YANGON (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will stress the need to halt violence and stabilize Rakhine State when he meets the head of Myanmar’s military on Wednesday in a bid to ease the Rohingya refugee crisis, a senior State Department official said. U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson attends as U.S. President Donald Trump holds a bilateral meeting with India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi alongside the ASEAN Summit in Manila, Philippines November 13, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan ErnstMore than 600,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled to Bangladesh since late August, driven out by a counter-insurgency clearance operation of Myanmar forces in Rakhine. A top U.N. official has called the operation a textbook case of “ethnic cleansing”. Attending an East Asia summit in Manila on Tuesday, Tillerson met Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whose less than two-year-old civilian administration shares power with the military and has no control over its generals. He will meet Suu Kyi again in the Myanmar capital of Naypyitaw on Wednesday, and hold separate talks with the head of the armed forces, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing. Asked what approach Tillerson would take with Myanmar’s army chief, the State Department official told journalists in a briefing by teleconference that the emphasis would be on restoring peace in Rakhine. “We are focusing on trying to stabilize areas in northern Rakhine so that people can return there, stopping the violence, making sure that the military would protect all populations in that area equally and that they conduct a credible investigation that leads to accountability for people who have perpetrated abuses,” said the official, who was with Tillerson in Manila and declined to be identified. The official said the consequences for the country, also known as Burma, if it failed to respond to the crisis with accountability could be part of the conversation with the military leader. “Burma made a lot of progress and we would not want to see that progress reversed,” the official added. U.S. senators in Washington are pressing for economic sanctions and travel restrictions targeting the Myanmar military and its business interests. “The secretary will reiterate support for Burma’s democratic transition and urge the Burmese government to protect the local population and allow unhindered humanitarian and media access, (and) support for a credible investigation of abuses,” the official added. Accusations of organized mass rape and other crimes against humanity were leveled at the Myanmar military on Sunday by another senior U.N. official who had toured camps in Bangladesh where Rohingya refugees have taken shelter. Mass Exodus: tmsnrt.rs/2xTAOon Pramila Patten, special representative of the U.N. secretary-general on sexual violence in conflict, said she would raise accusations against the Myanmar military with the International Criminal Court in the Hague. The military, known as the Tatmadaw, has consistently protested its innocence, and on Monday it posted the findings of an internal investigation on the Facebook page of Min Aung Hlaing. It said it had found no instances where its soldiers had shot and killed Rohingya villagers, raped women or tortured prisoners. It denied that security forces had torched Rohingya villages or used “excessive force”. The military said that, while 376 “terrorists” were killed, there were no deaths of innocent people. Human rights groups poured scorn on the military’s investigation, branding it a “whitewash” and calling for U.N. and independent investigators to be allowed into Myanmar. “The Burmese military’s absurd effort to absolve itself of mass atrocities underscores why an independent international investigation is needed to establish the facts and identify those responsible,” Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. Amnesty International also dismissed the military’s internal investigation. “There is overwhelming evidence that the military has murdered and raped Rohingya and burned their villages to the ground,” the London-based rights group said. The government in mostly Buddhist Myanmar regards the Muslim Rohingya as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. And Suu Kyi’s failure to speak out strongly over their plight has widely damaged the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s international reputation as a stateswoman. Many diplomats, however, believe Myanmar’s fragile transition to democracy after 49 years of military rule would be jeopardized if she publicly criticized the armed forces. “Both parts of the government will have to work together in order to solve this problem...Trying to get two of them to work together, to try to solve the problem, is certainly going to be very important,” the U.S. official said. The U.S. official said Suu Kyi had been forthcoming in her talks with Tillerson and others during the past few days about the steps that needed to be taken to improve the situation, including plans for the voluntary repatriation of Rohingya. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau were among those she met in Manila to discuss the Rohingya crisis. “This is a tremendous concern to Canada and to many, many countries around the world,” Trudeau told a news conference. Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pledged up to 117 billion yen ($1 billion) of development aid to Myanmar in his meeting with Suu Kyi. While world leaders wrung their hands, thousands of Rohingya remained stranded in Myanmar, on beaches around the mouth of the Naf river, hoping to find a boat to make the short, sometimes perilous crossing to Bangladesh. Slideshow (3 Images)“They’re still coming, risking their lives, driven by fears of starvation and violence,” Shariful Azam, a police official in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar, a narrow spit of land where the world’s most urgent humanitarian crisis is unfolding. Trail of destruction: tmsnrt.rs/2fDBxTc A desperate escape: tmsnrt.rs/2A1ATUP Additional reporting Wa Lone in YANGON, Ruma Paul in DHAKA, Steve Holland, Karen Lema and Manny Mogato in MANILA, David Brunnstrom in WASHINGTON; Editing by Robert Birsel/Mark HeinrichOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

It’s been nearly five years since the brutal gang rape of a woman on a bus in New Delhi shocked India. In the weeks that followed, thousands took to the streets in protest, and the Indian government even adopted more stringent legislation to prevent such violence against women in the future.But little has really changed on the ground, according to a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), released on Nov. 08. Through field research in the states of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan, which routinely record the highest number of rape cases in the country, HRW identified how untrained police officials, insensitive health workers, and a dire lack of legal support combine to make it almost impossible for justice to be served.“Five years ago, Indians shocked by the brutality of gang rape in Delhi called for an end to the silence around sexual violence and demanded criminal justice reforms,” Meenakshi Ganguly, south Asia director of HRW, said in a statement. “Today there are stronger laws and policies, but much remains to be done to ensure that the police, doctors, and the courts treat survivors with dignity.”HRW analysed 21 cases of rape, including 10 involving girls under the age of 18, interviewing survivors and their family members. The non-profit also interviewed lawyers, doctors, and government and police officials in the four states, as well as in the cities of New Delhi and Mumbai.Here are the key obstacles they identified:In the event of sexual assault, India’s laws say that a trained female police officer is supposed to record a statement from the victim, and police officials are required to register complaints. But HRW’s research shows that this doesn’t always happen across India.“(The police) resist filing the First Information Report (FIR), the first step to initiating a police investigation, especially if the victim is from an economically or socially marginalized community,” the report said. “Police sometimes pressure the victim’s family to ‘settle’ or ‘compromise,’ especially if the perpetrator is from a powerful community.”The organisation gave the example of a 22-year-old from the Lalitpur district in Uttar Pradesh who was raped by a local political leader belonging to a more powerful caste. He threatened to kill her if she went to the police—and the police themselves hardly offered any help, delaying the filing of a complaint until the courts ordered them to do so. In the meantime, facing threats and harassment, the rape survivor and her husband were forced to leave their home and move far away from their village.In some cases, HRW found that the police treated rape survivors brutally, even resorting to beatings and threats to force them to change their statements. In other instances, the police simply chose not to pursue an investigation, turning a blind-eye to the crime.In 2014, India’s ministry of health and family welfare released guidelines for doctors on how to appropriately conduct examinations on victims of sexual assault. Since medical evidence can be used to bolster the case against perpetrators, these examinations are a key part of the process of securing justice for a rape survivor.However, so far, only nine out of the country’s 29 states have adopted these guidelines, according to HRW. And they don’t always follow them. In its research, the organisation found many cases of insensitive health workers flouting the guidelines completely, and often blaming the rape victims themselves, insinuating that the act was consensual.Some hospitals even continue to allow doctors to conduct the intrusive “finger test” to use the state of a victim’s hymen as a way to establish if an assault has really taken place, HRW alleged. And as for providing the necessary counselling and therapeutic care, the healthcare system often fails completely.“In nearly all the rape cases documented by HRW, women and girls said that they received almost no attention to their health needs, including counseling, even when it was clear they had a great need for it,” the report said.If after all these hurdles a rape survivor in India manages to proceed towards fighting for justice in the courts, she usually encounters another big problem: a dire lack of legal represenation.While the government has established fast-track courts focused on crimes against women and children, and non-governmental organisations in cities such as New Delhi try to make legal aid more accessible, most women from poor or marginalised communities struggle to find legal assistance, especially in rural areas. In many cases, HRW found, the police never even informed victims of their right to legal aid, nor connected them to people who could help.All together, these obstacles put the victims of sexual assault through yet another harrowing experience, that of trying to seek the justice they deserve in a system that seems expressly designed to deny it.For any real change, HRW says, central and state governments are going to have to step up their training programmes to make police officers, judicial officers, and medical professionals much more sensitive to the trauma of sexual assault, besides coordinating a more effective implementation of the existing laws and guidelines.It’s a tough ask. But without this, millions of Indian women will continue to be brutalised by the very system created to protect them.

Media player Media playback is unsupported on your device Video A guided tour around Syria with the Russian army Russia's military intervention in Syria has been crucial in keeping President Assad in power. The Russians now claim that 85% of Syrian territory has been cleared of illegal armed groups.The BBC's Steve Rosenberg joined the Russian military on a carefully-choreographed tour in Syria.

The COP24 summit, concluded over the last weekend in Katowice, has left a lot to be desired for developing countries like India. This is despite the outcome of the talks being officially welcomed by the country.On Dec. 15, at the end of the United Nations climate talks, 200 countries decided on the rules to implement portions of the Paris Agreement, which they signed in 2015 to limit the global temperature rise to “well below 2°C.”The new rulebook states that countries will be subject to uniform standards for providing information about progress on their self-determined targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.“India considers the outcome of COP24 a positive one,” said a statement from the country’s ministry of environment, forest, and climate change (MoEFCC).However, key demands of India as well as other developing countries did not find their way into the Katowice rulebook.The Paris Agreement states that developed and developing countries have different responsibilities to fight climate change. Developed countries, historically the biggest emitters of carbon dioxide, are expected to take greater responsibility for climate action. Citing “the principle of equity,” the agreement asks them to “take the lead” in reducing emissions. Equity and differing responsibility were also earlier recognised in the Kyoto Protocol and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.But despite India’s push, developed countries led by the US blocked an acknowledgment of these principles in the Katowice rulebook.“India was the only country which raised this issue. We had wanted greater emphasis on equity during the global stocktake in 2023,” said a senior MoEFCC official and leading member of India’s negotiating team at Katowice who wished to remain anonymous. In 2023’s “stocktake,” countries will come together to measure whether emissions are on track to keep global warming within the limit.Individual countries have set self-determined targets to reduce their carbon emissions under the Paris Agreement. But the UN Environment Program notes that, collectively, these targets will need to be raised three times to limit global warming to 1.5°C. An emphasis on equity in the rulebook would have put greater pressure on developed countries in 2023 to do more than the developing ones.“There has been a watering down of the principle of equity,” said Rajani Ranjan Rashmi, former special secretary of the MoEFCC who was India’s point person for climate negotiations from 2008 to 2013. “It is difficult to guess what would happen when the challenge comes to share global responsibilities.”After the rulebook was finalised, India formally expressed “its strong reservation regarding the treatment of equity in the global stocktake decision.”Under the Paris Agreement, developed countries have to provide financial resources to developing countries to help them mitigate and adapt to the risks posed by climate change. In Paris, the developed countries had pledged an annual mobilisation of $100 billion for the developing world starting from 2020. India and other developing countries wanted a transparent roadmap on how these funds would be transferred, but for now, they will have to wait. “The rulebook had to define what all will constitute ‘finance’, and how it will be reported and reviewed. But at Katowice, rules on financial contributions by developed countries have been diluted,” said a statement from the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a New Delhi-based think tank.“Developed nations will somehow write the ledger to show that they have given $100 billion dollars,” said Chandra Bhushan, CSE’s deputy director general. “Developing countries’ demand that climate finance be new and additional (to other investments) has not materialised.”Besides, developing countries say the $100 billion figure is too little to meet their climate-loss needs. “Just one climate-related extreme weather event like the Kerala floods costs India tens of billions of dollars,” Bhushan said.Developed countries at Katowice, however, have agreed to revisit the process for scaling up their financial support in 2025.The Paris Agreement will create a new market for trading carbon credits. Earlier, an existing market structure from the Kyoto Protocol allowed industries in the developing countries to earn carbon credits by reducing their emissions. Developed countries could then buy these credits to meet their own reduction targets. India and China silently supported Brazil during its stand-off with developed nations to whether it can carry its carbon credits from the existing system to the new one. However, the developed countries oppose this on the grounds that rampant corruption in the existing system has delegitimised the carbon credits of the developing countries.But the deadlock with Brazil wasn’t resolved, and a decision on the rules for the new market has been postponed till next year’s climate talks.In October, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a landmark scientific report which concluded that though it is possible to cap the global temperature rise at 1.5°C, the world needs to radically shift away from fossil fuels. The report notes that south Asia will be especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change.While India and the rest of the world favoured a formal endorsement of the report at Katowice, four oil-exporting countries—the US, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait—blocked the move, leading to a watering down of the supporting words.The rulebook now expresses “appreciation and gratitude to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the scientific community” for the report.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - There is “lots of evidence” that chemical weapons are being prepared by Syrian government forces in Idlib in northwest Syria, the new U.S. adviser for Syria said on Thursday, as he warned of the risks of an offensive on the country’s last big rebel enclave. FILE PHOTO: A general view taken with a drone shows part of the rebel-held Idlib city, Syria June 8, 2017. REUTERS/Ammar Abdullah/File Photo“I am very sure that we have very, very good grounds to be making these warnings,” said Jim Jeffrey, who was named on Aug. 17 as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s special adviser on Syria overseeing talks on a political transition in that country. “Any offensive is to us objectionable as a reckless escalation,” Jeffrey told a few reporters in his first interview on the situation in Syria since his appointment. “There is lots of evidence that chemical weapons are being prepared.” The White House has warned that the United States and its allies would respond “swiftly and vigorously” if government forces used chemical weapons in the widely expected offensive. Jeffrey said an attack by Russian and Syrian forces, and the use of chemical weapons, would force huge refugee flows into southeastern Turkey or areas in Syria under Turkish control. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has massed his army and allied forces on the frontlines in the northwest, and Russian planes have joined his bombardment of rebels there, in a prelude to a possible assault. The fate of the insurgent stronghold in and around Idlib province rests on a meeting to be held in Tehran on Friday between the leaders of Assad’s supporters Russia and Iran, and the rebels’ ally, Turkey. “We will find out to some degree tomorrow if the Russians are willing to come to a compromise with the Turks,” Jeffrey said. Backed by Russian air power, Assad has in recent years taken back one rebel enclave after another. Idlib and its surroundings are now the only significant area where armed opposition to Damascus remains. Jeffrey described the situation in Idlib as “very dangerous” and said Turkey was trying to avoid an all-out Syrian government offensive. “I think the last chapter of the Idlib story has not been written. The Turks are trying to find a way out. The Turks have shown a great deal of resistance to an attack,” he said. He said the United States had repeatedly asked Russia whether it could “operate” in Idlib to eliminate the last holdouts of Islamic State and other extremist groups. Asked whether that would include U.S. air strikes, Jeffrey said: “That would be one way.” There was periodic cooperation between the United States and Russia against the same jihadist groups operating in Idlib until mid-2017. As sides close in on the remaining jihadist forces operating in Syria, Jeffrey said it was time for a “major diplomatic initiative” to end the seven-year conflict. There was a “a new commitment” by the administration to remain in Syria until Islamic State militants were defeated, while ensuring Iran left the country, he added. While President Donald Trump had signaled that he wanted U.S. forces out of Syria, in April he agreed to keep troops there a little longer. Trump will chair a U.N. Security Council meeting on Iran during an annual gathering of world leaders in New York later this month. The meeting will focus on Iran’s nuclear program and its meddling in the wars in Syria and Yemen. France has invited the United States, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Germany and Britain for talks on the sidelines of the U.N. meeting to discuss Syria, Jeffrey said. He said Assad “has no future as a ruler” in Syria, but it was not up to Washington to get rid of him and it would work with Moscow on a political transition. “Right now (the Syrian government) is a cadaver sitting in rubble with just half the territory of Syria under regime control on a good day,” Jeffrey said. Reporting by Lesley Wroughton; Editing by Peter Cooney and Leslie AdlerOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Civilians like me trapped in Idlib in Syria are terrified, fearing it is only a matter of time before their northern enclave becomes the last and most brutal frontline in the crisis. Every day brings a new barrage of bombing, and fresh reports that an attack on the region surrounding Idlib city by government forces is imminent.Just a few weeks ago, a woman I knew was killed along with her husband and five children in an airstrike. More than 116 other people also died that weekend and 70 others were injured in what was the worst period of bombing and shelling we have seen for some time.It left the whole community reeling, but we all know things are only likely to get worse as the government gears up to retake the area, the last major region under rebel control. I cannot bear to think of the bloodshed and suffering this will cause. Experience has shown that civilians will probably be targeted first.There are now at least three million people in Idlib. Half of this population is displaced from other areas in Syria, and nearly a quarter of a million were displaced this year. People are living in overcrowded camps, in dire need of food, water and health care, with no electricity, no running water and no sewerage system.It’s hard to imagine just how much more the Syrian people can take. For seven years we have been bombed, besieged and forced to endure circumstances that do not befit human beings. I was born in Aleppo, and lived through the bombing attacks that started in 2012. I’ve seen hundreds of people being blown to bits in front of my eyes or buried alive under the rubble of destroyed buildings; things that no human being should ever witness. It was like the end of the Earth. And now I face the prospect of having to do it all again, knowing I will likely lose friends, family and maybe even my own life.Even as we stare death in the face, however, I fear the international community will once again fail to act and allow one of the worst humanitarian crises in living memory to go unchallenged.For seven years we have seen hospitals, markets, schools, mosques, people’s homes, whole cities turned to dust, and people’s bodies and minds broken beyond repair. While we bleed, world leaders respond with meek platitudes and statements of “concern”.Where were they when whole families suffocated to death in chemical attacks, when barrages of barrel bombs killed thousands and turned ancient cities to dust? Where are they now that one “de-escalation” zone after another is turned into a bloody battleground?This collective inaction and inability to bring the warring parties to the table in any kind of meaningful way will haunt the public conscience for generations to come. Despite growing efforts to sweep this tragedy under the carpet and pretend things are getting back to normal, these atrocities cannot be erased or forgotten.Throughout all of this devastation and despair, aid organisations such as Islamic Relief have helped provide a sliver of light, working alongside local Syrian organisations to deliver aid to those who need it most. But without help from the international community, there is only so much that we can do in the face of so much need.That is why humanitarian access in all areas must be secured and the safety of aid workers guaranteed. Funding must also be made available so that the 1 million people already displaced inside Idlib can get access to the most basic of supplies, food, water, shelter and medicine.In the absence of a political solution, and the growing likelihood that we will see a fresh and brutal assault on Idlib, we also need to seriously talk about the failure of western governments to take in families who have fled the fighting and those who are still living in daily fear of their lives inside Syria.Credit must be given to neighbouring countries like Turkey – which has more Syrian refugees than the whole of Europe – but this is not a problem they can deal with alone.In 2015 the UKagreed to resettle 20,000 Syrians by 2020, but has so far resettled only half that number.To know that doors have been shut to so many people fleeing for their lives, and that some people in Europe don’t care if we live or die – openly calling us “cockroaches” and a “threat to national security” – breaks my heart. To escape bombing and bullets, and see your friends and family drown in the Mediterranean in a bid to make it to safety, only to be greeted with racism and suspicion once you arrive, is too much to bear – even for a people who have endured so much already.My wife is pregnant with our first child, and I should be looking forward to our future together. But I don’t know what this future holds. I’m just living in the present and doing what I can to play a positive role in my country and to stay alive.We all want an opportunity to live in peace and rebuild our homeland; but to do this, we need to see an urgent end to this war and the senseless killing of innocent men, women and children. To do this, the international community needs to step up – because we have been left with nowhere else to go and nothing to come back to. Topics Syria Opinion Middle East and North Africa Bashar al-Assad comment

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Visa and Mastercard have offered to trim the fees merchants pay on card payments by tourists in the European Union in an attempt to stave off possible fines after a long-running antitrust investigation, people familiar with the matter said. FILE PHOTO: Visa credit cards are seen in this picture illustration taken June 9, 2016. REUTERS/Maxim Zmeyev/Illustration/File PhotoEven after the cut, the fees paid by merchants when they accept card payments, a lucrative source of revenue for banks, will still likely be higher than those for EU cards, they said. The European Commission has battled for more than a decade to reduce so-called interchange costs and encourage cross-border trade and online commerce. U.S. regulators have also frowned on such practices. Retailers say interchange fees count as a hidden cost and the card companies have paid billions of dollars to settle class action lawsuits. Visa, the world’s largest payments network operator found itself in the Commission’s crosshairs in August 2017, charged with subjecting the cards of foreign tourists to excessive fees when they were used in the EU. The case originally concerned Visa Europe which was acquired by Visa Inc in June 2016. The EU said that fees charged to retailers when they accept Visa cards issued outside the EU could raise prices of goods and services for all consumers. The EU competition enforcer’s charge against Mastercard dated from July 2015. The company is also accused of having rules which blocked banks in one EU country from offering lower interchange fees to a retailer in a second EU country. The Commission and Visa declined to comment. Mastercard said: “At this time, we have no information to share on our ongoing engagement with the European Commission.” Mastercard has warned it might be fined more than $1 billion if found guilty of breaching EU antitrust rules, but this might be less if there was a negotiated resolution. The Commission can hand down fines as much as 10 percent of a company’s global turnover for infringing EU antitrust rules. But under EU settlement rules for antitrust cases, companies do not get fines nor are required to admit wrongdoing. The Commission is expected to seek feedback from retailers and consumer groups before deciding whether to accept the offer from Visa and Mastercard. Negative comments could lead it to demand a bigger fee cut. Business lobbying group EuroCommerce, whose 1997 complaint triggered the EU investigations, and Visa declined to comment. Visa and MasterCard capped cross-border fees within Europe - that is, fees on transactions in one EU country charged for transactions in another EU country - in 2014 and 2009 respectively, to end another EU investigation. Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; editing by Philip Blenkinsop and Alexander SmithOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Enlarge this image Nuns and supporters demand the arrest of Bishop Franco Mulakkal, outside the High Court in Kochi in the southern Indian state of Kerala in September. -/AFP/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption -/AFP/Getty Images Nuns and supporters demand the arrest of Bishop Franco Mulakkal, outside the High Court in Kochi in the southern Indian state of Kerala in September. -/AFP/Getty Images The narrow lane that leads to what may be India's most infamous convent winds past spindly coconut palms and fat banana leaves flapping in the breeze. Tropical bird calls break through the muffled drone of female voices praying inside a house with pink stucco columns.The bucolic setting, in the jungle of India's southwestern Kerala state, is home to about a dozen Roman Catholic nuns who belong to the Missionaries of Jesus order. But their peace has been shattered by what allegedly happened here between 2014 and 2016.One of the nuns says she was raped by a bishop more than a dozen times. The bishop, Franco Mulakkal, denies the nun's accusations, and is out on bail. The Vatican has temporarily relieved him of his duties while he defends himself in court.The alleged victim is huddled upstairs, under police guard in the convent. She has received death threats.Meanwhile, her fellow nuns have become activists, staging street protests in her defense — a rebellion against India's church leadership from within."So much trust was there. We never expected this thing," says Sister Anupama, 30, who joined the convent 10 years ago and began using only one name.The nuns describe how Mulakkal, 54, used to come to the convent for dinner. He is originally from Kerala but was stationed in Punjab, in the country's north, and used to return home often. He'd frequently spend the night at their convent. Enlarge this image From left: Sisters Alphy, Anupama, Ancitta, Neena Rose and Josephine stand on the steps of their convent in southern India's Kerala state. Lauren Frayer/NPR hide caption toggle caption Lauren Frayer/NPR From left: Sisters Alphy, Anupama, Ancitta, Neena Rose and Josephine stand on the steps of their convent in southern India's Kerala state. Lauren Frayer/NPR The nuns say they only learned much later that he allegedly raped their sister during those visits."She was always upset and she was crying always," Anupama says. "Whenever we asked, she used to tell us that she had a headache."They say she was too frightened to come forward until earlier this year."Girls are supposed to suffer, but boys are not like that. They've got all the freedom," says Sister Alphy, 36. "It's the same in the church also. We know many [other] cases [of abuse] are there. But bishops and high authorities always support the men."The trial of Bishop Mulakkal is expected to take place next year. It has divided India's 28 million Christians. Many blame the nun.Christianity is India's third-largest faith, after Hinduism and Islam. Some of Kerala's Christians trace their lineage back to St. Thomas, one of Jesus' 12 disciples, who the faithful believe landed on India's southwest coast in 52 A.D.While no official polls have been conducted, Kochurani Abraham, a feminist theologian and former nun in Kerala, says a majority of India's Christians appear to support the bishop and question the nun. Based on her knowledge of the Christian community and her conversations with parishioners, she estimates about 2 percent may leave the Catholic Church because of the scandal. But, she believes, more than 60 percent blame the nun for tarnishing the church. Enlarge this image A nun cries as she participates in a protest demanding the arrest of a bishop accused of rape, in Kochi, Kerala, India in September. AP hide caption toggle caption AP A nun cries as she participates in a protest demanding the arrest of a bishop accused of rape, in Kochi, Kerala, India in September. AP Some believe the nun should have been arrested — instead of, or at least alongside, the bishop.Cyriac Joseph, 71, a retired Supreme Court justice and prominent Catholic who is close to church leaders, is skeptical of the nun's claims."After the first incident — if at all it happened — if she doubted this man may misbehave, it was easy for her to refuse to go to his room alone," he says.It's unclear whether the nun did in fact visit the bishop's room or whether the alleged rapes happened in another part of the convent. Details may come out at Mulakkal's trial next year.Facing such skepticism in the community, the once-demure nuns of the Missionaries of Jesus took to the streets in protest and led rallies all summer, demanding Mulakkal's arrest."If simple nuns with full-fledged habit – they are not feminist theologians – if they could come out on the street, that is a big breakthrough," says Abraham.In September, authorities did arrest Mulakkal. He spent more than three weeks in jail before his release on bail in October. The Catholic clergy threw him a party. Hundreds of well-wishers threw flowers. An Indian politician called his accuser a prostitute.Mulakkal's office did not respond to NPR's requests for an interview. Neither did the headquarters of the Missionaries of Jesus. The Catholic Bishops' Conference of India said it was unable to comment.Before Mulakkal was arrested, Sisters Anupama and Alphy say they sent multiple letters to the Vatican asking it to intervene, and never got any reply. But in October, an Indian archbishop made a rare apology for scandals in the Catholic Church around the world, though he did not mention Mulakkal by name."I regret that these things happened. I publicly apologize for the scandals caused by the church leaders to the common Catholic faithful," Archbishop Kuriakose Bharanikulangara told a Bible convention in New Delhi. "The sexual abuse of the church leaders cause their faith suffer a lot."But a lower-ranking priest, the Rev. Augustin Vattoly, 48, who attended the nuns' protests, was given a warning by the church for doing so. He describes the clergy's strategy when one of their own is accused:"The first thing they will do is defend that cardinal, defend that bishop. Cover up the issue," Vattoly says. "Frighten them that if you are going against a priest, you are against God."Priests are particularly revered among Indians, Abraham notes, because their status reminds Indians of something very familiar to them."Patriarchy and caste hierarchy go hand in hand," she explains.This year, the Catholic nun was not alone in alleging abuse by priests. Female parishioners from several other denominations also started coming forward with accusations.Elsewhere in Kerala, four priests from the Malankara Orthodox Church have been arrested for allegedly raping and blackmailing a mother of two who had attended their church for years.The husband of the alleged victim, Alex Thomas, tells NPR his wife was molested by one of the priests as a teen. When she confessed that to three other priests, they used her account to blackmail and rape her, her husband says.In July, India's National Commission for Women, a government body, called on churches to stop hearing confessions from female faithful, to protect them from blackmail.The commission chair, Reena Sharma, told reporters she believes the number of women who have spoken out so far "is just a tip of the iceberg."But many victims and their families doubt that justice will be served."Never. Nothing will happen. No change will happen," says Thomas, whose wife's complaint led to the Malankara priests' arrests. "The church is like a big corporation. They can manipulate anything. And believers, they're a huge number of people, you know?"NPR producer Sushmita Pathak contributed to this report.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - A United Nations General Assembly committee on Thursday called on Myanmar to end military operations that have “led to the systematic violation and abuse of human rights” of Rohingya Muslims in the country’s Rakhine state. FILE PHOTO: Aerial view of a burned Rohingya village near Maungdaw, north of Rakhine state, Myanmar September 27, 2017. REUTERS/Soe Zeya Tun/File Photo The move revived a U.N. resolution that was dropped last year due to the country’s progress on human rights. The General Assembly’s Third Committee, which focuses on human rights, voted 135 in favor, 10 against with 26 abstentions on the draft text that also asks U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to appoint a special envoy on Myanmar. For 15 years the Third Committee annually adopted a resolution condemning Myanmar’s human rights record, but last year the European Union did not put forward a draft text, citing progress under the leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi. However, in the past three months more than 600,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled to Bangladesh after the Myanmar military began an operation against Rohingya militants, who attacked 30 security posts and an army base in Rakhine state on Aug. 25. This prompted the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation to put forward a new draft U.N. resolution, which will now be formally adopted by the 193-member General Assembly next month. The resolution deepens international pressure, but has no legal consequences. Myanmar’s army released a report on Monday denying all allegations of rapes and killings by security forces, days after replacing the general in charge of the military operation in Rakhine state. Top U.N. officials have denounced the violence as a classic example of ethnic cleansing. The Myanmar government has denied allegations of ethnic cleansing. Myanmar is refusing entry to a U.N. panel that was tasked with investigating allegations of abuses after a smaller military counteroffensive launched in October 2016. The draft resolution approved by the Third Committee on Thursday urges Myanmar to grant access. It also calls for full and unhindered humanitarian aid access and for Myanmar to grant full citizenship rights to Rohingya. They have been denied citizenship in Myanmar, where many Buddhists regard them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. The 15-member U.N. Security Council last week urged the Myanmar government to “ensure no further excessive use of military force in Rakhine state.” It asked Guterres to report back in 30 days. Human Rights Watch accused Myanmar security forces on Thursday of committing widespread rape against women and girls, echoing an allegation by Pramila Patten, the U.N. special envoy on sexual violence in conflict, earlier this week. Patten said sexual violence was “being commanded, orchestrated and perpetrated by the Armed Forces of Myanmar.” Reporting by Michelle Nichols; Editing by Frances Kerry and James DalgleishOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

A third teenage girl has been raped and burned alive in a week in India, the latest brutal sexual assault to shock the country.The 16-year-old died from the burns after being set alight by a 26-year-old man who acted after the girl said she would tell her family about the rape.Two other teenagers were victims of similar attacks a week ago in Jharkhand state. One died and one is in hospital.The latest teenager was alone at her home in Sagar district of Madhya Pradesh state when she was raped, police said on Friday.“We have arrested the two accused,” said Sagar district police superintendent Satyendra Kumar Shukla. “One of them is the cousin of the girl who informed the main suspect that she was alone in the house. The main accused is married with a child.”Indian authorities have faced renewed pressure to act on sexual assaults, notably after brutal gang rape and killing of an eight-year-old Muslim girl in Jammu and Kashmir state sparked demonstrations.The cases are the most high-profile since the 2012 rape and murder of a student on a New Delhi bus that triggered mass protests. Topics India South and Central Asia news

Twelve hours after the Socceroos beat Syria, across 120 nervous, suffering minutes in Sydney, Romell Quioto beat the offside trap. To the delight of 38,000 Hondurans in the Estadio Olimpico Metropolitano, he spun a neat full circle, picked his spot, and unlocked a series of events that would send a handful of Socceroos fans on a 14,000km trip from Australia to San Pedro Sula.It could have been Panama. Or the United States. Kevin Pollard, a travel booker from Melbourne, and his fellow travelling Socceroos fans had done the maths – the points, the permutations of the results and the airfares. Honduras, the small Central American country, population 9 million, were the outsiders.But if decades of supporting the Socceroos had taught them anything it was to expect the unexpected. Pollard and his fellow fan Les Street, a self-confessed tragic writing a history of Australian football stadiums, are two of roughly 300 fans travelling to Honduras for this week’s first leg of the Socceroos’ final World Cup qualifying playoff. If the current numbers hold steady, they will be outnumbered by about 120 to one.Street says he saw all this coming – in a dream. “I’ve actually had two dreams about the Socceroos in Honduras,” he says. He went to bed on the night of the Syria game, his mind on Panama, and instead dreamt of booking tickets to Honduras, where, thanks to dream logic, he found himself playing baseball.In the lead-up to Friday’s game (Saturday AEDT), much of the media focus has been on the gangsters and gun crime of San Pedro Sula. It has been reported as a place of Zika virus, hurricanes and carjackings – with world’s third-highest per capita murder rate. But Pollard, and local journalists, say the only source of danger to Australian fans is Honduran anger at this relentless caricature of a country that has, at least for travelling football fans, always been safe harbour. Pollard is leading the contingent from the Green and Gold Army, a fan group that have followed the Socceroos overseas since 2001. They’ve been to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Iran, Tajikistan, Malaysia, Japan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.This will be his 50th tour, the latest in a long-running tradition of away legs, especially for older fans, who grew up before the glory days of three successive World Cups and the (notionally) easier path of direct qualification via the Asian confederation. “We have fans who have been on a lifetime journey with the Socceroos,” says Michael Edgley, a director of the Green and Gold Army. His love of away matches began when he watched Australia beat England 3-1 in a 2000 friendly at Upton Park, West Ham United’s old stadium in London. “We have all generations of fans. They’ve gone to Scotland in 1985, they’ve flown to Argentina in 1993.”This kind of far-flung, cross-confederation travel, is in many ways a part of the DNA of a Socceroos fan. From 1997’s 1-1 with Iran in Tehran, to the 3-0 humbling in Montevideo in 2001, to have been a fan is to have lived, for too long, on a diet entirely of odd intercontinental trips ending in heartbreak. And this will probably be the last time. With the World Cup expanding in 2026 to 48 teams, Australia might never have to endure a playoff again. The travellers to Honduras are saying farewell to a unique kind of Antipodean, self-doubting rite of passage – of white-knuckle, absolute drama, constant fear of disaster, and the mad mathematics of away goals always in the back of the mind. In Honduras, the Estadio Olimpico Metropolitano is sold out, with 38,000 fans booked in and extra overfill very much expected. The Australians anticipate an atmosphere to make the trip worth it. “Honduras is a country that lives for football, dreams of football, eats football,” says Gerson Gómez, a Honduran journalist and football writer. “People arrive very early at the stadium. The temperature is usually 100 degrees Fahrenheit, yet the Honduran fanatics enter under a strong sun two or three hours before the match begins.“There is no violence, no punches, no hooligans. When the Honduras national team plays, people behave well. Inside the stadium, people drink beer and shout, sing, jump. We have a saying: when the national team plays, we are all joined.”Gómez points out that travelling fans from the United States, Argentina, Costa Rica, and even fierce rivals Mexico have all visited here during qualifying without incident.“I do not deny that there are problems, that there is organised violence, that there are criminals, but the vast majority of Hondurans are honest and hard-working people,” he says. “Honduras is a country with high rates of violence, but it doesn’t affect a match of World Cup qualification.”Inside the stadium, the Honduran fans bring drums and trumpets. “I don’t know how we’re going to compete with that if there’s only 300 of us,” says Pollard. “But hopefully the team, knowing there’s 400 Australians there, they’ll feel pretty pumped up.“You’d feel pretty proud that there are all these other Aussies there. They know it’s a fair way to go. That we made an effort. It’ll help a fair amount.”The Hondurans too, will put everything on the line. “Going to the World Cup is the greatest joy that Hondurans can have every four years,” says Gómez. “When the national team plays, the cities stop. The traffic is over. The radios play commentary, the televisions only project the game.”But for now, the Australian fans are looking forward to immersing themselves in Honduran culture. Street has been there for a full week. The Green and Gold Army have a six-day itinerary planned that takes them to San Pedro Sula’s cathedral, its markets, and the Cafe Skandia – a 1950s-style cafe that looks like an ocean liner. Street is also planning on visiting the Copan Ruins, a Mayan archeological site three or four hours from San Pedro Sula. “I’ve never seen Mayan ruins before, so I’m really excited about that”, he says. On Thursday night, he and the other Australian fans will watch a local league game.If, in the cauldron of the Estadio Olimpico Metropolitano, and in Sydney next week , everything goes well, the Green and Gold Army will be ready. Pollard has visited Russia multiple times already, laying down the groundwork for a huge trip for the World Cup. They will continue travelling. “We pride ourselves on being at every single Socceroos World Cup qualifying fixture away from Australia,” says Edgley. “My favourite destination is Tokyo, and the rivalry between Australia and Japan. It’s a friendly rivalry, the Japanese fans are the most welcoming in the world. I never get tired of taking people there for the first time. It’s an amazing experience to see Saitama full of the Samurai Blue.”Street has his eyes on central Asia. “I have a big interest now in the ex-Soviet Union,’ he says. “I started learning a bit of Russian before I went to the Confederations Cup. I don’t have a long bucket list but one of them is going to every state in the ex-Soviet Union. That’s why I was a bit disappointed that Syria got through instead of Uzbekistan. They got a goal with two minutes left. I would have preferred to go to Uzbekistan.“I enjoy the away games more than the home ones,” he says. “You’re in another country, you bond with other people. I like talking to locals. If anyone from Honduras reads this, get in contact via Twitter and have a beer.” Topics Australia Honduras World Cup 2018 qualifiers Australia sport features

COX’S BAZAR, Bangladesh — Hundreds of women stood in the river, held at gunpoint, ordered not to move.A pack of soldiers stepped toward a petite young woman with light brown eyes and delicate cheekbones. Her name was Rajuma, and she was standing chest-high in the water, clutching her baby son, while her village in Myanmar burned down behind her.“You,” the soldiers said, pointing at her.She froze.“You!”She squeezed her baby tighter.In the next violent blur of moments, the soldiers clubbed Rajuma in the face, tore her screaming child out of her arms and hurled him into a fire. She was then dragged into a house and gang-raped.By the time the day was over, she was running through a field naked and covered in blood. Alone, she had lost her son, her mother, her two sisters and her younger brother, all wiped out in front of her eyes, she says.Rajuma is a Rohingya Muslim, one of the most persecuted ethnic groups on earth, and she now spends her days drifting through a refugee camp in Bangladesh in a daze.She relayed her story to me during a recent reporting trip I made to the camps, where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya like her have rushed for safety. Her deeply disturbing account of what happened in her village, in late August, was corroborated by dozens of other survivors, whom I spoke with at length, and by human rights groups gathering evidence of atrocities.Survivors said they saw government soldiers stabbing babies, cutting off boys’ heads, gang-raping girls, shooting 40-millimeter grenades into houses, burning entire families to death, and rounding up dozens of unarmed male villagers and summarily executing them.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The dollar rose to fresh 2018 highs on Monday while oil prices climbed to their highest since late 2014, driven by declining Venezuelan crude production and worries the United States could re-impose sanctions on Iran. Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S., May 3, 2018. REUTERS/Brendan McDermidThe crude surge lifted energy stocks in Europe and on Wall Street, with European shares supported by strong results and gains in Nestle after the Swiss company agreed to pay $7.15 billion to Starbucks in a global coffee alliance. The euro broke below $1.19 for the first time this year on weaker-than-expected German industrial orders and declining euro zone investor sentiment. Investors increased bets that rising U.S. interest rates would continue to boost the dollar, while traders unwound their bearish positions on the greenback. An index that tracks the dollar against a basket of leading currencies climbed to 92.974, its highest since December. The index was last up 0.23 percent at 92.782. “The general view right now is that the dollar is probably going to continue to move a bit higher against the euro in particular, maybe against the yen as well,” said Larry Hatheway, chief economist at GAM Investment Solutions. The euro could slip to $1.1750 or even $1.15 as a support level as the Federal Reserve tightens monetary policy and the European economy trends weaker, he said. “There’s a general appreciation the Fed is going to move at least twice again this year and the consensus is shifting toward three more moves this year.” The euro fell 0.3 percent to $1.1922, while the Japanese yen slipped 0.04 percent to 109.07 per dollar. Venezuelan oil exports came under threat after U.S. oil major ConocoPhillips moved to take Caribbean assets of state-run PDVSA to enforce a $2 billion arbitration award, three sources told Reuters. The move could further crimp PDVSA’s declining oil output and exports. Widespread expectations that President Donald Trump will withdraw the United States from the Iranian nuclear pact also weighed on crude prices. U.S. crude rose $1.01 to settle at $70.73 a barrel, breaking above the $70 mark for the first time since November 2014, while Brent gained $1.30 to settle at $76.17. Nestle rose 1.6 percent after it gained the rights to market Starbucks products around the world outside of the U.S. company’s coffee shops. Nestle was the biggest contributor to the 0.59 percent advance in the pan-European FTSEurofirst 300 index of leading regional shares. Oil giants Royal Dutch Shell and Total were the fourth- and seventh-biggest contributors, respectively. On Wall Street, the S&P energy index was the biggest gainer among the 11 major sectors during much of the session but faded by the close, ending up 0.18 percent. Trump tweeted that on Tuesday he would announce his decision on whether to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. “Oil has done well in anticipation of the announcement from Trump. People are braced for the worst,” said Keith Lerner, chief market strategist at SunTrust Advisory Services in Atlanta. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed up 94.81 points, or 0.39 percent, at 24,357.32. The S&P 500 gained 9.21 points, or 0.35 percent, to 2,672.63 and the Nasdaq Composite added 55.60 points, or 0.77 percent, to 7,265.21. Euro zone government bond yields slid as the unexpected fall in German industrial output was seen as encouraging the European Central Bank to prolong an unwinding of stimulus. The yield on the benchmark 10-year German bund fell to 0.53 percent, while yields on U.S. benchmark 10-year Treasury notes rose slightly to 2.9516 percent. Gold slipped, snapping three days of gains, as the U.S. dollar index strengthened. U.S. gold futures for June delivery settled down 60 cents at $1,314.10 an ounce. Reporting by Herbert Lash in New York; Editing by Dan Grebler, James Dalgleish and Susan ThomasOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

08/19/18 | NR | CC Trump's lead attorney delivers a new reason not to testify in the Russia investigation; EpiPen shortage leaving parents on edge as students head back to school Continue Reading

Greisa Martínez Rosas has seen it before: a rare bipartisan breakthrough on immigration policy, offering a glimmer of hope to advocates like herself. Then a swift unraveling.Martínez is a Dreamer, one of about 700,000 young undocumented migrants, brought to the US as children, who secured temporary protections through Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, or Daca. She considers herself “one of the lucky ones”. Last year, she was able to renew her legal status until 2020, even as Donald Trump threw the Dreamers into limbo by rescinding Daca and declaring a deadline of 5 March for Congress to act to replace it.Martínez is an activist with United We Dream, the largest youth-led immigration advocacy group in the US. She has fought on the front lines. In 2010 and 2013, she saw efforts for immigration reform, and a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, culminate in disappointment. She rode a familiar rollercoaster this week, as a bipartisan Daca fix was undermined by Trump’s reported – if contested – reference to African and Central American nations as “shithole countries”.“It feels like a sequel,” Martínez told the Guardian, adding that Trump’s adversarial views underscored the need to hash out a deal. “This same man is responsible for running a Department of Homeland Security that seeks to hunt and deport people of color.”Negotiations over immigration have always been precarious. Trump has complicated the picture. After launching his candidacy for president with a speech that called Mexican migrants “rapists” and “killers”, Trump campaigned on deporting nearly 11 million undocumented migrants and building a wall on the Mexico border.He has, however, shown a more flexible attitude towards Dreamers – despite his move to end their protective status. Last Tuesday, the president sat in the White House, flanked by members of both parties. In a 45-minute negotiating session, televised for full effect, Trump ignited fury among his hardcore supporters by signaling he was open to protection for Dreamers in exchange for modest border security measures.Then, less than 48 hours later, Trump’s reported comments about countries like Haiti and El Salvador prompted a fierce backlash.“People are picking their jaws up from the table and they’re trying to recover from feelings of deep hurt and anger,” said Frank Sharry, founder and executive director of America’s Voice, a group which advocates for immigration reform.“We always knew we were climbing a mountain … but it’s improbable to imagine a positive breakthrough for immigrants with the most nativist president in modern America in charge.”As the uproar continued, it was nearly forgotten that on Thursday, hours before Trump’s remarks became public, a group of senators announced a bipartisan deal.Under it, hundreds of thousands of Dreamers would be able to gain provisional legal status and eventually apply for green cards. They would not be able to sponsor their parents for citizenship – an effort to appease Trump’s stance against so-called “chain migration” – but parents would be able to obtain a form of renewable legal status. There would be other concessions to earn Trump’s signature, such as $2bn for border security including physical barriers, if not by definition a wall. The compromise would also do away with the diversity visa lottery and reallocate those visas to migrants from underrepresented countries and those who stand to lose Temporary Protected Status. That would help those affected by the Trump administration’s recent decision to terminate such status for some nationals of El Salvador, effectively forcing nearly 200,000 out of the country.The bill would be far less comprehensive than the one put forward in 2013, when a bipartisan group of senators known as the “Gang of Eight” proposed a bill that would have given nearly 11 million undocumented migrants a path to citizenship. The bill passed the Senate with rare bipartisan support. In the Republican-led House it never received a vote.Proponents of reform now believe momentum has shifted in their favor, despite Trump’s ascent. The Arizona senator Jeff Flake, part of the 2013 effort and also in the reform group today, said there was a clear deadline of 5 March to help Dreamers.“I do think there is a broader consensus to do this than we had before,” Flake told the Guardian. “We’re going have 700,000 kids subject to deportation. That’s the biggest difference.”Activists cited a grassroots movement grown much stronger. If immigration reform was once “the stepchild that nobody wanted to talk about”, Sharry said, today it is a priority of the entire progressive coalition.Public opinion overwhelmingly favors Dreamers. According to a Quinnipiac poll released last week, 86% of Americans (including 76% of Republicans) want Dreamers to remain in the country. How to achieve that goal, however, remains uncertain. Democrats are under pressure to force a vote as part of a spending bill that Congress must pass by Friday in order to avert a shutdown of the federal government. Republicans have dismissed the idea of tying immigration reform to funding.For Dreamers like Martínez, who have seen friends and loved ones lose their protected status, there is no more time to waste.“Ultimately, members of Congress have to choose a side,” she said. “They’re either on the side of immigrant young people and our families … or they’re on the side of Trump.“There’s no middle ground.” Topics US immigration US politics Donald Trump features

In the classic Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged, the rich go “on strike” – withdrawing their services and disappearing from society in protest against taxes and regulation. Weary of carrying an ungrateful world on their shoulders, business leaders and other top income earners finally shrug, and leave the world without them.The book’s metaphor inspires political rhetoric to this day: if you tax the rich, they will leave. Variations on the threat are issued by well-off individuals all over the world – not least in the United States, where each state sets its own tax policies, and periodic warnings are issued that taxes on the rich will lead to millionaire migration to more obliging US states.When Oregon voters passed a millionaire tax at the start of this decade, for example, the state’s richest resident, Nike CEO Phil Knight, warned the tax would set off a “death spiral … in which thousands of our most successful residents will leave”. As California considered similar taxes, policymakers cautioned “nothing is more mobile than a millionaire and his money”. In New Jersey, governor Chris Christie simply stated: “Ladies and Gentlemen, if you tax them, they will leave.”But does this rhetoric stand up to statistical scrutiny? To better understand elite migration across state lines, I analysed tax return data from every million-dollar income-earner in the United States. The dataset includes 3.7 million top-earning individuals, who collectively filed more than 45 million tax returns over more than a dozen years – showing where millionaires live and where they move to.And it turns out that place still matters for the rich – much more so than we might think. Only about 2.4% of US-based millionaires change their state of residence in a given year. Interstate migration is actually more common among the US middle class, and almost twice as common among its poorest residents, who have an annual interstate migration rate of 4.5%.While travel may be a classic “luxury good”, migration is not. Moving one’s home, life and family to a different place is mostly about people who have a poor economic fit with where they live, earn below-market incomes, and are struggling to find a livelihood. Higher income earners show low migration levels because they are not searching for economic success – they’ve already found it.When millionaires do move, they admittedly tend to favour lower-tax states over higher-tax ones – but only marginally so. Around 15% of interstate millionaire migrations bring a net tax advantage. The other 85% have no net tax impact for the movers.Furthermore, almost all of the tax-migration moves are to just one low-tax state: Florida – where low-income taxes comingle with sun, sand and palm trees. Other low-tax states such as Texas, Tennessee and Nevada do not pick up any net tax-migration. So while some millionaires have moved to lower tax states over the years 1999-2011, the flows have been too small to change the geography of the economic elite in America.The Forbes list of the world’s billionaires offers an international look at elite migration, and takes us higher up the food chain to the greatest corners of wealth.Analysis of this list shows most of the world’s billionaires – about 84% – still live in their country of birth. And among those who do live abroad, most moved to their current country of residence long before they became wealthy – either as children with their parents, or as students going abroad to study (and then staying).Only about 5% of world billionaires moved abroad after they became successful. These individuals readily fit the stereotype of a “transnational capitalist class” – unplugged from their nation state, travelling the world for some combination of tax avoidance and cosmopolitan lifestyle.Many of them can be found in London claiming “non-dom” status to avoid the tax laws of both their homeland and those that apply to British citizens. Others are located in tropical tax havens – such as Sir Richard Branson, who moved to the British Virgin Islands after becoming a billionaire.These jet-setting billionaires generate a lot of headlines and cynicism about tax flight. But they are anecdotal exceptions. The world’s billionaires largely live where they were born or where they began their careers. The British elite live in Britain, the Chinese elite live in China, and the American elite live in America. After making it on to the Forbes billionaire list, elites are actually more likely to die than to move to a different country.Why do the rich have such low migration rates? And why is common intuition about elite migration so wrong? It turns out that education is a big part of the remaining puzzle.People with high levels of education have very high mobility – but only for a short period after finishing their education. If you know people who have been geographically mobile, the chances are they have a higher-level education. However, once they have made a solid start to their career, the chances are also that they will not move again.Migration is a young person’s game, and moving overwhelmingly occurs when people are starting their careers. By the time people hit their early forties, PhDs, college grads and high school drop-outs all show the same low rate of migration.Typically, millionaires are society’s highly educated at an advanced career stage. They are typically the late-career working rich: established professionals in management, finance, consulting, medicine, law and similar fields. And they have low migration because they are both socially and economically embedded in place.In the US tax data, while most of the millionaires’ incomes come from wages and salaries, a quarter of them also own a business. Almost all of them are married, and most have children at home. For all these reasons, places are sticky – it is hard to move after making a career and family in a place.If millionaires were mostly college-going twentysomethings not yet tied to place by career or family responsibilities, place-based income tax systems would face serious challenges. We would be trying to tax the rich exactly when they are most mobile. But this is not the case. Typically, people make decisions about where to live almost two decades before they hit their peak earnings.This shows a kind of unexpected genius behind taxes on the very highest incomes. A tax on million-dollar income serves as an intergenerational transfer, since those who pay it are the late-career working rich: socially and economically embedded in the place.In contrast, most of the people who are mobile – early career professionals – do not really care about the “millionaire tax”, because if they ever pay it, it will be decades in the future, and only if they are wildly successful.Millionaire tax revenues could be used to invest in things that matter to young people starting out: education, infrastructure, public services, urban amenities, quality of life. And this would help to attract and retain a pipeline of future top-earners, creating a virtuous tax circle.This is why places with highly progressive income taxes – such as New York and California – still thrive as centres for talent and elite economic success. Their policies focus on the pipeline of future top earners. They invest in what attracts mobile young professionals – quality of life – and only send them the bill if and when they achieve their highest aspirations. Cristobal Young is the author of The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight: How Place Still Matters for the Rich (Stanford University Press). He will be in conversation with Ed Miliband MP at the London School of Economics from 6.30pm today Follow the Inequality Project on Twitter here Topics Inequality Tax and spending Income inequality US income inequality news

India’s young, beauty-conscious shoppers are keeping Jean-Christophe Letellier, managing director of L’Oréal in the country, busy.Letellier, who’s been heading the company’s India business since 2013, thinks that with better access to the internet, affordability, and the desire for better grooming, young consumers in Asia’s third-largest economy are demanding more lip-colours, hair-colours, and anti-aging creams than before.And L’Oréal is matching up to these trends.Though a latecomer to India’s Rs81,000 crore ($12.52 billion) beauty and personal-care market dominated by biggies such as Hindustan Unilever (HUL) and Colgate-Palmolive, L’Oréal is the third-largest company by market share in India, according to data from Euromonitor.Letellier spoke to Quartz about topics ranging from Indians’ love for natural products to the beauty junkies who lined up at 3am for L’Oréal’s launch of cosmetics brand NYX in Mumbai.Edited excerpts from the interview:You’ve led L’Oréal in India since 2013. How has the market evolved?There are three fundamental changes happening today. First is the young demographic of India.The second is digitisation and the fact that social media is where consumers get access to sources of influence. So the capability of having access to trends is much greater now.And the third is the rise of e-commerce. Because, in India, access to makeup (in a traditional retail setup) is not easy—it is very fragmented.Also, more and more women are going to salons. Makeup is the fastest-growing category in the personal care market.How are the more digitally-connected consumers changing the beauty industry? The rise of this new generation that is really influenced by social media is happening all over the world. India is really into it, though not yet at the same scale. This era of “social” beauty has an impact on India because men and women want to look their best to be on social media. It pushes them to explore new things and be much more experimental than just four years ago. As a result, we don’t invest in digital by buying advertising; we invest in content to create more engagement with consumers who want to learn and explore.How will L’Oréal benefit from these changes?India as a market is yet to be developed. Today it is largely dominated by the personal care which is more about hygiene than care. It still has very basic needs and (does not involve) taking care of oneself in a more evolved and sophisticated way.The overall cosmetic market is Euro 200 billion, while in India it is Euro 5 billion, which is only 2.5 % of the worldwide market. But it is growing two-to-three times faster than the worldwide average. India is poised to become one of the top five-to-six markets in the next 10 years. Nothing will derail India.What categories will you focus on going forward?Cosmetics and hair colour remain two strong categories. These are markets we are eager to develop, democratise, and upgrade. We are also developing our footprint in hair-care with a more premium angle, i.e., the salon part of the business.Besides, we have male grooming. What we see now is that young men understand the importance of appearance.Is it easier to sell to Indians now since there is so much exposure to global beauty trends?It is true that consumers have never been so demanding and aware as now because they have access to the world.So last year we launched NYX and opened our first boutique in InOrbit Mall, Mumbai. People began queuing up at 3am and we had some 700 people by morning. There was no mass media, it was purely driven by digital media and influencers. The response was striking—to see how we could generate such big sales from a brand that we thought is still less known here. This just shows that Indian consumers really know this brand from the US.What are the categories seeing more research and development and India-specific innovations?The three categories I mentioned above. The priority is hair-colour; we bring a lot of investment and innovation in that category. We’ve just launched a hair colour spray, an instant root touch-up spray. We’re also about to completely relaunch our Color Naturals (creme hair colour). In the next two months, we will do mass-market highlights to democratise beauty product usage at home. We’re also launching a clay-based shampoo for Indian hair that is very oily.The second area of focus is makeup; one part is global products that we bring to India, the other is local innovation such as Colossal kajal.L’Oréal remains an urban brand, while HUL and others are entrenched in rural markets. Our focus is still urban because there is so much we can do; we are not completely maximised there.The phenomenon in India—I call it the “rurbanisation of India”—is that it isn’t so much about big cities becoming bigger but villages becoming small census cities. And this is a very specific form of urbanisation happening in India. When these (villages) become small cities, consumers (here) start behaving like urban shoppers; that’s when salons start coming in, beauty shops open up, and we will be a part of it. We see that small cities, thanks to digital penetration, are informed and aware; they want to be a part of grooming and the social beauty sphere. So here we have prices in our portfolio that range from Rs3 to Rs10,000 for our luxury portfolio.Retail has always been a challenge due to a lack of specialised beauty stores. How’s that changed?Retail is still very fragmented in India. Within beauty, if you want to bring innovation, you have to rely on in-store demonstration and point-of-sale displays. It is very easy to implement it in modern trade but very hard in unmanned shops. But, I think it is changing. We are seeing a lot more specialty cosmetic stores and chains coming in.So it is not so much about local grocers and modern trade getting big, but specialist stores like pharmacies and cosmetic stores which are improving the way they display products; and of course e-commerce.So has e-commerce been beneficial?Yes. We do 6% of our sales in India through online channels. In some categories, such as cosmetics, it is up to 15%.A lot of beauty companies in India sell fairness products. Does skin colour drive the market here?It’s a consumer demand, so you need that in your portfolio. But we have never been prisoners to that. We were the first ones to launch the anti-aging product under L’Oréal Paris. We sell more anti-aging than whitening products (under that brand). And on the professional front, we develop a lot of products and services for acne and pigmentation treatments. It takes time to build and develop portfolios in a market like India, but we are committed to building something beyond fairness.The last two years have really shifted the focus to natural products, thanks to Patanjali. L’Oréal, too, has pushed some natural products. How do you view that trend going forward?Patanjali has found the right spot and developed the category. It has inspired a lot of “me-too” launches, but it shows that Indians are fundamentally attached to natural and herbal products. What does it mean to us? We are not trying to do ayurvedic products, but trying to bring science and nature together. Like, for instance, in Garnier. Or bringing “clay” into a hair product. It is true our natural launches have gone up.Could you look at some acquisitions in the natural space?L’Oréal is made of successful acquisitions (globally). For India, we are always open and we look at what is the option. We are not dependent on it. We have 14 brands in India of the 33 brands we sell globally, so there are global brands that we haven’t got here because the market hasn’t reached that level.

India is simply running out of airports.Its 132 operational facilities, which handle under 300 million flyers annually, just aren’t enough for the expected 12.5% increase in air traffic by 2022. And this is already beginning to show on their performance.Two of the country’s busiest airports are among the world’s least punctual.Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, India’s second-busiest, was the fifth-least punctual among the 513 airports across the world between June 2017 and May 2018, according to a report released last week by OAG, a UK-based air travel intelligence company. Flight disruptions in Mumbai reached a five-year high in December 2017.Meanwhile, Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport was ranked 451 with an annual on-time performance (OTP) of nearly 71%.“These (Delhi and Mumbai) airports are too congested and are reaching their peak capacity. There is an urgent need for infrastructure support to these airports,” said Mark Martin, founder and CEO of Martin Consulting, an aviation consulting firm.India’s most punctual airport is thousands of miles away from the mainland in the Bay of Bengal island territory of Andaman & Nicobar. The facility in Port Blair, the island’s capital city, managed a global rank of 65, making it the best-performing Indian airport with an OTP of 84.6%.The Veer Savarkar International Airport is controlled by the Indian Navy. But the passenger terminal building and parking bay are under the government’s Airports Authority of India.To ease flight traffic, the existing infrastructure must be improved drastically.In 2007, the government gave the nod for an additional airport in Mumbai and its first phase was expected to be operational by 2019. However, “it seems unlikely that the Navi Mumbai Airport will be up before 2024-26,” added Martin.The government had also okayed a second airport in the National Capital Region surrounding New Delhi. It is expected to cater to between 30 million and 50 million passengers per year, over the next 10-15 years.“The government needs to speed up the process of getting the promised two new airports on track at the earliest,” a New Delhi-based aviation analyst told Quartz, requesting anonymity.

Donald Trump has revoked the security clearance of John Brennan, the CIA director in the Obama administration, citing “erratic conduct and behavior”.Brennan has been a vocal critic of Trump.The move comes as the White House has been rocked by allegations against the president by former aide Omarosa Manigault Newman, including the claim that an audio tape exists of Trump using “the N-word”.Reading a prepared statement from Trump in the White House briefing room, the press secretary, Sarah Sanders, railed against Brennan. She claimed “he has leveraged his status as a former high-ranking official with access to highly sensitive info to make a series of unfounded and outrageous allegations, wild outbursts on internet and television about this administration”.Sanders also said Brennan’s “lying and recent conduct, characterized by increasingly frenzied commentary, is wholly inconsistent with access to the nation’s most closely held secrets”.Brennan called the move “an abuse of power” in an interview with MSNBC.And on Twitter, Brennan responded by saying: “This action is part of a broader effort by Mr Trump to suppress freedom of speech and punish critics. It should gravely worry all Americans, including intelligence professionals, about the cost of speaking out. My principles are worth far more than clearances. I will not relent.”He added in the MSNBC interview: “This is not going to deter me at all. I am still going to speak out.” He described it as an effort “to cow individuals inside and outside the US government” and compared it to behavior from “foreign tyrants and despots”.Sanders had in July floated removing Brennan’s clearance along with a number of other Obama administration officials. At the time, the House speaker, Paul Ryan, laughed off the threat, telling reporters of Trump: “I think he’s trolling people, honestly.” A spokesperson for Ryan declined to comment on Wednesday.On Wednesday, Sanders repeated a long list of others from whom the White House was considering revoking security clearances. They were:• James Comey, former FBI director• James Clapper, former director of national intelligence• Sally Yates, former acting attorney general • Michael Hayden, former director of national intelligence• Susan Rice, former national security adviser• Andrew McCabe, former deputy FBI director • Peter Strzok, former FBI agent• Lisa Page, former FBI attorney• Bruce Ohr, former associate deputy attorney generalAll but Ohr, who is still serving in the federal government, have criticized Trump.Most recently, Brennan condemned Trump’s characterization of Manigault Newman as “that dog”.Brennan said: “It’s astounding how often you fail to live up to minimum standards of decency, civility and probity. Seems like you will never understand what it means to be president, nor what it takes to be a good, decent and honest person. So disheartening, so dangerous for our nation.”Hayden shrugged off the announcement that his clearance was under review. In a statement to CNN, he said “with regard to the implied threat today that I could lose my clearance, that will have no impact on what I think, say or write”.On Twitter, the Virginia senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, said: “This might be a convenient way to distract attention, say from a damaging news story or two. But politicizing the way we guard our nation’s secrets just to punish the president’s critics is a dangerous precedent.”John McLaughlin, the former deputy director of the CIA under George W Bush, called the decision “ridiculous” and said in an interview with MSNBC that it indicated “an authoritarian attitude in [Trump’s] governing style”.However, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky hailed the decision. Paul, who had long pushed for Trump to revoke Brennan’s clearance, said: “I applaud President Trump for his revoking of John Brennan’s security clearance.“His behavior in government and out of it demonstrate why he should not be allowed near classified information. He participated in a shredding of constitutional rights, lied to Congress, and has been monetizing and making partisan political use of his clearance since his departure.” Topics John Brennan Donald Trump US politics Trump administration CIA news