UNITED NATIONS/BEIRUT (Reuters) - The U.N. Security Council on Friday delayed a vote on a demand for a 30-day ceasefire in Syria, where pro-government warplanes have been pounding the last rebel bastion near Damascus in one of the deadliest bombing campaigns of the seven-year civil war. A draft resolution aimed at ending the carnage in the eastern Ghouta district and elsewhere in Syria will be put up for a vote in the 15-member council at noon (1700 GMT) on Saturday, Kuwait’s U.N. Ambassador Mansour Ayyad Al-Otaibi said. The 24-hour delay followed a flurry of last-minute negotiations on the text drafted by Sweden and Kuwait after Russia, a veto-holding ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, proposed new amendments on Friday. “Unbelievable that Russia is stalling a vote on a ceasefire allowing humanitarian access in Syria,” U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley posted on Twitter. Talks have centered on the paragraph demanding a cessation of hostilities for 30 days to allow aid access and medical evacuations. A proposal for the truce to start 72 hours after the resolution’s adoption has been watered-down to instead demand it start “without delay” in a bid to win Russian support. Diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Moscow does not want to specify when a truce should start. It was not immediately clear how Russia would vote on Saturday. A resolution needs nine votes in favor and no vetoes by Russia, China, the United States, Britain and France to be adopted. “We’re not going to give up. ... I hope that we will adopt something forceful, meaningful, impactful tomorrow,” Olof Skoog, Sweden’s U.N. ambassador, told reporters. Previous ceasefires, however, have had a poor record of ending fighting in Syria, where Assad’s forces have gained the upper hand. The towns and farms of eastern Ghouta have been under government siege since 2013, with shortages of food, water and electricity that worsened last year. Earlier on Friday, the densely populated enclave was bombed for a sixth straight day, witnesses said. The civilian casualties and devastation there are among the worst in Syria since the government captured rebel-held parts of Aleppo in 2016. At least 462 people have been killed, including at least 99 children, and many hundreds injured, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said on Friday. Syrian state media reported one person was killed and 58 injured in rebel shelling of sites in Damascus, including a hospital. Clouding any potential ceasefire is the Syrian government’s frequently used tactic of pushing rebels to surrender their strongholds after long sieges and military offensives. Insurgents in eastern Ghouta have vowed not to accept such a fate, ruling out an evacuation of fighters, their families and other civilians of the kind that ended rebellions in Aleppo and Homs after heavy bombardment in earlier years. “We refuse categorically any initiative that includes getting the residents out of their homes and moving them elsewhere,” Ghouta rebel factions wrote in a letter to the Security Council. Eastern Ghouta has 400,000 people spread over a larger area than other enclaves the government has recaptured. Late on Thursday, government aircraft dropped leaflets urging civilians to depart and hand themselves over to the Syrian army, marking corridors through which they could leave safely. People inspect missile remains in the besieged town of Douma, in eastern Ghouta, in Damascus, Syria, February 23, 2018. REUTERS/Bassam KhabiehLeading up to the Security Council vote, all eyes have been on Russia. Moscow has a history of standing in the way of Security Council measures that would harm Assad’s interests. Germany and France were among the nations to ratchet up the pressure on Russia, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron asking Russian President Vladimir Putin to support the resolution. Earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow wanted guarantees that rebel fighters will not shoot at residential areas in Damascus. Damascus and Moscow say they only target militants. They have said their main aim is to stop rebel shelling of the capital, and have accused insurgents in Ghouta of holding residents as human shields. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said government planes and artillery hit Douma, Zamalka and other towns across the enclave in the early hours of Friday. There was no immediate comment from the Syrian military. Medical charities say more than a dozen hospitals were hit, making it nearly impossible to treat the wounded. A witness in Douma who asked not to be identified said by telephone that the early morning bombing was the most intense so far. Another resident, in the town of Hamouriyeh, said the assault had continued “like the other days.” “Whenever the bombing stops for some moments, the Civil Defence vehicles go out to the targeted places. They work to remove the debris from the road,” Bilal Abu Salah said. Slideshow (4 Images)The Civil Defence there said its rescuers rushed to help the wounded after strikes on Hamouriyeh and Saqba. The emergency service, which operates in rebel territory, says it has pulled hundreds of people out from under rubble in recent days. Hamza Birqdar, the military spokesman for the Jaish al-Islam rebel faction, said it had thwarted nine attacks by pro-government militias trying to storm a front in the southeast of Ghouta. Reporting by Ellen Francis in Beirut and Michelle Nichols at the United Nations; Additional reporting by Dahlia Nehme in Beirut and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Ellen Francis and Paul Simao; Editing by James Dalgleish, Will Dunham and Lisa ShumakerOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

For the world’s largest furniture retailer, IKEA, the first two months in India have been anything but humdrum.On Aug. 09, after much anticipation, the Swedish multinational giant had raised its iconic blue-and-yellow signage in Hyderabad, Telangana. From a major traffic jam caused by 40,000 overzealous customers on day one to a later mishap that forced the retailer to pull a dish from its menu, IKEA’s early days in the country have been remarkable enough to write home about.The one million footfalls that the store has attracted so far prove its reputation preceded it.More importantly, IKEA, which spent two years and Rs1,000 crore ($134 million) building the store, has finally gotten a pulse of how Indians—largely unfamiliar with its unique concept—want to interact with its brand.“So people have liked the way we have worked on affordability,” Patrik Antoni, IKEA’s deputy country manager, told Quartz in an interview. “Maybe we didn’t believe so much (at the onset) in our strategy (of low prices) but it shows it actually works.”IKEA’s store in India sells 7,500 products, ranging from kitchenware, textiles, and hard-furniture to artificial plants. But what is most in demand are its colourful spoons, toolkits, mattresses, and beds.A Rs15 set of four plastic spoons (made in India) has remained the highest-selling product in the country so far. “We’ve sold more spoon packs than the number of people who have come to our store,” Antoni said. And then there are the retailer’s tool-kits that are moving at a surprisingly quick pace, suggesting that shoppers are getting ready to self-assemble the retailer’s do-it-yourself (DIY) range, Antoni added.But shoppers are yet to loosen their purse strings; they are still not splurging on the big-ticket items. “People are buying a lot more items but at a lower value. In India, we have an average of 13 products per ticket (bill) which is higher than most other markets.”Foreseeing this, IKEA deliberately kept product prices in India among the lowest in the world—1,000 products are priced lower than Rs200. Though a magnet to draw first-time shoppers, the lower-priced sales aren’t encouraging for the retailer that has invested heavily to begin operations in India.Antoni, however, indicated that now big-ticket items are starting to move off the shelves. Among the large furniture pieces, the retailer said, beds and mattresses have seen a strong pick-up. Then, of course, kids’ furniture has been a hit among shoppers, Antoni added.But not everyone is coming for a glimpse of Scandinavian design.“We expected people to come for something like two to two-and-a-half hours. People are staying for as long as five hours,” Antoni said.Shoppers are doing a mix of both. To IKEA’s surprise, Indians are spending a lot of time inside the Hyderabad store. After all, the IKEA store is a sprawling 400,000 square-feet complex—navigating the maze can take hours for a first-time shopper.This is something IKEA has identified and fixed. “We have identified areas where there are challenges on the floor, where people stop a little more, there we have increased customer guidance…during hectic periods we have put more people to help guide shoppers to the next section.”Shoppers have also taken to the retailer’s food section. When the store opened, the biryani, priced at Rs149, was a hot-seller, until a customer reported finding an insect in the rice dish. The retailer has since then severed ties with the food supplier and temporarily discontinued the dish.With the store up and running in Hyderabad, IKEA is now gearing up to launch the next ones in India’s financial capital Mumbai. On Oct. 11, it will also hold a ground-breaking ceremony for its store in Bengaluru.For its Mumbai launch next summer, the retailer is going all out to launch multiple formats—a large store in Thane, supported by a small store within the city. IKEA will also activate e-commerce sales to help shoppers both in Mumbai and Hyderabad order its range of goods on the internet.Moreover, the retailer has announced plans to invest Rs3,000 crore to open more warehouses in Gurugram, Bengaluru, and Mumbai over the next year-and-a-half.As it expands, IKEA will stay true to its product and price range, it says. But it will adopt some cues it has picked up on the way. “There will be adjustments going into Diwali (maybe we’ll use more lights) and even going into Christmas,” Antoni says.

By Oct. 3, 2018 5:30 am ET SÃO PAULO—Just days before Sunday’s pivotal presidential election, Brazilian candidates are promising to crack down on spiraling violence, improve weak educational and health systems and shore up the country’s crumbling infrastructure. But none of the leading candidates mention Brazil’s biggest problem: There is no money to do any of that. After years of overspending followed by a deep recession, Brazil’s next president will run a government living on borrowed money to pay salaries and pensions and keep schools and hospitals... To Read the Full Story Subscribe Sign In

Donald Trump only has himself to blame for Robert Mueller’s return to public life. The former FBI director, now 74, was asked to come out of retirement after Trump fired James Comey,on 9 May 2017.In March that year, on Capitol Hill, Comey revealed publicly that in July 2016 the FBI opened an investigation into Russian interference in the US election and possible Trump campaign collusion. During the election, Comey spoke openly about the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. The Trump-Russia inquiry was kept secret.Eight days after Comey was fired, the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, appointed Mueller as special counsel. Eighteen months later, the inquiry has led to indictments against 32 individuals and three Russian entities on charges ranging from computer hacking to obstruction of justice.Trump’s former campaign chair Paul Manafort and former national security adviser Michael Flynn both pleaded guilty to criminal charges and pledged to cooperate. Donald Trump Jr and longtime Trump aide Roger Stone are in legal peril.Trump Jr orchestrated the now infamous Trump Tower meeting with a group of Russians after being promised “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Stone has been under scrutiny over whether he joined the Russian conspiracy.Trump, who would himself be in legal trouble if he knew of any conspiracy or obstructed justice, has consistently called the Mueller investigation a hoax and turned “NO COLLUSION!” into a catchphrase.The investigation, which cost more than $16.6m in its first 11 months, can be broken down into four distinct parts which have all led to indictments: Manafort and his business connections to Russia following years of work in support of the former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. Russian use of fake social media accounts to influence the 2016 election. Russian hacking of the Democratic party and the Clinton aide John Podesta – and the subsequent leak of thousands of emails by WikiLeaks. Trump campaign connections to Russia – including the Trump Tower meeting and the adviser George Papadopoulos’s involvement with a professor who told him the Russians had “dirt” on Clinton including “thousands of emails”. Anne Milgram, a law professor at New York University and a former prosecutor and attorney general of New Jersey, said Mueller and his 17 lawyers had done “a terrific job”.“Months have gone by – people think it’s a long time – it is not in criminal justice,” she said. “He has moved incredibly quickly, got a lot of cooperation agreements, charges, done an extraordinary job of running down Russian hacking of the election.”Elizabeth de la Vega, a former federal prosecutor for the northern district of California, said: “Complex charges against nearly three dozen people [and] organizations in less than two years is unheard of. Federal investigations may go on for three or four years before charges are brought against a few defendants. Also despite nearly daily false attacks from the president and his allies, the entire team has just kept its head down and done their work.”One indictment charging three Russian companies and 13 Russians goes into amazing detail about the companies, which had budgets of more than $1.2m a month and hundreds of staff creating fake content aimed at stirring up American voters. Another indictment charges 12 members of the Russian military with hacking the Democrats and the Clinton campaign. The individuals are alleged to have created the site DC Leaks and created the Guccifer 2.0 persona, supposed to be a lone Romanian hacker who shared data with WikiLeaks.“It is really extraordinary, detailed evidence of the way the Russian government hacked the American election,” Milgram said. “What is still outstanding is are any Americans charged in connection with that, will Roger Stone be charged, will Mueller write a report on the president, what about Donald Trump Jr?“High-level questions remain – how close did this come to the campaign? Were they involved in the coordinated release of the hacked emails of Podesta? What about the president’s efforts to fire Comey to allegedly obstruct justice?”Little is known about the inner workings of Mueller’s investigation, which has been operating out of an office in south-west Washington, not far from the National Mall.A grand jury has been convened, meeting at the DC federal court on Pennsylvania Avenue, midway between the White House and Capitol Hill. People appear either voluntarily or under subpoena and are questioned without their lawyer. The jury can weigh evidence and say whether charges should be brought.Rob Goldstone, a British PR man for the Russian Agalarov family, fixed up the Trump Tower meeting with a promise of Russian dirt on Clinton.“If it’s what you say, I love it,” Trump Jr wrote, before bringing in his brother-in-law Jared Kushner and Manafort. He had been promised “very high-level and sensitive information” as part of Russian support for Trump.Goldstone met Mueller’s team voluntarily. He told the Guardian he was taken in an unmarked car for six or seven hours of interviews in February this year.“It was a basic room,” he said, “a long table. I sat on one side and they sat on the other side with my lawyers sat next to me. There was something very methodical and logical about the approach to questions.“There were about six people in total, a couple of FBI people and a couple of people from, I suppose, the Mueller team. Over the course of the day they asked me a series of questions about my email, the Trump Tower meeting and about my relationship with my clients, the Agalarovs.“A lot of friends have asked me did you meet Robert Mueller? I’ve said even if he came in to change the lightbulb or adjust the air-conditioning I’d probably be horrified by the idea that he was there, considering I hadn’t heard he had been in anybody else’s. So I was thankful of the fact I didn’t see Bob Mueller.”On 9 March, Goldstone voluntarily appeared before the grand jury. He said there were 22 or 23 people in tiered seating.“Similar sort of thing,” he said. “The difference there, you have no lawyers, you’re on your own, so that’s pretty terrifying. Terrifying even if you know and believe you have nothing to fear.”All eyes are on Manafort. Due to be sentenced on charges including bank and tax fraud on 8 February, he is cooperating.Mueller’s team asked for a delay in the sentencing of Rick Gates, Manafort’s former partner and a key witness against him. Earlier this month they also asked for a delay before updating a judge about Manafort’s cooperation. On Monday, they will submit a report.Observers assume that means an indictment is imminent, against someone. If he is not cooperating fully, Manafort could be sentenced more harshly.Milgram said: “Now the question you and I can’t answer is what does Paul Manafort have … is he cooperating against the president, is he cooperating against Donald Jr – and only Mueller knows that right now.”Milgram suspects Mueller was aware the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, was likely to be removed after the midterm elections. The acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, is under pressure to keep his hands off the investigation.“I suspect there are a lot of cases already put into the grand jury, some of those could have been voted out and put under seal,” Milgram said. “I think Mueller will have done as much work as possible and have gotten as far as he can prior to the midterms, understanding there was a risk to the integrity of the investigation.”She thought the investigation might have about six months left, although if Trump refuses a face-to-face meeting, Mueller could seek a subpoena to put him before the grand jury. That could be fought all the way to the supreme court.There is a precedent, US v Nixon, when the justices ruled that the president must deliver subpoenaed materials to a district court. Sixteen days later, Nixon resigned.If Mueller decides not to have that fight, he could write a report saying he believed the president obstructed justice. If he does not reach that conclusion, the Democratic-led House could issue its own subpoenas.“It is a chess match,” said Milgram. “We’ll have to see how it plays out in the next year.” Read part one. ‘America’s straightest arrow’: Robert Mueller silent as urgency mounts Topics Trump-Russia investigation Robert Mueller Donald Trump US politics Paul Manafort Trump administration features

In the relatively staid fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) market in India, a boundary spanner has made a huge impact through the superb timing of entry and scaling up: the Patanjali brand has made a significant consumer impact in a very short time.I reflected on what the company must be watchful of to convert such a grand beginning into a sustainable, long-term business. What are the risks they must guard against?Patanjali has made a significant consumer impact in a very short time.The first is excessive brand extension and distraction. So long as the product range is squarely in the wellness space—I include personal products and ghee in wellness, but not mustard oil, noodles or detergents. Stretching the image into jams, noodles, detergents and cattle feed is neither smart nor image-consistent. Patanjali has a choice to make: create scale by being a minor player in a large number of categories or become a significant player in chosen categories.The second is the ability to deliver a consistent quality, day after day, year after year. FMCG companies have built systems of quality assurance, safety, food standards and general excellence over decades. This is not rocket science, and delivering results reliably requires a strong systems orientation. Because consumers are hassled with lifestyle pressures, they long for natural, ayurvedic remedies, which stand pre-sold in the consumers’ minds. They trust blindly, and that trust must never be broken in terms of ingredients, quality and freshness. That is a tall order to deliver. Some of the quality complaints on social media are horrendous.The third is to remain focused on the consumer rather than on the competitor, which can take away focus from the consumer.Patanjali should remember that long-lasting, value-creating consumer companies are rarely controversial entities. They are almost self-effacing because they are always trying to strengthen consumer trust! Advertising or product claims that get struck down by legal courts or by standards councils do not augur well for Patanjali. Suggesting that other edible oils in the country carry carcinogens or add sodium benzoate as a preservative and then claiming that their product is “chemical-free” is avoidable! How can a detergent be chemical-free? The consumer does not really care whether Patanjali deals a death blow to MNCs or Indian manufacturers.The fourth is product distribution. “Herbal-related” brands like VLCC and The Body Shop rely on exclusive stores rather than general trade. Patanjali’s ability to get corporate stacking in modern trade is impressive. Currently, Patanjali offers tight retailer margins, but reaches 10 per cent of the retail universe. It is expanding distribution gradually on the strength of consumer pull, but there is a long, long way to go.The fifth is to dilute the political connections of the business. Consumer research data shows clearly the disapproval of consumers when the Patanjali brand ambassador gets involved with political statements or movements. Changes of government regimes can change fortunes, for example, the availability of bank loans, favourable tax breaks, easing up of investigations into pending quality/tax cases, connection with powerful people, and so on.The sixth is the Icarus syndrome. If an entire business is constructed on the platform of one brand ambassador, there is inherent risk for life after. With growing success, differences of opinion and compatibility among the stakeholders could crack open. History shows that it is only after commercial god-men die that the putrid remnants of their ashram or empire became visible to the public.Excerpted from R Gopalakrishnan’s book A Biography of Innovations with permission from Penguin Books India. We welcome your comments at ideas.india@qz.com.

Ari Spitzer woke up in his fourth-floor apartment in Manhattan around 2 a.m. on Wednesday to sirens blaring and the smell of heavy smoke. When he opened his front door, the hallway was so full of smoke he couldn’t leave. “I couldn’t even see,” he said.He rushed to the fire escape, where the smoke was so thick he couldn’t see far enough to make his way to the ground. From there, fire crews helped him get down.Firefighters were still on the scene as of 11 a.m., working to extinguish a six-alarm fire in a building in the East Village that began early Wednesday.Fourteen people, 11 of them firefighters, were injured, officials said. None of the victims sustained life-threatening injuries.ImageBeth Rosner, left, comforting Reena Mohamed, the owner of a nearby salon that was damaged by smoke and water. Ms. Mohamed said this was the second time a fire had damaged her business.CreditUli Seit for The New York TimesAfter more than six hours of fighting the blaze, firefighters were pulled from inside the building over concerns that it may collapse.“We don’t want to put our guys at risk anymore,” James E. Leonard, the chief of the New York Fire Department, said. The fire broke out just before 2 a.m. at 188 First Avenue, a five-story building with eight apartments and a Japanese restaurant, Uogashi, on the ground floor. The building was evacuated and some businesses were closed. Two nearby schools, P.S. 19 Asher Levy and East Side Community High School, were closed for the day.“There was a lot of smoke, and the fact that the streets were closed, it was just difficult to bring children into the area,” Chief Leonard said. ImageAt one point during the blaze, firefighters were pulled from the building over concerns about the building's stability.CreditUli Seit for The New York TimesOfficials said they believe the fire began in the restaurant.By 8 a.m., most of the fire was contained, a Fire Department spokesman said, but crews were still fighting flames in a structure behind the building that had partially collapsed.Chief Leonard said he expected a “prolonged operation” as firefighters let the fire burn through the roof of the back building. ImageEleven of the 14 people injured by the blaze were firefighters.CreditUli Seit for The New York TimesMr. Spitzer said he was told it would be at least a day before he and his roommate, who was out of town, would be able to return to their apartment. Then he texted his roommate, “Our apartment was on fire. See you in the morning.”ImageBusinesses near the site of the fire and two schools were closed as fire crews worked to control the blaze.CreditUli Seit for The New York Times

Maruti Suzuki, India’s largest carmaker, has declared its intention to launch its first electric vehicle (EV) in the country in 2020. But it must clear one critical bump on the road: affordability.Although the auto major is currently still assessing what exactly Indians would want out of an EV, the right pricing remains the bottom line. ”On a total cost of ownership, running cost as well as maintenance, acquisition cost—all of that needs to be built in (for EVs) to see how much merit is there with respect to an IC (internal combustion) engine or with respect to hybrid engine,” CV Raman, Maruti Suzuki’s senior executive director of engineering, told Quartz.In November, Suzuki, the majority owner of Maruti Suzuki, entered into a partnership with Toyota to develop EVs for the Indian market, backing the Narendra Modi government’s plans to stop selling conventional gas-fuelled cars by 2030. Raman did not describe precisely how this partnership would work, but explained that the focus would be on developing a local manufacturing ecosystem. “That (the EV) will be built in India. At Maruti Suzuki, we believe in manufacturing cars, not importing,” he said in an interview on the sidelines of the 2018 Auto Expo in New Delhi. “We are committed to the localisation of the product.”To bring in EV technology at a reasonable price, Maruti Suzuki will have to leverage its formidable supply chain in India. “Many of the suppliers… already have technologies in Europe, Japan, and other places. The key would be that how would we get those technologies at an affordable (rate) and bring affordable technology into India,” explained Raman, who led the team that created the Vitara Brezza, the first Suzuki vehicle designed and developed in India.Maruti Suzuki, which currently produces over 1.5 million cars every year, has a domestic supply chain of about 400 vendors who provide over 95% of all parts that go into its vehicles. The aim is to eventually create something similar for EVs in India. ”Technology today is available all over the place. Now how to make it affordable, and how to make it relevant for India, is the discussion, which we need to have with our suppliers,” Raman added.Suzuki has already made some early moves. In April 2017, the Japanese automotive major announced an agreement with Toshiba and Denso to manufacture automotive lithium-ion battery packs in India. With an investment of $180 million, the facility in Gujarat is expected to begin production by 2020.But a firmer blueprint is likely to emerge in the next few months after Maruti Suzuki completes its survey of consumer requirements. “How will they do the charging at home, and what kind of range are they looking for? What kind of infrastructure is required for these vehicles? All of that we are trying to assess,” Raman said. “In the next three to four months, we are going to get some inputs, and based on that we are going to take our plan forward.”

“We cannot possibly move forward,” she protested, as the chairman, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, promptly ruled her out of order.Throughout the hearings, Ms. Harris, once the California attorney general, drew on her formidable skills as a former prosecutor to repeatedly skewer Judge Kavanaugh and back him into unpleasant corners.“Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?” she asked at one point, in an exchange that picked up considerable traction on social media.The judge seemed flustered. “I’m not — I’m not — thinking of any right now, senator,” he replied.Mr. Booker, for his part, proved his skills at oratory; on Wednesday night, he talked for 23 of the 30 minutes he was allotted to question Judge Kavanaugh, delivering a soaring lecture on racial inequality — even as he repeatedly cut off the nominee while grilling him about his views on affirmative action, racial profiling and voter identification laws.“It seems that you are O.K. with using race to single out some Americans for extra security measures because they look different, but you’re not O.K. with using race to help promote diversity,” Mr. Booker said at one point, while disclosing that the committee had a confidential email titled “racial profiling” relating to Judge Kavanaugh.

For many women, the past year of #MeToo has been a time of intense and often private reflection. Women in the Senate, long a male-dominated backroom-cigar sort of place, have suffered their share of professional reckonings: Although the climate is slowly improving, only 23 senators are women, and the body only recently, and with considerable delay, created a modernized sexual harassment policy. But the workplace culture of the Senate isn’t important just on an individual level. As the Kavanaugh hearings bring #MeToo to its most public and political height so far, female Senate aides are both responsible for the outcome of the process and enduring its brutal, and extremely personal, fallout.Last week, I spoke with a number of female midlevel and senior Senate staff members on both sides of the aisle. Nearly all described the Kavanaugh hearings as uniquely wrenching.It’s not as though these women are surprised by the intensity of the debate. Some of them have worked on the Hill for decades, experiencing the Anita Hill hearings as well as the 1995 resignation of Senator Bob Packwood after charges of sexual harassment. Looking back at that period, a senior Democratic aide said: “I think, how did we live through that? We were so angry.” (She, as well as most other sources in this article, spoke on background to discuss private reactions.) But there was an institutional acceptance of harassment at the time — everyone knew you didn’t get in the Senate elevator alone with Strom Thurmond — and anger was mixed with fear. “Women were intimidated and weren’t comfortable coming forward,” said Maura Keefe, Senator Jeanne Shaheen’s chief of staff, who has worked in Congress since the early 1990s.Over the years, several of the women I spoke with experienced off-color comments, uncomfortable jokes or the standard everyday gut-punch of men talking over them in meetings. They, like women everywhere, always, learned well how to paste on a frozen smile or deflect an ugly comment with humor. A senior aide to a Republican senator described a conversation about one of the recent sexual assault scandals, in which her boss said he couldn’t believe people close to the alleged perpetrator hadn’t known what kind of man he was. The aide shrugged and responded with a non-answer. But privately, she thought, “You have no idea what kind of men work for you,” having fielded constant “pornographic” remarks from her male co-workers.The past year has brought some validation to female Senate aides. “We never thought there would be any kind of accountability, so to see it happening feels like you can finally exhale,” Ms. Keefe said, speaking about the general #MeToo movement. But the scrambling over Judge Kavanaugh has reawakened old traumas while creating some new ones.

The family of Shamima Begum has formally started court challenges against the home secretary, saying Sajid Javid’s decision to strip the teenager of her citizenship is unfair because hundreds of Britons who went to Islamic State territory have been allowed back.Begum fled her east London family for Syria in February 2015, aged 15, along with two school friends after reading terrorist propaganda online. There she married a terrorist fighter and had three children, all of whom died as infants.After she emerged in a refugee camp in Syria pleading to come home, but seemingly ambivalent about the atrocities committed by Isis, Javid controversially stripped her of her British citizenship.Appeals against that decision have now been lodged with the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) and another challenge to the home secretary’s actions will be lodged with the high court on Thursday, the Guardian understands.The appeal brought by Begum’s mother claims the home secretary’s decision means Begum’s life is in danger, leaving her suffering degrading treatment in a Syrian refugee camp, and facing threats from Isis extremists.The solicitor Tasnime Akunjee, who has represented Begum’s family since 2015, claims the government decision breaks several articles of the European convention on human rights. “We are arguing the decision is wrong because it renders Shamima Begum stateless, it puts her life at risk, exposes her to inhumane and degrading treatment, and breaches her right to family life,” he said.“The decision was disproportionate. To strip her citizenship, the home secretary has to balance the risk she poses versus the effect on her. It endangers her life, her child died, and we know she was threatened by Isis supporters in the camp and had to be moved.“In her camp another family had their tent burnt down killing their children.”The decision, the court will be asked to accept, is all the more wrong because the government itself has admitted that hundreds of others who went to Syria have been permitted to return.Akunjee said: “The government has accepted that 400 people have picked up a gun and actively fought for Isis and then been allowed back to Britain. So how can it be proportionate for a 19-year-old girl who had a child not to be allowed to return, when the others have been allowed to return?”The high court action seeks a judicial review accusing the home secretary of failing to take into account facts as he took key decisions. Javid will not reconsider his decision despite Bangladesh saying it will not grant Begum citizenship, thus rendering her stateless if the British decision stands. This would be contrary to the law, it is argued. Lawyers for the family say the death of her third child last month should also be taken into account.The SIAC case is complicated by the fact that Begum is incommunicado.Akunjee’s attempt to see her in the al-Roj camp to get her formal instructions failed when authorities refused him permission.Furthermore, a second law firm claims Begum has instructed it through a third party and it, too, has lodged an appeal at SIAC, with both applications received on Tuesday.At SIAC, judges can sit in secret and hear details of intelligence from security agencies such as MI5 or MI6.British security officials believe anyone who willingly went to Isis-controlled lands and spent extensive time there, in theory, poses a risk. But they have also warned evidence of involvement in violence or training may be hard to secure. Ultimately, the decision, they believe, on exclusion from the UK is a political one for the home secretary.Akunjee said: “We are trying to stop the home secretary continuing his decision that puts her life at risk, her human dignity at risk, when it is unnecessary in the circumstances.”In February a letter from Javid to Begum’s mother contained news of the decision to revoke her citizenship. In it the home secretary wrote that he made such an order, believing that because her parents were of Bangladeshi heritage the teenager could apply for citizenship of that country.This is crucial because, while the law bars him from making a person stateless, it allows him to remove citizenship if he can show Begum has behaved “in a manner which is seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the UK” and he has “reasonable grounds for believing that the person is able, under the law of a country or territory outside the UK, to become a national of such a country or territory”. Topics Shamima Begum Special Immigration Appeals Commission Immigration and asylum Islamic State Sajid Javid news

Fifteen Marines were wounded, six of them critically, when an amphibious vehicle they were training in caught fire at Camp Pendleton on Wednesday morning.The accident happened just after 9:30 a.m. at the base in Southern California, the Marine Corps said in a statement. The Marines, members of the First Marine Division, “were conducting scheduled battalion training” when the vehicle caught fire, the statement said. The cause is under investigation.Six of the Marines were listed in critical condition and six in serious condition. One other was hospitalized in stable condition, and two were treated on base for minor injuries.The accident involved an Assault Amphibious Vehicle, or A.A.V. These vehicles, which Marines use to move from sea to land, have been in use since the 1970s, the Marine Corps said in a second statement.First Lt. Paul Gainey, the First Marine Division’s public affairs officer, said in an email Wednesday evening that he had no further information.Wednesday’s episode was the third major accident involving Marines this summer. In July, a Marine Corps transport plane crashed in Mississippi, killing 15 Marines and a Navy corpsman. And in August, three Marines died when their Osprey aircraft crashed off the eastern coast of Australia. Twenty-three other military members on the plane were rescued. The Marine Corps briefly grounded its planes after the second crash in order to review safety measures.

In Germany, Gerhard Pauli, a state prosecutor based in Hagen, told me last month about a local firefighter trainee who had grown so fearful of refugees that he attempted to burn down a local refugee group house. “I’m quite sure that social media made it worse,” he said.Mr. Pauli said that his office spent more and more time tracking rumors and hate speech on Facebook, and that it seemed to rise in advance of violence, as when the mayor of nearby Altena was stabbed last year.Though Germany is a major economy with some of the world’s strictest social media regulations, Mr. Pauli had only somewhat more success with Facebook than his peers in the developing world.“In the beginning, they did nothing,” he said. “They would say, ‘You have no jurisdiction over us.’ In the last few years, they are more helpful, especially in cases of child abuse.”But, in other matters, the company remains skittish, Mr. Pauli said. “They do have a lot of information, but they don’t want to lose users,” he said.The prosecutor has grown especially concerned, he said, about social media rumors — say, a stranger near a school — that could spin ordinarily self-contained Germans into violence. Not so unlike in Sri Lanka or India.“We have lots of situations where somebody saw somebody outside the kindergarten,” he said. “Within five minutes it’s spreading, and from post to post, it gets worse. It takes two hours and then you have some lynch mob on the street.”

SANA reported: “Following the victories made by Syrian armed forces in cooperation with the Lebanese national resistance Hezbollah in the western Qalamoun area, and to prevent shedding of blood of the armed forces supporting forces and civilians, a deal reached between Hezbollah and ISIS terrorist organization on the withdrawal of the remaining ISIS terrorists from western Qalamoun toward the eastern region of Syria was agreed on.” Qalamoun is the name of the mountain range on the Syrian side of the border, opposite the Arsal area of Lebanon.There was no immediate statement from the Islamic State on the deal.It is the first time the group is known to have negotiated a settlement to stop fighting involving a large number of militants and to give up territory.The agreement calls for Islamic State fighters and their families to be escorted to Boukamal, an area in Deir al-Zour Province, large parts of which are dominated by the militants.The Lebanese government referred to the deal as a “surrender” by the extremist group that would remove the last of Islamic State fighters from its border region with Syria. However, the militants were simply being relocated from the northern Lebanese border, where they were surrounded by hostile, pro-Syrian government forces, to an area in eastern Syria where they are largely engaged in fighting other Syrian opposition groups or the Western-backed Syrian Democratic Front.Lebanese Army soldiers in Ras Baalbek, near the scene of the Islamic State forces in Lebanon, said the group’s fighters had been permitted to keep light weapons when they were relocated. The official Syrian news media said the militants had destroyed their fortifications and equipment before the transfers took place. There was no suggestion that they would be prevented from returning to combat.Robert Ford, the former United States ambassador to Syria and now a teaching fellow at Yale as well as a fellow at the Middle East Institute, said this was just the latest in a series of accommodations the Syrian government had made with rebel groups around the country as it consolidates its control.“It’s not at all unprecedented,” Mr. Ford said. “There was a similar deal to the north of Raqqa; the Syrian government has cut deals like this many times with rebel groups it is fighting.”

The Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes is an austere, pale-yellow prison building nestled into the 18th-century city wall of Ludwigsburg in southwestern Germany. Once used by the Nazis to detain political prisoners, the building announces its contemporary tenants obliquely, with a small, silver sign. Entering the Central Office still feels like entering a jail; to gain access, one must pass through a white metal gate and then through a second secure doorway.Since it was created by the West German government in 1958, the Central Office’s mission has been to deliver Nazis to justice. Every year, its six investigative “departments,” each of which consists of a single prosecutor, scour the globe looking for members of the Third Reich. Chief prosecutor Jens Rommel, who heads the operation, is a sturdy, jovial 44-year-old with frameless glasses and a triangular goatee. The German press calls him a Nazi hunter, but Rommel doesn’t like the term. “A hunter is looking for a trophy,” he told me. “He has a rifle in his hand. I’m a prosecutor looking for murderers and I have criminal code in my hand.”Rommel and his staff visit the sites of former concentration camps across Germany and eastern Europe to sift through records and walk the grounds to determine what defendants might have witnessed from their posts. Over the past decade, the office, which has an annual budget of €1.2m, has also conducted more than 20 trips to archives in South America. The investigators spend most days under an avalanche of bureaucratic documents, checking and cross-checking names on German, Russian, British, French and Polish lists – everything from SS papers documenting quotidian affairs such as the issuing of new uniforms and marriage requests, to Allied inventories of prisoners of war. Their goal is to find the last living Nazis who have yet to be indicted and might still be able to stand trial.When I visited Ludwigsburg in May, Rommel was preparing for a trip to Moscow, where he would search an archive for names of perpetrators from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, which the Nazis operated near Berlin from 1936 to 1945. Another Central Office prosecutor, Manuela Zeller, was sorting through records from Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, looking for anyone whose name hadn’t been checked by her predecessors. Her colleague Michael Otte was doing the same for the Buchenwald and Stutthof concentration camps. Another colleague was about to travel to Mauthausen, in Austria, where at least 95,000 people were murdered during the war.“This is a giant cold-case operation,” Devin Pendas, a historian of Nazi prosecutions at Boston College, said of the Central Office. “It’s looking at crimes that happened a long time ago, with only the sketchiest information about who the perpetrators might be.” Rommel, a former criminal prosecutor, approaches the work the same way he used to investigate homicide cases, treating the archives at his disposal as live crime scenes. “There are crimes behind these words, but there’s no blood here,” he said.Central Office prosecutors unearth the names of about 30 living perpetrators per year. Their cases are then handed over to regional prosecutors, who usually spend another year conducting follow-up investigations and deciding whether to take the individuals to court. Since the start of the 21st century, this work has led to six prosecutions, but in the media, every case has been called “the last Nazi trial”, as if writers, editors and readers all hope the label will finally prove to be true.Today, the youngest suspects are 90 years old, and most were low-level Nazi functionaries: guards, cooks, medics, telephone operators and the like. The defendants tend to die during the lengthy judicial process, so the odds of conviction are miniscule. Partly as a result, few Germans know the Central Office exists, and many of those who do tend to view it with ambivalence. “It is hard for people to see what exactly the point is of putting a 90-year-old in jail,” Pendas said. Others view the office with reverence, awed by what it has managed to achieve despite considerable odds.Throughout its history, the condition of the Central Office has been one important measure of Germany’s evolving relationship to its Nazi past. After its founding in 1958, it enjoyed 10 years of robust activity before receding from public view, amid widespread opposition to further investigations of German war crimes. Now, every day that passes – separating the present from the atrocities in question – further imperils the Central Office’s cause.In Rommel’s corner office, on the second floor of the old prison, 16 small flags, one for each German state, stand atop a wooden bureau. “My bosses,” he said. The 16 regional ministers of justice will soon determine when Rommel’s investigative operation will shut down, ending this global effort to bring Nazi perpetrators to justice. One regional minister told the press that 2025 is a possible deadline for the Central Office to complete its investigations – “‘deadline’ being almost literal,” Rommel told me. Others view that as an optimistic estimate, predicting that the end of the Central Office is much nearer.The question of whether Nazi trials should continue in spite of the increasingly unrealistic odds of success – whether the work of the Central Office remains essential, or if it needlessly litigates crimes that belong to the past – lingers over the Ludwigsburg headquarters. “How much does Germany need to do to render justice on its own prior crimes?” Pendas said. “And how long does it need to make those kinds of efforts?” These questions have haunted Germany since the war’s end, but have gained renewed currency with the rise of rightwing populist movements such as Alternative for Germany, which may become the third-largest party in the German parliament after the country’s upcoming September election, though the party’s support has declined in recent months. Earlier this year, an AfD politician called for Germany to stop atoning for its Nazi crimes.Yet the very fact of the Central Office’s continued existence is a testament to the gravity and extent of Nazi crimes, a reminder of just how much is threatened by the rise of reactionary nationalism both in Germany and abroad. In the US, parallel institutions are under threat of closure. The Trump administration has plans to close the State Department’s modest Office of Global Criminal Justice, which is tasked with supporting international prosecutions for perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide; its director, Todd F Buchwald, has already been reassigned. As his predecessor, Stephen J Rapp, told the New York Times earlier this year, “The promise of ‘never again’ has proven hard to keep.”Behind a vault door in the basement of Ludwigsburg’s old prison building lies the Central Office’s “treasure,” as Rommel calls it. In row upon row of beige file cabinets, an ever-expanding archive of 1.7m yellow and green index cards records the names of massacres, battles, concentration camps, victims, witnesses and perpetrators. It is the world’s most comprehensive repository of Nazi crimes and postwar attempts to bring the regime to justice. Anyone who has ever testified or even been mentioned during a Nazi trial has a card, filed in alphabetical order. But the record is not yet complete, and part of the Central Office’s job is to fill in the blanks. “Every day, we add new cards, we change cards,” Rommel said.Only one copy of the Ludwigsburg archive exists, stored in microfilm at an undisclosed location. Protecting the index is paramount to ensuring war crimes can be tried, and that nothing is forgotten or undocumented – a relatively new undertaking in the history of warfare. For centuries, most peace treaties sought to obliterate the memory of war, a practice stretching back to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which called for “perpetua oblivio et amnestia”, or “perpetual oblivion and amnesty” on both sides. It was only after the 1919 Treaty of Versailles assigned guilt to Germany for igniting the first world war, and demanded the arrest and trial of German officials, that the promise of oblivio et amnestia was abandoned.Versailles laid the groundwork for the prosecution of war criminals after the second world war, an effort that was well underway even before the Nazis surrendered to allied forces in Reims, France, on 7 May 1945. At the time of his death, a week before the surrender, Adolf Hitler was under indictment by the UN War Crimes Commission, whose members produced hundreds of files documenting his crimes. The commission, which was established in 1943 to investigate offences by the axis powers, also supported indictments against 36,000 German and Japanese personnel, of whom at least 10,000 were convicted in roughly 2,000 trials over the next five years.These efforts were not universally applauded. Some international participants felt the year-long Nuremberg trials, which culminated in 1946, were a “shocking waste of time”, in the words of Sir Norman Birkett, a British judge who served at the trials. In Germany, the press portrayed the hearings as an attempt to humiliate the country. “If you want to understand why the Central Office was created in the first place, you can see this as a counter-project against Nuremberg,” says Annette Weinke, a historian of post-war prosecutions. “We wanted to take the past into our own hands.”Between 1945 and 1949, West German courts issued 4,600 convictions for Nazi crimes, but after the creation of the Federal Republic in 1949, a desire for amnesty and oblivion prevailed on both sides of the Atlantic. The UN War Crimes Commission was shuttered and its records sealed, an erasure propelled by the cold war and a rising tide of pro-Nazi sentiment in the US and Germany. As Communists became the greater enemy, the public turned away from reckoning with the Holocaust. Many of the Nazis convicted in the trials that followed Nuremberg were released in the 1950s, when a series of amnesty laws passed by the newly minted West German parliament reinstated the pensions of Nazi soldiers and paroled 20,000 Nazis previously jailed for “deeds against life”. According to the German historian Norbert Frei, nearly 800,000 people benefited from amnesty laws. By the end of the decade, thousands of Nazis had been freed from German prisons and rehabilitated, taking up comfortable posts in the judiciary, police and state administration.At the same time, however, new trials were gradually opening up the public’s eyes to the enormity of the crimes that had been committed, particularly in eastern Europe. In 1958, during what is now known as the Ulm trial, 10 former policemen from the same mobile killing unit were tried as accessories in the murder of more than 5,000 Lithuanian Jews. Ulm was the first major Nazi trial to take place under West German law, and it exploded “like a bomb” on the German psyche, says Hans-Christian Jasch, director of the memorial site and museum at Wannsee House, where the Nazi leadership discussed the “final solution to the Jewish question” in 1942. Süddeutsche Zeitung, the largest German daily newspaper, carried an opinion piece headlined “Noch sind die Mörder unter uns” (“Murderers are still among us”), calling for more trials. Eager to counter East German propaganda that claimed his government was crawling with former Nazis, chancellor Konrad Adenauer created the Central Office, which was to focus solely on bringing Nazis to justice.The first index cards were logged at the Central Office when it opened in December 1958. Yet, in truth, the office was never really meant to revise the West German policy of amnesty and reintegration. Its function was intended to be largely symbolic – a kind of alibi for a West German state that wanted to appear as if it were pursuing postwar justice without actually indicting the former Nazis who were once again part of the country’s establishment. As such, the Central Office was denied the ability to prosecute criminals itself. Its work was also hampered by the fact that German law contained no special provision for war crimes, and by a statute of limitations that made certain crimes nearly impossible to prosecute after 1960.When it became known that the office was delivering a spate of names to regional prosecutors, the West German leadership, and the public, was nonplussed. The Central Office’s work was “done against domestic opinion rather than going with it,” Pendas said. Its staffers contributed evidence to the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, which lasted from 1963 to 1965 and attracted unprecedented coverage in the domestic and international press, but were a “matter of indifference, if not open hostility, for much of the German public,” Pendas has written. When they concluded, pollsters asked the German public whether further Nazi trials should be held. Fifty-seven percent said no.In 1969, the German high court dealt a blow to the Central Office, when it overturned the conviction of an Auschwitz dentist and former SS member on the grounds that working at the concentration camp was not a crime in itself. As a result, prosecutors were forced to drop an investigation into the Reich Security Main Office, the primary organisation responsible for implementing Hitler’s policy of mass murder. It was a “perpetrator-friendly approach,” Weinke said. “In a way, they were exonerating these crimes.” It also cast the Holocaust, legally and in the public imagination, as a sequence of ordinary murders, replacing the narrative of systematic, state-sponsored genocide with one of individually motivated killings.After 1969, the work of the Central Office stalled, its prosecutors reduced to chasing the few former Nazi officials whose murderous acts had been recorded on paper. Even though a series of public debates in the 1960s and 70s led to the elimination of the statute of limitations for murder, thousands of men and women who served as cogs in the machine of genocide – as concentration camp guards, doctors, police, administrators and even radio operators – were never forced to reckon publicly with their culpability. For the next four decades, the Central Office largely receded from public view, and many forgot it existed entirely. Then, starting in 2007, a series of landmark cases changed everything.In January 2007, Mounir el Motassadeq was sentenced by a German court to 15 years in prison. While studying in Hamburg, Motassadeq, a Moroccan national, had wired money to the 9/11 hijacker Marwan al-Shehhi. He was convicted of 246 counts of being an accessory to murder, one for every passenger aboard the four flights that were hijacked that day. The decision had momentous implications for prosecuting Nazis. If Motassadeq could be guilty of helping commit murder, so too could people like John Demjanjuk, a former guard at the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland. Thomas Walther, a lawyer who was working with the Central Office at the time, came up with a strategy to use the same logic to challenge the precedent set in 1969.Walther’s revelation came just in time for the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Central Office, which was teetering on the brink of irrelevance, as victims, witnesses and perpetrators began to die of old age. Pursuing Demjanjuk helped justify the office’s continued existence, and Kurt Schrimm, the head of the Central Office at the time, used the case and the anniversary to try to recast the office as a success of the postwar West German government.Die Zeit called the Demjanjuk trial a “premiere”, because it promised to be the first of many attempts to hold former Nazis accountable for serving in death camps, and the process was avidly covered in the international and domestic media. In 2011, 91-year-old Demjanjuk was convicted of 28,060 counts of accessory to murder – the number of people slaughtered at Sobibor during the four months he served there in 1943 – but the case was still under appeal when Demjanjuk died in a Bavarian nursing home a year later, still a free man. (In Germany, a conviction does not legally hold if an appeal is pending.)In 2013, a year after Demjanjuk’s death, the Central Office prepared the “Auschwitz list”, consisting of 30 living former Auschwitz personnel who could be immediately tried according to the logic of the Motassadeq ruling. Of these, only five cases made it to court. (The others died, or were deemed unfit to stand trial.) Ernst Tremmel, a former Auschwitz guard, died in 2016, days before he was due to make his first court appearance for 1,000 counts of accessory to murder. His fellow former guard, 95-year-old Reinhold Hanning, was convicted in June 2016 of facilitating more than 170,000 murders, but died on 30 May of this year, days before Germany’s highest court was expected to deny his final appeal. One trial, that of the 96-year-old former Auschwitz medic Hubert Zafke, is still ongoing, but the proceedings have been so poorly handled that the head judge has become the first jurist in history to be dismissed from an Auschwitz trial because of accusations of bias.Rommel arrived somewhat reluctantly at the Central Office in 2015, in the midst of these cases. He was leaving a comfortable position as a public prosecutor in his hometown of Ravensburg, a stone’s throw from the Alps, where he liked to ski on weekends. But the allure of approaching the past not as history, but as crime, swayed Rommel to take the Central Office helm (that, and the fact that the age of the average defendant meant the job would hardly last for ever). According to Rommel, the government also wanted someone relatively young to head the organisation, “to avoid the impression that they were terminating the work”.In 2016, Rommel sent 30 cases to prosecutors. That same year, Oskar Groening became the first person on the Auschwitz list to be successfully convicted using the precedent set by the Motassadeq case. The long story of Groening’s belated sentencing captured something of the agonising history of trying to bring Nazis to justice. Groening’s name was on the final 1948 UN War Crimes Commission list of Polish indictments concerning Auschwitz. But after the commission was dissolved, none of the allied powers provided the Central Office with a copy of the 36,000 indictments the commission processed. (It received a digital copy sometime in the 1980s.)For the rest of the 20th century, Groening’s guilt was not widely known. Then, in 2005, the former “bookkeeper of Auschwitz” agreed to be interviewed by Der Spiegel. Groening spoke at length about how he sorted through Jewish inmates’ belongings, confiscated their money, and heard their screams emanating from gas chambers. “I would describe my role as a ‘small cog in the gears’,” he said. “If you can describe that as guilt, then I am guilty, but not voluntarily. Legally speaking, I am innocent.”At the time, the Central Office passed along the article to local prosecutors, but neither law enforcement nor the courts were ready to take on what appeared to be an improbable, and perhaps unpopular, battle. After Motassadeq, however, sentencing Groening seemed not just possible, but prudent.The final judgment against Groening bought the Central Office a bit more time. Without Groening’s conviction, “our work would have stopped,” Rommel said. Instead, the threshold for guilt had been substantially lowered, and 70 years after the crimes in question, it was once again possible to hold cogs accountable. Groening was 20 when he joined the SS; he is now 96, and in August, prosecutors in Hanover, his home region, deemed him fit to serve his four-year-prison sentence.In March, I followed Manuela Zeller and Michael Otte, the Central Office prosecutors, to Buenos Aires, where they were trying to complete a database of Nazis who escaped to Argentina after the war. They went with little hope of finding living suspects – no indictments have come out of more than 20 expeditions to archives in Brazil, Peru, Chile, Argentina and Paraguay. A few years ago, they identified a former concentration camp doctor who fled to Peru, but it turned out he was already dead. Given the dismal track record, Zeller and Otte’s trip was primed to be the organisation’s final mission to South America, the culmination of more than a decade of scouring the continent.“The point of the work is not always to put someone in front of a judge, but also being able to close an archive and say, ‘OK, now we know,’” Otte, a trim, bald prosecutor, explained to me over dinner in Buenos Aires’s antique San Telmo district. “It’s for future generations to know what happened.” The record will never be complete, nor will the Central Office get the chance to check archives in every country where Nazis are known to have fled. “We tried to get into Paraguay, but they said: ‘We have no Nazis here,’” he told me.The apparent fruitlessness of the Central Office’s expeditions has not escaped scrutiny in the German press. Before Rommel took over in 2015, Die Welt, a conservative broadsheet, ran an article criticising the organisation’s expenditures, under the headline “German Nazi Hunters on Holiday in South America?” It was accompanied by a stock photograph of beachgoers in Rio de Janeiro.Another common refrain among detractors is that the Central Office’s work could have been completed decades ago. “What I started doing in 2008, they could have done 30 years before,” said Thomas Walther, the lawyer who pressed the Central Office to take up the Demjanjuk case. Law is open to constant reinterpretation and revision; someone could have challenged the high bar for Nazi prosecutions long before the Motassadeq verdict, but, astonishingly, no one thought of it, or dared to try. If they had, it might still have been possible to find and try living offenders around the world; these days, it’s almost certainly impossible.Although the promise of prosecution has been virtually extinguished, naming every as-yet-unknown name is not futile. Rommel is all too aware of the belatedness of his efforts, and the fact that time is running out. But he is also driven by a sense of finality – the knowledge that if the Central Office does not complete its inventory of Nazi perpetrators, no one will. Collecting the evidence is physically strenuous, mentally exhausting work, but it is perhaps the only thing, short of a trial, that can approximate justice. “Even if we don’t get a lot of perpetrators now, it’s important both for the survivors and their relatives, and for German society as well,” he told me in Ludwigsburg. “I think that’s why all of my colleagues are here, to try to do what’s possible today.”Two days after our dinner in Buenos Aires, I found Otte and Zeller in an old dormitory on the top floor of the Hotel de Inmigrantes, a sprawling, spare complex that opened in 1911 to accommodate thousands of immigrants arriving from the Old World, and now also serves as a museum. The dormitory had been converted into an archive and working immigration office, its walls lined with 20th-century ship ledgers from around the world. Displayed on one side of the room were European ship manifests from between 1939 and 1968 – a record of every individual who arrived at the port seeking asylum, opportunity and, all too often, a place to hide.Hugo Mouján, the museum’s press manager, laid out Adolf Eichmann’s landing record. The logistical mind behind the Holocaust had arrived at the Hotel de Inmigrantes in 1950, under the alias of Ricardo Klement. One year prior, the Auschwitz physician Josef Mengele, who performed deadly experiments on prisoners, had also passed through the hotel’s doors. Mouján laid out Mengele’s landing record, browned and frayed, documenting his arrival under the alias Helmut Gregor. The success of the Central Office’s current expedition relied on a single, simple assumption: unlike high-ranking Nazi officials such as Eichmann and Mengele, lower-ranking SS members did not expect to be held accountable for their sins, so they did not bother concealing their identities upon arriving in South America.Zeller and Otte spent the next two weeks poring over passenger lists from between 1959 and 1962, recording the names of every German who could have served the Nazi regime and who could still be alive. Zeller, a former Bavarian judge who has a short black bob and triple ear piercings, had made herself a cheat sheet. The men and women she was looking for must have been born between 1918 and 1931 (14 is the German threshold for criminal culpability, and the Central Office will not open cases against anyone over 99), which means they would have been between 28 and 44 years old upon arriving in Buenos Aires between 1959 and 1962. Every time she and Otte came across a German name that fit those parameters, they wrote it down on a plain piece of A4 printer paper, noting the individual’s nationality, age and hometown.Standing under a crucifix at the doorway to the archive, arms folded, Zeller reflected on the prevailing public criticism of the Central Office. “They say: ‘Why now, when we have only the little ones, and the others have never been charged?’ But I think that’s no reason to let them all go untouched.”By the end of their trip, Otte and Zeller had collected more than 1,000 names of potential perpetrators. It will take about 12 months for the Central Office staff to cross-check them against the names in the basement archive. If a name from Buenos Aires happens to match that of an SS officer, Otte will open an investigation. But even if some suspects are alive today, they may not be a year from now.On their last work night in Buenos Aires, Otte and Zeller seemed at peace with the limited nature of their mission. They said knowing that they’re probably the last ones to do their work – the clean-up crew for one of history’s darkest episodes – makes the job a little easier to bear; the march of time lends it renewed urgency, the impending conclusion endows it with heightened integrity.“It’s all maybe for nothing – we know that,” Zeller said. “The point now is to say we’ve left nothing out.”In an 18th-century gatehouse next to the old prison building in Ludwigsburg, a replica of the office of one of Rommel’s earliest predecessors is visible beneath a transparent floor. The exhibit conveys the slow, analogue nature of the postwar pursuit of justice. Stacks of files line the walls; the desk is littered with books, paper and stamps; a binder lies open to a page full of portraits of notable Nazi officers. Leather belts hang from pegs on the wall, ready to be used in binding thousands of pages of evidence. Today, boxes rather than belts are used to store files from the few cases that see the inside of a courtroom. Their slow accumulation has begun to transform the former prison into a labyrinthine memorial to the victims of the Holocaust.Despite its imperfect mandate and modest findings, the Central Office provides a model for the expiation of national wrongs, acting as a precedent for countries that might be compelled to re-evaluate the past not as history, but as crime. A research institute and federal archive already share the building with Rommel and his team; when it becomes impossible to justify opening any further cases, they will likely subsume the investigative wing. “Criminal justice will hand the baton over to history,” says Lawrence Douglas, a professor of law and jurisprudence at Amherst College.For the first time, the past will be past, the crime scene will be closed, and Germany’s effort to convict its own criminals will come to an end. Other nations, reckoning with their own wrongdoings, have been far hastier to arrive at this point. As Dan Plesch, author of a new history on the UN War Crimes Commission, put it, “Right now, you see a German chancellor and public who are ironically more alive to the dangers, more willing to share the past, than some of the countries that fought them.”Rommel and his staff are keenly aware that some in Germany would like to see the Central Office’s closure expedited, including those who think the office’s efforts to prosecute Nazi telephone and radio operators, guards, chefs and medics strain the limits of propriety. The ambivalence with which much of the public views their trials is understandable, Plesch said, “until it becomes the thin end of the wedge for Holocaust denial, which it very often does, and very quickly”. In 2015, when the refugee crisis ignited a wave of xenophobic hate crimes against asylum seekers in Germany, the Central Office received emails and letters from Nazi sympathisers protesting its work.For now, though, there’s still so much left to be done: “There are still documents which haven’t been put together, there are still matches that can be found,” Hans-Christian Jasch told me after a recent fact-finding trip to Auschwitz. For Rommel, continuing to scour the world for new evidence is “a question of personal guilt and responsibility”, he said. “A lot of my compatriots have preferred to look into the future instead of into the dark past.”Main image: the Hotel de Inmigrantes museum and archive in Buenos Aires, Argentina, photographed by Peter Bauza for the GuardianSupport for this article was provided by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.• Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here. Topics The long read Second world war Germany Europe War crimes Holocaust features

很多人或许都没想到，一直是配件的Apple Watch也有开卖即售罄的一天，要知道这种情景以往只会发生在老大哥iPhone身上。9月22日发售当天之所以出现这种盛况，原因很简单，Apple Watch Series 3可以脱离手机、独立打电话的卖点俘获了大批人的青睐，让他们甘于买买买。但是很遗憾，这项可以支持打电话的功能，在正式发售之后不久，作为中国唯一提供这项功能的中国联通，就停止了认证申请。随后苹果官网显示三大运营商均推迟到年底上线。不过，有一个细节需要注意的是，在9月28号之前激活的Apple Watch Series 3不受影响，仍然可以使用独立通话功能，但28号之后的用户就只能等到年底了。很幸运，我们提前激活了Apple Watch Series 3，体验了它的全部新功能，发现Apple Watch Series 3简直就是一次逃离iPhone的“荒野求生”，运动、健康暂且不论，它真正实现了在特定甚至严苛场景中，满足用户当时的迫切需求。就连“站在食物链顶端的男人”贝尔·格里尔斯体验之后，恐怕都会对它念念不忘。Apple Watch Series 3为了实现接打电话功能，与我们往日手机所用的SIM卡不同，它采用的是一种叫做eSIM卡（内嵌式SIM卡芯片技术），优点是直接置入到手表内部，让用户不需要两张卡就可以实现“一号多终端”，并且eSIM卡完全不受运营商限制。第一次与iPhone配对步骤会有些繁琐，不过都是一些诸如姓名、身份证个人信息的认证，按照指引来填写就OK了。配对成功之后，手表的表盘中央会出现运营商信号的标示，这意味着你可以用手表打电话了。当Apple Watch Series 3具备独立打电话功能时，很多人第一直觉是，终于可以实现iPhone双卡双待了。但事实是：不可能。因为Apple Watch Series 3压根就不是为了双卡双待而来，它想要实现的是在没有iPhone的特定场景下，实现打电话的功能。再说“一号多终端”指的是一个号码可以在多个智能终端使用，手表只是其中一个终端而已。在实际通话测试中，Apple Watch Series 3无论是反馈速度还是通话质量，和iPhone的体验几乎保持了一致，只不过它是换在了手腕上，有时候反应甚至更快，因为少了手机蓝牙连接的步骤。外出忘记带手机，临时又要电话联系，直接拨号就可以，而且反馈速度很快有一点需要注意的是，Apple Watch Series 3通话只有免提模式，置身公共场合需要抬起手臂靠近耳朵，而且你的通话内容可能会被身边人听到。但假如你有AirPods搭配使用，则直接忽略这个顾虑。事实上，自2014年9月苹果发布Apple Watch以来三年时间，从Apple Watch只是一个手机的附属配件，到如今释放更多的自由度，甚至“独立”使用，Apple Watch在苹果的产品阵列所占权重越来越高，毕竟销量和市场好评度就在齐头并进。但很显然，Apple Watch Series 3具备通话功能，并不是为了取代iPhone，而是提升苹果产品之间整体的用户体验。准确的说，是补足以往iPhone和Apple Watch结合时某些场景鸡肋的用户体验。不妨设想一下，当外出时手机突然没电，甚至忘记带手机，又或者是跑步游泳运动时无法随身携带iPhone，你又必须用到接打电话功能，那么Apple Watch Series 3的通话功能就凸现了。你甚至可以在Apple Watch上使用Apple Pay进行支付购物。不过，如果以上场景出现时你身边没有手机，也没有Apple Watch，就会寸步难行，并且心急火燎。别否认，这就是都市生活的真实写照。从这个层面来说，Apple Watch Series 3相当于解决了用户日常“不联网”焦虑症。一个通话功能，使得Apple Watch Series 3成为智能手表圈里众人追捧的网红，这也是使得用户掏钱包的最大理由。但是假如没有通话服务，还可以用它来做什么？于是，我们把Apple Watch Series 3绑定了另一款没有配对eSIM卡的iPhone体验了一番。当我们使用蜂窝数据时，Siri在Apple Watch Series 3上实现了脱离iPhone而独立运作，事实是即便不使用蜂窝数据，只要Apple Watch和iPhone通过蓝牙连接，那么你也可以直接在手表上唤醒Siri并且进行一系列操作，这种体验尤其适合手机装在口袋，或者正在忙碌没空拿出手机的时刻。更智能的Siri表盘，定制你想要的一切信息，同时还可以随时唤醒它伴随着Siri的支持，苹果把语音控制的入口第一次引入了Apple Watch。当然，为了让你多使用Siri，苹果还特别推出了更智能的Siri表盘，日常所要了解的天气、运动轨迹以卡片式呈现，并且展示的内容还可以自定义。然而，语音在Apple Watch Series 3上的应用不仅仅局限于Siri。微信作为最常使用的社交工具，也做了一系列的优化，并且感知很明显，这一部分要归功于watchOS 4系统开发者带来的各种工具。与之前单一的功能相比，如今在Apple Watch上你不仅可以通过标签、快速回复，甚至还可以涂文字、语音来进行沟通了。是的，在手表上，微信也支持语音回复，不再局限于纯文本的响应。作为最常用的功能之一，微信能够实现多种回复方式，得心应手太多！watchOS 4带来的另一个本地化福利是可以用Apple Watch解锁摩拜，操作方式很简单，只需要把手表靠近单车，瞬间即可实现解锁。有趣的是，解锁成功之后，Apple Watch便开始记录你的运动轨迹和卡路里消耗，结束之后直接完成扣款，整个过程一气呵成。只需要把Apple Watch贴近摩拜单车车锁的位置，即可实现快速开锁。从Apple Watch诞生以来，苹果就给它赋予了运动的基因。现在苹果希望你带上Apple Watch的那一刻，就要运动起来。但苹果并不想让你盲目的运动，而是在身边安插了一位“健身教练”。这位虚拟的“健身教练”会时刻盯着你的健身记录，督促你去运动，站起来走走或者深呼吸一下，完成运动目标之后还会鼓励你。对于健身爱好者来说，新增的诸如 HIIT 运动、游泳等体能训练模式会成为你的日常。如果走进健身房，利用健身器材上的NFC读卡器可以实现向健身器材传达数据，按照苹果官方的说法，Apple Watch支持市面上80%的健身器材，同时健身器材上的数据也可以传回Apple Watch。在运动层面，一个细微且贴心的变化不得不提，那就是心率监测数据的呈现。当你打开心率App，它会立即检测当前的心率数据，点击进去滚动数码表冠，便可以查看到静息心率、步行心率的数值。一个贴心到可以救命的设计，随时同步静息心率、步行心率的数据关键是，假如你的心率有超常变化，Apple Watch会立即发出警报提醒，而这项功能已经不只一次提前预测用户身体状况，并且起到了救命的作用。由此可见，运动之余，苹果也越来越重视 Apple Watch 的健康和保健用途。就在早些时候，苹果已经宣布在与斯坦福大学的临床医生以及 American Well 的专家进行合作，以确定 Apple Watch 的心率监测仪是否可以监测心律失常。如果问运动时和什么最配？答案一定是音乐。于是，watchOS 4升级了音乐应用和全新的电台应用，你可以把iPhone里的歌曲直接同步到Apple Watch中了。大家都说...Apple Watch和AirPods搭配使用很配噢对于带有蜂窝数据的Apple Watch Series 3用户，任何地方都能收听Apple Music 4000万首歌曲中的任何一首。即使没有WiFi，配对iPhone没有在附近，用户仍然可以通过手机连接串流整个Apple Music歌曲库和自己的iCloud歌曲库。与此同时，Apple Watch Series 3蜂窝数据版本拥有了16GB大空间，这意味着可以存储更多的歌曲。但一个前提是，如果要彻底脱离手机用Apple Watch听歌，你需要付费开通 Apple Music。在实际体验中，我们还发现iPhone里的音乐App也可以直接通过Apple Watch来直接操控了。以网易云音乐为例，你可以通过Apple Watch来播放、暂停甚至切换歌曲，如果点击歌曲播放界面，还会显示歌词。当然，这必须要求手机与Apple Watch处于连接状态。网易云音乐已经支持在Apple Watch上直接操控然而，在Apple Watch具备了音乐串流功能之后，千万别忽略一个关键角色：AirPods。因为当Apple Watch与AirPods配合使用时，会让你一瞬间有种真正实现扔掉手机，把音乐戴在手上的真切感觉。只论外观，可以很直接的说，除了新增的红色表冠，Apple Watch Series 3与前代相比相差无几，和初次见到iPhone 8、iPhone 8 Plus带来的直观感受一样：颠覆式创新不可见，也很难第一时间让你喊出牛逼的字眼。但事实上，苹果一个最大的特点是把改变潜移默化的嵌入到产品体验的每一个环节，恰恰是这些细微到看不见的改变让整个产品的体验提升了不只一个level。这就好像，乔布斯用一款iPod让频临死亡的苹果公司起死回生，却间接重写了音乐行业的游戏规则，同时用一部iPhone改变了整个智能手机行业，但iPod、iPhone在当时看来都只不过是一款再简单不过的硬件。而现在，Apple Watch Series 3某种程度上是选择了以运动为核心，同时把iPod和iPhone的某些特定使用场景迁移到自己身上。但如果要问，Apple Watch Series 3是必须的吗？答案可能是否定的，因为你总能找出不买它的理由，比如电池续航、很多功能不知道怎么用、蜂窝数据服务要等到年底......然而，当你想要扔下手机去运动甚至外出散步时，第一时间一定会想到它，那种能够适时脱离手机的轻松感，正是苹果倡导的移动生活方式，也是Apple Watch Series 3带来的改变，如果你觉得还没有适应它，那么接下来就只能追赶它。

Late-night hosts on Tuesday discussed Sean Hannity’s connection to Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who appeared in court on Monday, and James Comey, who was interviewed by Stephen Colbert as he promotes a tell-all book about his tenure as FBI director.“Everyone’s still reeling from yesterday’s court hearing about Trump attorney and guy-who-looks-as-tired-as-a-Trump-attorney, Michael Cohen,” said Colbert. “Trump asked to look at all the evidence seized from Cohen’s office before the government had a chance to and the judge said, and I quote, ‘No.’”The judge is considering turning the evidence over to a “special master”, which Colbert joked is “also what Trump called Stormy Daniels while she was spanking him with that magazine”.“Trump’s got to be concerned about what the Feds are going to find,” added Colbert, who noted, citing a report from Axios, that Cohen’s work is “all side deals and off-the-books stuff”. “There was also an appearance from porn star and major historical figure Stormy Daniels,” the host added, showing the illustration, done by a forensic sketch artist, of the man who supposedly threatened Daniels not to discuss her affair with Trump. “There he is, the man who threatened her: the lovechild of Willem Dafoe, Tom Brady and Bon Jovi.”Colbert also conducted an extensive interview with James Comey, who’s currently promoting his book A Higher Loyalty. The former FBI director, in response to a question about Trump calling him a “slimeball” on Twitter, said: “I’m like a breakup he can’t get over.” When Comey compared Trump to a mob boss, noting “the leadership style is actually strikingly similar”, Colbert asked then why he was surprised he got “whacked”.“I actually was quite surprised because I thought, ‘I’m leading the Russia investigation’,” Comey said. “Even though our relationship was becoming strained, there’s no way I’m going to get fired or whacked.”“Why wouldn’t you get fired?” Colbert added. “Because that would be a crazy thing to do. Why would you fire the FBI director who is leading the Russia investigation?” Comey replied. Colbert shot back: “Because you’re leading the Russia investigation!”The two also briefly discussed rumors of a “pee tape”, alleged in the infamous Steele dossier. Colbert, who recently stayed at the same hotel suite in Moscow where Trump allegedly slept with Russian prostitutes, asked Comey if he’d like to ask anything about the room.“Is it big enough for a germaphobe to be at a safe distance from the activity?” Comey asked, referencing Trump’s claim that, because he is a germaphobe, the rumors of golden showers with Russian hookers cannot be true.“The bedroom is very long,” Colbert replied. “You’d definitely be out of, what we call at Sea World, the splash zone.”Meanwhile, Trevor Noah focused on the revelation that Michael Cohen’s third, previously undisclosed legal client is Fox News anchor Sean Hannity, who in the last year has frequently covered Trump and Cohen’s mounting legal troubles without disclosing his relationship to Cohen.“Even though yesterday might have sucked for Hannity, it helped his ratings because everyone tuned in to see what creative excuse he’d come up with to explain his Michael Cohen relationship,” Noah began. “And the answer was: ‘it’s complicated’.”Noah then showed clips from Hannity’s Monday night show, in which he said he’s “never received an invoice” from or “paid Michael Cohen for legal fees”. Hannity claimed he’d only discussed real estate with the attorney.“He wasn’t your lawyer, he just answered your legal questions? Giving legal input and perspective is exactly what a lawyer does,” Noah said, noting that Hannity’s real estate excuse “makes what he said a few hours earlier on his radio show all the more confusing”.The host then played audio from Hannity’s afternoon radio show, where he said, in reference to Cohen, “I might have handed him 10 bucks” to suggest “I definitely want attorney-client privilege on this”.Noah continued: “You know, what gets me is how casually Hannity is trying to minimize his connection to Michael Cohen, like it means nothing, especially when every other day of the year he’s the guy who can bake a conspiracy cake out of nothing more than an egg and the word Hillary.” Topics Late-night TV roundup Stephen Colbert Trevor Noah Donald Trump Michael Cohen Stormy Daniels US television news

A vast search by a multinational taskforce for an Argentinian submarine that went missing in the South Atlantic with 44 crew members four days ago has failed to provide details of its possible location. A total of 13 ships and six aeroplanes are braving strong winds and high waves over an area of 66,000 sq km (25,500 sq miles) more than 400 km (250 miles) east of the bay of San Jorge off the coast of Patagonia in southern Argentina. Argentina’s navy said it was not sure what had happened to the submarine but said it was now convinced the ship was beneath the surface and not adrift on choppy seas, as was previously thought Search for missing Argentinian submarine fails to find any clues

Footage from Nigerian TV shows the site of a bomb blast in a mosque in Adamawa state, eastern Nigeria, which killed at least 50 people on Tuesday. Adamawa borders Borno state, where terrorist group Boko Haram is based. The group has not claimed responsibility for the bombing• Warning: contains graphic scenes • Nigeria mosque attack: teenage suicide bomber kills at least 50

Brazil’s new environment minister, Ricardo Salles, has suspended all partnerships and agreements with non-governmental organizations for 90 days, in a move that was described as “a war against NGOs”.Announcing the move, Salles said the three-month suspension was to allow a re-evaluation of such partnerships, but civil society organizations described the move as a blatant and illegal attack on the environment and those working to protect it.Salles, appointed by the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, and hand-picked by the agro-business caucus, has previously described global warming as a “secondary issue” and dismissed fines for environmental crimes as “ideological”.A group of eight networks of environmental organizations said there was “no justification” for the measure, which they described as unconstitutional, because contracts between the government and NGOs can only be suspended through a formal process after irregularities have been found.The newspaper O Globosaid the move “sounded like a declaration of war on NGOs dedicated to conservation”.Carlos Rittl, the executive director of the Observatory on Climate, argued that because NGO and government partnerships were subject to long approval processes and periodical progress reports, the minister already had the information needed to evaluate current contracts.“The minister has shown much more interest in attacking organizations that protect the environment than fighting environmental crimes,” said Rittl.Many environmental projects are supported by money that comes from outside Brazil. But included in Salles’s announcement of the suspensions was the Amazon Fund, which is administered by Brazil’s national development bank, BNDES, and is funded through donations mostly from the Norwegian and German governments.Throughout his campaign, Bolsonaro jeered at NGOs: “You can be sure, if I get [to the presidency], there will no money for NGOs. Those useless people will have to go work.”Bolsonaro’s supporters celebrated Salles’s decision. “The spending spree with government money is over!” wrote one Twitter user. “Brilliant! Many NGOs benefit from public money to practice political-ideological activism.”But Rittl said the damage done from a three-month suspension could be irreversible. He and many in the environmental protection community see a grim outlook for the next four years under the Bolsonaro administration.“The environment is under attack,” he said. “All indications say that deforestation and violence against indigenous people will go up.” Topics Brazil Jair Bolsonaro Americas news

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