By Updated April 2, 2018 7:28 pm ET Shares of the biggest names in the technology industry extended their three-week decline Monday, raising fears among investors that cracks could finally be appearing in what had been one of the most enduring trades of the past year. All together, the so-called FAANG stocks—Facebook Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Netflix Inc. and Google parent Alphabet Inc.—which powered major indexes to repeated highs last year, lost $78.7 billion in market value Monday, bringing their declines since the Nasdaq Composite’s March 12 peak... To Read the Full Story Subscribe Sign In

Mr. Kilimnik, meanwhile, was trying to use his extensive ties to Mr. Manafort to advance another. It envisioned the return of Viktor F. Yanukovych, a pro-Russia politician who had risen to the presidency of Ukraine in 2010 with the help of Mr. Manafort, who was paid tens of millions of dollars for his efforts.Mr. Yanukovych was forced from office by a popular uprising in 2014 and fled to Russia. Mr. Kilimnik wanted to resurrect him as a semiautonomous leader in eastern Ukraine, a division of the country fiercely opposed by most Ukrainians.In a February 2017 interview with The Times, Mr. Kilimnik described Mr. Manafort as a possible negotiator for the deal. He said that Mr. Manafort had told him that “there is only one enemy — the chaos.”“If there is a serious project that can bring peace to Ukraine, Manafort will be back,” Mr. Kilimnik said at the time.The first discussion between Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kilimnik cited by the prosecutors took place on Aug. 2, 2016, at the Grand Havana Room in Manhattan, and also included Rick Gates, Mr. Manafort’s deputy on the Trump campaign and during his Ukraine work. Mr. Weissmann noted that Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates tried to avoid drawing attention at that meeting, leaving separately from Mr. Kilimnik.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A long-awaited U.S. Justice Department internal watchdog report on former FBI chief James Comey’s public disclosures on Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state and whether FBI employees leaked information to try to hurt her 2016 presidential bid is expected to be issued next month. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks at the annual Hillary Rodham Clinton awards ceremony at Georgetown University in Washington, U.S., February 5, 2018. REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein The report from Michael Horowitz, the department’s inspector general, arises from an investigation he launched about a week before Republican President Donald Trump, who defeated Democrat Clinton in the election, took office in January 2017. In a letter last week to Republican Representative Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Horowitz said his office was “working diligently” to complete the report and expected to release it in May. Horowitz’s letter did not offer details of what will be in the report. In a Jan. 12, 2017 letter to five congressional committees, he enumerated 2016 election-related issues his office would look into. Clinton has called the FBI investigation into her emails and Comey’s public disclosures about it significant factors in her loss to Trump, who fired Comey as FBI director in May 2017. The investigation will examine Comey’s statements in August 2016 that no charges would be brought against Clinton and in October about the re-opening of the FBI investigation into her use of a private email server rather than a government server, potentially jeopardizing classified information. The report also is expected to address whether active and retired FBI agents in New York leaked information about investigations of the Clinton Foundation charitable organization and the discovery of a trove of Clinton-related emails. Law enforcement officials previously told Reuters the information was leaked to former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, an adviser to the Trump campaign who subsequently discussed the contents on Fox News. Horowitz’s office also has sought to determine whether such leaks influenced Comey’s decision 11 days before the election to announce the reopening of the Clinton email investigation. Law enforcement sources with knowledge of the matter, speaking on condition of anonymity, said at the time a fear of leaks from within his own agency helped prompt Comey to make that public disclosure. Comey did not respond to a request for comment. Trump and Comey have exchanged harsh criticism in the past week. Trump called Comey a “slime ball.” Comey called Trump an unethical liar who is morally unfit to be president. Reporting by Mark Hosenball; Editing by John Walcott and Will DunhamOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Tencent Holdings Ltd. will license each other’s technology patents, a deal that could help the former broaden its toehold in the Chinese market and accelerate the global expansion of the latter.They entered a long-term patent cross-licensing agreement for a broad range of products and technologies, the two companies said Friday, adding they were open to more cooperation in the future.“By...

History unfortunately does repeat itself. Two thousand years ago the Romans laid siege to Carthage, killing more than half of the city's residents and enslaving the rest.Hitler attempted to annihilate the Jews in Europe. In 1994 the Hutus turned on the Tutsis in Rwanda. The Khmer Rouge killed a quarter of Cambodia's population. After the breakup of Yugoslavia, Serbs slaughtered thousands of Bosnians at Srebrenica in July of 1995.Last year when Buddhists attacked Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, many people were shocked to hear that mass killings still occur in the 21st century. But they do – and there's growing evidence that these events follow familiar patterns. And if they do, we should be able to see them coming."Genocides are not spontaneous," says Jill Savitt, acting director of the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. "In the lead-up to these types of crimes we do see a consistent set of things happening."Since 2014, the Holocaust Museum and scholars from Dartmouth have mapped the conditions that precede a genocide. They built a database of every mass killing since World War II. Then they went back and looked at the conditions in the countries where the killings occurred just prior to the attacks. And now they use that computer model to analyze which nations currently are at greatest risk. Loading... Don't see the graphic above? Click here."We're not forecasting with precision. That's not the intention of the tool," Savitt says. "What we're doing is trying to alert policymakers that here's a situation that is ripe for horrors to happen and give them a heads up that there are actions that can be taken to avert it." In the three years prior to the attacks on the Rohingya, Myanmar ranked as the country most likely to have a mass killing for two of those years and ranked No. 3 the other year.The museum's computer model analyzes statistics that you might think have nothing to do with genocide — fluctuations in per capita gross domestic product, infant mortality rates, overall population. Such factors, they believe, are indicators of inequality, poverty and economic instability.They also plug in data about recent coup attempts, levels of authoritarianism, civil rights, political killings and ethnic polarization.Lawrence Woocher, the research director at the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, has worked on the Early Warning Project since 2014. He says that the form of government is one of the key data points in their computer model. The most dangerous appears to be a regime that's not a full dictatorship but also not a full democracy."The prevailing view about why mass atrocities occur is that they tend to be decisions by political elites when they feel under threat and in a condition of instability," Woocher says. "And there's lots of analysis that suggests that these middle regime types are less stable than full democracies or full autocracies." The Early Warning Project ranks 162 countries by their potential for a new mass killing to erupt in the coming year. They define a "mass killing" as more than 1,000 people being killed by soldiers, a militia or some other armed group. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is currently the most at risk followed by Afghanistan. Egypt is No. 3 on the list. The researchers note that Egypt was ranked so high because of a variety of factors including a lack of freedom of movement of men, a history of mass killings and a recent coup d'etat. They add that Egypt faces multiple security threats and that "there have been reports of large-scale attacks by extremist groups, including IS [Islamic State], on Christians and Sufi Muslims, and violence against civilians perpetrated by both insurgents and government forces in the Sinai Peninsula." War-torn South Sudan is No. 4 on the list. Its incredibly brutal civil war is expected to get even worse.Greg Stanton, a professor at George Mason University and the president of Genocide Watch, agrees with the goal of the Early Warning Project rankings but disagrees with their methods. Stanton says the Holocaust Museum's model is overly dependent on national data that's often released only once a year. "They tend to notice that there is a risk of genocide too late," Stanton says.Rather than looking at statistics to try to predict mass killings, he argues that you should look at events. "In other words, it's not enough to know that you have an authoritarian regime," he says. "It's important to know what that authoritarian regime is doing."Stanton has come up with a genocide prediction model based on 10 stages of genocide. His model starts with classification of people by ethnicity, race or religion, moves through dehumanization, persecution and extermination before stage 10 — denial during and immediately after a genocidal act. Interestingly, the U.S. currently ticks off many of the early stages of a country headed for a bloodbath, according to Stanton. There's polarization, discrimination, dehumanization. But strong legal and government institutions in the U.S. are likely to block such a disaster from happening, he says.The information that Genocide Watch and the Holocaust Museum are sifting through has been available to national security agencies for decades. The big question is what to do with this information. At the time of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, Stanton was working in the State Department; he says top government officials knew that the violence was about to begin."When President Clinton said after the Rwandan genocide, 'We really didn't know.' I'll be direct. He was lying. He did know," Stanton says. "I've read the confidential cables that came in from Rwanda from our ambassador there months before that genocide. And they knew it was coming."Stanton's 10 stages of genocide and the Holocaust Museum's Early Warning Project are both attempts to spread information more widely about the early rumblings of a genocide so that world leaders and others might be able to stop it.

A planned summer basketball league, the Historical Basketball League, would pay scholarships for its college-level players while enabling them to sell their names, images and likenesses to sponsors. The N.B.A.’s development league plans to offer higher salaries. The probable dissolution of the one-and-done rule in the next few years will again permit the most talented high school graduates to jump straight to the N.B.A. instead of having to spend at least a year in college.A few states, notably North Carolina and California, have bills floating around that would allow athletes to be paid if, say, a video game uses their names and likenesses.All these efforts are well intentioned. But if past is prologue, the system will not be successfully reformed in such patchwork fashion.Nor is the college sports establishment likely to change its mind of its own volition.At a news conference in Minneapolis last week, the N.C.A.A. president, Mark Emmert, said that he had sought to increase athlete participation in college sports’ governance.“I’m a lifelong academic,” he said. “I grew up with that tradition, and I never worked at a school that didn’t have students on their board, and they were full voting board members. They voted on my contract, and I think that’s just perfectly appropriate.”There are athletes serving on several important councils, but there is not one on the N.C.A.A. Board of Governors. No athletes vote on Emmert’s contract, which was extended late last year through 2023.Tim Nevius, a onetime N.C.A.A. investigator whose experiences led him to turn on the system, believes the answer lies with player activism. Last month, he announced a new organization, the College Athlete Advocacy Initiative, that plans to pair his business representing athletes before the N.C.A.A. with trying to advocate for broader reform in coordination with players.

India’s young internet companies have had a great ride over the past decade with global investors queueing up to pump billions of dollars in them.Yet, it’s not all good news as these firms have been burning huge amounts of cash despite being in business for years.The combined losses of just five of India’s most funded and celebrated internet firms—Paytm, Flipkart, MakeMyTrip India, Swiggy, and Zomato—during the financial year ended March 2018 (FY18) was at Rs7,800 crore ($1.08 billion), data from business research platform Tofler showed.One97 communication, the parent company of digital wallet Paytm and e-commerce site Paytm Mall (which was hived off into a separate entity a couple of years ago) together led the pack with a huge Rs3,393 crore loss in FY18.“(The) trend will continue as long as there is significant potential for growth, significant competition in the market to grab that growth and deep-pocketed investors who are willing to fund the growth of these companies,” said Harish HV, an independent analyst who tracks India’s startup sector.Startups in India are still focused more on grabbing market share than controlling their costs.“There’s pride and ego associated with Flipkart being larger than Amazon and Ola being larger than Uber and all of that. Everybody wants to maintain pole position,” said Ankur Nigam, partner at KPMG. “The core fundamentals of business are not being adequately looked at.”This race has also been fanned by investors.A couple of years ago, amidst a global funding crunch, investors had begun pushing Indian startups towards profitability. However, over the past year or so, the focus has shifted back to growth and winning at any cost. This has particularly been fueled by the entry of new-age Asian investors like Baidu, Tencent, and Softbank, who had made a lot of money in the consumer tech sector back home.“Far east investors—Chinese, Japanese, South Korean etc—started pumping in fresh funds to set the ball rolling for land grab again. Everybody’s coffers have been sort of full since,” said Nigam. “Now, it’s all about who is larger, who is doing more trips, who is selling more merchandise, who is got more orders a day, etc.”And this tendency to overlook profitability won’t taper anytime soon.“Companies such as Oyo, Ola, etc continue to expand globally and that should worsen this trend,” said Yugal Joshi, vice-president, at consulting and research firm Everest Group. “Flipkart, which is in a never-ending discount model in fending off Amazon, is struggling as well.”Besides, splurging alone isn’t the issue—there is no plan to plug the bleeding either.“The challenge is if the startup doesn’t have a roadmap or meaningful plan to turn around much like the way Snapdeal did and a few others did earlier,” Joshi said. Profit-making has to feature on their agenda somewhere down the line even if growth is the priority now, he added.Meanwhile, behemoth startups with deep-pocketed backers are creating a crisis of sorts for new, upcoming ventures.“Now that you’ve taken an $800 million bet or $2 billion bet, you’re not going to suddenly shut the tap off,” explains KPMG’s Nigam. Because of significant follow-on rounds required for large companies, there is a direct and negative impact on money being poured into the small and new ventures. “They’re not getting funded,” said Nigam.There’s already proof of this phenomenon. While the big boys like Oyo and Flipkart have hogged most venture capital funding in the 12 months ending September 2018, seed funding (the first stage of venture capital financing) slid down 21% to $151 million.“So far, startups were funded and, hence, there was innovation towards multi-billion companies,” said Nigam. “At the starting of the funnel, if you start to filter out early to do only late-stage funding, startups raising inaugural rounds feel the void.”

Tencent Holdings Ltd. may have lost a chunk of its market value this week, but one of its businesses is surging in the eyes of investors. The valuation of Tencent Music Entertainment Group, the Chinese internet giant’s digital music-streaming business, has soared in recent weeks after some of the company’s shares changed hands in private-market transactions, according to people familiar with the matter. Some recent stock trades valued Tencent Music at around $25 billion, one of the people said. ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump defended his congratulations to Vladimir Putin on the Russian president’s disputed re-election victory on Wednesday, saying he wants Putin’s help in solving crises from North Korea to Syria and beyond. Trump drew fire from Republicans and Democrats alike for telling reporters on Tuesday that he had congratulated Putin on his re-election and that the two leaders had made tentative plans to meet in the “not too distant future.” The Washington Post reported that Trump, in his briefing papers to prepare for the phone call with Putin on Tuesday, was specifically warned “DO NOT CONGRATULATE” the Russian president. White House officials did not dispute the report, but said whoever leaked it could be subject to dismissal. A Trump confidant who asked not to be named said Trump was angry about the leak, and a White House official said John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, was “frustrated and deeply disappointed.” In a pair of tweets on his call with Putin, Trump said U.S. news organizations “wanted me to excoriate him. They are wrong! Getting along with Russia (and others) is a good thing, not a bad thing.” “They can help solve problems with North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, ISIS, Iran and even the coming Arms Race,” Trump said. Trump’s congratulations to Putin, which came shortly after he joined Britain in blaming Russia for a poison nerve gas attack against a former Russian spy in southern England, has revived criticism that Trump has been too tolerant of the Russian leader. Trump is under investigation by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller on whether he or his aides colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential election that Trump won. Trump calls the probe a political witch hunt. Trump’s overture to Putin has drawn heavy fire by critics who called Sunday’s election rigged. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said there was a “lack of credibility in tallying the result.” Senator John McCain, a longtime Putin critic, was even blunter, saying: “An American president does not lead the Free World by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections.” Administration officials said it was unclear if the president had seen the briefing memo that was leaked to the Post. “If this story is accurate, that means someone leaked the president’s briefing papers. Leaking such information is a fireable offense and likely illegal,” said a senior White House official, who requested anonymity. Republican Senator Marco Rubio said he did not like Trump’s congratulations to Putin but thought the leak was worse. “If you don’t like the guy, quit. But to be this duplicitous and continue to leak things out, it’s dangerous,” Rubio told reporters. White House officials have said that Trump is less trusting of Putin because of Russian activities in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere. Last week, after initially equivocating about the chemical attack on the former Russian double agent in Salisbury, England, the White House joined a statement by the leaders of Britain, France and Germany in which they said they “abhor the attack” and blamed it on Moscow. Moscow has denied any involvement in the poisoning. The issue came up on Wednesday in a telephone call between Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron, who is scheduled to visit the White House in late April, according to a White House statement. “The presidents reiterated their solidarity with the United Kingdom in the wake of Russia’s use of chemical weapons against private citizens on British soil and agreed on the need to take action to hold Russia accountable,” it said. But the poisoning incident did not appear to come up in Trump’s call with Putin. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly sits at the end of the table as U.S. President Donald Trump and Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman sit down to a working lunch with their delegations at the White House in Washington, U.S. March 20, 2018. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst “I don’t believe that was discussed in today’s call,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told reporters on Tuesday. The leak incident was likely to revive questions about whether Trump would embark on more turnover in his senior staff after the departure of Rex Tillerson as secretary of state. Trump’s national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, is widely seen as likely to leave at some point, and Kelly himself is said by Trump confidants to have tested the nerves of the president. Reporting by Steve Holland; Editing by Toni Reinhold and Leslie AdlerOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

The White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, gave scathing remarks about the former FBI director James Comey on Friday. Sanders said that firing him was "one of the president's greatest achievements". She was speaking after Comey's book A Higher Loyalty gave a unique insight into working under Donald Trump 'Slime ball': Trump attacks Comey after new book likens president to mafia boss

The baby of a 13-year-old Indian rape victim, allowed by the Supreme Court to terminate her pregnancy, has died two days after he was born. The baby had been in neonatal intensive care in Mumbai but died on Sunday.The girl, who was 32 weeks pregnant, gave birth to the boy by Caesarean section on Friday, the hospital said.Her father's colleague is under arrest for the rape. India normally allows terminations after 20 weeks only if the mother's life is in danger. The case made headlines after her pregnancy was discovered on 9 August by chance when her parents took her to a doctor to seek treatment for suspected obesity. A Delhi-based lawyer approached the Supreme Court on her behalf, seeking permission to abort the baby. The pregnant child caught in a media storm Raped Indian girl, 10, gives birth India child rape victim allowed to abort In a landmark judgement, the court granted her permission on Wednesday to medically terminate her pregnancy.The doctors had suggested a wait for two weeks to allow the foetus to grow further, but the judges ordered an immediate termination to avoid further trauma to the girl.A panel of five doctors, headed by gynaecologist Dr Ashok Anand, carried out the Caesarean section at Mumbai's JJ Hospital. Since her pregnancy was at such an advanced stage, the termination resulted in the birth of the baby boy, Dr Anand told the BBC on Monday."The mother is doing fine and we'll discharge her in a couple of days."He said the baby boy had been was born slightly underweight at 1.8kg (4lb) It's not clear what the baby died from, but a Times of India report quoting doctors said he had lung problems and severe breathing difficulties. In another report, the newspaper said the "family had sprung a surprise showing its willingness to keep the baby".Hospital staff told the BBC the 13-year-old had been informed about the infant's death and that so far she had been coping well.The BBC's Geeta Pandey in Delhi says this is the third case in the past few months involving raped Indian children who became pregnant and sought the court's permission for a termination.Last month, a 10-year-old rape victim gave birth to a baby girl in the northern city of Chandigarh. She too was 32 weeks pregnant, but she was denied permission to abort after a doctors' panel said that termination of her pregnancy would be "too risky".In May, a similar case was reported from the northern state of Haryana where a 10-year-old, allegedly raped by her stepfather, was allowed to abort. She was about 20 weeks pregnant, doctors said. None of the girls can be named for legal reasons.These cases came to light so late because the children themselves were not aware of their condition and their parents also missed the obvious signs because they couldn't imagine that their daughters could be pregnant at such a young age, our correspondent says. A child under 16 is raped every 155 minutes, a child under 10 every 13 hours More than 10,000 children were raped in 2015 240 million women living in India were married before they turned 18 53.22% of children who participated in a government study reported some form of sexual abuse 50% of abusers are known to the child or are "persons in trust and care-givers" Sources: Indian government, Unicef

In 2003, when Jon Phillips was 24, he met someone who changed everything about how he perceived the world. At the time, Phillips was a graduate student in computer science and visual art at the University of California, San Diego. Rather than work for a big tech company, as most of his friends were doing, he wanted to use his computing skills to “build society and community.” So he turned to open software, collaborating with strangers every day on Internet Relay Chat, a platform that software developers use to chat in real time while working on projects together. One day, while he was on an IRC channel developing an open source clip art site, someone with the username Bassel popped up.Bassel wrote a patch for the site, then went on to develop a software framework for a blog platform that he and Phillips called “Aiki,” which was also the name of Bassel’s pet turtle. Phillips had no idea who Bassel was, where he lived, or what he looked like, but they spent hours hacking together, and eventually Phillips picked up more details: Besides the pet turtle, he learned that his collaborator lived in Damascus and was of Palestinian and Syrian descent; he taught Phillips that the Arabic term inshallah, “God willing,” could also mean “no.” He would joke with Phillips while hacking, “Don’t say inshallah, dude, don’t hex it, inshallah means it’ll never happen!” Eventually, Phillips learned his full name: Bassel Khartabil, though he went by Bassel Safadi online, a reference to his Palestinian origins in the town of Safad.Phillips and Khartabil met at a time of great optimism for “open culture” advocates like them. Both men became active in the Creative Commons, a movement dedicated to open source programming and a culture of sharing knowledge across the world. Khartabil saw the internet and connectedness in grand, almost utopian terms, and in November 2009, he and Phillips organized an event at the University of Damascus called Open Art and Technology. It was the first significant “free culture” event in Syria—and the first time Phillips and Khartabil met in person. They invited a variety of artists, including the Syrian sculptor Mustafa Ali. After a speech given by the CEO of Creative Commons, who had traveled from the United States to Damascus, the artists stood up one by one and pledged to put their art in the commons, licensed for sharing, open to all.“It was cool, like, is this really happening?” Phillips says. “We were sitting there, like, Dude, yeah, we did this, man. This is our thing. This is the ultimate social hack.” For Khartabil, it was a highlight of his effort to bring more Syrian art, culture, and knowledge onto the internet; it was the web as a peaceful revolutionary force.Six years later, Khartabil was dead. Syrian military intelligence arrested him in Damascus on March 15, 2012. He was interrogated, tortured, and imprisoned in the Saydnaya military prison and Adra prison, sometimes in solitary confinement. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention determined that Khartabil’s imprisonment violated international law and called for his release, to no avail. Then, in October 2015, he disappeared from Adra, without any government statement of his whereabouts. Friends and family started a #freebassel campaign, believing he was still alive somewhere. But on August 1, 2017, Khartabil’s wife, Noura Ghazi Safadi, who is a human rights lawyer, announced that his family had confirmed his death. “He was executed just days after he was taken from Adra prison in October 2015,” Ghazi Safadi wrote on Facebook. “I was the bride of the revolution because of you. And because of you I became a widow. This is a loss for Syria. This is loss for Palestine. This is my loss.”L: Bassel Khartabil at a Creative Commons event in Damascus, November, 2009. R: Jon Phillips and Bassel Khartabil together, wearing Arab keffiyeh scarves, at a Creative Commons event in South Korea, June, 2010.Maria Lokke/WIRED (Photo sources: Joi Ito, Tyng-Ruey Chuang)Bassel Khartabil was born in 1981 to a Palestinian writer and Syrian piano teacher. By the age of 10 he had learned English using a CD-ROM on his father’s computer, according to his uncle Faraj Rifait, and got his own computer at age 11, a birthday gift from his mother. He spent a lot of time during his teenage years learning to program in C and translating historical books, especially ones about ancient Middle Eastern history and Greek mythology. Khartabil was barely 20 when he started working on a 3-D virtual reconstruction of Palmyra, the ancient city near Homs, collaborating with Khaled al-Asaad, a renowned archaeologist and expert on the ruins.Online connectedness was still fairly rare in the Arab world in the mid-2000s, when Khartabil was becoming active on the internet. Facebook had just been launched, internet access remained excruciatingly slow within Syria, and content in Arabic was limited. But a small group of Arab youth, mostly city kids in their twenties, embraced both the internet and the Creative Commons view of collaboration, connection, and sharing. During Ramadan, Creative Commons organized iftar potlucks where attendees broke the fast together while discussing poetry and entrepreneurship. In Tunis, the organization hosted a three-hour concert with musicians from across the Arab world, which was recorded and released with an open license, for free. The vision was to get together, build things, and share them, instead of hoarding knowledge for profit, or keeping societies closed. Khartabil was one of its firmest advocates.In 2005, Khartabil and Donatella Della Ratta, an Italian scholar who was doing research in Syria and was Creative Commons’ regional manager, started Aiki Lab in Damascus. Aiki Lab was not political, Della Ratta says, but Khartabil was holding hackathons and teaching kids to code and there was potential in the skills they were learning that Syria’s police had not yet caught on to. “Before the uprising, you couldn’t even gather in a public space without having mukhabarat approval,” Della Ratta says, using the Arabic term for the secret police or military intelligence. “They were scared of people gathering in places like cinemas, cafés, doing anything more than playing backgammon—it wasn’t about the websites. That was the least thing.”Khartabil, however, saw the possibilities. In 2009, when Al Jazeera was one of the only news organizations with correspondents covering the war in Gaza, Khartabil helped convince the network to release video footage with a Creative Commons license, so that more of the world could see what was happening. Being a “digital native” was not about having a lot of social media accounts, Della Ratta says, but about empowering people to be informed and connected. “It’s not about writing bullshit posts on Facebook,” she says. “It’s about a culture that’s deeply rooted in people who are like us, surfing the internet and believing we are equal.”In a region with severe social inequality and corruption, these ideas were mesmerizing—and dangerous. “It’s about the culture of sharing. And that’s exactly why Bassel was killed,” Della Ratta says. “In this region run by authoritarians, they all work to divide people. And we were working to unite people.”In 2011, the Arab Spring erupted. Mass movements led by young people overthrew governments in Tunisia and Egypt and began filling the streets in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria. Assem Hamsho, a photographer who was imprisoned twice for participating in protests, met Khartabil in February 2011 at a demonstration in front of the Libyan embassy in Damascus. They waved candles and handwritten signs, chanting, “Qaddafi, out, out!” Syrians had not yet begun protesting against their own government—there was still too much fear—but they would gather in solidarity with citizens of other Arab countries.One month later, in March 2011, 15 schoolchildren in Daraa, in southern Syria, wrote on a wall: “The people want the fall of the regime,” a slogan of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. They were imprisoned and tortured, sparking protests in Daraa that quickly spread. In Damascus, Hamsho, Khartabil, and their friends joined in. “For the first time, you felt courage,” Hamsho says. The protests were peaceful in the beginning, with hundreds of thousands of civilians marching, clapping, and singing in the streets. “Nobody was afraid of anything because we all had one heart,” Hamsho says. “You’d go to the protests, and there was power in the people. We’d go to cafés, talk politics, and this had never happened before. You just thought, I’m going to stand with my conscience now.”Tamam al-Omar, a graphic designer, also met Khartabil in 2011. He recalled how Khartabil cheered a group of exhausted protesters with a bag of Snickers. They had spent all day chanting in a plaza, and he started passing candies out to everyone as if distributing sweets at a Syrian wedding. “I remember the joy in his eyes,” al-Omar said. “It was a celebration.”Khartabil met Noura Ghazi during these demonstrations. Al-Omar watched his friends’ love grow as the government crackdown worsened. In one 2011 video, Ghazi sits on Khartabil’s lap and kisses his cheek, joking about how they met while under siege in the same house. “We really love each other, we fit each other so well, we really want to live together,” Ghazi beams. “We’re afraid for our families, more than for ourselves,” Khartabil says, pressing his face to hers. By December 2011, the United Nations had already reported that more than 5,000 Syrians were killed in the uprising, with thousands more in detention. But people like Khartabil were convinced that by documenting and broadcasting what was happening, using their real names, other countries would intervene. “We thought if we only reported what was happening to international news, and the UN saw, we thought it would end,” Hamsho says. “Then we saw that the whole world is a liar, and humanity is a lie.”Revolutionary art posters designed by Tamam al-Omar, for an activist group called "The Syrian People Know the Way" (الشعب السوري عارف طريقة). Tamam al-OmarMohamed Najem, an activist in Lebanon, helped Khartabil by sending iPhones, which weren’t allowed in Syria at the time, from Beirut, to make sure “the stories of the peaceful uprising were being told.” The internet was coming under state control in Syria, so Bassel would resize and upload pictures, setting up proxies and VPNs to get images and videos out to international media. “He was on a mission inside Damascus to make sure that the voices of the people doing the uprising would be heard,” Najem says. Phillips remembers Khartabil telling him how badly they needed camera phones: “He said a phone with a camera is a hundred times more powerful than a gun.”Khartabil gave computer security consultations and taught Linux to al-Omar, who was making revolutionary posters at the time. “He encouraged me to publish the art without copyright,” al-Omar says. “‘The poster is the revolution. It’s not about you, it’s about all of Syria, and all the people,’” Khartabil told him.Khartabil’s work—sending live broadcasts of protests from his phone to outside media—was putting him in the government’s crosshairs, but he was calm and clear-headed. As the danger increased, Khartabil and al-Omar started meeting in a secret house every two to three days, sometimes staying overnight. They’d cook together, eat, run out to photograph protests, then come back to hide. They were all wanted by security. When friends were arrested, Bassel would delete their Facebook accounts to prevent police from getting into their messages.Aiki Lab closed during this time. Phillips remembers that Khartabil called him in 2011, saying that security forces had raided the space. “He was like, ‘Hey man, this thing is very real, it’s happening here—they came in and just took all the TVs,’ ” Phillips says. Khartabil was still attending international Creative Commons meetups, but he was distracted, always on the phone with people back home, where emergencies kept arising. “He’d be like, ‘My dad, they don’t have water, they’re out of water,’ ” Phillips says. “He’s freaking out. ‘My mom, there was an explosion, I have to go find her.’ ”The last time Phillips saw Khartabil was in Warsaw, at a Creative Commons meeting in 2012. Late one night, Phillips and Khartabil were having drinks alone, and Phillips started imploring him not to return to Syria. “I was screaming at him, ‘Don’t go back, man, you’re gonna die.’ He goes, ‘It’s fine. If I die, it’s fine.’ ” Phillips started to cry when Khartabil said this. “It was, ‘I’m going to help my people. And if I die, so be it.’ That’s why it hurts so bad,” Phillips says.Khartabil was arrested in his office on March 15, 2012, days before he and Ghazi were supposed to be married. He was held, incommunicado, in a military prison, then moved to Adra prison in 2013. There he met Wael Saad al-Deen, a photographer and documentary filmmaker who’d also been interrogated and tortured. “I wasn’t a protester. I didn’t have weapons, just a camera, laptop, mobile, and hard drive,” says Saad al-Deen. He was kept initially in military detention with 120 people in a room measuring about 10 by 20 feet, in the Kazaz area of Damascus. “It’s extremely crowded. You don’t sleep. Every two days someone would die just from being there,” Saad al-Deen says. He was interrogated about his photographs and films. “They hit you, they use electricity, they torture you, and no one knows anything about us,” he says. “There is no contact with the outside world.” He saw tens of people die in those few months. “One day it’d be two people, another day five,” he says. “There were women too, and children with us who were only 12 or 13 years old. There were elderly people as well.”Adra is a civilian prison, which was an improvement over the military confinement for both men. Saad al-Deen and Khartabil were kept in the same section for two years and three months, and were able to see each other every day. Khartabil got back in touch with Noura, and they had a simple wedding ceremony through prison bars. Friends smuggled letters in and out. He wrote to Phillips, describing the military prison and his attempt at suicide:“Cell No 26: is the cell I spent 9 month in. It is 2 by 1 meter with no light at all… I decided to end my life in cell No 26 after 8 month of no light and no hope. Then canceled the idea when I thought of Noura’s eyes and got the feeling that I will see them again. That moment changed and saved my life and charged me with power.”TAMAM AL-OMARKhartabil wrote to friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, finding the humor to make fun of the prison guards’ tech ignorance: “I’m living in a place where no one knows anything about tech, but sometimes the management of the jail face problems on their win-8 computers, so they bring me to solve it so I get a chance to spend few hours every month behind a screen disconnected. Also I had to write them a small app for fingerprint recognition ones, and it had to be on visual basic since there is no other real language installed, it was my first time with Microsoft, so it took me two hours to learn their technology, four hours to write the code, and one minute to hate it. Don’t tell anyone of that ”He also wrote: “Of my experience spending three years in jail so far for writing open source code (mainly) I can tell how much authoritarian regimes feel the danger of technology on their continuity, and they should be afraid of that. As code is much more than tools, it’s education that opens youth minds and moves the nations forward. Who can stop that? No one…. As long as you people out doing what you are doing, my soul is free. Jail is only a temporary physical limitation.”Khartabil asked Najem to create an anonymous blog and Twitter account for him, titled “Me in Syrian jail,” and wrote out 140-character-or-less tweets on paper, which were then smuggled to his Lebanese friend for typing and posting. “We can’t fight jail without memory and imagination #Syria #MeinSyrianJail,” he tweeted on April 5, 2014.Inside the prison, Saad al-Deen and Khartabil tutored each other in classical Arabic and English. Saad Al-Deen composed Arabic poems while Khartabil painted pictures to go with them. Friends smuggled books to them, and they discussed artists and authors: Salvador Dalí, Abdul Rahman Munif, Dan Brown, Gabriel García Márquez. Saad Al-Deen couldn’t read the English books Khartabil had, but he was waiting for Khartabil to finish translating Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture into Arabic. He’d already translated Karl Fogel’s Producing Open Source Software. Saad Al-Deen had never heard of open source before, but Khartabil explained it all, and they fantasized about starting a company together after they got out of prison.Outside, the Syrian war spiraled. Extremist groups like Jabhat al-Nusra gained power. In 2013, the Syrian government used chemical weapons against civilians in East Ghouta. In 2014, ISIS declared a “caliphate” headquartered in Raqqa. Soon, a US-led coalition began bombing Iraq and Syria. In 2015, the Syrian refugee crisis, which had already overwhelmed neighboring countries Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan, spilled into the Mediterranean, with thousands of migrants—many of them Syrian, many of them children—dying in the sea.On October 3, 2015, Saad al-Deen was with Khartabil when military police entered Adra prison. They called the names of 10 people, Khartabil among them, and said to put on their pajamas, take nothing but their washing supplies, and move. “Anyone who’s taken like this, they don’t come back,” Saad al-Deen says. “It’s known. This is the way to death.” Khartabil had rarely shown fear, but in this moment, both men were afraid. “When you’re about to disappear, and this is the real moment, and we knew he wasn’t going to come back—I felt—it was one of the hardest moments of my life,” Saad al-Deen says. Khartabil had become closer than family to him, but at that moment neither one could speak. “Everything happened in five minutes,” Saad al-Deen says. “They took him, and after three days, his bed was given to someone else.”The #freebassel campaign escalated after Khartabil disappeared. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales wrote an article about him for The Guardian. The Creative Commons community produced a volume of essays titled The Cost of Freedom, including an imagined conversation with the director of Star Trek, arguing for Khartabil to be a character in a 2017 Star Trek TV series. Phillips pushed to revive Khartabil’s 3-D Palmyra project and advocated for Khartabil’s release through open art installations. In 2015, the Islamic State extremist group destroyed Palmyra’s most precious monuments and al-Asaad, the archaeologist with whom Khartabil had collaborated to make his replica of the ancient site, was beheaded in a public square. Phillips did not know it at the time, but five months after that beheading, the Syrian government executed Khartabil. He was 34 years old.When news of Khartabil’s death came out last month, most of his friends had already been killed, imprisoned, or were living outside of Syria, refugees with little hope left for the revolution they’d once taken to the streets. Hamsho left Syria in June 2012, after a second prison stint. He spent some time in Lebanon, helping refugee children with remedial education. Now he’s living in Strasbourg, France, 37 years old, learning French. “Every day I go to see friends, go to language exchange, get a glass of beer. Of course I’m thinking about Syria,” Hamsho says. “I can’t stay here. But I also can’t go back.” Saad Al-Deen lives in Istanbul, where he worked for a time with an NGO helping Syrian children and is now making a documentary about Syrian women’s stories in Turkey. Najem is in Beirut, still training social media users, though since 2011, he says, many countries have adopted more restrictive laws in the name of combating terrorism.Al-Omar is 31 years old and a refugee in France. He left Syria in June 2014, after enduring imprisonment and torture. The worst part of hearing about Khartabil’s death, he says, was being unable to mourn with anyone in person. He called three friends that day. “We’re all in different countries. Bassel has died and none of us could be with him. None of us could give him a flower. There isn’t even a room for us to sit together. Today we just have telephones, Skype, WhatsApp—I’m talking with my friend in Canada and our friend is lost, but we can’t even grieve together,” al-Omar says. “This is like the revolution. It’s lost and broken and there’s no place for it.”Della Ratta spoke from Rome, where she’s written an ethnography titled Shooting a Revolution, on the photographers and filmmakers who were killed in 2011 and 2012. “An entire generation was filming to produce evidence, but while they were shooting a revolution, they were shot,” Della Ratta says. “We should take it very seriously when the international community is dealing with Bashar al-Assad like he’s not doing what he’s doing, which is killing his people and executing people like Bassel. It’s a very sad story but it deserves to be told. Otherwise an entire chapter of this situation in Syria will be lost.”Tamam al-OmarAt least 17,723 Syrians have died in custody, according to Amnesty International. Since 2011, more than 65,000 people have disappeared, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights. Noura Ghazi started an organization advocating for the detainees’ release, or at a bare minimum informing families of their whereabouts. Khartabil’s family is requesting access to his remains and more information on his death. Creative Commons has established a memorial fund in his name to support other Arab developers and entrepreneurs.But it is a very different time. “There’s a lot of blood and violence and fear in the Middle East again,” Della Ratta says. Bassel gave his life for a peaceful vision that ended in what Della Ratta called “hell,” a hell that continues to consume even those who have escaped the country physically. Refugees like Saad al-Deen are haunted by what happened in Syria. Yet he doesn’t regret the revolution, despite his years of prison, torture, and witnessing death. “I want Bassel to be an inspiration for Syria’s youth. We should not give up on our rights to live in safety and freedom,” Saad al-Deen says. “I wish everyone would learn from him and his faith in change.” Della Ratta agrees. “We need people in the Middle East to stay resilient, as Bassel was,” she says. People are still sharing some of his tweets, she says, pointing out one in particular: “They can’t stop us #Syria”But that tweet was sent on December 17, 2011, with only a few hundred likes and retweets since. The hashtag #Syria continues to trend, with new results every few minutes: Russian airstrikes, Iranian militias, American speeches, refugees in Europe, ISIS and other extremists, war maps, aid trucks, torture reports, chemical attacks, the Mediterranean, dying children, fear. Meanwhile, Bassel’s feed is silent.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Trump administration publicly released on Wednesday its rules for deciding whether to disclose cyber security flaws or keep them secret, in an effort to bring more transparency to a process that has long been cloaked in mystery. FILE PHOTO: A man types on a computer keyboard in front of the displayed cyber code in this illustration picture taken on March 1, 2017. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel/Illustration/File Photo The move is an attempt by the U.S. government to address criticism that it too often jeopardizes internet security by stockpiling the cyber vulnerabilities it detects in order to preserve its ability to launch its own attacks on computer systems. The revised rules, published on whitehouse.gov, are intended to shed light on the process for how various federal agencies weigh the costs of keeping a flaw secret, said Rob Joyce, the White House cyber security coordinator. Speaking at an Aspen Institute event in Washington, Joyce said the rules were the “most sophisticated” in the world and that they set the United States apart from most other nations. Private companies, he said, “are not getting tips from China, Russia, North Korea, Iran” about flaws in their technology. Under former President Barack Obama, the U.S. government created an inter-agency review, known as the Vulnerabilities Equities Process, to determine what to do with flaws unearthed primarily by intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA). The process is designed to balance law enforcement and U.S. intelligence desires to hack into devices with the need to warn manufacturers so that they can patch holes before criminals and other hackers take advantage of them. The new Trump administration charter on the process explains how it functions and names the agencies involved in the vulnerability reviews. They include intelligence agencies in addition to several civilian departments, including the Departments of Commerce, Treasury, Energy and State. The NSA is listed as the “executive secretariat” of the inter-agency group, tasked with coordinating debate over flaws submitted by the various agencies if there is disagreement about whether to disclose them. If disagreements are not reconciled the group will vote on whether to disclose or retain the flaw. The rules also require an annual report, portions of which will be made public, that provides metrics about the amount of flaws discovered, retained and disclosed. Decisions to retain vulnerabilities must be reconsidered every year, according to the charter. The publication of the charter is “a major improvement,” said Ari Scwhartz, coordinator of the Coalition for Cybersecurity Policy and Law and a former Obama administration cyber official. The Obama administration sought to release a similar document before the end of last year but ran out of time, Schwartz said. Some security experts have long criticized the process as overly secretive and too often erring against disclosure. Joyce said on Wednesday more than 90 percent of flaws are ultimately disclosed, though some critics say they are not shared quickly enough and that the most severe flaws are too often stockpiled. The criticism grew earlier this year when a global ransomware attack known as WannaCry infected computers in at least 150 countries, knocking hospitals offline and disrupting services at factories. The attack was made possible because of a flaw in Microsoft’s Windows software that the NSA had used to build a hacking tool for its own use. But in a breach U.S. investigators are still working to understand, that tool and others ended up in the hands of a mysterious group called the Shadow Brokers, which then published them online. Suspected North Korean hackers spotted the Windows flaw and repurposed it to unleash the WannaCry attack, according to cyber experts. North Korea has routinely denied involvement in cyber attacks against other countries. Asked about the WannaCry attack, Joyce declined to say whether the Windows flaw detected by the NSA went through the vulnerability review process. Reporting by Dustin Volz; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Susan ThomasOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - Talks to allow Argentine soymeal livestock feed to enter China are progressing at a slower-than-hoped pace amid bureaucratic issues, including Chinese demands to inspect local crushing plants, the head of Argentina’s soy industry chamber said on Thursday. FILE PHOTO: Soy plants are seen at a farm in Carlos Casares, Argentina, April 16, 2018. REUTERS/Agustin Marcarian/File PhotoLuis Zubizarreta, president of Argentina’s ACSOJA soy industry chamber that represents farmers, exporters and seed companies, said the country was keen to clinch an export deal that would secure access to the world’s biggest hog- and pork-producing country. China needs enormous amounts of animal feed and has historically protected its soy crushing industry by importing raw soybeans to be processed locally. However, a trade war between China and the United States - its second largest supplier of soybeans - has limited the flow of U.S. oilseeds to Chinese plants, encouraging them to look elsewhere. Argentine President Mauricio Macri’s government hopes to announce the soymeal-to-China agreement at the G20 meeting in Buenos Aires at the end of this month, but that deadline looks increasingly ambitious. “The government of Argentina is pushing to make this happen but it depends on a decision by the Chinese government to do something it has never done before: import soymeal from Argentina,” Zubizarreta said in an interview. “It’s a complicated road to change a policy that has been in place for such a long time,” he added. Argentina has long been the world’s top exporter of soymeal but the crushing plants that dot the banks of the Parana River, its main grains thoroughfare, are working at only about half their capacity due to fallout from the U.S.-China trade war. U.S. President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping are due to meet at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires for highly anticipated talks on the trade dispute. Beijing has slapped a 25 percent tariff on U.S. soybean imports, effectively halting soybean shipments to China. The resulting glut of cheap soy in the United States has lowered input costs for U.S. meal crushing factories, making them more profitable and rendering crushers in Argentina uncompetitive. The soymeal manufacturing industry in Argentina was already reeling from a drought on the Pampas farm belt that dried up soybean supplies this year. The opening of China to Argentine meal would be a boon to the South American country, whose large processing plants located between the Pampas and the deep-water ports of the Parana make it the world’s most efficient place to crush soy. “The government is confident that the negotiations will advance, but things are going slowly,” Zubizarreta said, adding that there had been no progress in registering plants with Chinese authorities. “We are pushing to advance in all the steps, including the inspection and registration of Argentine soy crushing plants by the Chinese authorities. The ball is in their court.” Argentina’s agriculture chief Luis Etchevehere was in Beijing earlier this month, trying to settle the deal. There was no immediate comment from the Chinese embassy in Buenos Aires. A spokesman for the Argentine agriculture secretariat declined to comment on the talks. Zubizarreta said that, given economies of scale advantages enjoyed by the massive crushing plants on the Parana River, Beijing could include some “reasonable limits” on the amount of Argentine meal allowed into China. “It is very important for Argentina to sell value-added products,” Zubizarreta said. “China has historically protected its soy crushing industry but they need to protect the food security of their country.” Additional reporting by Karl Plume in Chicago; Editing by Daniel Flynn and Marguerita ChoyOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

When Google launched Inbox in 2014, the company embarked on a bold mission: to reinvent the very way we think about email.In essence, what Google wanted was a do-over. Gmail, a decade old at the time, was starting to feel ill-suited for taming the wild beast email had become. Inbox was designed to be a “completely different type of inbox,” as then senior VP Sundar Pichai put it at the time—a “better way to get back to what matters.” It didn’t look or feel like Gmail, Pichai explained, and that was the very point of its existence.As it turns out, reinventing email on such a foundational level may have been too bold of a gamble. Despite its devoted base of users, Inbox evidently didn’t amass enough adopters to warrant Google’s ongoing investment. After bringing a few of the service’s features into Gmail earlier this year—including easier access to attachments, native support for snoozing, and cross-platform availability of predictive text for composing—Google announced last week that it would discontinue Inbox and shut it down for good in March.But for all the ways Gmail has followed Inbox’s lead, many of Inbox’s best ideas haven’t made their way over. If they face extinction, it would be a shame not only for Inbox devotees, but also for anyone interested in maximum email efficiency.That’s why I decided to embark on my own bold mission: to find a way to let Google’s cleverest email concepts survive in a post-Inbox world. Once you’ve invested some time in configuring the following workarounds, you’ll find yourself with a supercharged email environment—one that brings the best remaining bits of Inbox directly into Gmail, where they’ll remain at your fingertips through March and beyond.Ready?Part I: Save links to your inboxOne of the first Inbox features I came to rely on was its ability to save articles from the web with a single click (or a couple taps in the mobile app). Whatever you saved would then be treated as its own item within your inbox; you could even snooze it, just like an email, so you’d remember to look at it when the time was right.It’s easy to replicate this function externally, of course, with an app like Pocket or Instapaper—but if you’re anything like me, articles saved to those sorts of standalone services tend to do little more than collect virtual dust. Saving something important to your inbox is a more effective way to ensure it catches your eye, especially with the option of snoozing available.Email This saves entire articles directly into your inbox for later reading.You can save articles using Email This from your phone, too, though the process is a bit more complicated. For iOS users, the only real option is to share an article into Gmail and then send the message to [email protected]. The service will then process the page and send it back in a self-contained, fully formatted email a moment later.For Android users, there’s an easier way—though it’s a minor pain to set up. First, tap the blue “Get Started” button in the initial welcome message Email This sent you upon confirming your address. On the page that opens, tap the “Add the bookmarklet to an Android device” link and then tap the blue “Copy to clipboard” button. After that, tap the three-dot menu icon in your browser’s upper-right corner and then tap the star-shaped icon in the menu that appears.Look for the bar at the bottom of your screen that says “Bookmark saved” and tap the “Edit” command inside it. Now, change the name of the bookmark to “Save” (without the quotes)—then erase what’s in the URL field, long-press that empty space, and paste in the code you copied a moment ago. (It should be a lengthy string that starts with the word “javascript.”)Once that’s done, hit the back button in the top-left area of your screen—and that’s it: The next time you come across an article you want to save, simply tap the address bar while viewing it and type in the word “Save.” Select the option labeled “Save” (the one with a URL that begins with “javascript”), and the article will be on its way to your inbox.The “Save” bookmark gives Android users a speedier way to save pages.Oh, and one final tip: When you see your first saved article in Gmail, open up the email from the desktop site, click the three-dot menu icon at the top of the screen, and select “Filter messages like these.” Click “Create filter” in the box that appears, then select “Apply the label” followed by “New label.” Enter the name “Saved Articles”—and then, every time a new saved article arrives, it’ll automatically be grouped with that label. That’ll set such items apart from your regular messages, and it’ll also give you a handy way of browsing through your saved articles in the future.Email This is free for up to 20 article saves per month. If you want to save more than that, you can pay $19 a year for a premium subscription, which also includes the ability to add searchable notes onto saved articles.Part II: Get reminders in your inboxHaving a centralized place for viewing and managing reminders is the Inbox feature I’m most bummed about losing. Sure, there are countless other ways to collect reminders on digital devices, but they lack the simplicity, prominence, and seamless integration Inbox’s setup provided.After much contemplation and experimentation, I’ve found a way to emulate this setup within Gmail. The workaround relies on Google Calendar as its backbone: Anytime you want to set a new reminder, you create an event in Calendar that begins with the word “remember” (don’t worry: I’ll give you some super-simple shortcuts for doing that in a minute). The item will then show up in your calendar, just like an old-fashioned Google reminder, and you’ll get a notification via the Calendar app when its time arrives.But—critically—the item will also show up as a reminder in your inbox, following the Inbox model. That way, even if you ignore or miss the notification, your inbox will act as a centralized to-do list in which all of your tasks remain until dismissed. Yes, you could just use the new Google Tasks app instead—but despite its presence in the Gmail website’s sidebar, it has no meaningful integration with your actual inbox; you still have to go out of your way to open it in order to see any pending tasks. It also has no Gmail integration whatsoever on mobile, and it lacks basic features like the abilities to set times for reminders and to set recurring alerts.This one’s especially involved to set up, but I promise: It’s worth it. First, head over to IFTTT—a fantastic free utility that connects different web services together. Either sign in or register for an account, then click “My Applets” at the top of the site and click the “New Applet” box in the top-right area of the screen. That’ll let you create your own new automation sequence, which is what’ll allow your Calendar-created reminders to appear in your inbox.Click the “+this” on the next screen, then type “Google Calendar” into the search box and select the Calendar icon. Select “Event from search starts,” type “remember” (without quotes) into the keyword box, and click the “Create trigger” button.This IFTTT applet will serve as the foundation for a powerful Gmail-connected reminders system.Now click “+that,” type “Gmail” into the search box, select the Gmail icon, and then select “Send yourself an email.” Click the subject field and delete everything except for “{{Title}}.” Then, click the body field and delete everything except for “{{Description}}.”Next, click the attachment field and delete everything, leaving it blank—and then click “Create action” to save and finish. Finally, on the confirmation screen that appears, turn off the toggle next to “Receive notifications when this Applet” and click “Finish.”Take a deep breath: The hardest part is over. The last big step is simply to create a filter in Gmail that’ll detect these reminders and label them accordingly. Go into Gmail’s settings on the desktop, select “Filters and Blocked Addresses,” and scroll down until you see a “Create new filter” option.Click that, then type your email address into the from field and type “remember” (without quotes) into the subject field. Click “Continue,” then select “Apply the label” followed by “New label.” Name the label whatever you’d like; I used “** REMINDER **” for mine, but you could go with “TO DO,” “TASK,” or anything else.Once your label name is in place, click the “Create filter” button—and for the finishing touch, find your new label in Gmail’s left-hand panel, hover your mouse over it, and click the three-line menu button that appears to its right. Select “Label color” and change the color to a pale yellow Post-It-like hue.And that’s it: Anytime you create a new calendar event that starts with “remember,” you’ll automatically be alerted at the appropriate time via Google Calendar—you may want to take a quick glance at Calendar’s settings to confirm that your default notification time is set to “zero minutes”—and the reminder will then appear inside your inbox with a yellow-highlighted label, so you’ll be sure not to miss it.Your reminders will automatically appear in your inbox, properly labeled and ready to demand your attention.Last but not least, take note of these easy options for quickly creating reminders using this new system: Anywhere you can access Google Assistant, say or type “Add to my calendar,” “Add to calendar,” “Create an event,” or “Create event” followed by your reminder and the day and time on which it is due—so, for example, “Add to calendar, remember to eat lunch at noon” or “Add to calendar, remember to send invoice Friday at 3 p.m.” Type any of those same commands into the Chrome address bar or Google search box on any computer or mobile device where you’re signed in. Open the Google Calendar box in Gmail’s new right-hand side panel and click on any day and time to add a reminder from there. Install the Checker Plus for Google Calendar Chrome extension, then type “chrome://extensions/shortcuts” into your address bar, find the extension on the page, and create a keyboard shortcut (such as Alt-C) for activating it. Then, any time you want to add a new reminder, just press that key sequence, type “remember to” followed by your actual reminder, and hit enter when you’re done. Install the IFTTT app on your Android or iOS phone and create a widget using the “Quickly create events in Google Calendar” option. You can then tap that widget anytime you want to set a reminder; just like with all the other methods, as long as you start your event with the word “remember,” it’ll automatically play into this system. Remember, too, that you can use this setup to create recurring reminders, just like you could in Inbox. And if a reminder pops up that you aren’t ready to deal with right away, you can snooze it using Gmail’s built-in snoozing command.If you want to create a reminder that appears only in your inbox, meanwhile, without a notification—similar to what would happen when you’d create a reminder directly within Inbox—just send yourself an email with the reminder (starting with the word “remember”) as its subject line. You can then leave it there or snooze it for whenever you want.Part III: Edit reminders in your inboxInbox offered an exceptionally easy way to edit reminders: You could just click or tap their text and then change it as needed. If you want that same kind of power in Gmail, grab the Rename Email Chrome extension. It adds a simple button into Gmail’s toolbar that allows you to change the subject line of any item in your inbox, which works wonderfully for this system. (As of now, unfortunately, there’s no mobile equivalent.)Just be sure you’re comfortable with the providing company’s privacy policy, as unlike the other solutions in this article, this extension does require you to grant it full access to your email in order to operate. (In short: The company promises it never stores your emails, and its business model appears to be using its free email extensions to encourage folks to upgrade to its subscription-based productivity offerings.)Part IV: Attach reminders onto individual emailsIn addition to its regular reminder system, Inbox allowed you to add notes and reminders onto individual emails—something I found to be invaluable, especially when snoozing a message to a later date.To create a similar function in Gmail, look no further than the open-source Simple Gmail Notes Chrome extension. The extension adds a small (and customizable) box atop every thread in your inbox. Click that box and type a note, and it’ll remain permanently associated with that email; you’ll see it anytime you open the message, and you’ll even see a snippet of it in your main message list.You can see email-specific memos made with Simple Gmail Notes right from your main message list.Simple Gmail Notes uses your own Google Drive storage, and the only permission it requires is the ability to view and manage Drive folders that the extension itself creates.The only real downside is that your email-attached memos won’t be easily accessible via mobile. If mobile access is critical to you, you could consider the similarly named Gmail Notes extension instead. That extension does allow you to see (though not edit) notes from the Gmail mobile apps, but it requires full access to all of your email, which you may or may not want to provide. Its desktop integration isn’t ideal, either—unlike the other extension, it shows reminders only when viewing messages in full and not also from the main message list—so unless you absolutely need mobile access to your in-email memos, Simple Gmail Notes is the better all-around option.Part V: Automatically organize travel summariesInbox automatically found and collected travel-related itineraries, reservations, and confirmations and then used them to create convenient summaries of upcoming trips. While there’s no way to get that same capability within Gmail itself at this point, you don’t have to give up on it altogether.Just download the standalone Google Trips app, available for both Android and iOS. It pulls data from your email, just like Inbox did, and creates those same travel summaries—and while it doesn’t exist inside your inbox, it does provide some compelling new perks, such as contextual suggestions of noteworthy restaurants, attractions, and even full day plans in the areas you’ll be visiting.(And yes, I realize the lack of Gmail integration makes this a slight exception to this story’s main focus. But being able to hang onto this feature, even externally, seemed worthwhile enough to warrant a mention.)Part VI: Zip around your inbox with smarter shortcutsInbox made getting around its desktop interface easy, with emails that opened in-line and simplified shortcuts for moving in and out of messages. While you can’t re-create that entire interface in Gmail, you can adopt a couple of its significant elements.Head into Gmail’s settings on the desktop and select “Advanced.” Find the line labeled “Custom keyboard shortcuts,” click the “Enable” button next to it, and then click “Save Changes” at the bottom of the screen.Once Gmail reloads itself, go back into the site’s settings and look for the newly added “Keyboard Shortcuts” option along the top. There, you can add alternate keyboard shortcuts for common commands—such as those you’re accustomed to using from Inbox.Two Inbox-initiated shortcuts I’ve come to appreciate are “ESC” for “Back to threadlist,” which lets you hit your Escape key to exit any thread and return to your previous screen, and “i” for “Go to Inbox,” which lets you jump back to your main inbox view from anywhere with that single letter keypress.Part VII: Swipe to snooze from your smartphoneMiss the ability to swipe a message to snooze it from your phone, as Inbox’s mobile apps allowed? You can actually set up the same command within Gmail—on Android, at least: Open the app’s settings, select “General settings,” then select “Swipe actions.” After that, tap “Left swipe,” select “Snooze,” and prepare to return to your familiar workflow.(Google hasn’t said if or when that option might make its way to iOS.)Part VIII: Sweep away entire sections of messages at onceGmail doesn’t make it especially easy to archive entire clusters of messages, as Inbox did, but there is one way to dismiss a bunch of emails at once in a vaguely similar manner: While viewing a category on the Gmail desktop site, click the square-shaped icon in the upper-left corner of the toolbar above your messages. That’ll select all the messages on the screen.If there are any messages in the group you want to keep, click the checkmark alongside them to unselect them from the list. Then click the archive icon—the box with a down-facing arrow, in the toolbar at the top—to send all the other messages out of your inbox and into your archive.Alternatively, you can star any messages you want to keep (à la pinning)—then click the downward-facing arrow next to the select icon, click “Unstarred” in the menu that appears, and click the archive command to dismiss everything else.Once again, annoyingly, there’s no equivalent for the mobile apps as of now.Wait—what about bundles?One last area that can’t be ignored is the way Inbox intelligently sorted messages into categories like “Purchases,” “Finances,” and “Low Priority” and then presented those messages as bundles within your inbox. You could opt to have any bundle appear immediately, as new messages arrived, or choose to have it show up only once daily or weekly to cut down on distractions and allow for more efficient triage.Well, bad news: Right now, there’s no great way to emulate bundles within Gmail. The app’s default inbox style, in which mail is sorted into five category-based tabs, is about as close as it gets.But wait! There’s good news, too: Google has confirmed it will be bringing bundles into Gmail at some point in the foreseeable future—and while the company isn’t committing to any specific time frame, somewhere ahead of March’s scheduled Inbox shutdown seems like a sensible bet.This problem should solve itself soon—and between that and the other workarounds on this page, you should be able to stop mourning and start moving on to a productive post-Inbox email existence.

WASHINGTON—A year ago, GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch was defending big tech firms against liberals who want to punish them for anticompetitive conduct, deriding the idea as “hipster antitrust.”Last week, the Utah senator appeared to throw in with the tech industry’s critics. In a letter to the Federal Trade Commission, Mr. Hatch called for the agency to investigate Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., for possible antitrust behavior that he called “disquieting.”...

20:12 | 04/13/18 | NR | CC Comey describes briefing with Trump 'almost an out-of-body experience'; Recordings seized during FBI raid of Trump personal lawyer's home, office: Sources Continue Reading

Four gunmen burst into a hospital in the Mexican resort of Cancún and shot to death a drug gang suspect and his wife, according to officials in the Caribbean coast state of Quintana Roo. The suspected drug trafficker was Alfonso Contreras Espinoza, alias “El Poncho”, according to a state official who was not authorized to be quoted by name. Contreras Espinoza was arrested in July on weapons charges, but had been allowed out of a local prison under guard for treatment at a hospital for leg problems. He was believed to head the Cancún operations of the Gulf drug cartel. The hyper-violent Jalisco New Generation cartel has been moving into the resort city over the last year, pushing out other gangs.The state prosecutor’s office said the four assailants overpowered one of the hospital guards and went to the area where Contreras Espinoza was being treated, killing him and his wife before escaping. State police said in a statement that the attack “was a possible settling of accounts between drug gangs”. The private hospital is located not far from Cancún’s tourist zone. The incident was the third troubling event in the state in less than two weeks. On Thursday, undetonated explosive devices were found on a tourist ferry that runs between the Caribbean resorts of Playa del Carmen and the island of Cozumel. A blast on 21 February shook another ferry plying the same route, injuring 19 Mexicans and at least five US citizens. The US embassy in Mexico barred its workers from taking any tourist ferries on the line because of the explosive devices found in the latest incident. Cancún, which is a popular travel destination, has been largely spared the violence plaguing the rest of Mexico. But in January 2017, gunmen attacked the state prosecutors’ office in Cancún, killing four people. A day earlier, a shooting at a music festival in Playa del Carmen left three foreigners and two Mexicans dead. Topics Mexico Americas news

To a pure originalist, this is an incoherent mixing of methodologies. Any ruling that departs from the original meaning should be thrown out. Judge Kavanaugh has called for no such thing. Instead, he has proudly said that he’s a textualist, which means that he gives primacy to the ordinary meanings of the words of a statute, or the Constitution itself. Textualists steer away from other sources of meaning, like legislative history. Conservatives have often touted textualism for its neutral deference to the legislature. Three of the court’s conservative members — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch — lay claim to textualism as a guiding principle. But textualism doesn’t serve as an overarching theory for conservative jurisprudence. Textualist interpretation can produce liberal as well as conservative interpretations of statutes. And because ambiguous phrasing in laws leaves judges with choices to make, it doesn’t put much of a restraint on judges. As Judge Kavanaugh has said, quoting the liberal-moderate Justice Elena Kagan, “We are all textualists now.” This means that textualism offers neither a clear dividing line from liberals nor the historical gravitas of originalism.If Judge Kavanaugh is confirmed, there will be only one dyed-in-the-wool originalist left among the justices — Clarence Thomas — who is also, at 70, the oldest member of the court’s conservative wing. The court’s other leading originalist, Antonin Scalia, died in 2016. This shift away from originalism is a window into the conservative movement’s priorities as it prepares to lock in a five-member Supreme Court majority. Originalism is no longer the powerful tool it once was for advancing a conservative jurisprudence. This is clear from the conservatives’ expansive interpretation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, an approach that has no historical support from the time the First Amendment was written. Despite this, in a series of decisions, from Citizens United in 2010, which opened a faucet of campaign donations and spending, to Janus v. AFSCME in June, which diminished the clout of unions by stopping them from collecting dues from all the workers they represent, conservatives have used the First Amendment to strike down laws that regulate corporations, help unions and limit the influence of money on politics. Tellingly, the court has accepted far more cases involving challenges to regulations of conservative speech than previous courts, with a win rate of 69 percent, compared with 21 percent for cases involving liberal speech. Judge Kavanaugh, too, has embraced this business-friendly interpretation of the First Amendment.

[Editors’ note: An earlier version of this story included details based on a police report obtained by Forbes. The City of London Police later told Forbes that the report was a forgery. Quartz has removed any details that could not be independently verified.]In a bombshell story, Forbes today reported that London police investigated a rape claim against Shervin Pishevar, the prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist who was an early Uber investor and backed former Uber CEO and founder Travis Kalanick in his fights with the company’s board.Pishevar wasn’t charged. According to Forbes, Pishevar was arrested on May 27 at The Ned, an exclusive hotel frequented by London’s financial crowd. Police publicly confirmed that a 43-year-old man from San Francisco had been arrested on suspicion of sexual assault, but had not named the individual. He was later released under investigation.An attorney for Pishevar told Forbes:“In May 2017, Mr. Pishevar was detained briefly in London in connection with an alleged sexual assault, an allegation he categorically denied. He fully cooperated with the police investigation which was exhaustive and detailed. In July he was informed that no further action would be taken against him and he was “de-arrested” (a British legal term). Mr. Pishevar is grateful for the highly professional and expeditious manner in which the inquiry was conducted.”Pishevar has meanwhile filed suit against a Republican-led research firm in San Francisco, alleging the firm, Definers Public Affairs, as well as two of its executives, have defamed him in a covert smear campaign. Among other things, Pishevar claims that Definers has spread false information by saying he paid to have the London accusation settled.A Definers partner, Tim Miller, told Recode that Pishevar’s claims against the firm are “delusional.”The Pishevar allegations have particular relevance given the numerous charges of sexual assault and harassment against tech executives in Silicon Valley, not to mention in Hollywood, where movie producer Harvey Weinstein has become infamous for his decades-long practice of bullying and intimidating actresses to engage in sexual activity in return for boosting their careers.