The Brazilian football club Íbis Sport hadn’t won a match for two years.But now the self-styled “worst team in the world”, which plays in the lowest division of the Pernambuco state championship, has three consecutive victories – and can make it a record-breaking four if they can beat Centro Limoeirense this Sunday.But far from welcoming this sudden reversal of fortune , some fans claim the club’s roots and identity are at stake.Following the latest 1-0 victory against Ferroviário do Cabo, fans stormed a local bar where the players were enjoying a post-match barbecue and beers to demand: please stop winning.“This is destroying our history,” said one protest leader, Nilsinho Filho.Other fans went on social media to complain, or call for resignations. “This is a worrying situation in the long term. To stop being an icon and to be just another winning team. It’s the coach’s fault,” read a typical tweet.Between 1980 and 1984, the team went three years and 11 months without winning a game, and entered the Guinness Book of Records as “the worst club in the world”.The club’s Maradona-permed former midfielder Mauro Shampoo, boasts that he scored just one goal in 10 years, and has also criticised the recent victories.“If we keep winning, we are going to lose our brand,” he said.The club’s president, Ozir Junior, insisted that the club’s ambition is to get to the first division of the state championship.He attributed the string of sudden victories to several new players who had joined the team after recently becoming unemployed. “We are not the worst team in the world – that was a thing of the 1980s. We’re not even the worst team in Pernambuco,” he said. “The first division is our dream, but it’s going to be a lot of work.”Nilsinho Filho claimed that even if the club is promoted, Íbis Sport has already claimed its place in history.“Even if we go on to win the Brazilian championship one day, no one will ever be able to take our title as the worst team in the world,” he said. Topics Brazil Americas news

During his Supreme Court confirmation hearing on Thursday, Judge Brett Kavanaugh referred to some forms of birth control as “abortion-inducing drugs.” The phrase is a characterization that some anti-abortion religious groups use, but it is not supported by scientific evidence.Judge Kavanaugh used the phrase while answering questions by Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, about a 2015 dissent he wrote in a case brought by a Catholic organization over a requirement in the federal health care law that employers include contraception coverage in employee health plans. The group, Priests for Life, argued that the provision violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, despite an exception allowing employers with religious objections to arrange for a separate insurance company to provide contraceptive coverage.“They said filling out the form would make them complicit in the provision of the abortion-inducing drugs that they were, as a religious matter, objecting to,” Judge Kavanaugh testified, describing the group’s position.It was not clear exactly which methods Judge Kavanaugh was referring to when he used the phrase “abortion-inducing drugs.”Most common types of contraception — birth control pills, condoms, hormonal intrauterine devices and implants — prevent conception by keeping eggs from becoming fertilized.The description “abortion-inducing” is most often used by anti-abortion religious groups to characterize methods they believe can prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus. These groups typically say that such methods are morning-after pills and copper intrauterine devices.There are two main reasons this belief does not comport with scientific evidence. First, the medical definition of pregnancy is that it begins after a fertilized egg is implanted in the uterus, not before. That is because many, probably most, fertilized eggs naturally fail to implant in the uterus on their own.Second, a growing body of research strongly indicates that morning-after pills, such as Plan B and Ella, do not prevent implantation. Instead, the pills, if taken up to five days after unprotected sex, work to stop fertilization from occurring. They do this by delaying ovulation, the release of eggs from the ovaries that occurs before eggs are fertilized, or by thickening cervical mucus so that sperm have trouble swimming and reaching the egg to fertilize it.A New York Times investigation of the science behind morning-after pills in 2012 prompted the National Institutes of Health website to delete passages suggesting emergency contraceptive pills could disrupt implantation. A spokeswoman for the Food and Drug Administration said at the time that “emerging data” suggested that morning-after pills do not inhibit implantation.The other method of emergency contraception, the copper IUD, does appear to be able to block implantation of a fertilized egg, scientists say. (It is different from the more popular hormonal IUDs, such as the common brand Mirena, which are extremely effective at preventing fertilization in the first place and have no effect on implantation.)The copper IUD is also highly effective at preventing fertilization and, unlike hormonal IUDs, can do so even if inserted within five days after unprotected sex. In the small number of cases where the copper IUD does not prevent fertilization, scientists say it might be able to disrupt the process by which the fertilized egg would implant in the uterus.Because it has to be inserted by a health provider within a few days after unprotected sex, however, the copper IUD is a much less common method of emergency contraception than morning-after pills.

After several days in which he failed to publicly address the issue, Modi finally broke his silence during a speech in Delhi on Friday, promising justice for "our daughters." Indian demonstrators stage a silent protest in New Delhi Sunday in support of rape victims following high profile cases in Jammu and Kashmir and Uttar Pradesh states.For critics, it was a case of too little, too late. Leader of the main opposition Congress Party, Rahul Gandhi, who has been vocal in his support for the protests, responded to Modi onsocial media. "You said 'our daughters will get justice.' India wants to know: When?" asked Gandhi.Gandhi led asilent vigilon Thursday in the capital. Similar scenes and rallies have also taken place in major cities including Mumbai, Puducherry, Goa, Bengaluru, and Kolkata among others.The case of the gang rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Jammu and Kashmir state was originally reported in January. But it wasn't until last week, when a group of lawyers and right-wing Hindu activists attempted to forcibly block investigators from filing charges against the men accused, that the case began to gain nationwide attention. Source: CNN and Indian media reports Police say the young girl, who belonged to a Muslim nomadic community known as the Bakarwals, was abducted while grazing horses in a meadow in the isolated Himalayan district of Kathua on January 12.From there, it is alleged she was taken to a Hindu temple, where she was drugged and held captive for five days.During that period, police say she was raped repeatedly by several different men, before being murdered and dumped in a nearby forest. Police have arrested eight men in connection with the death of the girl, all of whom are Hindu. The accused were present in court for a brief hearing Monday. Seven of the eight pleaded not guilty to accusations of involvement in the abduction, rape and murder of the girl. The next hearing will be held on April 28.The eighth, who is a juvenile, will go through a separate hearing on a different date. The arrests of the men, who investigators allege plotted the girl's abduction as a means of scaring the predominately-Muslim nomads into vacating the region, has proved to be a lightning rod in a part of India simmering with religious tensions. A right-wing Hindu nationalist group called the Hindu Unity Council, which has links to Modi's BJP, has seized on the issue, whipping up long held communal grievances, and insisting the police investigators are prejudiced, owing to their Muslim faith.Following last week's protests held in support of the accused, the father of the victim said his family had become afraid "to go anywhere.""When we go down [from the hilltop village where the family live], we should have security," said the father, Monday. The actions of the Hindu nationalists have in turn resulted in a counter-campaign on social media, demanding justice for the young victim. The online campaign, which has drawn widespread support from a number of high-profile Indian celebrities, has helped push the issue to the forefront of the national agenda, putting pressure on the BJP to reel in its supporters. On Friday, two BJP ministers in the Jammu and Kashmirstate government who had participated in the protests in support of the accused outside the courthouse last week were forced to resign from office, amid accusations of political interference and religious discrimination.The suggestion that the BJP is complicit in attempting to protect the accused has not been helped by the resurfacing of a second case, this time involving a member of the party.Last week police brought a case against Kuldeep Singh Sengar, an elected member of the Uttar Pradesh state legislative assembly, for the alleged rape of a 16-year-old girl in June 2017.Sengar allegedly raped the minor on June 4, 2017, court records reveal. A week later on June 11, the minor was abducted and repeatedly raped by others who it is alleged were known to Sengar.Protesters take part in the 'Not In My Name' protest against the Kathua and Unnao rape cases, in New Dehli on April 15.The politician denies the allegations. Prior to his arrest he told CNN Indian affiliate CNN News 18: "I have done nothing wrong. I will be proved innocent after the investigation. The rape allegations are false and baseless."According to court records, the teenage girl was found by police on June 20 and taken to a local police station. During the journey, it is alleged that the police attempted to intimidate the girl, telling her that Sengar would kill her family members if she implicated him in the case.In April 2018, her father was allegedly assaulted by the lawmaker's brother and other aides. He died of his injuries on April 9. The day before her father's death, the victim, now 17, attempted to set herself on fire in front of the residence of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister. Murder and rape of 8-year-old inflames religious tensions in northern IndiaSpeaking to reporters Tuesday, her face covered by a veil, the girl addressed the ongoing questions regarding the case. "(I am) positive, yes, I think justice will be served," said the girl, whose identity is protected by Indian law.On Friday, the Allahabad High Court in Uttar Pradesh issued a statement deriding state authorities' handling of the case."The disturbing feature of the case is that the law and order machinery and the government officials were directly in league and under the influence of Kuldeep Singh Sengar," the statement said.Sengar is currently in the custody of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which is handling the case. He was arrested for investigation on Friday by the CBI following the court order. A female aide to Sengar was arrested on Saturday. The High Court has ordered that a report on the status of the investigation must be provided to the court by May 2. The reaction to the recent cases have been compared to the outcry over the 2012 gang rape of 23-year-old physiotherapy student Jyoti Singh, who later died from injuries sustained in the attack.The case shocked India, resulting in an intense period of media coverage and large nationwide protests. Singh is commonly referred to as Nirbhaya, meaning "fearless" in Hindi.In the months following her death, the central government passed numerous legislative reforms, commonly known as the Nirbhaya Act, to increase penalties for sexual violence, including extending the length of prison sentences and introducing the death penalty.Yet despite the introduction of stricter laws, the latest data from India's National Crime Record Bureau recorded a 12%rise in the number of rape related cases-- up from 34,651 cases in 2015 to 38,947 in 2016. On average, that's more than 100 reported cases of rape every day.Another child rape and murder, this time in Surat in Modi's home state of Gujarat, was made public over the weekend.String of brutal rapes shocks IndiaThe body of a young girl, who was believed to be around 11-years-old, was found abandoned on a street in a residential area on April 6. The official post-mortem report revealed that she had sustained injuries that were consistent with rape, torture, and strangulation.Commentators point out that despite the high-profile nature of the recent spate of cases, getting justice in India's court system is far from certain. Courts and police both face a massive backlog of cases. According to court records, the number of sexual assault-related casesawaiting a trial date in 2016totaled 15,450, with the courts resolving just 1,395, or less than 10% that year.

A new trend of "shareable make-up rooms" aimed at urban women is igniting debate in China, as companies try new ways to grab a slice of the world's largest market for beauty products.The rooms represent a new frontier in China's vast sharing economy. Some think they are an affordable way to get to use expensive make-up, while others shudder at the thought of sharing a lipstick with a stranger. Although they have been springing up in many Chinese cities since late last year, a recent opening in eastern Wuhan has prompted a flood of discussion online.But how do you use one, and are they likely to take off elsewhere? Using their phones, customers scan a Quick Response (QR) code to pay a small fee, and enter a room with a chair and dressing table. An array of beauty products is spread out on the table, including products from high-end Western brands.Users can help themselves to a range of products: moisturisers, powders, eye shadows and lipsticks. The room also provides brushes and other application tools for people to use. Products in the Wuhan store are worth an estimated 4,000 yuan ($590; £460), according to the Chutian Metropolis Daily newspaper, so it is not surprising that CCTV watches over users as they beautify themselves.It costs a small amount to use one of the rooms from anywhere between 15 and 45 minutes. In the Wuhan branch, the maximum a customer can expect to spend in one sitting is 58 yuan ($8.50; £6.70). Young women who have tried the rooms and who the BBC spoke to had mostly positive impressions."I thought the shared make-up room was great, a very creative idea and a very novel invention," said Ms Liu, a woman in her twenties from Wuhan. Though she added: "I may not go often because I don't think they're very practical." Kylie Jenner 'on track to be billionaire' How your beauty regime could be harming the planet Another in Shanghai said she would use them again, because she felt her skin was especially damaged and she needed to have access to high-end products. Online comments suggested a more mixed response.Some on China's Twitter-like Sina Weibo service said that they thought the concept would make money because it allows people to try products without "being bombarded by servicewomen at make-up counters", or forced into an expensive sale for something that might not be right for them. One user in eastern Shandong province said she thought the room was "good", especially as disposable application tools were provided. But others have concerns about the idea of sharing certain make-up products with strangers. "Lipstick, for example, lots of people will use - that's not very hygienic," one Wuhan-based user told the Pear Video website. "Cosmetics are personal items, I can't really accept this," another said. Others expressed concern about contracting viruses or skin conditions.Chinese shareable make-up pods could ultimately attract up to 80 customers a day, one seller told the Beijing Youth Daily newspaper. But at present just a handful of people are visiting.Self-contained shareable make-up pods are still a relatively novel idea, and they have only begun appearing in China since October 2018. They are largely being set up by private companies, not the cosmetic brands themselves, and are now found in major Chinese cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Nanjing. Large public dressing rooms offering similar services have been around in Japan and South Korea since as early as 2014. The rise of Korean make-up in the West 'Toxic' chemicals found in fake cosmetics The concept is part of a wave of shareable products that have hit the Chinese market in recent years. Well-known services include shareable bikes and phone chargers; but the country is also home to more obscure rentable goods, including umbrellas and basketballs. China promotes shareable technologies for having both economic and environmental benefits, and in the case of luxury brands, helping Chinese users distinguish between fake and real goods in an increasingly saturated market. It is entirely possible, given the surging spending power of urban consumers and their willingness to spend their disposable cash on cosmetic products.Research from OC&C Strategy Consultants says that China has the largest skincare market in the world, worth US$22bn, followed by the US. Chinese women, according to the group's findings, have added more steps and products to their daily beauty routine in recent years, with the average Chinese woman surveyed having a 6 or 7-step daily skincare regime before applying make-up. Some had as many as nine daily steps. Pascal Martin, a partner at the company, says China has a "massive [cosmetics] market with massive growth opportunity". "International brands used to be dominant; it's a market in which everyone is competing," he says. "Yet, you can see Chinese brands gaining share year after year." The appeal of young, fresh-faced celebrities like the popular TFBoys band has also led to a surge in spending on skincare products, with consumers splashing out on products because of the associations with their favourite icon. So-called "little fresh meats", men who have delicate or feminine features, have become key influencers among young, urban Chinese and are known to team up with local cosmetics brands.Social media platforms have also seen a rising trend of video make-up tutorials.And with young Chinese increasingly working longer hours outside the home, and spending more time online, the concept of a shareable make-up room may well prove desirable. China's trade figures should concern us US-China trade war in 300 words But Pascal Martin says that they are still in the experimental stage, and he is not convinced they will see mass take-off. He says that concerns about hygiene could pose a significant risk."It is not impossible that the promoters of this concept may have convinced investors to put money in it, even if the concept is not bullet-proof."There are many examples in China of original concepts that suddenly take off with the backing of massive venture capital, and then hit reality before scaling down or disappearing." BBC Monitoring reports and analyses news from TV, radio, web and print media around the world. You can follow BBC Monitoring on Twitter and Facebook.

The annual festival, taking place in the Nevada desert, started with a dust storm and ended with the usual combination of fire, theatrics and wild costumery

Five years after the brutal New Delhi gang rape highlighted the crisis of women’s safety in India, two more gruesome cases—involving children this time—have shown that solving the problem will need a lot more than just laws. For, what’s adding to the gravity of the cases are the responses of politicians and key political groups.In the town of Kathua, Jammu & Kashmir, the brutal rape and murder of an eight-year-old Muslim girl has sparked protests by a local Hindu nationalist group, shockingly, in support of the accused. The protesters allege that the probe itself was botched. Even lawyers in the town tried to prevent the police from filing charges against them. Meanwhile, in Unnao, Uttar Pradesh, a BJP lawmaker who reportedly raped a minor girl months ago was arrested only following heavy criticism of the state government.These cases merely demonstrate the role of powerful interests and religious prejudices, which add to women’s existing difficulties of securing justice in a country where even the police and doctors rarely offer support.However, the two cases also signal a worrying trend: the rising incidence of child rape. In 2016 alone, the National Crime Records Bureau recorded a staggering 19,765 cases of child rape across the country, up 82% from the year before. And given the persistent taboo surrounding sex and sexual assault, it’s likely that the actual incidence is even higher.In 2016, data for which is the most recent available, Madhya Pradesh recorded the most cases, followed by Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh.The numbers are proof of the alarming situation. But given that the perpetrators include powerful men, thousands of India’s young girls remain at risk.

Mr. Ahmady, the cameraman, studied law part-time and had recently started a small chicken farm on a loan.“He had covered 10 suicide attacks, and he lost his life covering the 11th,” said Atiqullah, Mr. Ahmady’s uncle, who, like many Afghans, uses only one name. “I asked him many times to leave his job. He kept telling me that if he left his job and his other colleagues left, who would show the sorrow and pain of the Afghan people to the world?”When Mr. Ahmady’s family had arrived outside the hospital morgue, they joined nearly 200 others waiting for news of loved ones. A ToloNews employee said that when he walked outside to deliver the news, it seemed that Mr. Ahmady’s father, Noorullah, could immediately tell that his son had not survived. Before the employee spoke, Noorullah asked him not to say a word. He said he didn’t need to hear. He walked away, into the distance, and asked to be left alone for a while.Atiqullah, the uncle, said that just two weeks ago he had attended the burial of another of his nephews, a police officer killed in a Taliban attack.“I feel that I am asleep and all this is a nightmare,” the uncle said. “I want someone to wake me up and say everything is O.K.”At ToloNews on Wednesday, the staff was in shock after the bombing. The newsroom’s most senior leaders tried to rally a tearful crew.

For years, a utopian vision of life under so-called Islamic State (IS) was at the heart of the propaganda it pumped out online. As it loses vast swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq, is it also losing control of its "virtual caliphate"?In Syria and Iraq, Islamic State is on the brink of collapse.Just days ago, it lost the city of Deir al-Zour, its last major stronghold in Syria: a defeat that followed those in Mosul, Tal Afar and Raqqa.The idea of an IS "state" is no more - nowadays, it exists mostly as a series of scattered insurgencies.Territory matters to IS, but it is not the be-all and end-all for a group that has long had a remarkably strong online presence.However, there is lots that is wrong with the idea that it can simply retreat into a "virtual caliphate" and hope to be as powerful as it ever was.IS will not go away, but nor will it thrive like it has done these past few years - not least because its official propagandists are in tatters.For three years, I've been monitoring IS's Arabic language media and trends in the way it communicates.I have never seen the group's propaganda more subdued than it is now.For months, IS has been putting its all into diverting supporters' attention away from the haemorrhaging territories of the "caliphate".When I first scoped out the full extent of the media operation, in the summer of 2015, it was producing more than 200 videos, radio programmes, magazines and photo reports each week.It was also releasing dozens of claims about its military operations every day. IS wasn't just mindlessly pumping out propaganda - it was manufacturing a brand. Media officials had a direct line to the caliph himself and pervaded every part of the organisation.They had a hand in everything from military affairs and external terrorism, to irrigation projects and traffic policing. In many ways, they were making the IS "utopia" really look like a utopia, painting an intense - and, by all accounts, demonstrably false - picture of life in the "caliphate".Photos and videos depicted giggling children playing freely at funfairs, modern medical care being dispensed to the elderly and infirm, and bags of cash being delivered to the poor and destitute.Nowadays, IS propagandists can barely get out 20 pieces of media in a week.And that's not all - their utopian message has almost entirely evaporated.While they may have been able to churn out a few photographs of grape farming in Egypt and drug policing in Afghanistan in the past few weeks, their output is more stilted now than it has ever been.These days, the IS brand is all about war.Its images of children zooming down inflatable slides have been replaced by pictures of teenagers scrambling through trenches and driving bomb-laden vehicles. The focus is squarely on buoying morale: showing that its fighters are enthusiastically dying in its name is a way to shame those having doubts. Which countries have fleeing IS fighters gone to? What should happen to IS fighters in Syria and Iraq? The secret lives of IS fighters - BBC News Fishing and ultraviolence - BBC News There are three big factors that led to this state of affairs.First is IS's territorial setbacks: it is nigh on impossible to make propaganda about "normal" civilian life if normal civilians are few and far between.And, even if they were to be found, there is the issue that IS propaganda takes a lot of polishing.As the group has lost control of its strongholds in Syria and Iraq - along with the media hubs they housed - it has lost the ability to edit and produce propaganda on the industrial scale it once managed.It is likely that some hubs still exist near the border between Syria and Iraq, but they are becoming fewer and further between by the day. Increasingly, IS seems to be relying on places outside of its heartlands to keep up the propaganda flow: its Sinai and Afghan affiliates have been disproportionately vocal of late. Second is IS's reduced manpower.Alongside IS fighters, media operatives have long been in the sights of the coalition and its allies.Its spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani and information minister Abu Muhammed al-Furqan were killed last year.Countless other mid- to high-level propaganda officials, cameramen, editors and producers have been targeted by coalition air strikes. These mounting losses have inevitably had an impact on the operation as a whole.Third, the internet is not quite the "safe space" it once was.Whether it is down to coalition cyber-offensives, or self-regulation by internet service providers, IS can no longer use big social-media platforms and file-sharing spaces like it once could.The sum of all this is a gradual, but undeniable, volte-face in IS's propaganda.This is important, and not just because it means IS is no longer able to be as internationally prominent as it once was.Propaganda is a litmus test for organisational health, and that its brand has disintegrated in this way does not spell success for the group's insurgent prospects in Syria and Iraq, at least in the short to medium term.While this is certainly something to be optimistic about, it is not all good news.IS may be less productive than ever, but the quality and ambition of its propaganda remains head and shoulders above that of its rivals.Indeed, in spite of the pressures the group is facing on the ground in Syria and Iraq, the trickle of instructional materials on how to plan terror attacks still emerging online could prove extremely dangerous. Another threat comes from its supporters, who still swap recipes for homemade explosives and handcrafted poison in their droves. The problem hasn't gone away, it's just changed. It is far too early to talk about the end of IS - either in Iraq and Syria, or as a "virtual caliphate" - but nor should we ignore the fact that it is reeling. Interactive Slide the button to see how the area IS controls has changed since 2015 2017 2015 About this pieceCharlie Winter is senior research fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, King's College, London.Follow him @charliewinter.Edited by Duncan Walker

NEW DELHI/BHOMADA, India (Reuters) - Narendra Modi swept India’s 2014 general election with the slogan “Achhe din (good days) are coming”. Misri Lal, 52, a farm labourer, stands outside his house with his family in Bhomada village, Sehore district, in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, India, September 11, 2018. REUTERS/Krishna N. DasFour years later, as Prime Minister Modi mobilizes to win re-election in May, he and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are being buffeted for a lack of jobs, falling farm prices and rural wages, a tax reform that led to unemployment and a demonetization exercise that sapped liquidity. Despite high economic growth, the fall of the rupee currency to record lows this year has led to a surge in prices of largely imported fuel, which is feeding into inflation. Nationwide protests have broken out because of the price rise. “There’s no improvement in our life - we eat two basic meals a day but struggle to save for soap and detergent,” Misri Lal, 52, said in Bhomada village in central India’s Madhya Pradesh state, where he earns $2 a day watching over a yellowish-green soybean farm. In a series of interviews in India’s political heartland, the northern and central plains, many people said they had been disappointed by Modi’s government. But in a nation of 1.3 billion people, it was difficult to estimate how far the disillusionment had spread and how much it could affect Modi and the BJP at the next general election. Despite its fitful performance on the economy, the BJP remains robustly Hindu nationalist, which plays well among many voters. Modi’s aides insist that the party will not suffer in the election next year and will repeat the 2014 performance. They also say the BJP will do well in three big state elections due later in 2018, which could signal how things will go in the general election. Opinion polls predict Modi will return to power next year, but said the gap against the opposition was narrowing. But “achhe din”, which has become synonymous with Modi and his rule, is being mocked on social media in India. A cartoon widely distributed on Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging platform had a man looking through a telescope for “good days”. Another had Modi sitting in front of a spinning wheel weaving “achhe din” stories. Some BJP officials privately say they are not quite sure of sentiment in the small towns and villages of rural India, where two-thirds of the people live. Lal, the farm hand, said he was a long-time BJP supporter but it was time for change. “We have always voted for them but people are angry now. It appears things will change this time around,” Lal said, his wife and two grandchildren looking on from near their tin shed in the middle of the unfenced soybean fields. The Modi administration has acknowledged that farmers are suffering in a country where agriculture is the biggest employer, engaging 263 million people or 55 percent of the total number of workers. “Trends in inflation clearly show that farmers are under distress due to un-remunerative prices and need to be compensated appropriately,” India’s farm ministry said in a report sent to states last month and seen by Reuters. Rural wages have weakened across India compared to a high growth period during the rule of the center-left Congress party which aggressively promoted a rural jobs scheme that guaranteed every citizen paid work for at least 100 days in a year. Economists say its impact has now leveled out. A boom in the construction sector had sustained the growth in wages but that has since slowed down dramatically, dragged by Modi’s November 2016 move to suck high value currency notes out of the system to combat corruption and then a sweeping goods and services tax (GST) that businesses are struggling to adapt to. Average inflation-adjusted growth in rural wages fell to 0.45 percent between 2015/16 and 2017/18, compared with 11.18 percent between 2012/13 and 2014/15, said India Ratings & Research, a unit of international agency Fitch. The Reserve Bank of India says that high growth in rural wages from 2007/08 to 2012/13 was followed by a phase of “significant deceleration”. “GST and demonetization have really depressed the construction industry. I get only 20 percent of the work I used to get before demonetization,” said Chotelal Rajput, a construction contractor in the Madhya Pradesh capital Bhopal, as he stopped by a busy roundabout where dozens of laborers gathered to be hired for daily wages. In Wai, a small town south of Mumbai, migrant worker Mithilesh Yadav said he voted for Modi at the last election but would not do so again. “The BJP was talking about bringing down inflation, bringing down petrol and diesel prices, but instead they are raising prices every day,” the 26-year-old said. “All tall claims made by Modi were just advertising and we fell for it. I won’t commit the mistake again.” Many political analysts say Modi’s failure to create tens of millions of jobs for the country’s youth - a promise which helped him secure the largest mandate in three decades in 2014 - would be the biggest threat to his bid for another term. “No one here will vote for Modi,” said Rakesh Kumar, a college graduate in the town of Kasba Bonli in northern Rajasthan state who says he has worked as a house painter because he could not get any other employment. Kumar said he finally found a job as a teacher in a private college last month but his paltry monthly salary of 8,000 rupees (about $111) meant his six brothers worked as manual laborers. The town voted overwhelmingly for the BJP in 2014. In Panipat, a town north of the capital Delhi, workers in textile mills said hundreds had been laid off because many small business owners could not cope with the complexities of the new GST regime and had shut shop. Gopal Krishna Agarwal, a BJP spokesman, said the country could not expect the Modi government to resolve all its problems in so short a time. “India has been independent for more than 70 years and we can’t say that problems that have persisted for around 65 years would go away in four and half years,” he said. “We’re not saying every problem has been solved but our focus and direction are correct.” The BJP is also confident about its prospects next year because of the fractured opposition. Rahul Gandhi of the Congress is Modi’s main opponent, but there are a host of regional parties that are likely to divide the opposition vote. India Today news magazine published a survey last month predicting the BJP would lose seats compared to 2014, but retain just enough to form a government with allies if the opposition remained divided. It predicted the BJP would win 36 percent of the vote and Congress 31 percent, but said smaller parties would get 33 percent. Gandhi told a group of journalists last month that a “robust opposition alliance” would be in place before the 2019 election and that a candidate of a unified opposition would go up against the BJP in each constituency. “More damage has been done to India by this government than any in the past and everyone recognizes the over-riding need to thwart them,” Gandhi said, referring to the BJP’s Hindu nationalist agenda that critics say has targeted the country’s minorities. Subhanshu Sethia, a college student in the northern town of Meerut, said Modi’s singular failure had been the lack of jobs. FILE PHOTO: Activists of Center of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) break a police barricade during a protest against the goverment for hike in fuel prices, demanding complete debt waiver for farmers, along with various other issues in Kolkata, India, August 9, 2018. REUTERS/Rupak De Chowdhuri/File Photo“Achhe din is only for the rich, the businessmen who get fat contracts, for the rest of us it has been a let down,” he said. “There is a war out there for jobs.” ($1 = 71.9150 Indian rupees) Additional reporting by Rajendra Jadhav and Manoj Kumar; Editing by Raju GopalakrishnanOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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.

Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence officer who compiled an explosive dossier of allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, believes it to be 70% to 90% accurate, according to a new book on the covert Russian intervention in the 2016 US election.The book, Collusion: How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win, by the Guardian journalist Luke Harding, quotes Steele as telling friends that he believes his reports – based on sources cultivated over three decades of intelligence work – will be vindicated as the US special counsel investigation digs deeper into contacts between Trump, his associates and Moscow. “I’ve been dealing with this country for 30 years. Why would I invent this stuff?” Steele is quoted as saying. One of the reasons his dossier was taken seriously in Washington in 2016 was Steele’s reputation in the US for producing reliable reports on Russia, according to Harding’s book. Between 2014 and 2016, he authored more than a hundred reports on Russia and Ukraine, which were commissioned by private clients but shared widely within the state department and passed across the desks of the secretary of state, John Kerry, and the assistant secretary Victoria Nuland, who led the US response to the annexation of Crimea and the covert invasion of eastern Ukraine. The sources for those reports were the same as those quoted in the dossier on Trump, which included allegations that the Kremlin had personally compromising material on the US president, including sex tapes recorded during a trip to Moscow in 2013, and that Trump and his associates actively colluded with Russian intelligence to influence the election in his favour. Years earlier, Steele shared the results of his investigation of the global football organisation, Fifa, with a senior FBI official in Rome; that led to an investigation by US federal prosecutors, and ultimately the arrest of seven Fifa officials. “The episode burnished Steele’s reputation inside the US intelligence community and the FBI. Here was a pro, a well-connected Brit, who understood Russian espionage and its subterranean tricks. Steele was regarded as credible,” Harding writes. The book traces Steele’s career as an MI6 officer, sent to Moscow in 1990 under cover of working as the second secretary in the UK chancery division at the embassy. While there, the young spy was witness to the 1991 attempted coup and looked on when Boris Yeltsin climbed on a tank in central Moscow to denounce the plotters. Steele left Moscow in 1993 and was later posted to Paris before taking a senior post on MI6’s Russia desk in London in 2006. Because his name had been on a list of MI6 officers leaked and published in 1999, he was unable to return to Moscow. But he was chosen to lead the MI6 investigation of the assassination of the former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko by radioactive poisoning in 2006. Steele left MI6 in 2009, to start up a commercial intelligence firm, Orbis, with a former colleague, Christopher Burrows. Soon after its founding, Orbis began working with Fusion GPS, a Washington-based company doing political and business research, which commissioned the investigation of Trump in 2016. Steele delivered a total of 16 reports to Fusion between June and early November 2016, but his sources started to go quiet beginning in July, when Trump’s ties to Russia came under scrutiny. According to Harding’s account, Steele was shocked by the extent of collusion his sources were reporting. “For anyone who reads it, this is a life-changing experience,” Steele told friends. Steele flew to Rome in June to brief his FBI contact with whom he had shared his Fifa report, and returned in September to meet a full FBI team of investigators. He described their response as “shock and horror”, and they asked him to explain his methods and to pass on future reports. However, as the weeks went by leading up to the 8 November election, the FBI told him it could not go public with material involving a presidential candidate, and then his FBI contacts went silent altogether. Steele told a friend it was clear he had passed on a “radioactive hot potato”. Topics Donald Trump Trump-Russia investigation Russia news

On Friday the Pentagon identified three of the Americans who were killed as Chief Warrant Officer Jonathan R. Farmer, 37, of Boynton Beach, Fla., a Special Forces soldier, or Green Beret; Chief Cryptologic Technician Shannon M. Kent, 35, of New York State, who was in the Navy; and Scott A. Wirtz, a Defense Intelligence Agency civilian employee, of St. Louis, Mo.Three other service members were wounded and flown to an American military hospital in Germany for treatment, a military official said.Until this week, just two American service members had been killed in Syria.Allied aircraft bombed a mosque on Thursday that the Islamic State had used as a command center in Safafiyah, Syria, in the Middle Euphrates River Valley, the Pentagon said. It was unclear if the airstrike was in response to the attack in Manbij, scores of miles to the northwest, or, more likely, a target of opportunity.Manbij was still in shock on Thursday, residents said, struggling to deal with the aftermath of the bombing and their town’s uncertain future should Mr. Trump make good on his promise to withdraw American troops. Turkey has talked about invading. The Syrian government and its Russian and Iranian allies want the territory back. And the Islamic State has proved it still has the ability to strike.The attack added fuel to the debate over the ever-shifting American mission in eastern Syria, and President Trump’s plans to bring troops home.While Mr. Trump and, as recently as Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence, insisted that the Islamic State had been defeated, a range of American officials, including many of Mr. Trump’s allies, have said the attack proved otherwise and that leaving Syria could allow the jihadists to come roaring back.Mr. Darwish, of the local military council, said that whether the United States ultimately withdraws or not, the existing confusion over American policy had emboldened the jihadists.

In the 1760s, the young, charismatic son of the recently assassinated Mughal emperor, Alamgir II, made a decision that would completely transform India’s fate. Determined to restore his dynasty’s glory, Ali Gauhar, known as Shah Alam II, went to war with the British East India Company (EIC).But the Battle of Buxar ended in a humiliating defeat and the consequences were more damaging than anyone imagined at the time: Shah Alam was captured by the company’s forces and made to sign an order that replaced Mughal revenue officials with British traders selected by the EIC. From then on, supported by a growing army of tens of thousands of sepoys, the company would be in charge of collecting taxes across the Mughal empire.It was a decisive turning point that paved the way for the EIC’s sweeping control over the region, eventually giving way to the British Raj.It’s this moment in history that William Dalrymple focuses on in his upcoming book, The Anarchy, which analyses how a trading firm completely displaced a once-powerful empire. The historian says that while schools continue to teach that the British conquered India, the reality was that it wasn’t the British government at first but a private company.“The Mughals were not an insignificant force…They were vastly rich, it was a magnificent empire. And yet it fell not to another wave of invaders from the Steppes or the Ottomans or the Persians, it fell to a bunch of merchants,” Dalrymple told Quartz. “It’s one of the most extraordinary and unlikely stories, and a very contemporary story because it shows how corporations have an extraordinary ability to take over the state.”For Dalrymple, the story is particularly relevant today, given the power enjoyed by businesses and businessmen, not just in India but around the world. At a time when the US president is Donald Trump, he argues, rediscovering the corporate nature of 18th century Indian history is an important thing to do.While doing research for the book, Dalrymple travelled across India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, following in the footsteps of Shah Alam and looking out for vestiges of that tumultuous time. The photographs the author took during his travels are now on display in Mumbai at an exhibition titled The Historian’s Eye, presented by Tasveer and the art platform Dauble.The melancholic images highlight what little remains to remind the curious traveller of the might of the Mughals or the cunning of the company. But the elegiac approach does remind you of how much of India’s cultural heritage is disappearing for good.“India has an embarrassment of riches, every little town in this country has the most extraordinary past,” Dalrymple said. “(But) there’s no realisation of how important these things are, how fragile they are.”Here’s a selection of the historian’s photographs from the exhibition:

BEIJING (Reuters) - Baidu Inc (BIDU.O) is prepared to win against Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google in China, its chief executive officer said on social media, amid rumblings the U.S. search engine giant was planning to re-enter a market it left eight years ago. A Baidu logo is seen at the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) at the National Convention Center in Beijing, China April 27, 2018. REUTERS/Damir SagoljGoogle’s search engine has been largely blocked in China since 2010, when the company exited the market over ethical concerns related to China’s strict censorship laws. Baidu dominates the domestic search engine space currently. Last week, Reuters reported Google was developing a censored version of its search engine to enter China, citing information from the firm’s employees and Chinese officials. The plans were earlier reported by the news website Intercept. In a posting on a private social media account on Tuesday, Baidu CEO Robin Li said if the two companies come head to head, “Baidu will win again”. “Chinese companies today have plenty of ability and confidence” to compete globally, he added. A Baidu spokeswoman confirmed the posting, which was shared by local media, was authentic. Li was reacting to an article posted by state media outlet People’s Daily which said Google was welcome in China but must abide by local laws. The report has since been removed from People Daily’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. The article was originally circulated in another state media newspaper on Monday. Google declined to comment on the report and Li’s comments. News of Google’s plan to return with a censored search app, criticized by human rights advocates as a blow to global free speech, comes at a time when China has stepped up scrutiny of business dealings involving U.S. tech firms including Facebook Inc (FB.O), Apple Inc (AAPL.O) and Qualcomm Inc (QCOM.O) amid intensifying trade tensions between the countries. Apple has removed hundreds of apps from its Chinese app store in the past year under increasingly strict censorship laws championed by Chinese president Xi Jinping. Facebook, whose social media products are banned in China, is also making efforts to enter the restrictive market. Last month, it said it was opening an innovation hub in the eastern city of Zhejiang, but only hours later the announcement of the project’s registration was pulled by regulators from a national database. Reporting by Cate Cadell; Editing by Himani SarkarOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Fresh off striking a budget deal with Democrats, Donald Trump is toning down his rhetoric and looking to cut deals on such American hot-button issues as immigration and tax reform in search of a much-needed legislative victory. U.S. President Donald Trump meets with a bipartisan group of members of Congress, including U.S. Representative Susan Brooks (R-IN) (L) and Representative Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) (2nd L), at the White House in Washington, U.S. September 13, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan ErnstEight months in office, the Republican president is openly courting and pressuring Democrats for support on taxes and, for now at least, steering away from hardline positions on immigration that might antagonize them. The approach is still in its early stages. In the past Trump has briefly taken a more moderate direction only to quickly return to his conservative base. But White House aides say the driving force behind the change of tactics is a desire to secure some wins in Congress after months of failure. Internal squabbling among Republicans, who control both chambers of Congress, killed their efforts to overhaul healthcare. The divisions threaten to undermine the push for a tax overhaul, especially in the Senate, where Republicans hold a narrow 52-48 majority. “We learned this summer that keeping 50 or 52 Republicans (in the Senate) is not something that’s reliable,” Marc Short, Trump’s liaison to Congress, told reporters this week. Frustrated with Republican leaders, Trump is moving away from a strategy that relies on passing legislation on strict party lines. He hosted seven senators at the White House on Tuesday, including three Democrats, and had dinner plans on Wednesday with House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer. Hours before the dinner, Trump told reporters his tax plan might include a tax increase on the wealthy, a welcome gesture for Democrats, who oppose cutting taxes on the rich. Trump’s bipartisan moves followed a series of staff changes. He replaced chief of staff Reince Priebus, a longtime Republican operative, with John Kelly, a former Marine general with strong relationships on Capitol Hill, and ousted more polarizing aides, including Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka. Last week Trump went so far as to take Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp along with him to her home state of North Dakota for a tax-reform rally. Her state leans strongly Republican, and Heitkamp is seen as vulnerable in next year’s midterm elections. Hurricanes that struck Texas and Florida have forced Trump to focus on governing. He has petitioned Congress for financial aid backed by both parties. But not everyone has been pleased with Trump’s outreach to Democrats. Immigration hardliners, including some in his party, were furious when the White House said it would not insist on funding for a proposed Mexican border wall as a condition of legislation that would help young undocumented immigrants known as “Dreamers” who were brought to the United States as children. Conservatives said this forfeited some leverage. Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which seeks to limit legal and illegal immigration, said he worried that Democrats would take advantage of Trump’s eagerness to strike a deal on Dreamers. “Trump is the kind of guy who goes on foot to the car dealership and can’t get a ride home without buying a car,” Krikorian said. Some Republican lawmakers said Trump’s courtship of Democrats on tax reform made them nervous, especially since details of the plan had yet to be worked out. “Now Trump is talking about doing bipartisan stuff with Chuck and Nancy on taxes,” Republican Representative Dave Brat said. “I don’t want to open the door to that until we see what does this tax plan look like.” But some conservatives said a bipartisan legislative strategy made sense. “People inside the Republican party need to understand that the president has to search wherever the votes are,” said Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union. Additional reporting by Richard Cowan and Amanda Becker; Editing by Howard GollerOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Donald Trump will deny having ever discussed former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn with former FBI director James Comey, if he is questioned about it in a sit-down interview with special counsel Robert Mueller, according to the president’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.Comey testified to senators last year that Trump told him during an Oval Office meeting that he wished Comey would drop an investigation into Flynn’s contact with Russian diplomats before Trump was sworn in as president. The conversation underpins any potential obstruction of justice claim that Mueller may bring as part of the investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.“There was no conversation about Michael Flynn,” Giuliani told Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Union show on Sunday. “That is what he will testify to if he’s asked that question.”According to Comey, Trump told him “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go” after he was informed of an FBI investigation into contacts between Trump’s transition team and Russia.Giuliani’s comments on Sunday appear to contradict a previous appearanceon ABC last month, in which he said Trump did not directly ask Comey to drop the investigation but offered a more nuanced, ‘Can you give him a break?’ that in his experience as a prosecutor “doesn’t determine not going forward”.The revised account of the exchange comes as Trump’s legal team seeks to finalise the terms of a possible interview between the special counsel and the president and form an apparent pattern of publicly floating negotiating positions.In addition to claiming there had been no conversation about Flynn, who was fired weeks after the inauguration when he was found to have misled Vice-President Mike Pence about his contacts with Russian envoys, Giuliani offered a timeline that suggests Comey revised his interpretation of the exchange.“There was no conversation about Michael Flynn. The president didn’t find out that Comey believed there was until about, I think, it was February when it supposedly took place. Memo came out in May. And in between, Comey testified under oath, in no way had he been obstructed at any time,” Giuliani said.“Then all of the sudden in May he says he felt obstructed. He felt pressured by that comment, ‘you should go easy on Flynn.’ So we maintain the president didn’t say that.”The new position, if it holds, cuts through semantic complexities and differences in interpretation to what Trump may have meant, and could avoid what the president’s counsel described as a “perjury trap” for his client contained in differences of recollection.“The president says he never told Comey he should go easy on Flynn. Comey says the president did; he put it in his memo,” Giuliani added. “So if he goes in and testifies to that under oath, instead of this being a dispute, they can say it’s perjury.”Giuliani gave further insight into the Trump team’s thinking, softening claims that a sitting president can never be subjected to obstruction of justice complaints.That, he said, was “far-fetched”. But he dismissed as “very questionable” the idea that a claim of obstruction of justice could be made in the context of the president firing someone who reports to him. Topics Trump-Russia investigation Rudy Giuliani Donald Trump James Comey Michael Flynn Robert Mueller US politics news

Apple is just a couple of pips away from becoming the first company ever to be valued at $1tn, a symbolic threshold that further shows just how much tech companies have come to dominate the US stock market.On Friday, Apple was valued at over $940bn – “just” $60bn short of a figure no other listed company has ever achieved. It’s not the only tech company nearing $1tn – Amazon is currently valued at over $820bn.But – for now – Apple is the clear leader. Even notorious tech-skeptic investor Warren Buffett has put his stamp of approval on the company, buying 75m shares and injecting new confidence in the tech titan.When Steve Jobs died in 2011, some worried the company would struggle. But under his handpicked successor Tim Cook, Apple has more than trebled the $300bn the company was then valued at. Apple still may not be the first company to pass the $1tn mark. The tech giant could be beaten by Aramco, the Saudi Arabian oil producer that could be valued at $2tn when it finally goes public next year.But assuming $1tn is Apple’s prize to grasp, there will be more questions asked as to whether tech now takes up too much weight on US stock indexes. Add the value of the “Fang” companies – Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google – together and throw in Microsoft and the tech giants are worth close to $4tn. Just in the last six weeks more than $300 billion has been added to the value of the group. Tech currently makes 26% of the S&P 500.For some, tech’s dominance of the stock markets might bring back memories if the dotcom crash of 2002. But that’s not a fear on Wall Street these days – where the Fangs are broadly regarded as fairly valued and perceptions of tech have changed.Scott Kessler at CFRA Research says his firm has a buy opinion on almost all the tech giants, including the Fangs. “People see the performance of the technology sector and focus on the largest and get concerned,” he said. “It’s harder at times to get comfortable with the valuation constructs for Amazon and Netflix. But the short answer is, we’re not concerned. We see strong fundamentals, continuing growth, benefits related to tax reform and continuing out-performance.”A billion dollars for Apple is important only when you look at the broader tech space, says Daniel Ives, head of technology research at GBH Insights. Concern over an overweighting of tech stocks in the market is really a problem of definition, since tech is what consumers are purchasing.Apple at $1tn, Ives says, “speaks to the fundamentals and market dynamics that are moving technology to the forefront. The fundamentals are backing a trillion-dollar market cap. It’s not any kind of bubble. Apple is starting to get rerated as a software services company, and this speaks to a new age for tech stocks. These are unique secular growth stories that are driving the market higher and the fundamentals are backing up those moves.”Despite slowing growth in smartphones, Cook said the first three months of 2018 was the “best quarter ever for services, and momentum there continues to be incredibly strong”.Apple sales increased 16% in the first three months of 2018, and shares are up more than 13% this year – considerably better than the overall market. For Apple to hit a $1tn market valuation, the stock would need to go up just another 6% to $202.30 a share.“We had all-time record revenue from the App Store, from Apple Music, from iCloud, from Apple Pay and more, all of which are a powerful illustration of the importance of our huge active installed base of devices and the loyalty and engagement of our customers,” Cook said.“For several years we’ve been trading Apple as company that makes iPhones and some other stuff,” says Eric Ross at Cascend Securities.“What’s happening is that Apple has an enormous install base of iPhone users and other Apple products so they are able to transform for an iPhone manufacturing company to an ecosystem company. We think they’re going to take their user base and sell products and services, including the iPhone, into it.”And Apple is not facing the same headwinds buffeting Facebook and Google as consumers and government officials question their commitment to privacy and the true cost of “free” – read ad-funded – services.Unlike competitors Google and Facebook, Apple has in recent weeks been able to capitalize on its privacy-friendly approach to data. This week, Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, said he believed privacy is a basic fundamental right, but warned that tracking of internet data is “totally out of control”.With privacy concerns growing some of the Fangs may stumble – but others are keen to join the pack. Uber and Airbnb are keen to go public. China has a wave of tech companies that could challenge the valuations of US rivals. Apple may be the first to reach $1tn, but it is unlikely to be the last. Topics Apple Stock markets Amazon Facebook news

The new TV spot is called “Private Side.” Instead of droning on about why privacy matters, Apple uses the ad to playfully show you the steps you already take to protect your privacy every day. In other words, your actions show you already know your privacy is important in your everyday life, so why shouldn’t it be important on your phone?The commercial begins with cuts showing various “no trespassing” and “keep out” signs before transitioning to a “beware of dog” sign, then a shot of two men speaking at a table in a diner before abruptly halting their conversation when a waitress comes over. Cut to closed filing cabinets, people locking drawers and doors, and shutting blinds and tree house hatches. My favorite scene shows a man enter a bathroom where another man is already at a urinal. The newcomer then walks four urinals away before he feels comfortable relieving himself.The ad concludes with the line “If privacy matters in your life, it should matter to the phone your life is on” and a new tagline: “Privacy. That’s iPhone.” Apple’s traditional logo also gets modified for the spot, replacing the leaf with the U-lock of a padlock that snaps shut.Apple doesn’t use the commercial to highlight any of the steps it takes to keep your data private from themselves and others. Nor does it reference other companies, such as Facebook and Google, who are regularly skewered in the press over privacy issues (Apple called them out at CES instead). Instead, the focus is on addressing the fact that consumers may claim or think that privacy isn’t that important, without realizing the number of real-world daily actions they take that demonstrate just how much privacy matters.Along with being a slick piece of marketing, the ad is a great first step in elevating national awareness of just how much privacy matters to us–even if we can’t always verbalize why. And as more of our financial and health data moves to our phones in the coming years, the public’s desire for secure and privacy-focused devices is sure to only increase. With this commercial, Apple shows it’s ready to capitalize on that desire.The new Apple privacy ad premieres tonight nationally and runs through March Madness in the U.S. After that, it will roll out globally.

HELSINKI, Finland — The novelist Meg Wolitzer once wrote that Helsinki is “a place no one ever thinks about unless they’re listening to Sibelius, or lying on the hot, wet slats of a sauna, or eating a bowl of reindeer.” The city leadership here is keen to add something new to that list: fine art.Amos Rex, a new contemporary art museum, goes a long way toward achieving that goal. A museum that appears to physically resist its placement in a vast underground space, it is topped by five conical domes that bubble up from the surface of the Lasipalatsi Square in downtown Helsinki like inverted craters of an alien moonscape. Children clamber up the mounds, teenagers skateboard down its slopes, and passers-by snap selfies.ImageA passer-by peeks in from one of the museum’s skylights. The stairs are part of the old Bio Rex cinema.CreditVesa Laitinen for The New York TimesImageAsmo Jaaksi, lead architect of JKMM, the museum’s designer, on the slope of one of the conical domes. “That was one of the intentions, to make it like a playground,” he said.CreditVesa Laitinen for The New York Times“That was one of the intentions, to make it like a playground, and also to make a kind of new city space and city culture,” said Asmo Jaaski, lead architect of JKMM, the museum’s designer.The weeklong series of parties and special events around the official Aug. 30 opening drew some 10,000 visitors, including the national art cognoscenti and scores of international journalists, making it one of the most eventful cultural happenings in the Finnish capital in years. “It’s what we hoped for but it’s more than we dared to expect,” said the museum’s director, Kai Kartio. “Since the opening, we’ve had endless lines.”ImageClowns in front of the museum, which drew some 10,000 visitors during its opening week.CreditVesa Laitinen for The New York TimesThe $58 million privately funded museum arrives less than two years after Helsinki’s City Council rejected a plan to build a $138 million Guggenheim museum along the city’s harbor. City officials as well as residents were deeply, often rancorously, divided about the proposal, with supporters asserting that the Guggenheim would raise the city’s international profile and serve as an economic game-changer, while opponents said local resources were better spent on cultural institutions that showcased Finnish talent. Finland, after all, has a proud tradition of design exemplified by the architect Alvar Aalto, the designers Timo Sarpaneva and Tapio Wirkkala and, yes, Marimekko.After the five-year controversy dissipated, Mayor Jan Vapaavuori of Helsinki said, everyone took a step back to reconsider the city’s cultural priorities.“What the Guggenheim process led to was a quite serious reflection among all important art players in the city, where they were forced to assess their own place and role in today’s world,” Mayor Vapaavuori said in an interview. “The positive side of the discussion is that we have a more comprehensive understanding of what culture and art does for the city. It could be that without the Guggenheim discussion we would not be that far along.”ImageThe interior of the museum, which has 24,000 square feet of exhibition space.CreditVesa Laitinen for The New York TimesIn many ways, Amos Rex vindicates the city’s decision to turn down the Guggenheim project, and instead champion a homegrown Finnish institution. The new contemporary art museum is funded by private money, whereas the Guggenheim was designed as a public-private partnership, which some artists feared would sap funding for local arts initiatives.Mr. Kartio, who said he would have welcomed the Guggenheim, notes that planning for Amos Rex was already underway when the Guggenheim project fell apart. However, he added, “The timing was fortunate for us because of course politically, internally in Finland, we were compared to Guggenheim all the time. Since this was completely privately financed and homegrown, people were very fond of us, especially the people who weren’t in favor of the Guggenheim.”The money to build the new museum came from a foundation established by the museum’s Finnish founder, Amos Anderson, a newspaper publisher and a patron of the arts, who died in 1961 and earmarked his fortune for the building of the Amos Anderson Art Museum. Four years after he died, the museum opened in his own home in Helsinki with a collection of mostly Finnish and other European art.ImageAsmo Jaaksi, left, the lead architect, and Kai Kartio, the director of Amos Rex. “Since the opening, we’ve had endless lines,” Mr. Kartio said.CreditVesa Laitinen for The New York TimesImageHenriikka Harinen, a museum guard.CreditVesa Laitinen for The New York TimesSeeking to build a new larger home, Amos Anderson museum and its officials chose the Lasipalatsi, or glass palace, a landmark of Finnish functionalist architecture that houses an entertainment and shopping center with an Art Deco cinema called Bio Rex.Designed by architecture students in 1936 as a temporary site for the Olympics (scheduled to take place in Helsinki in 1940 but postponed until 1952 because of World War II), the Lasipalatsi was supposed to be torn down afterward, but remained, and became a cherished national landmark.The private Amos Rex Foundation formed a real estate company with the city of Helsinki to jointly own the old entertainment complex, and to build a new museum, which it owns independently. The foundation leases the land on which both buildings sit from the city.To build the museum while preserving the existing building, the architects came up with an ingenious idea to excavate the central plaza and create 24,000 square feet of exhibition space. Below the exhibition halls, two stories down, are archive and storage rooms.Amos Rex, which derives its name from the museum’s founder and the cinema, has helped create a kind of “museum mile” that joins up with the three of the city’s nearby art institutions — Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, the Helsinki Art Museum and Kunsthalle Helsinki. “It’s one big cluster, and we bind it together in a way, and we all support each other,” Mr. Kartio said.ImageVisitors at the museum’s inaugural exhibition, “Massless,” a digitally based show by the Japan-based art collective teamLab.CreditVesa Laitinen for The New York TimesFor its first exhibition, Mr. Kartio highlighted the international curatorial ambitions of the museum by choosing the Japan-based art collective teamLab. For “Massless,” its digitally based exhibition, teamLab has blacked out the walls of four gallery spaces in the subterranean museum, using immersive and interactive installations. (The show runs until Jan. 6, 2019.)One piece, “Graffiti Nature,” features flowers, butterflies, frogs and whales that glide across the floors and walls, inviting visitors to rub their hands across the walls to generate digital flowers, or jump on the floors to squash the frogs that burst into colorful splatters. With “Vortex of Light Particles,” the museum’s main hall has been converted into a swirling stream of white and blue light siphoned upward into one of the building’s light portals, as if it were a giant black hole.ImageChildren clamber up the mounds of the new museum.CreditVesa Laitinen for The New York TimesThe results of Helsinki’s post-Guggenheim rethink are manifest throughout the city: A few blocks away from the new museum, the Helsinki Central Library Oodi is under construction and expected to open in December. The Helsinki Art Museum is organizing an International Helsinki Art Biennial to open in 2020 and two weeks ago, the city announced its intention to build a world-class architecture and design museum in the harborside space that the Guggenheim might have occupied.“A lot of exciting things are happening right now in Helsinki,” said Raija Koli, director of Frame Contemporary Art of Finland, which provides grants to Finnish artists and coordinates Finland’s participation in the Venice Biennale. “We’re regrouping and I think in a good way. There’s a lot of good will from everyone to kind of bring their resources together and that’s why it’s such a great time to be working with art and culture here right now.”

We live in frightening times. From heads of state tweeting threats of nuclear annihilation, to whole regions rocked by climate chaos, to thousands of migrants drowning off the coasts of Europe, to openly racist parties gaining ground: it feels like there are a lot of reasons to be pessimistic about our collective future.To take one example, the Caribbean and southern United States are in the midst of an unprecedented hurricane season, pounded by storm after storm. Puerto Rico – hit by Irma, then Maria – is entirely without power and could be for months, its water and communication systems severely compromised. But just as during Hurricane Katrina, the cavalry is missing in action. Donald Trump is too busy trying to get black athletes fired for daring to shine a spotlight on racist violence. A real federal aid package for Puerto Rico has not yet been announced. And the vultures are circling: the business press reports that the only way for Puerto Rico to get the lights back on is to sell off its electricity utility.This is a phenomenon I’ve called the Shock Doctrine: the exploitation of wrenching crises to smuggle through policies that devour the public sphere and further enrich a small elite. We’ve seen this dismal cycle repeat again and again: after the 2008 financial crash, and now in the UK with the Tories planning to exploit Brexit to push through disastrous pro-corporate trade deals without debate.Ours is an age when it is impossible to pry one crisis apart from all the others. They have all merged, reinforcing and deepening each other like one shambling, multi-headed beast. The current US president can be thought of in much the same way. ,It’s tough to adequately sum him up. You know that horrible thing currently clogging up the London sewers, the fatberg? Trump is the political equivalent of that. A merger of all that is noxious in the culture, economy and body politic, all kind of glommed together in a self-adhesive mass. And we’re finding it very hard to dislodge.But moments of crisis do not have to go the Shock Doctrine route: they do not need to become opportunities for the obscenely wealthy to grab still more. They can be moments when we find our best selves.We all witnessed this in the aftermath of the catastrophic fire at Grenfell Tower. When the people responsible were missing in action, the community came together, held one another in their care, organised donations and advocated for the living – and for the dead. And they are doing it still, more than 100 days after the fire – with, scandalously, only a handful of survivors rehoused.It’s not only at the grassroots level: there is a long and proud history of crises sparking progressive transformation on a societal scale. Think of the victories won by working people for social housing in the wake of the first world war, or for the NHS after the horrors of the second world war. This should remind us that moments of great crisis and peril do not need to knock us backwards: they can also catapult us forward.But these transformative victories are never won by simply resisting, or saying no to the latest outrage. To win in a moment of true crisis, we also need a bold and forward-looking yes: a plan for how to rebuild and respond to the underlying causes. And that plan needs to be convincing, credible and, most of all, captivating. We have to help a weary and wary public to imagine itself into that better world.In recent months the Labour party has showed us there’s another way. One that speaks the language of decency and fairness, that names the true forces most responsible for this mess, no matter how powerful. And one that is unafraid of some of the ideas we were told were gone for good, such as wealth redistribution, and nationalising essential public services. Thanks to Labour’s boldness, we now know that this isn’t just a moral strategy. It’s a winning strategy. It fires up the base, and it activates constituencies that long ago stopped voting altogether.The last election also showed us something else: that political parties don’t need to fear the creativity and independence of social movements – and social movements have a huge amount to gain from engaging with electoral politics. That’s a very big deal, because political parties tend to be a bit freakish about control, and real grassroots movements cherish their independence. But the relationship between Labour and Momentum shows it is possible to combine the best of both worlds and create a force both stronger and more nimble than anything that parties or movements can pull off on their own.What happened here in Britain is part of a global phenomenon. We saw it in Bernie Sanders’ historic campaign in the US primaries, powered by millennials who know that safe centrist politics offers them no kind of safe future. We see something similar with Spain’s still young Podemos party, which built in the power of mass movements from day one. These electoral campaigns caught fire with stunning speed. And they got close to taking power – closer than any other genuinely transformative political programme has in Europe or North America in my lifetime. But not close enough. So in this time between elections, we need to think about how to make absolutely sure that, next time, all of our movements go all the way.In all of our countries, we can and must do more to connect the dots between economic injustice, racial injustice and gender injustice. We need to draw out the connections between the gig economy – which treats human beings like a raw resource from which to extract wealth and then discard – and the dig economy, in which extractive companies treat the Earth in precisely the same careless way.And let’s show exactly how we can move from that gig and dig economy to a society based on principles of care – caring for the planet and for one another. A society where the work of our caregivers, and of our land and water protectors, is respected and valued. A world where no one and nowhere is thrown away – whether in firetrap housing estates, or on hurricane-ravaged islands.Battling climate change is a once-in-a-century chance to build a fairer and more democratic economy. We can and must design a system in which the polluters pay a very large share of the cost of transitioning away from fossil fuels. And in wealthy countries such as Britain and the US, we need migration policies and levels of international financing that reflect what we owe to the global south, given our historic role in destabilising the economies and ecologies of poorer nations for a great many years, and the vast wealth of empire extracted from these societies in bonded human flesh.The more ambitious, consistent and holistic that the Labour party can be in painting a picture of the world transformed, the more credible a Labour government will become.Around the world, winning is a moral imperative for the left. The stakes are too high, and time is too short, to settle for anything less.• Naomi Klein is the author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. This is an edited excerpt of her speech at the Labour party conference Topics Labour Opinion Labour conference 2017 Climate change Grenfell Tower fire Labour conference comment