The fate of Indian cryptocurrency exchanges continues to be in a limbo as they await clarity from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the country’s top court.Last month, the central bank barred all banks from having any business relationship with these exchanges, with a directive to wind down all existing accounts by the first week of July. Staring at the end of the road in India, the virtual currency exchanges then took the legal route appealing against the RBI order at India’s supreme court.However, the supreme court has not provided any breather to the exchanges yet. “The petitioners shall be at liberty to submit a representation to the competent authority of RBI within two weeks hence which shall be dealt with in accordance with law,” read a May 17 order given by chief justice Dipak Misra, a copy of which has been seen by Quartz. The other judges on the bench included A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud.Meanwhile, India’s digital currency ecosystem is in a quandary as the next date for the hearing of the case in the apex court is July 20, two weeks after the RBI deadline to close down all crypto-related bank accounts.“The understanding is that this means that the ban will continue, at least for the time being. Businesses are getting affected due to this uncertainty and this phase will continue for a while,” said Kunal Barchha, director at Kali Digital Eco-Systems, which plans to launch its cryptocurrency exchange in the next few months. Kali had also challenged the RBI’s diktat in the Delhi high court last month.With the latest supreme court order, it is up to the RBI now. “Among the major grievances that these virtual currency exchanges have is that the decision had been taken by the RBI without taking their views into account,” said Anirudh Rastogi, managing partner at legal firm TRA Law, which has filed the petition for four exchanges in the supreme court.“And second, there shouldn’t be an industry wide-ban, instead it can be implemented on a case-to-case basis where it is seen that the firms are violating any of the norms,” he said. Most of these exchanges claim that they follow strict guidelines to ensure that there is no money laundering or illicit activities, and the steps taken by them to self-regulate address several concerns raised by the RBI. ”Hopefully, the central bank will be able to see merit in the steps taken by the firms in the recommendations made,” added Rastogi.Still, other cryptocurrency players have been preparing for a scenario where there won’t be any respite from the central bank’s order. “Lot of firms are looking at launching or have already launched crypto-to-crypto trade (which allows customers to buy one cryptocurrency in exchange for another) to comply with the new RBI rule,” said the head of another exchange, requesting anonymity. “Some others are also exploring to set up offices in other countries, so most exchanges have been looking at other options.”The supreme court has also barred petitioners from filing any case against the RBI on the subject of cryptocurrency in any of the other high courts. All the cases on this topic will be merged with the existing petitions and will be heard collectively, as per the central bank’s request.“There were cases being filed in the Calcutta high court, Delhi high court, etc. So the RBI asked the supreme court to merge all the cases on bitcoin and other such currencies in order to save time,” said Dwaipayan Bhowmick, a lawyer who had filed a public interest litigation in the supreme court in November requesting that these currencies be regulated.Meanwhile, the supreme court has also asked the attorney general of India (AGI), K K Venugopal, who is the government’s chief legal advisor, to be present on the next date of hearing. “The union government is also a party in some of the cases that has been filed so that may be one of the reasons for calling the AGI,” said a lawyer, requesting anonymity. “But also it clearly shows that the court thinks it’s a significant matter and has therefore asked the AGI to be present.”

The Indian government has announced a halt in operations against militants in Kashmir for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. On its face that should be welcomed, given the steady rise in violence this year, though skeptics have said it will give Islamist separatist militants time to gather strength. In any case, it requires a strong leap of faith to expect that the break, if it holds, can achieve anything resembling a peace process.The struggle over Kashmir is one of those territorial disputes that seem only to deepen and to assume greater symbolic importance as decades go by and the atrocities and resentments on both sides pile up. The conflict dates back to the end of British rule in 1947 and has been the cause of the three wars between India and Pakistan. Since 1989, an Islamist insurgency supported by Pakistan has further complicated the conflict and raised the death toll.Border skirmishes along the heavily armed Line of Control dividing Indian- and Pakistani-controlled parts of Kashmir are common. With India and Pakistan both in possession of nuclear arms, former President Bill Clinton once called the border “the most dangerous place in the world.” On Friday, despite Ramadan, a fierce exchange of fire between border posts left eight civilians dead.The Ramadan cease-fire was sought by the chief minister of the Indian-administered part of Kashmir, Mehbooba Mufti, who has found herself increasingly isolated since her political alliance with India’s dominant party, the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, has failed to lower violence. India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, is due in Kashmir over the weekend to inaugurate development projects.Another explanation for the cease-fire was evident in a new police report on militancy in south Kashmir. It said that an Indian offensive initiated against jihadists this year has doubled the number of local recruits to the Islamists. It was an age-old story: Heavy-handed tactics may hold territory, but they lose the population.Yet as former President Barack Obama remarked in 2009, when he considered appointing Mr. Clinton to try his hand as mediator, Kashmir is also “a tar pit diplomatically.” The dispute has long ceased being purely territorial, which might be amenable to a practical solution, and has deepened into a zero-sum clash of national pride and identity, made all the more intractable by the rise of Islamist passions among young Muslim Kashmiris. Under stiff Indian opposition to American intervention, Mr. Obama abandoned his mediation effort.A solution to a conflict that touches on so many religious and nationalist nerves must ultimately come from within, through talks among India, Pakistan and the people of Kashmir. They have tried before, but contacts in 2008 collapsed when Islamist terrorists staged a series of bloody attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai. A promising meeting in December 2015 between Mr. Modi and Nawaz Sharif, who was then Pakistan’s prime minister, came to nothing when Islamist militants attacked an Indian Air Force base.Yet the obvious and growing danger of the Kashmir conflict demands trying again and again, however elusive the goal. It may be too much to expect either side to surrender territorial claims on Kashmir, but India’s Ramadan olive branch, however inauspicious, could become the start of a sorely needed dialogue if Pakistan responds by at least suspending its support for Islamic terrorist groups in Kashmir. Given the magnitude of what’s at stake, Washington and other affected powers should do all they can to encourage all sides to give this opening a chance.

Special counsel Robert Mueller has collected sufficient evidence to charge Michael Flynn, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, and his son in the investigation into alleged collusion between Trump aides and Russia, NBC News reported on Sunday.Citing multiple sources familiar with the investigation, NBC said Mueller’s team was looking at possible charges of money laundering and lying to federal agents, and Flynn’s role in a possible plan to remove an opponent of the Turkish president from the US in exchange for millions of dollars.Reuters was not immediately able to confirm the report. Barry Coburn, a lawyer for Michael Flynn Jr, declined to comment. Robert Kelner, Flynn’s lawyer, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The younger Flynn appeared to address the report in a tweet. “The SJW are out in full this morning,” he wrote, using an acronym for “social justice warriors”, a pejorative often used in reference to liberals. “The disappointment on your faces when I don’t go to jail will be worth all your harassment.”In a week which began with Mueller’s indictment on financial charges of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and campaign aide Rick Gates – and news of a guilty plea and potential cooperation by a former foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos – White House and Republican party sources have sought to increase pressure on Mueller.Mueller is increasing pressure on Flynn following his indictment of Manafort, the NBC report said.The Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, said on Sunday Mueller should not be fired or step down.“We need to let these career professionals do their jobs, see it through … I don’t think he should be stepping down and I don’t think he should be fired,” Ryan told Fox News Sunday.Flynn served 24 days as Trump’s national security adviser but resigned after it was discovered he had misrepresented his contacts with a Russian diplomat to Vice-President Mike Pence.The NBC report said lawyers for Flynn and his son, Michael G Flynn, who worked with his father, declined to comment. So did Mueller’s office. Reuters was not immediately able to confirm the report. Topics Trump-Russia investigation Michael Flynn news

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate shifted slightly closer on Tuesday to resolving a month-long partial government shutdown, but there was no sign of relief anytime soon for 800,000 federal workers who are furloughed or working without pay. Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell laid the groundwork for a vote on Thursday on a Democratic proposal to fund the government for three weeks, without attaching the $5.7 billion in U.S.-Mexico border wall funding demanded by President Donald Trump. The president has opposed similar legislation in the House of Representatives. McConnell had said previously he would not consider a funding bill that Trump would refuse to sign. The Senate leader said he would also bring up for a Thursday vote a proposal by Trump to end the shutdown that includes border wall funding and relief for “Dreamers,” people brought illegally to the United States as children. The plan was unlikely to pass in the Senate and had even less chance in the Democratic-led House of Representatives. Democrats have said they would not trade a temporary restoration of the immigrants’ protections from deportation in return for a permanent border wall they view as ineffective. In 2017, Trump moved to end the Dreamers’ protections, triggering a court battle. But the Senate action could set the stage for the type of bipartisan negotiating that will be necessary to end a shutdown that began on Dec. 22. Americans have largely blamed Trump for the shutdown, now the longest in U.S. history. Related CoverageSenate to vote on Trump plan to re-open government this week: McConnellUSDA says exploring options to continue food stamps amid shutdownAffected federal workers are struggling to make ends meet. A Trump administration official said on Tuesday the president still intended to deliver his State of the Union speech on Jan. 29, even though House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the top U.S. Democrat, had recommended he delay it because of the shutdown. The request seemed likely to set up another clash between Trump and Pelosi, days after Trump abruptly refused to let her use a U.S. military plane to go on an overseas trip hours before she was to depart. Aides to Pelosi did not respond to requests for comment on whether Trump’s invitation to speak would stand. Trump may have lost the Dreamer issue as his main negotiating point on Tuesday when the U.S. Supreme Court was silent, at least for now, on considering an administration appeal of lower-court rulings allowing continued temporary protections for the immigrant youths. A woman walks by the U.S. Capitol on day 32 of a partial government shutdown as it becomes the longest in U.S. history in Washington, U.S., January 22, 2019. REUTERS/Carlos Barria Instead, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program established by then-President Barack Obama in 2012 lives on with or without approval by Congress. As the Senate debates Trump’s proposal, House Democrats this week are pushing legislation that would end the partial shutdown of agencies including the departments of Justice, Homeland Security, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor and Interior. While their legislation would contain new border security money, there would be nothing for a wall, ensuring Trump’s opposition. Once the government reopens, Democrats said, they would negotiate with Trump on further border security ideas. “We were optimistic that he might ... open up government so we could have this discussion,” Pelosi told reporters in comments carried by CNN. “But then we heard what the particulars were in it and it was a non-starter, unfortunately.” Representative Jim Clyburn, the No. 3 House Democrat, welcomed any effort by the Republican-led Senate to debate and vote on legislation to reopen the government. “This gets us started,” Clyburn told MSNBC in an interview. Slideshow (2 Images)The shutdown’s impact was being felt at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with the FBI Agents Association saying probes of possible financial crimes, drugs and terrorism were being hindered by a lack of funds. Many federal employees and contractors were turning to unemployment assistance, food banks and other support as the shutdown entered its second month. Others began seeking new jobs. Reporting by Richard Cowan and Jeff Mason; Additional reporting by Susan Cornwell, Colette Luke and Sarah N. Lynch; Writing by Richard Cowan and Steve Holland; Editing by Bill Trott and Peter CooneyOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST: The city of Charlottesville, Va., is reviewing a 207-page report on everything that went wrong last summer when white supremacists clashed with counterprotesters. The report's author is a former U.S. attorney. He has outlined more than a dozen mistakes altogether and points blame at city officials and police. From member station WVTF, Sandy Hausman reports.(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) Nazi scum off our streets. Nazi scum off our streets.SANDY HAUSMAN, BYLINE: As hundreds of white supremacists rallied in a downtown park on August 12, more than a thousand counterprotesters gathered along the perimeter. Charlottesville's police force, 128 sworn officers, were given no specialized training for the event, according to former U.S. attorney Tim Hafey.TIM HAFEY: A lot of them had never even tried on the ballistic helmet or used the shield that they were given for that day.HAUSMAN: And he said the city's police chief and high-level officers appeared overconfident in the days leading up to the Unite the Right rally.HAFEY: There was a sense we found of, we got this. We were told by the command staff at the police department we've had major events in the past. We've had dignitary visits. We have the Wertland Street block party. And this was a fundamentally different kind of event, August 12, than anything that had happened here before.HAUSMAN: Six hundred state police were on hand, but Hafey said there was little coordination between the two forces. In fact, he found they could not even talk directly with one another.HAFEY: They had to relay everything through their respective chains of command and verbal communication either in the command center or down on the ground - horribly inefficient to have separate communications.HAUSMAN: What's more, state and local police were following different orders. Charlottesville officers were told not to intervene in fights unless people were at risk for serious injuries or death, while state forces said they were only there to police the park. On the morning of the rally, their commander expressed concerns for the safety of his officers and vowed they would not go into what he called that mess on Market Street. And as fights broke out, Hafey added, Charlottesville's police chief may have issued a surprising order.HAFEY: We had evidence from a couple of people in the command center that the chief actually said, let them fight for a little while. It will make it easier to declare an unlawful assembly.HAUSMAN: He also blamed lawyers for telling the city it could not ban sticks, poles, clubs and shields. Hafey said that was incorrect, and the presence of those makeshift weapons elevated the threat to public safety. Officers who cleared the park made matters worse as they forced white supremacists into crowds of counterprotesters.HAFEY: And that's where you have more clashes. You have a gunshot fired. You have a flame thrower. You have punches. Easy for us to say, but the lack of separation is a huge problem.HAUSMAN: And finally, he faulted the decision to assign laymen to keep traffic out of the protest area.HAFEY: You had an animal control officer at Second and High. You had a lab tech who was at Third and High. They were told if it gets dangerous, if it gets violent, go inside your car and lock the door. And that's what they did.HAUSMAN: That mistake allowed a man to drive his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one and injuring 19. The chief of police has denied that he allowed fighting to continue on August 12 and said this is no time for finger pointing. He told reporters Charlottesville is still a community in crisis. In a statement, the city manager disagreed with some aspects of the report but conceded authorities fell short of expectations, and for that he said the city was profoundly sorry. Hafey will present his findings and make recommendations at a city council meeting Monday. For NPR News, I'm Sandy Hausman in Charlottesville, Va.Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Special counsel Robert Mueller has collected stacks of evidence in his probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Among them is a nude selfie, according to a Thursday court filing by one of the Russian companies accused of spreading misinformation to influence voters.Concord Management and Consulting wants the US district court for the District of Columbia to dismiss a request from Mueller to share sealed information with the judge overseeing the case.Mueller has argued that access to sensitive material should be limited. Otherwise it could make its way to the Russian government, tipping it off to the methods he was using in the probe, he has said.But Concord says Mueller’s argument doesn’t hold, because there’s nothing sensitive about the information or how it was obtained.“Could the manner in which he collected a nude selfie really threaten the national security of the United States?” Concord’s lawyers asked in the filing. They didn’t provide any other information on the selfie, or who it might depict.Concord has been trying to get the court’s permission to share the evidence with Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch with close ties to the Kremlin. Along with Concord, Prigozhin is one of 15 defendants charged in February with interfering in the 2016 election. He controls Concord, and funded the Internet Research Agency, which allegedly orchestrated the trolling operation.Government prosecutors have accused Prigozhin of trying to use Concord to gain access to investigation materials. In June, DC district judge Dabney Friedrich barred the company’s attorneys from sharing the material with anyone outside the US.Concord is not expecting its latest arguments to change the judge’s mind, it said in its filing.“But object we must both for Concord and every other defendant to whom the Special Counsel believes the laws and rules of the United States no longer apply to his novel adventures,” it added.

The US supreme court on Tuesday endorsed US government authority to detain immigrants awaiting deportation at any time – potentially even years – after they have completed prison terms for criminal convictions, handing Donald Trump a victory as he pursues hardline immigration policies.The court ruled 5-4, with its conservative justices in the majority and its liberal justices dissenting, that federal authorities could pick up such immigrants and place them into indefinite detention at any time, not just immediately after they finish their prison sentences.The ruling, authored by the conservative justice Samuel Alito, leaves open the possibility of individual immigrants challenging the federal law involved in the case on constitutional grounds if they are detained long after they have completed their sentences.In dissent, the liberal justice Stephen Breyer questioned whether the US Congress when it wrote the law “meant to allow the government to apprehend persons years after their release from prison and hold them indefinitely without a bail hearing”.The Trump administration had appealed against a lower court ruling in the case that favored immigrants, a decision it said would undermine the government’s ability to deport immigrants who have committed crimes. Trump has backed limits on legal and illegal immigrants since taking office in January 2017.The plaintiffs included two legal US 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.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. Topics US supreme court US immigration Law (US) US politics news

Google’s first public attempt to explain its reported interest in entering the Chinese market failed to appease critical members of Congress at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on Wednesday.The hearing, which was attended by Google, as well as by Amazon, Apple, AT&T, and Charter Communications, began as a broad discussion of possible privacy legislation. But it concluded as a pointed condemnation of Google over recent reports that the company is building a censored search engine for China. According to The Intercept, the plans, dubbed internally as Project Dragonfly, would require Chinese users to log in to search and would feed crucial data to a Chinese company.Google’s chief privacy officer, Keith Enright, came to the hearing prepared to give a carefully scripted explanation addressing these reports, remarks that would neither confirm nor deny their accuracy. “My understanding is we are not, in fact, close to launching a search product in China, and whether we would or could at some point in the future remains unclear,” Enright said when asked by Senator Maggie Hassan, Democrat of New Hampshire. If Google did choose to pursue any interests in China, he added, “my team would be actively engaged. Our privacy and security controls would be followed.”Enright repeated the term "not close to launching" several more times throughout the hearing, before Senator Ted Cruz of Texas finally stopped him short. “You’re saying you’re not close to launching. I’m asking [...] is [Project Dragonfly] a project to develop a search engine in China? I didn’t ask timing of launch. I asked what it is,” the Republican said.Enright only went so far as to confirm that Project Dragonfly does in fact exist. But he declined to expound upon its purpose, insisting he was “not clear on the contours of what is in scope or out of scope for that project."That, of course, is the problem. It’s not just that Enright came off as cagey. The far bigger issue is that his claims about taking privacy seriously and not knowing much about the project can't peacefully coexist. If Google's chief privacy officer isn't actively engaged in these conversations, it undermines the idea that Google is carefully considering the ramifications of this work.It's not as if Google is unfamiliar with the stakes. The company has seen firsthand what requirements imposed by the Chinese government on foreign tech firms. In 2010, Google decided to stop censoring search in the country, after a Gmail phishing attack targeted Chinese human rights activists. The questions of whether to censor search in China and give data to Chinese entities are, first and foremost, privacy questions.Yet in his testimony, Enright tried to frame the issues as distinct. "I wouldn't think it was necessarily appropriate for a privacy conversation to speculate as to what we might be looking at in terms of a product launch in some part of the world," Enright told Cruz in response to questions about Project Dragonfly.Google was hardly the only business at the hearing to face questions about China. Senator Cory Gardner, Republican of Colorado, asked Apple’s vice president of software whether the company upholds its human rights and privacy standards there. He also cornered Amazon on its work with a Chinese subsidiary. The committee members, arguably, should have pressed these companies harder. But Google, whose supposed plans in China have dominated recent headlines, got the brunt of the backlash.Before Wednesday’s hearing, a former Google research scientist named Jack Poulson sent a letter to the committee’s chairman and ranking member, encouraging them to focus their questioning on Project Dragonfly. In the letter, first reported by The Intercept, Poulson calls on the committee to ask about what he describes as “a catastrophic failure of the internal privacy review process, which one of the reviewers characterized as actively subverted.”If Google is indeed considering building such a search tool for China—and, to be clear, Enright never once denied that it is—then the idea that the company's privacy team wouldn't be intimately involved seems at best short-sighted, and reckless at worst. It's also just bad optics considering how frustrated members of Congress on both sides of the aisle were with Google during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing earlier this month. The company had refused to send either Google CEO Sundar Pichai or Larry Page, CEO of Google's parent Alphabet, to testify. Instead, senators including Marco Rubio of Florida and Tom Cotton of Arkansas stared down an empty chair with a Google name plate in front of it, as they attacked Google for pursuing business in China. (This week, Pichai is heading to Capitol Hill to make nice with members of Congress, including House leader Kevin McCarthy, who recently have accused the search giant of liberal bias.)1Enright's vague responses echo answers Pichai put forth in a letter to the intelligence committee before the last hearing. The letter was a response to a bipartisan group of senators’ questions about Google’s work in China. But Pichai offered up few specifics. “Google has been open about our desire to increase our ability to serve users in China and other countries. We are thoughtfully considering a variety of options for how to offer services in China in a way that is consistent with our mission,” he wrote. “We are committed to promoting access to information, freedom of expression, and user privacy, as well as to respecting the laws of jurisdictions in which we operate. We seek to strike the right balance in each context.”Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia and vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told WIRED he was “disappointed” in Pichai’s answers in August. “Any effort to get back into China could enable the Chinese government in repressing and manipulating their citizens,” Warner said at the time. “Google owes the public some answers about its reported plans.”Those are answers Enright failed to provide.1Correction 10:36 am EDT 9/28/2018 An earlier version of this story misstated Kevin McCarthy's title. He is House Leader.College Humor gives comedy subscription a serious effortHow the best jumpers in the world fly so damn highTips to get the most out of Screen Time controls on iOS 12Tech disrupted everything. Who's shaping the future?An oral history of Apple's Infinite LoopLooking for more? Sign up for our daily newsletter and never miss our latest and greatest stories

The show’s second section deals with the refugee experience in video interviews with 21 Vietnamese men and women who arrived in the United States in the war’s wake. Together they represent a history that has never become part of the American view of the conflict, and that is being forgotten, if not deliberately erased, in Vietnam itself. It’s a history of in-between-ness, of people, now elderly, who identify neither with the country they’ve come to, nor with the one they’ve left behind. Most feel abused by both.In the show’s third and last section, the perspective goes global, and also points to the future. A 12-foot long embroidered world map covers a wall. Lines of stitched colored thread trace the paths of forced South Vietnamese migration across the world. A nearby display of documents from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva gives a sense of the archival ardor that has gone into Ms. Chung’s Vietnam project, while a set of small watercolors indicate a way to insure that research continues.The watercolor images — of migrant camps, food lines, displaced families, crammed and capsizing boats — are paintings based on photographs taken in the 1970s and ’80s, when the fallout from war was most crushing. They were created recently by young Vietnamese artists, commissioned by Ms. Chung, in Ho Chi Minh City. Most had no knowledge at all of the past depicted. Now they do.Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975 (through Aug. 18)Tiffany Chung: Vietnam, Past Is Prologue (through Sept. 2)Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington; 202-633-7970, americanart.si.edu.

A top Democrat condemned Donald Trump as a “racist” hours after the president retweeted a series of anti-Muslim videos on Wednesday that were posted by the deputy leader of a British far-right group.“The president is racist. There’s no doubt about that in my mind,” Keith Ellison, the deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee and a Muslim member of Congress, told the Guardian.“This is Trump. He is a politician who is cynically trying to divide people along racial and religious lines,” he added. “Somehow people who call him out on his racism have to worry about defending themselves against [people saying], ‘How dare you call the president a racist?’”Trump has repeatedly denied being a racist in the past.He prompted the latest controversy after he shared the incendiary videos – which drew a swift and rare rebuke from Britain’s prime minister, Theresa May, through an official spokesperson – to his 43.6 million Twitter followers despite serious questions about their authenticity. They marked the latest inflammatory action against Muslims from Trump, who as a candidate campaigned on banning all Muslims from entering the US and as president has sought to limit Muslim immigration through executive order.The videos purported to show Muslims committing violent acts, such as pushing a boy off a roof and destroying a statue of the Virgin Mary. Another claimed to show a Muslim immigrant beating a Dutch boy on crutches, even though the Dutch police and media never suggested the attacker was Muslim.They were originally posted to the Twitter feed of Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of Britain First, who was charged last year with religiously aggravated harassment for verbally assaulting a Muslim woman wearing a hijab in January 2016.Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, said it was “particularly unhelpful” for Trump to have shared the videos. “One, it legitimizes these websites, this group in England,” Graham told the Guardian, while adding of Fransen: “She’s being prosecuted for religious harassment.”“You don’t want to take a fringe group and elevate their content,” he said. “I think it also is not the message we need to be sending right now when we need Muslim allies.”Arizona senator Jeff Flake, one of Trump’s most vocal Republican critics, dubbed the president’s tweets as “highly inappropriate”.Despite the backlash, the White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, doubled down on Trump’s tweets even as she appeared to acknowledge their authenticity could not be confirmed. “Whether it’s a real video, the threat is real,” she said. “The threat needs to be addressed and the threat has to be talked about and that’s what the president is doing in bringing that up.”Raj Shah, the White House deputy press secretary, later framed the matter as one of national security while addressing reporters aboard Air Force One. “The president has been talking about these security issues for years, from the campaign trail to the White House,” Shah said.Asked if Trump felt Muslims posed a threat to the US, Shah held up the president’s proposed travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries as reflecting his views on the subject. “No, look, the president has addressed these issues with the travel order [he] issued earlier this year,” he said.“There are plenty of Muslim-majority nations whose citizens can come to the United States without travel restrictions. Those that pose public safety or terrorism threats … is why there were certain travel restrictions put in place.”A spokesperson for May said it was “wrong” for Trump to have retweeted the videos. “Britain First seeks to divide communities by their use of hateful narratives that peddle lies and stoke tensions. They cause anxiety to law-abiding people,” the spokesperson said.“British people overwhelmingly reject the prejudiced rhetoric of the far right which is the antithesis of the values this country represents, decency, tolerance and respect.”Asked to respond to the statement from Downing Street, Shah simply said Trump “has the greatest respect for the British people and for Prime Minister May”. Shah declined to comment on how Fransen’s original tweets came to Trump’s attention.Reaction on Capitol Hill was nonetheless muted, with attention fixated on Republican efforts to pass an overhaul of the US tax code.Jim Inhofe, a senator from Oklahoma, told PBS he hadn’t seen the anti-Muslim tweets but was critical more broadly of Trump’s social media habits. “I would like to see someone kind of look at the language before they go out,” he said. David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, celebrated Trump’s tweets. “He’s condemned for showing us what the fake news media WON’T.” Duke wrote on his own Twitter account. “Thank God for Trump! That’s why we love him!”As a candidate, Trump routinely fanned the flames of Islamophobia by making a number of inflammatory statements about Muslims.In March 2016, he told CNN: “I think Islam hates us.”Since assuming office, Trump has shown no signs of shifting his tone – often seizing upon terrorist attacks as evidence that his travel ban is necessary. Ellison, who in 2007 became the first Muslim member of Congress, said Trump’s latest outburst was “in line with what he always does”.“Yesterday he was calling a US senator Pocahontas at an event designed to commemorate the contributions of Navajo war veterans,” Ellison told the Guardian, referring to a racial taunt Trump directed at Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday. “Today, he’s pushing out hate propaganda against Muslims … He made an equivalency between the Klan and the neo-Nazis and the people who were protesting them this summer.” Ellison said there was “no question” Trump’s actions could incite violence across the country.“What was it but violence that resulted in the woman getting hit by the car this summer?” Ellison said of the August rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, when a white supremacist drove his car into a group of counter-protesters, leaving one dead and several injured.Ellison also cited the bombing of a mosque in his home state of Minnesota in August as the consequence of hate speech.“My point is simply this: We’ve got to stand for solidarity among all people of all colors and all backgrounds,” he said. “We believe an American is an American is an American … We believe we need all colors, all cultures and all faiths.” “He’s the one who says we don’t,” Ellison added of Trump. “He’s the one who says you’ve got to be the right religion, the right pigment … to be fully American. He does this time and time and time again.”“The point is not whether or not he’s racist any more – he clearly is. The question is what are Americans going to do about it.” Topics Donald Trump US politics Islam Twitter news

Last week's electoral losses in five states for India's ruling party has led to speculation that its agenda of promoting hardline Hindu politics has backfired. The BBC's Priyanka Pathak reports. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lost to the main opposition Congress party in the Hindi-speaking heartland states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, all of which they previously governed. Local parties swept up the other two states - Telangana and Mizoram - putting the BJP in a tough place ahead of general elections next year.It appears that after winning no less than 13 state elections since coming to power in 2014, the BJP's seemingly invincible electoral juggernaut is losing steam.There is a great deal of introspection within and outside the party. And the main question is: has the BJP's recent pursuit of a hardline Hindu agenda - known locally as Hindutva - backfired? Will a departure from an inclusive, development agenda to a polarising, communal one cost the BJP general election too? Setback for Modi's BJP in three key states India elections: Should Narendra Modi be worried? These are legitimate questions because the party deployed the chief minister of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath, as its star campaigner in the five states that went to polls. Mr Adityanath is widely considered a controversial figure because of his well-publicised anti-Muslim comments.He addressed 74 election rallies while Mr Modi, who is usually his party's star campaigner, addressed just 31.Mr Adityanath also spent the past few months courting the Sangh Parivar - a "family" of Hindu nationalist organisations including the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a hardline Hindu organisation with umbilical ties to the BJP. The Sangh Parivar also includes the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), which has been at the forefront of a movement demanding the construction of a Hindu temple on the site of a 16th Century mosque that was torn down by Hindu mobs in 1992, provoking widespread riots that left thousands dead.Hindus believe Ayodhya, situated in Mr Adityanath's Uttar Pradesh state, is the birthplace of their revered deity Lord Ram, and say an older temple existed at the site before the mosque was constructed. Masses gather at Ayodhya as Hindu-Muslim dispute simmers Are Hindu nationalists a danger to other Indians? Mr Adityanath has announced the construction of a giant statue of Ram in the state, and changed the name of the historical city of Allahabad to the more "Hindu" sounding Prayagraj ahead of the forthcoming Ardh Kumbh Mela, one of the world's largest religious gatherings.But if Mr Adityanath was hoping to prove to the VHP leadership that he is a more willing pursuer of the Hindutva agenda and, therefore, a potential alternative to Mr Modi, the recent electoral defeats do not advance his case.Many observers believe that the BJP's defeats are because the party deviated from the development agenda that swept them to power in 2014. The pursuit of Hindutva has backfired, they say.But some in the Sangh Parivar disagree, insisting that it is actually the opposite that is true. "Just the way people feel disenchanted with the economic policies of the government, the people have also lost faith in this government's commitment to build the Ram temple. If the VHP and RSS have to come to the street to warn the government about it, what does it tell you? What does it tell the electorate?" one of them said.Last week, tens of thousands of Hindus gathered in the capital, Delhi, to demand the expedited construction of the temple and criticised the government for failing to do so. They chanted a striking slogan directly targeting Mr Modi's stated development-first agenda: "Pehle Ram ko aasan do, phir humko sushasan do (First give Ram a throne, then give us good governance)".But it must be noted that while Mr Modi has never openly supported these hardline elements, his silence on issues such as an increasing number of attacks on Muslims over various issues like eating beef - cows are considered sacred in Hinduism and their slaughter is banned in many Indian states - is interpreted as a tacit approval for muscular Hindu politics. But he now faces pressure to do more. His government already leads a lacklustre economy. And this renewed pressure to recommit to Hindutva, despite its apparent failure as an electoral agenda, puts Mr Modi's government in a difficult place. Who's the Hindu hardliner running India's most populous state? The Hindu hardline RSS who see Modi as their own There is also the fact that the RSS played a vital role in the BJP's 2014 election victory by mobilising and galvanising voters. They are also credited for Mr Modi's rise from state chief minister to a national figure. Apart from spearheading a sophisticated online and digital campaign in his favour, cadres also held 600 district-level meetings across the country to make Mr Modi a familiar name among the rural population. Clearly, they cannot be ignored or offended. So even as the liberals suggest that Hindutva has backfired and demand that the government refocus on the economy, there are voices within the BJP which are demanding a more strident return to the party's "core" agenda - including the construction of the Ram temple and renewed focus on efforts to protect cows - to reassure their base that the BJP has not abandoned them. The less-than-satisfactory economic performance will also make the Hindutva agenda more important, they say.

India’s supreme court has confirmed that the four men accused of gang-raping a woman in New Delhi in 2012 will face the death penalty.Today (July 09), a bench made up of the chief justice of India, Dipak Misra, and justices Ashok Bhushan and R Banumathi dismissed the review petitions filed by three of the accused following the court’s May 05, 2017, decision that first confirmed the death penalty. That ruling came over four years after the chilling incident that took place on the night of Dec. 16, 2012. The accused, Mukesh Singh, Vinay Sharma, Akshay Thakur, and Pawan Gupta, along with two others, brutally beat, tortured, and raped a 23-year-old paramedical student, Jyoti Singh, on a moving bus, before leaving her bleeding on the side of the road late in the night.The attack shocked the nation and sparked widespread protests. At the time, due to Indian laws that prohibit the naming of rape victims, sections of the media referred to Singh as “Nirbhaya,” which means fearless, a nod to her determination to survive in the days after the incident. However, she later succumbed to her injuries, causing the protests to intensify, with thousands of Indians taking to the streets to call for justice.Following the perpetrators’ arrest, a fast-track court was set up in January 2013 to try the case. A few months later, one of the accused, Ram Singh, was found dead in prison. The sixth member was tried as a minor and sentenced to time in a correctional facility, while the four adults were sentenced to death in 2013, a ruling confirmed in 2014 by the Delhi high court. The accused appealed to the supreme court, which eventually delivered its judgment confirming the death penalty in May 2017.In the years since the attack, authorities in India have tried to improve existing laws to keep women safe. However, sexual harassment and assault remain the norm across the country, and crimes against women and even children have only increased. Just a few months ago, two horrifying cases of child rape proved that despite the 2012 incident, very little has changed on the ground.In fact, research conducted by Human Rights Watch has shown that when it comes to the process of getting justice, rape survivors often face even more brutality, thanks to insensitive doctors and policemen. As a result, activists say the death penalty isn’t enough to end the difficulties that women face.“Instead, the government must allocate adequate resources for the effective implementation of laws, improve conviction rates, and ensure certainty of justice in all cases,” Asmita Basu, Amnesty International India’s programmes sirector, said in a statement.

It sounds like another terrifying story of insurgent terrorism in the Middle East: on Tuesday, men dressed in the black garb of the Islamic State stormed through a mall in Iran, brandishing swords and guns, shouting “Allahu Akbar”. Shoppers reportedly fled the scene in fear.It was reminiscent of the 2017 Tehran Isis attacks in which 17 people were killed. Except that the mall “attack” was actually a Punk’d style prank. The weapons were fake, and the presumed terrorists were actually actors. The whole incident was a piece of viral marketing for a film called Damascus Time about an Iranian father and son who are kidnapped by Isis. Some shoppers worked out what was going in and filmed the stunt on camera phones, but others can be heard screaming in terror. The film’s director has since apologised – he said he had not been expecting one of the actors to arrive on horseback – but he is far from the first person to pull this kind of stunt. He was just following a tradition of prank terror plots begun by American teenagers.There are so many videos of fake terrorist atrocities that you can watch entire compilations of unsuspecting members of the public, running, screaming and vomiting in fear. Most of them have been created by young western YouTube stars, many with millions of subscribers. They tend to involve someone dressed in stereotypical Arabic clothing, dropping a package at the feet of some strangers and running away. In one clip, people drinking on a boat all jump into the sea after a bag is thrown aboard. In another, laughing emojis flash on the screen when a man urinates on himself in fear after being surprised in a public restroom.Joey Salads, a YouTuber with 2 million subscribers, has become notorious for these kinds of pranks. He tries to couch his videos as a “social experiments”, claiming to compare reactions between a man shouting “Allahu Akbar” when he drops a steel box on the floor with that of a man in western dress saying “praise Jesus”. Unsurprisingly, people are more distressed by the former prank, but the videos say less about Islamophobia than they do about the wild west of YouTube content, where pranksters seem to be able to get away with almost anything, with little interference from the site. Last year, the British YouTuber Arya Mosallah, who had 650,000 subscribers, apologised after he made prank videos in which he approached strangers for a conversation and then threw liquid in their faces and ran away, leading them to believe they were victims of an acid attack, common in Britain at the time. Re-uploaded versions of the video can still be viewed on YouTube.Some of these pranks seem too horrifying to be real, and in some cases they aren’t. Sam Pepper, a YouTuber with 2.3 million subscribers, apologised for faking a prank in which he appeared to kill someone’s best friend in front of him – admitting everyone in the video knew what was happening. In his apology, he said the pressure in the pranking community to make new videos led him to fake some of his content – a very odd version of peer pressure.YouTube has said videos like Pepper’s do not violate its community guidelines and the site rarely removes prank videos. In most cases it’s more likely that the police will get involved than online moderators. Australian pranksters the Jalal Brothers were arrested by anti-terror police after they faked a series of terror attacks, including aiming a fake AK-47 at a small child. They later admitted that that video was entirely staged, but the police had not been not aware.Despite the dangers and clear distress involved, new videos are emerging all the time. At this point, many people are more likely to be caught up in a faked YouTube prank than an actual terror attack. Topics YouTube Islamic State Internet features

Enlarge this image Chief Justice John Roberts administers the constitutional oath to Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh as his wife, Ashley Kavanaugh, holds the Bible. They're accompanied by their daughters, Margaret and Liza. U.S. Supreme Court via Getty Images hide caption toggle caption U.S. Supreme Court via Getty Images Chief Justice John Roberts administers the constitutional oath to Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh as his wife, Ashley Kavanaugh, holds the Bible. They're accompanied by their daughters, Margaret and Liza. U.S. Supreme Court via Getty Images A specially appointed federal panel of judges has dismissed all 83 ethics complaints brought against Justice Brett Kavanaugh regarding his conduct at his confirmation hearings. The judges concluded that while the complaints "are serious," there is no existing authority that allows lower court judges to investigate or discipline Supreme Court justices.The complaints against Kavanaugh ranged from allegations that he had misled the Senate about some of his activities in the George W. Bush White House to his angry, partisan statements in denying charges of sexual assault in high school. Politics Trump Foundation To Dissolve Amid New York Attorney General's Investigation At his contentious confirmation hearings, Kavanaugh railed against Democrats, accusing them of engaging in a liberal conspiracy, a sort of payback for his onetime role as a prosecutor investigating President Bill Clinton."This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons, and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups," Kavanaugh thundered. "This is a circus. ... And as we all know, in the United States political system of the early 2000s, what goes around comes around." National Security Federal Judge Delays Michael Flynn Sentencing After Plea Of Lying To Feds After the hearings concluded, Chief Justice John Roberts appointed a special judicial council panel of judges from the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals to look into the ethics complaints against Kavanaugh. But shortly thereafter, Kavanaugh was confirmed for a lifetime seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. And on Tuesday, Chief Judge Tim Tymkovich, of the 10th Circuit, acknowledged that while the complaints "are serious," the judicial council panel is obligated to dismiss them, because it has no authority over Kavanaugh. Law Justice Department Bans Bump Stocks, Devices Used In Deadly Las Vegas Shooting The judicial council is empowered to act against lower court judges, he said, but it lacks any statutory authority to investigate or act on complaints against Supreme Court justices. That is, in part, because the Supreme Court was established by the Constitution, while the lower courts were established by Congress. Some reformers have long urged Congress to enact a code of conduct for the Supreme Court and to put in place some sort of disciplinary mechanism short of impeachment.

What funding crunch and pressure for profits? It’s India’s biggest festive season and, as usual, e-commerce players are splurging.Between September and December, the cash burn—the amount companies spend to run their businesses—is estimated to reach up to $400 million, according to research firm RedSeer Consulting. This is up to 60% higher than the $250 million spent last year.The good news, however, is that it may result in more business. RedSeer estimates the total GMV (gross merchandise value, or the total value of goods sold from a marketplace) of the Indian e-commerce sector this festival season to be about 60% higher than a year ago at $1.7 billion (Rs11,309 crore).Festive season sales make for a huge share of the total annual sales in segments like apparel, consumer goods, and home decor. So companies go on advertising sprees during this time.Ahead of this year’s season, India’s e-commerce posterboy Flipkart raised its biggest-ever funding round of $2.5 billion.The cash burn “could pay off if the industry is able to deliver a top-class experience to the millions of new shoppers this time around and retain them going forward,” Anil Kumar, CEO of RedSeer Consulting, said.Like every year, companies are likely to spend on discounts. It will be higher than the previous year, RedSeer Consulting said, without putting any figure to it.Price-sensitive Indians love discounts and lower prices have been key to online shopping. According to a 2015 report by Goldman Sachs, 30% of an Indian e-commerce company’s expenses go towards discounts.“With the latest funding firepower, this time around, market leader Flipkart would most likely increase discounting spends to acquire new customers as well as to gain momentum over rival Amazon,” RedSeer Consulting said in the report. Amazon India and Paytm Mall are likely to follow suit, it said.The other area where online retailers will spend more than last year is logistics and supply chain management.“Customer demographics have changed compared to (the) past year with tier-II becoming a more important share (of the customer base)…E-tailers are more dependent on third-party logistics players for delivery (to tier II areas) which adds to the overall expenses,” RedSeer said.The one area where spending is seen flat or marginally lower this year is advertising. For companies are now increasingly spending on low-cost channels such as digital marketing.Flipkart is focusing on “personalised digital push,” Moneycontrol.com reported earlier this month. ”The Big Billion Days sale was the only big sale event online when we started. Now it is more of festive season sale, given many other players offer the same. In this scenario, we need to cut through the clutter and innovate ways to reach out to our potential users,” Flipkart’s director for marketing, Kartikeya Bhandari, told the news portal.

The owner of a mining dam that collapsed in Brazil last month, killing 165, knew it was at a heightened risk of failure, Reuters claims in a report.According to an internal report seen by the news agency, Vale was aware the Minas Gerais dam breached internal safety guidelines in October.Vale, the world's top iron ore miner, said the report was misleading as there was no evidence of imminent risk.Vale previously said the dam was ruled safe by an independent auditor. "There is no known report, audit or study with any mention of an imminent risk of collapse at Dam 1 in the Córrego do Feijão mine in Brumadinho," it said in a statement."To the contrary, the dam had all its certificates of safety and stability attested to by local and foreign specialists." Vale: The pride of Brazil becomes its most hated company Around 700 evacuated over Brazil mine safety The incident at Brumadinho dam is Brazil's deadliest mining disaster, with many workers still unaccounted for and with some 300 people feared dead.It was the second major mining disaster in the region since 2015, when a nearby dam co-owned by Vale collapsed.According to the internal report seen by Reuters, Vale was told the chance of collapse at Brumadinho was one in 5,000 - twice the maximum level of risk allowed under company guidelines.The report placed the dam within an "attention zone", saying that "prevention and mitigation controls" should be applied.It also said a failure could cost the company $1.5bn (£1.2bn) and lead to more than 100 deaths. Furthermore it flagged nine other Vale-owned mining dams in Brazil as being at risk.Vale acknowledged the existence of the report, but said the causes of the collapse were still being investigated. It has previously said an audit by German firm TÜV SÜD, carried out in September last year, found the dam met legal requirements. However, this audit report, also seen by Reuters, raised a number of concerns, particularly about the dam's drainage and monitoring systems.It made 17 recommendations to improve safety, all of which Vale said have been implemented. It is still not known what caused the collapse at Brumadinho, but experts believe liquefaction was to blame. Liquefaction is a process whereby a solid material such as sand loses strength and behaves more like a liquid. Shares in Vale extended their losses in New York on Monday following publication of Reuters' story. The company has lost a quarter of its market value - or nearly $19bn - since the 25 January disaster.

LONDON — A major public inquiry into the deadliest fire in Britain in more than a century opened on Thursday, with the retired judge who is leading the investigation citing a “sense of anger and betrayal” among former residents of Grenfell Tower in London, which was engulfed in flames in June.The fire, which killed at least 80 people, began early June 14 after a refrigerator on the fourth floor of the high-rise apartment building burst into flames. The blaze ignited the building’s exterior cladding, shot up the side of the tower and transformed the 24-story structure into an inferno.The inquiry’s leader, Martin Moore-Bick, said in his opening statement that he realized that the lives of Grenfell residents had been turned “upside down,” and he vowed to uncover the truth about what had led to the tragedy.“We are acutely aware that so many people died and that many of those who survived have been severely affected,” Mr. Moore-Bick said. “We are also conscious that many have lost everything.”“The inquiry cannot undo any of that, but it can and will provide answers to how a disaster of this kind could happen in 21st-century London,” he added.ImageMartin Moore-Bick, a former judge, arriving at the inquiry. He will lead the investigation.CreditNeil Hall/European Pressphoto AgencySome residents have asked to be part of the inquiry team. But Mr. Moore-Bick said on Thursday, during the session at the Grand Connaught Rooms in central London, that he would not include them because he wanted to ensure the inquiry’s impartiality.Mr. Moore-Bick said the inquiry, which is scheduled to produce an interim report by early April, would examine several questions and issues, including what caused the fire and why it spread; the regulatory framework for high-rise structures and how they may have contributed to the tragedy; the actions of the London Fire Brigade; and the response of the local authorities and the central government.No evidence was presented on Thursday.After the blaze, it emerged that the cladding was a less expensive and more flammable variety than the alternatives. That finding prompted anger and spurred accusations that the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the local council that owned Grenfell Tower, had cut corners to save money.The fire in the borough, which includes some of the wealthiest areas in the capital and some of the poorest ones, also underlined the social and economic disparities in London, and it raised questions about whether fire and safety regulations were being applied selectively.The London police have mentioned “reasonable grounds to suspect” that organizations managing Grenfell Tower had committed corporate manslaughter.Mr. Moore-Bick said that, while the law did not allow him to rule on criminal or civil liability as part of the inquiry, he would not refrain from pointing out blame based on the evidence.ImageGrenfell Tower was engulfed by fire on June 14. At least 80 people died.CreditDaniel Leal-Olivas/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn addition to the public bodies under scrutiny in the hearings, two American manufacturers — Arconic, which sold the combustible material used for the Grenfell cladding; and Whirlpool, which owns the company that made the refrigerator that started the fire — have also attracted criticism.On Wednesday, the commissioner of the London Fire Brigade, Dany Cotton, said that the Grenfell disaster should be a “turning point” for fire safety in Britain, calling for sprinklers to be installed in all high-rise buildings. In 2007, regulations stipulated that all new towers over 30 meters, or about 98 feet, should have sprinklers, but the rules did not apply to older buildings like Grenfell Tower, built in the 1970s.Former residents of Grenfell Tower have railed against what they say was the slow response of the Kensington and Chelsea council, and the authority’s leader, Nicholas Paget-Brown, stepped down. Three months after Prime Minister Theresa May vowed that every person who lost their home in the fire would be housed within three weeks, only 24 of 158 households have been placed in permanent housing.After the investigation was announced, Mrs. May told members of Parliament that it would “leave no stone unturned.” But many residents have questioned whether the inquiry can deliver justice. Others have argued that it will be difficult to win the trust of survivors after previous missteps by the authorities.Seraphima Kennedy, a former neighborhood officer for the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organization, which managed Grenfell Tower, wrote in The Guardian newspaper this week that “there are significant concerns that justice will not be served.”“There is a fear that those most affected will not get a seat at the table,” she wrote of the investigation. “This is crucial. Without building trust in the inquiry process, and placing victims, survivors and their families at the heart of the process, it will be doomed to failure.”Some have also questioned Mr. Moore-Bick’s appointment, citing some of his decisions as a judge.In 2014, Mr. Moore-Bick ruled that Westminster Council in London had the right to relocate a homeless woman, Titina Nzolameso, a mother of five who suffered health problems, to an area 50 miles outside the capital, even though she had previously lived in state-subsidized housing in the city center. She had argued that she needed her network of friends in London to manage her situation. Mr. Moore-Bick’s decision was overturned by Britain’s Supreme Court.

The geographic diversity of the places grappling with the trade-offs highlights how pervasive the connections are between natural resources, health and economic opportunity. In the vast farmlands of central California, day care centers have to take account of pesticide-spraying schedules. The local government’s revenues on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota have grown to $330 million from $20 million over the last 15 years because of vast fossil fuel reserves that can now be pumped from the ground using fracking. National forests 400 miles away can be clouded with haze produced by a coal-fired power plant near Houston.No parts of the federal government during the Trump era have been more aggressive in rolling back rules than the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department, which between them regulate much of the intersection between the environment and the economy. Together their rule changes have touched nearly every aspect of environmental protection, including air pollution caused by power plants and the oil and gas industry, water pollution caused by coal mines, and toxic chemicals and pesticides used by farmers nationwide.In short, what is at stake is the quality of the air we breathe and the food we eat, the cleanliness of the rivers that flow past us, and the pace at which the climate is changing. Two years after Mr. Trump took office, the policy shifts are not nearly complete; dozens of other rules have been targeted for rollback.After decades of legislation and regulation, the environment in the United States continues to get cleaner. What has changed under Mr. Trump in most cases is the pace of improvement, which has been slowed in a number of key areas compared to what it would have been if the Obama rules had been preserved.If there is a single industry that has been at the center of the fight — both during the Obama expansion of rules and the Trump rollbacks — it is coal. Mr. Obama targeted the industry as a way to combat climate change. Mr. Trump has defended and promoted it as part of his populist political and economic strategy. Mr. Trump’s approach has been to slow demands for further steps to curb air and water pollution caused by coal-burning power plants.

Americans have grown accustomed to the inflammatory rhetoric of Donald Trump. That doesn’t mean his words fail to provoke a reaction, as the aftermath of Charlottesville and his comments condemning black football players who refuse to stand during the national anthem have made clear. But eight months into his presidency, and many more into his time in the national spotlight, Americans know that it’s not always easy to discern when Trump is posturing and when he’s being serious—which makes it hard to tell just how bad things are.When it comes to North Korea, things are very bad right now.Consider the fact that, on Sept. 25, North Korean foreign minister Ri Yong Ho announced that his nation and the US were at war. “For the past couple of days, we had earnestly hoped that the war of words between North Korea and the U.S. would not lead to action,” he said, in remarks translated for NPR. “However, Trump had ultimately declared war again last weekend, by saying regarding our leadership, that he will make it unable to last longer.”The US has not declared war on North Korea. But it is unsurprising that Ri believes the countries are at war. After all, Trump essentially announced his intent to kill Ri and North Korean president Kim Jong Un two days before. “Just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at U.N. If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won’t be around much longer!” Trump tweeted on Sept. 25. And on Sept. 18, Trump tweeted that “the US will have no choice but to destroy #NoKo.”Trump is the commander in chief, with unilateral capacity to launch nuclear weapons at North Korea—an idea he has flirted with repeatedly—without needing anyone’s approval. Given his position, it hardly matters whether his comments on North Korea are mere bluster or genuine threats. They will have a real effect either way.Throughout both his campaign and his presidency, Trump’s bellicosity has been rationalized in a variety of ways: he should be taken “seriously, but not literally”; he was “only kidding”; he was engaging in “locker room talk.” Then there’s the ubiquitous theory that his most outrageous remarks are a “distraction” from the serious, but less juicy, issues of the moment.But these theories don’t make sense in an era when each distraction is a disaster unto itself. The neo-Nazi rallies distract from the natural disasters that distract from the Russian interference scandals that distract from the attacks on immigrants, and so on. Under Trump, the US faces ceaseless crises that all merit attention.The “distraction” excuse certainly fails on the foreign front, where those on the receiving end of Trump’s Twitter tirades have no choice but to analyze them through the lens of their own national security. Foreign leaders do not have the luxury of pondering on whether Trump is seriously threatening them or merely attempting to divert attention from a scandal. They must consider whether their population should evacuate, whether their own military should attack, and how to deal with neighboring states, which must similarly reorient their foreign affairs around threats delivered in vague 140-character increments.This would be a crisis for any country, but that Trump’s threats are aimed at North Korea – a paranoid and insular authoritarian state with rapidly developing military technology and a professed intent of using it – has put the world at the greatest risk of nuclear war in over 50 years.While every president since the end of the Korean War has had to contend with North Korea as a threat, the US has never had a president whose rhetoric is as inflammatory, destructive, and reckless as Trump’s. We have never had a president as thin-skinned as Trump, who is provoked by the slightest insult and abuses presidential powers – whether pardoning criminal friends or issuing unconstitutional executive orders – purely out of whim and spite. And we have never had a president whose attitude toward nuclear weapons is not deterrence or non-proliferation, but enthusiasm about the destruction they bring. “If we have them, why not use them?” asked Trump in 2016, a comment unsurprising given that his obsession with nukes goes back over thirty years. Now he is in a position to follow through—and no one can stop him.To be clear, Trump’s threats are not idle. His administration has increased the nuclear weapons budget dramatically, investing in new forms of missiles that former director of the Nuclear Weapons Council Andrew C. Weber deemed “a destabilizing system designed for nuclear war fighting” instead of deterrence. Earlier this month, a Trump administration committee announced they were embracing the development of “mini-nukes”, which nuclear experts fear makes the use of all forms of atomic weaponry more likely.North Korea, meanwhile, is equally fond of trash-talk, with its leaders describing Trump as a “dotard” who is “mentally deranged” and noting “the dangerous reality that the gambler who grew old using threats, frauds, and all other schemes to acquire a patch of land holds the nuclear button.” While it’s hard to argue with the veracity of that description, North Korea’s proposed course of action – “making our rockets’ visit to the entire US mainland inevitable” – is as destructive and horrifying as Trump’s. They note that they do not care if Trump is even “aware of what is uttered from his mouth.” In other words, it doesn’t matter to North Korea whether or not Trump intends to follow through on his comments, or if he changes his mind later on. The fact that he makes threats at all is enough to trigger the country’s fury, and it is the people of the US who will suffer “consequences far beyond his words.”What remedy is there for this crisis? Traditionally, one could turn to the State Department in the hopes of a diplomatic intervention. But the Trump administration has purposefully gutted it, and as early as March, secretary of state Rex Tillerson announced that diplomacy with North Korea had “failed.” That such a proclamation was made after less than two months in office is a sign not of actual failure, but of a refusal to even try – a move that seems designed to maximize tension between the two nations. Key positions necessary for diplomacy – like a US ambassador to South Korea – remain unfilled.Another potential solution is to boot Trump from Twitter, under the logic that threatening nuclear annihilation violates the terms of service. But Twitter refuses to do so, arguing that Trump’s tweets are “newsworthy” and must remain on the site. While Trump’s threats are not limited to Twitter – some of his most inflammatory rhetoric was delivered at the United Nations – the medium is dangerous not only in the ease through which he can quickly deliver careless threats, but in the one-sided format that facilitates confusion and chaos.Unlike a press conference, where Trump can be confronted with questions or corrected in a chyron, Twitter allows Trump to circulate lies that linger. Given the limited mechanisms of communication with North Korea – no red phone between the two countries exists – and the paranoia of leaders on both sides, it is easy to imagine a misunderstanding of either words or actions leading to armed conflict. And with both Trump and Kim Jong Un willing to employ nuclear weapons, that conflict may escalate into unparalleled destruction. With Trump eagerly threatening annihilation and Kim flaunting his state’s bolstered nuclear capacities, it is naïve to think that rhetoric will be the only weapon they use.