Given my age, this will most likely be my last election. But perhaps things might be different this time."

A bishop has been arrested in the southern Indian state of Kerala over allegations that he raped a nun 13 times times between 2014 and 2016. The 44-year-old woman registered a police complaint in June, alleging that the Catholic Church had taken no action despite repeated appeals.It led to unprecedented protests by nuns who came out in support of her. The case has shocked what is one of India's oldest Christian communities and attracted national attention. The bishop, 54-year-old Franco Mulakkal, was arrested on Friday after being questioned by police for three days, a senior police official speaking on condition of anonymity told BBC Hindi's Imran Qureshi.Bishop Mulakkal, who denies the accusations, will be brought to court on Saturday.The Vatican temporarily relieved him of his duties on Thursday.Mr Mulakkal is the bishop of a diocese in Jalandhar in the northern state of Punjab. And the nun who has accused him belongs to the Missionaries of Jesus, a congregation in Kerala that is part of the Jalandhar diocese.She alleged that the assaults happened when he visited the convent where she lived in the city of Kottayam, in Kerala.Sex abuse and the Catholic ChurchShe has not spoken to the media but she petitioned the Vatican and wrote an open letter to the Pope's representative in the Indian capital of Delhi earlier this month. She claimed that this was the fourth letter she had addressed to the Vatican. "We experience neglect from every side. We feel the Catholic Church is having concern only for the bishops and priests. We would like to know if there is any provision in the Canon Law for justice for nuns and women,'' she wrote. India Christian priest arrested over rape charge Mother Teresa India homes in 'baby trade' investigation The nuns who held protests for two weeks to demand the bishop's arrest welcomed Friday's news."We have won the first round of our struggle," Sister Anupama, who led demonstrations near the Kerala High Court, told the BBC."Our struggle is for many such sisters suffering in silence, and we will continue our campaign until all our sisters get justice."Christians are a tiny minority in India - less than 3% of the population. But in the southern coastal state of Kerala, they make up around 20%.Christians have lived and worshipped in Kerala for some 2,000 years. Kranganor, on the coast of Kerala, is the cradle of Christianity in India where according to legend, St Thomas, or Doubting Thomas - one of the 12 apostles of Jesus - first came ashore in AD52.All Kerala Christians who trace their ancestry to these times call themselves Syrian Christians. Some have become Catholic or Protestant in their outlook, while others are Orthodox.

White House counsel Don Mcgahn listens to U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh testify before a Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., September 27, 2018. REUTERS/Jim BourgWASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump repeatedly asked White House counsel Don McGahn to intervene with the U.S. Justice Department after former FBI Director James Comey disclosed the investigation of the Trump campaign to Congress, according the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Writing by Bill Trott Editing by Bill RigbyOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

In an early morning Twitter rant, President Trump railed against special counsel Robert Mueller, James Comey, and even his own Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein as he pondered what will be in the special counsel’s anticipated final report. Interested in Donald Trump? Add Donald Trump as an interest to stay up to date on the latest Donald Trump news, video, and analysis from ABC News. Donald Trump Add Interest The president’s tweets come as the special counsel prepares to make multiple court filings Friday expected to shed light into where the investigation is headed and as former FBI director James Comey, whom Trump refers to as “Leakin’ Lyin’ James Comey,” will testify behind closed doors Friday on Capitol Hill.(MORE: James Comey agrees to testify before House on condition it be made public afterward) The president repeats some of his standard lines against the special counsel, as he accuses Mueller and his team of political bias against him. He ponders whether “Robert Mueller’s big time conflicts of interest be listed at the top of his Republicans only Report” along with the “many contributions made by the 17 Angry Democrats to the Campaign of Crooked Hillary.” Mueller previously served as FBI director, appointed to the role by President George W. Bush, and continued in the role for part of the Obama administration.(MORE: The Note: Mueller takes center stage after week remembering Bush's GOP) President Trump also whether his current Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein will be mentioned in Mueller’s final report. He also mentions “bye the way” he didn’t know Jerome Corsi, an associate of former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone, but Trump but asks if the person in charge of his prosecution headed the “corrupt Clinton Foundation?”(MORE: Roger Stone associate Jerome Corsi says he is rejecting a plea deal from Robert Mueller)Robert Mueller and Leakin’ Lyin’ James Comey are Best Friends, just one of many Mueller Conflicts of Interest. And bye the way, wasn’t the woman in charge of prosecuting Jerome Corsi (who I do not know) in charge of “legal” at the corrupt Clinton Foundation? A total Witch Hunt...— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 7, 2018 ....Will Robert Mueller’s big time conflicts of interest be listed at the top of his Republicans only Report. Will Andrew Weissman’s horrible and vicious prosecutorial past be listed in the Report. He wrongly destroyed people’s lives, took down great companies, only to be........— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 7, 2018 .....overturned, 9-0, in the United States Supreme Court. Doing same thing to people now. Will all of the substantial & many contributions made by the 17 Angry Democrats to the Campaign of Crooked Hillary be listed in top of Report. Will the people that worked for the Clinton....— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 7, 2018 ....Foundation be listed at the top of the Report? Will the scathing document written about Lyin’ James Comey, by the man in charge of the case, Rod Rosenstein (who also signed the FISA Warrant), be a big part of the Report? Isn’t Rod therefore totally conflicted? Will all of....— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 7, 2018 ...the lying and leaking by the people doing the Report, & also Bruce Ohr (and his lovely wife Molly), Comey, Brennan, Clapper, & all of the many fired people of the FBI, be listed in the Report? Will the corruption within the DNC & Clinton Campaign be exposed?..And so much more!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 7, 2018

Silicon Valley technology corporations including Amazon, Palantir and Microsoft make millions from US immigration enforcement, according to a new report.They provide tools that aid surveillance, detention and deportation of individuals targeted by Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, according to a paper published Tuesday by a coalition of immigrant rights groups. The report outlined ways Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) has expanded its reach, with infrastructure from tech companies that have faced growing internal and external pressure to cancel their contracts.“During this time of continued escalated abuse by Ice and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), we’ve been frustrated, scared and shocked by the level of secrecy around how many of these tech contracts are procured,” said Jacinta Gonzalez, an organizer with Mijente, one of the not-for-profit groups behind the report. “These technologies are being used in real time, and so many companies are profiting.”The report – produced by research firm Empower LLC and commissioned by Mijente, the National Immigration Project and the Immigrant Defense Project – also explained how the tech lobby has pushed for “cloud” data storage policies over the years, paving the way for its contracts and services that now power Ice operations.In the last year, tech companies have increasingly come under fire for the harmful ways their platforms and products are used, whether to expedite Trump’s deportation operations, to help the government recruit border patrol agents or to create entirely new systems of border surveillance.Amazon Web Services (AWS), a subsidiary that sells cloud computing services, is facing renewed scrutiny over its government contracts, especially after its CEO Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, has positioned himself as a philanthropist and ethical leader on labor issues.AWS serves as the “key contractor” for DHS’ migration of its $6.8bn information technology portfolio to the cloud, the report said. Amazon has more federal authorizations to maintain government data across agencies than any other tech firm. That includes support of DHS’ data storage for immigration case management systems and biometric data for more than 200m identities. AWS stores cloud data for a system that “processes more than 300,000 biometric transactions per day” and uses the information to “detect and prevent illegal entry” into the US, according to DHS.AWS has a justice and public safety program that also sells cloud services to state law enforcement agencies that may share information with DHS, the report noted. Bezos’ company faced intense scrutiny earlier this year when public records revealed that the corporation was marketing and selling facial recognition software to police.“Amazon Web Services is the backbone for so many of these systems,” said Gonzalez.Palantir, a CIA-backed, data-mining firm co-founded by Trump ally Peter Thiel, also plays a significant role in Ice case management and analytics. The Silicon Valley firm provides a management system for Homeland Security Investigations, a key criminal investigative division of Ice. Palantir also provides an analytical tool called Falcon Search and Analysis, which helps authorities analyze data and produce intelligence reports.Palantir’s systems play an important role in sharing data with law enforcement, linking local and federal authorities and agents. Some of the Palantir systems also utilize AWS.The fiscal year 2019 budget includes an Ice technology modernization program worth $24.6m, a “biometric matching service” investment of $97.2m and an automated identification system of $11.9m. AWS and Palantir are partners in those efforts.Amazon and Microsoft were also part of a cloud computing caucus group that partnered with Congress and pushed for a new law that reformed federal IT acquisitions and, according to the report, gave Silicon Valley “influence over the contracting of its own services”.DHS also has agreements for biometric information sharing with the Mexican government, relying on a cloud-based application that has partnerships with AWS and Microsoft Azure, a cloud computing service. This relationship sparked internal backlash from Microsoft employees earlier this year, prompting its CEO Satya Nadella to try to downplay the significance of his company’s relationship with Ice.Microsoft also has a DHS contract that includes cloud migration services through 2020, the report said.Microsoft declined to comment, providing a statement from July that said its Ice contract was for email, messaging and “document management workloads”, adding: “Even at a time of increasingly polarized politics, we have faith in our fundamental democratic institutions and values.”Amazon and Palantir did not respond to requests for comment.Gonzalez noted how unsubstantiated allegations of “gang affiliation” can lead to the deportation of undocumented people – information that the tech firms help store and make accessible to authorities.“It is their ability to scale up enforcement and scale down due process – they are using technology for that,” said Gonzalez. “The workers inside of those companies [need] to see the consequences of what they are doing.” Topics US immigration Silicon Valley Donald Trump Trump administration US politics California Amazon news

在AR领域有一家神奇的公司 Magic Leap，成立时间超过6年但是并没有什么实际的产品发布，却获得了全球范围内累计超过20亿美金的融资，其投资机构阵容中不乏谷歌、摩根大通、阿里巴巴这类顶尖公司。12 月 20 日晚，在刚刚上线的新版网站上面，Magic Leap 终于公布了一副黑色智能眼镜 Magic Leap One，这也是Magic Leap 成立以来第一次有终端产品亮相，被官方称为 Creator Edition 版本。要知道这家公司在过去几年中，除了极为短暂地在官网更新过几段炫酷视频之外再没有过其他的内容或者产品，但就是这样一家看似很颠覆的公司，它的一举一动都能引起业界的关注，这次终于能给大家一个交代了。Magic Leap One 的外观看起来相当科幻，至少比我们印象中的Google glass在设计上更加大胆创新，又比微软 HoloLens 更轻便，它看起来更像是一副眼镜，而不是那些笨重的VR设备。根据官网展示的信息，Magic Leap One 实际上是三个设备的集合，具体分别为Lightwear头显、内含处理器的 Lightpack 和一个放在手上的 Control 设备。LightwearLightwearControlMagic Leap 虽然没有公布更为详细的参数，用的哪家CPU和GPU至今都是一个未知数，但根据目前的已知信息，以 Magic Leap 的行事风格来看，这是一款内置高性能计算芯片的设备，用来提供优秀的图形显示和智能交互。Magic Leap One 的最大的技术特点就是它的数字光场，它试图将数字光与自然光混合，使AR和真实世界的物体之间的差异不那么激烈，这是困扰在AR届的一个极具挑战性的难题。说到底，AR（增强现实技术）技术的目标就是在屏幕上把虚拟世界套在现实世界并进行互动，当用户在带上Lightwear眼镜，侧面的传感器将能够在数字世界中重建用户的周围环境，模糊数字和物理之间的界限。在官网公布的信息中，Magic Leap One 平台还具备以下技术特点：1、数字光场（Digital Lightfield）Magic Leap One 的数字光场技术能发射出不同景深的光线，并与自然光无缝结合，来生成与现实物体共存的仿真数字影像。这样可以解决观看虚拟影像时产生的眩晕感，让你像观看真实世界景物一样的，以便长时间沉浸在混合现实中。视觉感知 依靠刚刚提到得侧面传感器，Magic Leap One 上安装的传感器套件可以探测表面、水平度及物体本身，从而从新建构你身边的物理环境。3、持久性对象（Persistent Objects）Magic Leap的视觉感知及室内绘图技术能够完成复制你所在的物理环境，探测并定位墙壁的准确位置，各种平面，以及其他类型的物理目标。虚拟的光场物体与与物理世界的物体毫无二致，你可以把它们摆放在任何地方想想。4、声场音效（Soundfield Audio）要感到真实，它必须听起来真实。Magic Leap One 的音场音效模仿现实世界，以惊人的质量传递距离和强度 ... 这可以让你准确地听到声音来自哪里，这意味着你会知道虚拟T-Rex在你身后跺脚多久。5、高效能芯片组（High-Powered Chipset）Magic Leap 的集成处理单元具有高保真、游戏质量的图形以及笔记本电脑的功能和性能。从编辑精致的3D模型到在起居室玩第一人称射击游戏，Magic Leap One以复杂的细节生成光场物体，所有这些物体都是高度响应的可穿戴设备。6、下一代接口（Next Generation Interface）我们生活和思考在 3D 世界，而不是在一个平面屏幕上。Magic Leap 的空间界面包括多种输入模式，包括语音、手势、头部姿势和眼部追踪。这个综合输入系统包含了突破点击界面的过时惯例时所需的工具，提供了更自然、更直观的方式来与技术进行交互。基于以上这些技术，Magic Leap 也表示会做一些应用场景方面的尝试，并在官网中给出了几种可能性，如突破屏幕、扩展边界、无处不在等。作为业内一家当之无愧的明星公司，Magic Leap 正在暗处积蓄力量发大招，其所展示的无论是硬件产品还事应用场景，一旦推向市场将给带来非常大的影响力，这家公司的目标就是颠覆，我们也从中感受到了下一代计算设备的可能性。Magic Leap 将于2018年初在线推出创作者门户和SDK，Magic Leap One 产品本身也将于2018年的某个时间节点开始出货。（本文首发钛媒体，编辑／李玉鹏）更多精彩内容，关注钛媒体微信号（ID：taimeiti），或者下载钛媒体App

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Supreme Court on Tuesday endorsed the U.S. government’s authority to detain immigrants awaiting deportation anytime - potentially even years - after they have completed prison terms for criminal convictions, handing President Donald Trump a victory as he pursues hardline immigration policies. FILE PHOTO: The Supreme Court is seen in Washington, U.S., May 14, 2018. REUTERS/Joshua RobertsThe court ruled 5-4 along ideological lines, with its conservative justices in the majority and its liberal justices dissenting, that federal authorities could place such immigrants into indefinite detention anytime without the possibility of bail, not just immediately after they finish prison sentences. The ruling, authored by conservative Justice Samuel Alito, left open the possibility that some immigrants could challenge their detention. These immigrants potentially could argue that the use of the 1996 federal law involved in the case, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, against them long after finishing their sentences would violate their due process rights under the U.S. Constitution. Most of the plaintiffs in the case are legal immigrants. The law states the government can detain convicted immigrants “when the alien is released” from criminal detention. Civil rights lawyers in the case argued that the language of the law shows that it applies only immediately after immigrants are released. The Trump administration said the government should have the power to detain such immigrants anytime. In dissent, liberal Justice Stephen Breyer said the ruling raises serious due process questions. “It runs the gravest risk of depriving those whom the government has detained of one of the oldest and most important of our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms,” Breyer wrote. But Alito wrote that it is not the court’s job to impose a time limit for when immigrants can be detained after serving a prison sentence. Alito noted that the court has previously said that “an official’s crucial duties are better carried out late than never.” Alito said the challengers’ assertion that immigrants had to be detained within 24 hours of ending a prison sentence is “especially hard to swallow.” It marked Trump’s latest immigration victory at the court. The conservative justices also were in the majority in June 2018 when the court upheld on a 5-4 vote Trump’s travel ban targeting people from several Muslim-majority countries. Tuesday’s decision follows a February 2018 ruling in a similar case in which the conservative majority, over liberal dissent, curbed the ability of immigrants held in long-term detention during deportation proceedings to argue for release. American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Cecilia Wang, who argued the newly decided case for the challengers, said that in both rulings “the Supreme Court has endorsed the most extreme interpretation of immigration detention statutes, allowing mass incarceration of people without any hearing, simply because they are defending themselves against a deportation charge.” Wang said the ACLU is “looking into follow-up litigation along various avenues.” Trump has backed limits on legal and illegal immigrants since taking office in January 2017. Kerri Kupec, a U.S. Justice Department spokeswoman, said administration officials were pleased with the ruling. The case’s plaintiffs included two legal U.S. residents involved in separate lawsuits filed in 2013, a Cambodian immigrant named Mony Preap convicted of marijuana possession and a Palestinian immigrant named Bassam Yusuf Khoury convicted of attempting to manufacture a controlled substance. In the two detention case rulings, the Supreme Court reversed the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, a liberal leaning court with jurisdiction over a large part of the western United States that Trump has frequently criticized. In both cases, litigation against the federal government started before Trump took office. In the latest case, the administration had appealed a 2016 9th Circuit ruling that favored immigrants, a decision it said would undermine the government’s ability to deport immigrants who have committed crimes. The 9th Circuit had ruled that convicted immigrants who are not immediately detained by immigration authorities after finishing their sentences but then later picked up by immigration authorities could seek bond hearings to argue for their release. Other regional federal appeals courts that have addressed the issue did not rule the same way as the 9th Circuit and were more in line with the Supreme Court’s ruling. That means immigrants in those regions who were subject to mandatory detention already were not entitled to bond hearings. Under federal immigration law, immigrants convicted of certain offenses are subject to mandatory detention during their deportation process. They can be held indefinitely without a bond hearing after completing their sentences. In April 2018, conservative Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch joined the court’s four liberals in a 5-4 ruling that could hinder the administration’s ability to step up the removal of immigrants with criminal records, invalidating a provision in another law, the Immigration and Nationality Act. Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Additional reporting by Yeganeh Torbati; Editing by Will DunhamOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

The hostile immigration environment Theresa May set out to create when she was at the Home Office was regarded by some ministers as “almost reminiscent of Nazi Germany” in the way it is working, the former head of the civil service, Lord Kerslake, has said.Kerslake, who was speaking on BBC Newsnight, was the senior official at the Department for Communities and Local Government until 2014, a job that put him at the heart of Whitehall. He was commenting on the decision to scrap thousands of landing cards that was taken in 2010, which he insisted would have been referred to ministers.But the environment secretary, Michael Gove, who was education secretary for some of the time and would have been involved in aspects of the policy, dismissed the claim.“I’ve never heard anyone make that comparison before Lord Kerslake. It’s not for me to criticise a distinguished former public servant like Lord Kerslake but I respectfully disagree.”He added that after the Brexit vote, people felt able to be compassionate because countries that could control their borders were able to be more generous. “I think we can see in the national conversation that we have had about the Windrush generation that people are so glad that this country has had a tradition of welcoming people from abroad.”Gove’s remarks came as the prime minister prepared to address the opening session of the Commonwealth heads of government meeting (Chogm) on Thursday afternoon. At the gathering, the Queen will meet the heads of government of the Caribbean countries, some of whose former citizens’ lives have been blighted by the chaos over immigration documentation.Kerslake came to Whitehall from a highly successful career in local government, and rose rapidly to the top. But he later fell out with the Cameron administration. For two years from 2012, he was joint head of the civil service, sharing the running of Whitehall with Sir Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, before departing abruptly after two years. The job was then reunited under Heywood, in what was widely regarded as a political move.Permanent secretaries like Kerslake meet every week to discuss and coordinate government business, and he would have been very familiar with problems in other departments. Former Liberal Democrat ministers in the coalition and some special advisers have been speaking out about their fight to try to soften the policy. Sarah Teather, who was minister for children and families, revealed in 2013 that an internal working group on immigration was initially named the “hostile environment working group, with its name only changed following Lib Dem objections.Teather, who is now the director of the Jesuit Refugee Service, said: “Theresa May was determined to transform things. She was proud of wanting to generate a really hostile environment.“The Home Office has a culture of enforcement and disbelief which runs deep into the walls, but it is politically led. It’s a culture from the top, and it has been a bit rich for the home secretary, Amber Rudd, to blame civil servants. When you’ve had a Conservative home secretary that long, you cannot moan when civil servants deliver those policies.”A Lib Dem special adviser at the time, Polly Mackenzie, tweeted on Tuesday night that the “hostile environment” mission started with an inter-ministerial group set up on “migrant access to benefits and public services”.Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, warned that the impact of the way people who had settled in the UK years ago could have their rights challenged could jeopardise negotiations over future rights of EU citizens.He said the concern “is that if your approach to immigration is to create a hostile environment … that might flow into any post-Brexit relations with the EU and that would be a really bad way forward and it is time for the prime minister to be clear about that,” he said on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.Gove went out of his way to stress Britain’s open approach to migration and to praise Amber Rudd’s handling of the affair. He said her apology had been “graceful” and “a model”, and insisted she had “taken a grip”.Mackenzie claims that May’s mission was to make it systematically difficult to get by without papers, even though the Home Office had no firm evidence of the scale of the alleged abuse.Work checks, school registration, hospital and GP appointments, bank accounts and credit were all among the everyday activities where proof of status could be required.“I saw endless papers claiming the system was ‘unsustainable in the current economic climate’ but no evidence to back it up,” she tweeted.A former head of the UK border force said on Thursday that something had gone “badly wrong” at the Home Office with the loss of experience and knowledge of immigration as a result of departmental reorganisations.“Corporate memory and expertise has been lost with the abolition of the immigration service and subsequently the abolition of the UK Border Agency now as well,” said Tony Smith, a veteran official in immigration enforcement who was the interim director general of the UK Border Force between 2012 and 2013.“A lot of people were let go who had that experience and we have tried to codify all that experience on the basis of documents that people may or may not have, and we don’t have an identity management system.”This loss, Smith told the Today programme, was at the heart of problems with the hostile environment strategy.“In summary, you need an identity management strategy if you are going to have a hostile environment. You can’t have one without the other,” he said.He said: “We did not back the hostile environment with an identify management strategy. We thought about identity cards, didn’t we? We did start issuing biometric residence permits to newcomers in 2008 but we didn’t offer those to people who were already here, like a green card system in the US.”Smith mourned changes to the traditional culture among officials working in immigration, who followed a career path that allowed them to accumulate expertise at home and abroad in various roles.“I was called out regularly to police stations to talk to people who had been arrested for something or other and the police couldn’t tell whether they were allowed to be here or not. We were allowed to take pragmatic decisions based on what they told us – whether or not an enforcement decision could be taken.”Smith described the controversy over the destruction of landing cards recording the dates of arrival in Britain of members of the so-called Windrush generation as a red herring, saying that there would have been other ways to carry out necessary checks.He added: “All this blame culture about whether or not these landing cards would have made a difference is a complete red herring to me. It’s about being able to talk to people sensibly with a degree of knowledge or expertise and come to a sensible conclusion.” Topics Commonwealth immigration Immigration and asylum Theresa May Civil service Amber Rudd news

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Peter Dutton, who has launched a challenge to become Australia’s prime minister, is a polarizing former police officer who forged a hard-line reputation enforcing tough immigration policies and making unpopular cuts to the health budget. Former Australian Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton arrives at a media conference at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, August 23, 2018. AAP/Sam Mooy/via REUTERS Dutton has emerged in recent months as the leader of the Liberal Party’s conservative faction, which has become increasingly frustrated by a slide in opinion polls under the leadership of Malcolm Turnbull, an urbane former merchant banker. While winning plaudits from the right for preventing asylum seekers arriving by boat to Australia, Dutton has been criticized by the left for comments about the rise of African gangs in Australian cities and for boycotting a government apology to Indigenous people in 2008. A Dutton-led government would likely move Australia’s politics closer to those of U.S. President Donald Trump, with tax cuts and tariffs among his priorities, independent economist Saul Eslake said. “He might be Trump-esque, not only pursuing tax cuts, and possibly unfunded tax cuts at that, but he will likely be more protectionist as well,” Eslake told Reuters. In one of his first articulated policies, Dutton said this week he would exclude household electricity bills from Australia’s goods and services tax. He also supports a reduction in corporate tax rates. Dutton has had prominent roles in expanding the security and surveillance powers of state in his role heading the powerful Home Affairs “super ministry”. “He would be more populist but more inclined to big governments,” Eslake said. Dutton’s bid to become the country’s 30th prime minister comes amid a tumultuous time in Australian politics. A prime minister has not served a full parliamentary term in Australia in a decade, with leaders routinely being sacked by their parties amid poor polling. Despite narrowly beating Dutton in a party-room vote earlier in the week, Turnbull said he will hold a second leadership vote on Friday if the majority of Liberal MPs sign a petition supporting the move. But the leadership issue is complicated by questions over Dutton’s eligibility to sit in parliament. Dutton, who denies there is any question over eligibility, is the beneficiary of a family trust with interests in childcare centers that receive government subsidies. Federal politicians are banned from benefiting financially from the government. Turnbull said on Thursday the government’s chief lawyer would advise on Dutton’s eligibility on Friday morning. If Dutton has the numbers to force a vote, Turnbull said he would not contest. Other lawmakers, including Treasurer Scott Morrison and Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop, could also challenge for the top job. The son of a bricklayer, Dutton grew up in the northern suburbs of Brisbane, the state capital of Queensland, a politically important region full of tightly-contested electorates that often determine the outcome of federal elections. The 47-year-old, who is counting on strong support among his Queensland colleagues to unseat Turnbull, holds the seat of Dickson with a paper-thin 1.6 percent margin. “Anything different is good; it would be a change for the better,” said Colin Grant, who runs a shoe repair store in the electorate of Dickson. “He’d run the country well. People here agree with his policies.” A general election is due by May 2019 at the latest and Dutton would face an opposition Labor Party riding high. A poll by market research company Roy Morgan on Wednesday found Opposition leader Bill Shorten would be preferred prime minister in a head-to-head contest with Dutton, by a margin of 59 percent to 36.5 percent, while 4.5 percent undecided. Despite a ministerial career spanning over a decade, Dutton is not widely known around the country, said Ian McAllister, professor of Political Science at Australian National University in Canberra. “He’s only been Immigration Minister recently, and that’s not a particularly good portfolio as they tend to be known for making hard decisions about asylum seekers and refugees, rather than delivering good economic news, so he doesn’t have a high profile.” Internationally, Dutton is best known for his hardline stance on immigration including the enforcement of Operation Sovereign Borders, a controversial policy that places asylum seekers arriving by boat in offshore detention centers. He has, however, strongly supported some persecuted groups, including advocating for an increase in the number of Iraqi ethnic minority Yazidis to settle in Australia. Earlier this year, Dutton was criticized by the South African government after he suggested white farmers were being persecuted and deserved protection with special visas from a “civilized country”. Dutton has held a variety of ministerial roles since 2004, including the prominent health portfolio, where he regularly sparred with the medical association over funding. Dutton repeatedly warned of the “spiraling costs” of healthcare and sought reform. Dutton unsuccessfully tried to introduce a A$7 ($5.12) fee a doctor visit for patients who would normally draw on Australia’s universal health insurance system and avoid out-of-pocket expenses. The government eventually scrapped the unpopular measure. “If his record is repeated as Prime Minister, I shudder at the consequences for the vulnerable in our community,” physician and former Australian Medical Association vice president Stephen Parnis said on Twitter on Thursday. In 2008, when then Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered the formal apology to Indigenous people for past mistreatment, Dutton was the only Liberal cabinet minister to boycott the event - an act he has since said he regrets. FILE PHOTO: Australia's Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton speaks at the opening of the Counter Terrorism Conference at being held during the one-off summit of 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Sydney, Australia, March 17, 2018. Rick Rycroft/Pool via REUTERS/File photoRudd tweeted on Thursday that Dutton’s boycott should disqualify him from the country’s top political office. “A grown man, experienced politician who knew what he was doing - sending a dog-whistle to racist sentiment,” Rudd tweeted. ($1 = 1.3669 Australian dollars) Reporting by Jonathan Barrett and Erin Cooper in SYDNEY; Editing by Lincoln Feast.Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former FBI director James Comey said in an ABC News interview on Sunday that U.S. President Donald Trump is a dangerous, “morally unfit” leader doing “tremendous damage” to institutional and cultural norms. Comey, fired by Trump in May last year, was worried the president may be open to blackmail by Russia given claims he was present when prostitutes urinated on each other during a 2013 Moscow visit. Comey’s firing came as the Federal Bureau of Investigation was probing possible connections between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia’s meddling in the U.S. election. Russia has denied interfering in the election and Trump has denied any collusion or improper activity. Comey said in the exclusive interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, which aired at 10 p.m. on Sunday, that it is “possible, but I don’t know” whether Russia has evidence to back up the allegations about Trump’s Moscow trip. Trump told Comey that he had not stayed overnight in the Moscow hotel and that the claims related to the prostitutes were not true, Comey said. “A person ... who talks about and treats women like they’re pieces of meat, who lies constantly about matters big and small and insists the American people believe it, that person’s not fit to be president of the United States, on moral grounds. And that’s not a policy statement,” Comey said. “He is morally unfit to be president,” he added. Comey has a tell-all book, “A Higher Loyalty,” due out on Tuesday. The book’s imminent release - and the slated ABC News interview - prompted Trump to hurl a new set of insults at Comey earlier on Sunday, challenging accusations made in the book, and insisting that he never pressed Comey to be loyal to him. “Slippery James Comey, a man who always ends up badly and out of whack (he is not smart!), will go down as the WORST FBI Director in history, by far!” Trump wrote early on Sunday in one of five Twitter posts aimed directly at Comey. Reuters and other news outlets have obtained copies of Comey’s book before its formal release. In it, Comey wrote that Trump, in a private meeting, pressed the then-FBI director for his loyalty. A copy of former FBI director James Comey's book "A Higher Loyalty" is seen in New York City, New York, U.S. April 13, 2018. REUTERS/Soren LarsonComey told ABC News that the title of the book came from that “bizarre conversation” he had with Trump at the White House in January 2017, shortly after his inauguration. “He asked for my loyalty personally as the F.B.I. director. My loyalty’s supposed to be to the American people and to the institution,” Comey said in the interview. The FBI has long tried to operate as an independent law enforcement agency. “I never asked Comey for Personal Loyalty. I hardly even knew this guy. Just another of his many lies,” Trump said on Twitter. Comey is now a crucial witness for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump has tried to obstruct the Russia probe. Comey told ABC News that he believes there is “certainly some evidence of obstruction of justice.” Comey also defended his decision to publicly disclose the FBI’s re-opening of its investigation into Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s handling of email when she was secretary of state. The Clinton probe was already public, Comey said, whereas the FBI’s examination of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia was in its early stages. It did not become publicly known until after the 2016 presidential election. Despite his myriad of reservations about Trump, Comey told ABC News that he did not believe the U.S. Congress should impeach him, as it would let the American people “off the hook” for something “they’re duty bound to do directly.” “People in this country need to stand up and go to the voting booth and vote their values,” he said. U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, interviewed on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday morning, expressed qualified support for Comey. Asked whether Comey was a man of integrity, the Republican speaker said: “As far as I know,” but added that he did not know him well. Asked about Trump’s use last week of the words “slime ball” to describe Comey, Ryan said: “I don’t use words like that.” Slideshow (2 Images)Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said the ABC interview reaffirms that Comey’s “higher loyalty is to himself.” “He has no credibility and President Trump was right to follow through on the bipartisan calls for him to be fired,” McDaniel said in a statement. (Refiles to add dropped article “A” from book title, paragraph 9.) Reporting by Amanda Becker and Sarah Lynch; Additional reporting by Richard Cowan; Editing by Lisa Shumaker and Peter CooneyOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Donald Trump plans to nominate Jeffrey Rosen as the next deputy US attorney general, a senior administration official said on Tuesday night.Rosen, the deputy secretary of the Department of Transportation, would succeed Rod Rosenstein, who after the firing of the FBI director James Comey appointed special counsel Robert Mueller to investigate possible ties between Russia and Trump’s campaign.Rosenstein is expected to step down by mid-March, a justice department official said on Monday.The attorney general, William Barr, welcomed the choice of the new deputy, saying in a statement that Rosen had 35 years of experience at the highest levels of government and in the private sector.“His years of outstanding legal and management experience make him an excellent choice to succeed Rod Rosenstein, who has served the Department of Justice over many years with dedication and distinction,” Barr said.The transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, said Rosen had played a critical role in her department.“I will be sorry to lose him, but I am confident that he is the right lawyer to help the new Attorney General succeed at the Justice Department, for the benefit of the American people,” she said in a statement.Rosen’s nomination must be confirmed by the US Senate. Topics Trump administration Donald Trump US politics Robert Mueller news