ISIS took responsibility for a bombing attack in Syria that killed four Americans, the US military confirmed.The attack took place during a routine patrol today (Jan. 16) in the city of Manbij in northern Syria, near the border with Turkey. A suicide bomber detonated explosives killing two US service members, a civilian Defense Department employee and a Pentagon contractor, as well two local security officers and 13 civilians, according to local news services.After the attack, vice president Mike Pence told an audience that ISIS had been defeated, echoing Donald Trump’s argument for pulling an estimated 2,000 US troops from Syria. That shock decision led to the resignations of Trump’s secretary of defense and the US diplomat coordinating the coalition fighting ISIS there.Trump’s withdrawal proposal remains in limbo, but US forces are still, well, there. Their main tasks are aiding and training local partners, particularly Kurdish militias, to push ISIS out of the territory it claimed as its “caliphate.”The specifics of US forces’ activities, not well known, likely include acting as spotters for airstrikes and collecting intelligence. US service members have been killed in raids on ISIS prisons, surprise attacks launched by ISIS, and in fighting pitched front-line battles. They’ve also battled Russian mercenaries.Though ISIS no longer controls major cities, its fighters are still engaging in an effective insurgency and “far from defeated,” according to Seth Jones, a former Pentagon special-forces adviser who researches counter-terrorism at the Center for Security and International Studies.ISIS can continue using guerrilla tactics the way similar Islamist groups do in Iraq and Afghanistan, and likely won’t be stopped until some kind of legitimate political settlement is reached in Syria. With strongman Bashar al-Assad in control of Syria’s major cities and supported by Russia and Iran, and Turkey set against any new gains for the US-allied Kurds, US strategists face tough choices they just aren’t making.“I do not know what the US strategy is,” Jones says. “The use of military force, we know this from any military textbook, should be done in pursuit of political objectives. I do not know what the objectives are in Syria is at this point. It’s not entirely clear what the US strategy is because we’ve heard conflicting comments coming from other US officials.”Ostensibly, the strategy is about battling ISIS, Al Qaeda and other groups that sponsor terror attacks around the world, which Jones says still represents a threat to the US.“If I had a policy recommendation,” he says “it would be continue to find partners to do the vast majority of the fighting and the dying in these cases, but not to let up and declare victory like president Obama did in 2011 and what president Trump did right now.”The impatience of Congress with the costs of wars in the region now entering their seventeenth year may make that difficult. Last year, lawmakers questioned whether the fight in Syria is really about terrorism, or confronting Iran, as national security adviser John Bolton suggested when he said US troops would remain there as long as Iranian proxies do.“That to me sounds like we’re sending our military to Syria to counter Iran, especially because their withdrawal is apparently dependent on actions of Iran, not actions of ISIS or the defeat of ISIS,” Massachusetts Democratic representative Seth Moulton, a veteran of the war in Iraq, said at a September 2018 hearing on Syria.Battling Iran, as Moulton has pointed out, was not authorized by Congress. The US military continues to fight based on the legal authority that require it to fight terrorism, not another nation. Congress has refused to give the US new authorizations, even when asked by Obama in 2013 for permission to go after Assad forces directly.“If your son or daughter was in Syria right now and the national security adviser said your daughter can come home when Iran leaves, it seems to me that’s pretty dependent on Iran,” Moulton said. “You have already said that that is illegal under the authorization given from Congress, then I think the administration’s got a big problem.”Newly ascendant House Democrats are expected to increase scrutiny of the conflict, but divided government—on a partisan level, and the many disagreements within the Trump administration itself—will not make a change of direction simple.

Donald Trump said on Saturday he believes Vladmir Putin’s denials of Russian involvement in the manipulation of the 2016 presidential election.However, he appeared to contradict himself on Sunday when he said he was “with our agencies” on the question of Russian interference.Speaking at a news conference in Hanoi on Sunday, he was asked about his comments that he believed Putin’s reassurances given by the Russian president on the sidelines of Saturday’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in Vietnam.“As to whether I believe it or not, I’m with our agencies, especially as currently constituted,” Trump told a news conference in Vietnam. “As currently led, by fine people, I believe very much in our intelligence agencies.”The president’s comments were criticised by senator John McCain who said in a tweet that there was “nothing America First about taking the word of KGB colonel [Putin]” over the US intelligence community.Trump was also quickly countered by his own CIA chief, Mike Pompeo. A statement issued by the agency said: “The director stands by and has always stood by the January 2017 intelligence community assessment entitled: Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections. The intelligence assessment with regard to Russian election meddling has not changed.”On Saturday Trump also launched a tirade against special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between his campaign and the Kremlin.The investigation could cost “millions and millions of lives”, Trump claimed, by hindering agreement with Moscow over conflicts in Syria and Ukraine and a looming confrontation with North Korea.The president’s remarks, made to reporters as Air Force One flew to Hanoi from Da Nang, represented his open disregard for the views of US intelligence agencies which have concluded that Russia did interfere in multiple ways in the 2016 election, with the aim of helping Trump’s candidacy.The president disparaged officials who worked for Barack Obama, saying former CIA chief John Brennan, ex-director of national intelligence James Clapper and James Comey, the FBI director he fired in May, were “political hacks”.“I mean, give me a break,” Trump said. “So you look at it, I mean, you have Brennan, you have Clapper and you have Comey. Comey is proven now to be a liar and he is proven now to be a leaker.”Despite his qualifying remarks on Sunday, he suggested he put more faith in Putin’s word.“Every time he sees me he says ‘I didn’t do that’ and I really believe that when he tells me that,” Trump said on Saturday. “He really seems to be insulted by it and he says he didn’t do it. He is very, very strong in the fact that he didn’t do it. You have President Putin very strongly, vehemently says he has nothing to do with that.”The president described the investigation led by Mueller, a former FBI director appointed by Trump’s own justice department, as “Democrat-inspired” and a “hit job”.Trump also claimed the investigation was preventing a normalisation of relations with Putin and therefore could cost countless lives around the world. He suggested Russia was not helping more to persuade Pyongyang to disarm “because of the lack of the relationship that we have with Russia, because of this artificial thing that’s happening with this Democratic-inspired thing”.“I think [Putin] is very insulted by it, which is not a good thing for our country. Because again, if we had a relationship with Russia, North Korea which is our single biggest problem right now, it would help a lot,” he said.“You know you are talking about millions and millions of lives,” Trump said.“When we can save many, many, many lives by making a deal with Russia having to do with Syria, and then ultimately getting Syria solved, and getting Ukraine solved, and doing other things, having a good relationship with Russia is a great, great thing. And this artificial Democratic hit job gets in the way. It gets in the way. And that’s a shame. Because people will die because of it, and it’s a pure hit job, and it’s artificially induced and that’s shame.”John McCain, the Republican chairman of the Senate armed services committee responded angrily. Accusing the president of “taking the word of a KGB colonel over that of the American intelligence community”, the Arizonan added: “Vladimir Putin does not have America’s interests at heart. “To believe otherwise is not only naive but also places our national security at risk.” Trump met Putin briefly on three occasions at Da Nang. The two exchanged a jovial handshake at the gala dinner on Friday and stood next to one another in a “family photo” of leaders on Saturday. The US press pool including photographers were blocked from covering the day’s events, including the Trump-Putin meetings. Only Fox News and the official White House photographer were granted access.Putin dismissed accusations Moscow meddled in the US election. “Everything about the so-called Russian dossier in the US is a manifestation of continuing domestic political struggle,” he said.Putin was asked if he had followed the mounting investigation into alleged contacts between Trump’s campaign team and Russians, including a woman who claimed to be Putin’s niece.“Regarding some sort of connections of my relatives with members of the administration or some officials,” he said, “I only found out about that yesterday from [his spokesman Dmitry] Peskov.”He also said: “I don’t know anything about [the investigation]. I think these are some sort of fantasies.”The two leaders produced a joint statement on Syria, restating their determination to defeat Islamic State and their desire for a United Nations-brokered solution.“It’s going to save tremendous numbers of lives and we did it very quickly, we agreed very quickly,” Trump said.The statement lists longstanding areas of agreement between the US and Russia on the importance of reviving mostly dormant UN-mediated negotiations known as the Geneva process, which envisages constitutional reform and free elections. In the past, Washington has disagreed with Moscow on how the process should be carried out and what role Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad would play.Assad’s forces, with Russian and Iranian support, have been gaining ground. The Syrian president has consequently shown little real interest in a peace deal. Asked if Russia would be able to bring Assad to the table, a state department official, quoted on CNN, said: “We’re going to be testing that, we’re going to find out.”Trump renewed his assault on the Mueller investigation at a time when it is making significant advances, each time a step closer to the president. His former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and a senior fundraiser have been indicted for money laundering and conspiring to defraud the authorities.Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, is under investigation. His lawyer on Friday denied a report that he had negotiations with Turkish representatives about kidnapping a dissident cleric living in the US.A former foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, has pleaded guilty to perjury about his contacts with Russian surrogates and officials. Although he personally announced Papadopoulos’s hiring in March 2016, describing him as “an excellent guy”, since the guilty plea was made public the president has said he was a “young, low-level volunteer” who “few people knew”.However, court papers show Papadopoulos was in frequent contact with senior campaign staff, mostly about plans to bring Trump and Putin together. He met a UK foreign office minister, Tobias Ellwood, at the UN in September 2016. The New York Times reported on Saturday that Papadopoulos helped edit a major foreign policy speech in April of that year, and that one of the officials he was in touch with was Stephen Miller, still one of Trump’s closest advisers. Topics Donald Trump Vladimir Putin Trump-Russia investigation Syria Russia Islamic State Europe news

Late-night hosts on Thursday addressed Robert Mueller’s escalating probe into Trump campaign ties to Russia and the GOP’s proposed legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare.“Things are looking up, especially with the Russia investigation,” Stephen Colbert began. “Special counsel Robert Mueller has been unearthing all sorts of dirt on the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. And it just came out that Mueller requested documents from the White House related to 13 different areas in which investigators are seeking information, including some of the biggest stories since Trump took office.”Colbert continued: “Classics like the Trump tower meeting with the Russian lawyer, Sally Yates warning the White Souse about Michael Flynn, the Oval Office meeting with the Russian ambassador, the firing of James Comey, Flynn’s FBI interview, and literally anything having to do with Paul Manafort.“It’s all collected here on Now That’s What I Call Collusion, Volume 45,” Colbert quipped. “Now, Mueller seems to be closing in on former campaign manager and Dracula’s fun uncle, Paul Manafort. Yesterday, we found out that even though he repeatedly said no contacts with Russians, his emails now reveal that while he was Trump’s campaign manager Manafort offered to give a Russian billionaire private briefings on the 2016 campaign.”“The billionaire is Oleg Deripaska, who’s among the two to three oligarchs Putin’s turned to on a regular basis,” the host continued. “It’s two to three, depending on who’s been poisoned this week.”“While Manafort made the offer, we don’t know if these briefings ever happened, and Manafort’s spokesman said these emails just reflected ‘an innocuous effort to collect past debts’,” Colbert explained. “You know, innocuous effort to trade presidential campaign secrets for cash. He was just going back and forth between the man he worked for and the man he secretly worked for.”“One of the emails contain cryptic mentions of black caviar, which instigators believe is a veiled reference to payments Manafort hoped to receive,” Colbert said. “Either that, or black caviar describes how Steve Bannon reproduces.”Jimmy Kimmel of ABC discussed the Graham-Cassidy healthcare bill, legislation proposed by senators Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy that would repeal and replace Obamacare.“If you’ve been watching over the past few days, and you haven’t, I’ve found myself in a the middle of a battle over American healthcare,” Kimmel began. “After my son Billy had open heart surgery at the end of April, the senator Bill Cassidy came on our show and made some promises and assurances he did not keep. The reason I had him on the show in the first place is because he started telling people any plan he’d support would have to pass what he called the Jimmy Kimmel test. And then, he teamed up with senator Lindsey Graham to write a bill that most definitely does not pass that test.”Kimmel continued: “It doesn’t protect people from having their rates priced up for preexisting conditions, it doesn’t prevent insurance companies from putting lifetime caps on how much they’ll spend on a person with medical issues, and it cuts a huge amount of money from healthcare funding.”Kimmel then showed president Trump’s tweet about the bill, in which he express his support for the legislation and promised again to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.“Those are the key words, repeal and replace,” Kimmel said. “For Donald Trump, this isn’t about the Graham-Cassidy bill, it’s about getting rid of Obamacare, which he hates primarily because Obama’s name is on it. He likes to have his name on things. At this point, he’d sign anything to get rid of Obamacare. He’d sign copies of the Qur’an at the Barnes & Noble in Fallujah if it meant he could get rid of Obamacare.”“Some people tell me I should give him the benefit of the doubt, and I do give him the benefit of the doubt,” Kimmel said, in reference to Senator Cassidy’s about-face. “I doubt all the benefits he claims are part of the new healthcare bill.”“But I do admire what he’s done with most of his life,” the host continued. “He’s a doctor, a gastroenterologist, he founded a community clinic in Baton Rouge. He’s done good things. I just want him to keep doing good things. His plan is not a good thing.”“His supporters say he’s a doctor and you’re not, what do you know?” Kimmel added. “To them I say: all of these very reputable organizations, the American Diabetes Association, American Medical Association, American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, all of these groups, populated by doctors, say this healthcare bill is bad.”“We haven’t seen this many people come forward to speak against the bill since Cosby,” Kimmel joked.Meanwhile, Trevor Noah of Comedy Central discussed the Russia investigation, zeroing in on the ways its subject have so far avoided answering tough questions.“Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen a barrage of hurricanes hammer the Carribean and the Atlantic coast,” Noah began. “But for the White House, there’s been another storm brewing, one that could also leave them without power. I’m talking, of course, about Hurricane Mueller.“One of Mueller’s recent targets has been Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman and undercooked Sylvester Stallone,” Noah joked, showing news coverage of reports that the FBI conducted an overnight raid of Manafort’s home.“Surprise visits in the middle of the night? All up in his phone?” Noah said. “Ladies, get you a man who wants you as bad as Mueller wants Manafort.” “I get why Manafort is drawing this much heat, because everything he’s done until now has been shady,” Noah said, with regard to the most recent reports that Manafort offered briefings to a Putin-affiliated Russian oligarch. “Ask yourself this: when has the phrase ‘Russian oligarch’ ever been a good thing? It’s like the word a cappella concert, or unmarked van, or homemade condom.“Thanks to the Russian investigation, we’ve learned so many new ways to avoid questions. You’ve got Manafort with the stutter step, Mike Pence with the smoke screen, and if you really want to know how to not answer a question, there’s only one man you can go to: Master Spice.”Noah then showed a clip of Spicer’s recent interview with ABC News, in which he responded to questioning about the Russia prove by saying “I’m not going to discuss that issue at all” four times.“Did you catch that look at the end there?” Noah concluded. “That’s a man who knows where the bodies are buried.” Topics Late-night TV roundup Stephen Colbert Trevor Noah Jimmy Kimmel TV comedy Comedy US television

Enlarge this image The U.S. has been arming the Kurds through the umbrella group known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, but the aid has long been a thorn in U.S.-Turkey relations. AFP/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption AFP/Getty Images The U.S. has been arming the Kurds through the umbrella group known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, but the aid has long been a thorn in U.S.-Turkey relations. AFP/Getty Images President Trump told the leader of Turkey that he has instructed U.S. generals to stop supplying arms to Kurdish fighters in Syria, according to Turkey's foreign minister.Turkey's foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, spoke with reporters Friday following a phone call between Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.In a statement about the call, the White House did not confirm Cavusoglu's remarks about the Kurds, but it could have been alluding to a shift when it said:"Consistent with our previous policy, President Trump also informed President Erdogan of pending adjustments to the military support provided to our partners on the ground in Syria, now that the battle of Raqqa is complete and we are progressing into a stabilization phase to ensure that ISIS cannot return."The Associated Press reports that the announcement appeared to catch the U.S. State Department and Pentagon off-guard. The Kurds have been invaluable partners to the U.S. in the fight against ISIS, and stopping the supply of arms to those fighters would represent a big policy change.As NPR's Peter Kenyon reports from Istanbul, the Turkish government considers Kurdish fighters close allies with the militant PKK, which has been fighting in Turkey for more than three decades. Both the U.S. and Turkey consider the PKK a terrorist group.As recently as May, the Trump administration was refusing to stop arming the Kurds. As Kenyon reported at the time: "Here in Turkey, it's seen as a slap in the face of the government. This was the No. 1 demand Turkey was making of the Trump administration. Please cut ties with these Kurdish fighters. We've got a real problem with them. "President Erdogan kept saying, you know, we couldn't get through to Obama's people, but now we expect better from Trump. But instead, the U.S. is not only sticking with the Kurdish YPG in Syria; they're going to directly arm them — small arms, reportedly, but definitely not what Turkey was hoping to hear." Friday's phone call followed a summit on Syria in Sochi this week between Erdogan, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. Turkey, Russia and Iran are working to bring an end to the conflict. Politics Turkish Leader Calls Trump His 'Dear Friend,' Despite Decision To Arm Syrian Kurds

Even in this relatively hostile environment, it is possible to carve out some sense of normalcy. Mr. Ong is a D.J. who also runs a digital marketing agency and lives with his longtime partner, a chef. On weekends they watch movies. For Mid-Autumn Festival, they made durian and taro mooncakes and sold them to their friends.But so long as Section 377A remains on the books, Mr. Ong said, living as a gay man in Singapore will be like “standing over a trapdoor.”“You see the lever over there and the government is saying, ‘Don’t worry, we aren’t going to pull it,’” he said. “But you never know.”Though the petition left the government unmoved, Mr. Ong’s constitutional challenge is still pending, with a pretrial conference set for Feb. 18.Perhaps the greatest folly in all of this, activists say, is the effort by governments around the world to paint homosexuality and the gay rights movement as imported. Last year, the Singaporean government banned foreign participation and sponsorship at the annual Pink Dot gay pride rally.But activists and historians say this is a major misreading of history. If anything, they argue, the colonial laws banning gay sex in Singapore and elsewhere should be considered imports, since they grew directly out of British law.

A Georgia man accused of plotting to use an anti-tank rocket to storm into the White House was arrested in a sting Wednesday after he traded his car for guns and explosives, authorities said.Hasher Jallal Taheb, 21, of Cumming, was arrested Wednesday and is charged with attempting to damage or destroy a building owned by the United States using fire or an explosive, the US attorney Byung J “BJay” Pak said.It wasn’t immediately clear whether Taheb had an attorney who could comment on the allegations.A local law enforcement agency contacted the FBI in March after getting a tip from someone who said Taheb had become radicalized, changed his name and planned to travel abroad, according to an FBI agent’s affidavit filed in court.The affidavit says Taheb told a confidential FBI source in October that he planned to travel abroad for “hijra”, which the agent wrote referred to traveling to territory controlled by the Islamic State. Because he didn’t have a passport, he couldn’t travel abroad and told the FBI source that he wanted to carry out an attack in the US against the White House and the Statue of Liberty.He met with the undercover agent and the FBI source multiple times last month and was also in frequent contact using an encrypted messaging application, the affidavit says.During one meeting with the agent and the source, Taheb “advised that if they were to go to another country, they would be one of many, but if they stayed in the United States, they could do more damage”, the affidavit says. Taheb “explained that jihad was an obligation, that he wanted to do as much damage as possible, and that he expected to be a ‘martyr’, meaning he expected to die during the attack”.At another meeting, he showed the undercover agent a hand-drawn diagram of the ground floor of the West Wing of the White House and detailed a plan for attack, the affidavit says. He asked the undercover agent to obtain the weapons and explosives needed to carry out the attack, and they discussed selling or exchanging their cars to pay for them.Taheb told the undercover agent they needed a “base” where they could regroup and where he could record a video to motivate people: “He stated he would be the narrator, clips of oppressed Muslims would be shown, and American and Israeli flags would be burned in the background.”Last week, Taheb told the undercover agent he wanted to pick up weapons this week and drive directly to Washington to carry out the attack, investigators said. Taheb said they would approach the White House from the back road, causing a distraction for police and then would proceed into the White House, using an anti-tank weapon to blow open a door and then take down as many people and do as much damage as possible, the affidavit says.Taheb told the undercover agent he had never shot a gun but could learn easily and also said he had watched some videos of how grenades explode, authorities said.Taheb met with the FBI source and undercover agent on Wednesday in a parking lot in Buford to exchange their cars for semi-automatic assault rifles, three explosive devices with remote detonators and an anti-tank rocket, the affidavit says.A second FBI source met them and inspected the vehicles, and a second FBI undercover agent arrived in a tractor trailer with weapons and explosives that had been rendered inert by the FBI. The undercover agent and Taheb talked about the guns, how to arm and detonate the explosives and how to use the anti-tank rocket, the affidavit says.Taheb and the undercover agent and FBI source whom he believed to be part of his group turned over their car keys to the second confidential source and then loaded the inert explosives and guns into a rental vehicle, the affidavit says. Then, after they got into the car and closed the doors, agents arrested Taheb. Topics Georgia FBI US crime news

A pledge to make it easier for “good citizens” to buy guns for self-defence helped sweep Jair Bolsonaro to power. But there is alarm that the Brazilian president’s decree loosening firearms laws will make pervasive violence against women even worse – and more deadly.“I believe this is a very negative measure that will lead more women to be threatened by violence,” said Maria da Penha, the women’s rights activist whose case changed Brazil’s domestic violence laws. “This decree should be reviewed.”In a country plagued by public insecurity, Da Penha’s story is widely known. In May 1983, she was asleep at her home in Fortaleza when her husband shot her in the back, leaving her paralysed. When she returned from hospital four months later, he was still free – and attempted to murder her again, this time by electrocution in the shower. Her fight for justice eventually led to the Maria da Penha law, which set up specialised courts and police stations, and ushered in protective measures like restraining orders.Since the decree, domestic violence survivors have been using the hashtag #SeEleEstivesseArmado (“If he had been armed”) to express the belief that, had their attacker had access to a gun, they would be dead.“My ex found it normal to pursue me 200km into a different state, invade my house, harass and threaten me,” says one. “That day, every time he reached in his rucksack, I thought he was going to grab a gun. If he had been armed, I would be dead.”Another tweet reads: “For many of us who experienced an abusive relationship, that question that lingers in the mind is: what if he had come back with a weapon?”“We live in a society colonised by fear,” says Debora Diniz, professor of anthropology at the University of Brasilia, explaining the appeal of Bolsonaro’s stance on gun ownership to women who voted for him in November and others who back the decree. “We are afraid of walking the streets and are looking for easy solutions.”Diniz warned that, imported into a macho society like Brazil, a US-style political understanding that an individual has a right to protect their private property is problematic for women, who might be regarded as part of that property.“A gun is an object of desire for men. Gender comes into the politics of weapons, for those who aspire to own them and those who use them to kill,” Diniz wrote in El Pais, arguing that weapons policy must be sensitive to a country’s gender norms. “Femicide is a word invented in Latin America. We are the region of the world where more women die at the hands of their husbands, boyfriends, fathers and sons.“If today there are cases where women survive attempted femicide, it is in large part because the instrument of violence was physical force or other instruments that are less lethal, like knives or ropes. In cases where guns are used, the chances of a woman surviving are much rarer.”The gun policy debate goes to the heart of divisions in Brazil as the country adapts to a new president. While many revile Bolsonaro for his expressions of misogyny and homophobia, his toughness on crime resonates with women panicked by what has become a violent crime epidemic.Pictured draped in a Brazilian flag, a revolver protruding from her jeans, São Paulo state deputy Leticia Aguiar is among high-profile supporters. She argues that women have been “the main victims” of a previous policy of civilian disarmament.“An unprotected woman is an easy target for rape. A woman who is armed is prepared for daily life and, in my view, can even be considered more of a citizen in favour of social order,” says Aguiar, the self-described “adoptive daughter” of Bolsonaro.That view is not echoed by the public defenders who have issued statements warning the decree will increase the risk of femicide. The public defender of São Paulo has formulated a protective measure that suspends the possession of weapons by anyone with a history of domestic and family violence, in accordance with the Maria da Penha law.Some point out that laws making it easier to own a gun wouldn’t help poorer women to protect themselves, since they couldn’t afford to buy one anyway.In communities where violence is already rife, the idea of introducing more weapons is widely seen as sheer madness. Women in such areas are disproportionately affected by gun violence, not just from drug trafficking gangs but also from military police during operations.“Making it easier to get guns is really bad, because we are already living in a civil war,” says *Jenifer Rodriguez, who lives in a favela in Duque de Caxias near Rio de Janeiro. “This week I was awoken with a gun to my head because the police came into the favela and they had a key to open all our doors. It was terrible, they kept me there answering questions for two hours and confiscated my phone. These days I say that when I leave the house I don’t know if I am going to return home alive.”Education is the weapon to protect women from violence, not guns, says Da Penha. “Only education from an early age can dismantle the culture of machismo and homophobia. We need to mobilise women against this mindset.”*Name changed to protect identity Topics Conflict and arms Brazil Americas Women Gender Gun crime Domestic violence features

Self-styled “god man” Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for the rape of two women.The sentence was announced on Monday amid tight security in the northern town of Rohtak where the “guru of bling” has been held since his conviction on Friday, which provoked protests among his followers that left at least 38 people dead and more than 200 injured.Tens of thousands of police enforced a lockdown in large parts of the northern states of Haryana and Punjab where Singh, the 50-year-old leader of the Dera Sacha Sauda sect, has a mass following. A lawyer for the victims earlier said Singh had been sentenced to 10 years in jail. In fact, he was given two consecutive 10-year sentences.“He has been sentenced for 10 plus 10, which is a total of 20 years of imprisonment,” said Abhishek Dayal, spokesman for India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), after the sentencing hearing.On hearing the sentence, Singh slumped down in his chair, sobbed, and asked the judge for forgiveness, according to reporters inside the court.Singh was found guilty of raping two women 15 years ago at the headquarters of the sect, which has a vast following in Punjab and Haryana and claims to have 60 million followers worldwide. He denies the charges.Some leaders of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party welcomed the sentence. “It’s a triumph for women’s rights and shows that no one is above the law,” said Subramanian Swamy, the former leader of the Janata party which merged into the BJP.Anil Jain, who heads the BJP in Haryana, also welcomed it. “He deserves to be punished like anyone else because he committed the crime under the veil of being a ‘god man’, which is worse,” he said.But lawyers for the women who brought the case said they had wanted a much harsher sentence and would appeal against it in a higher court, asking for a longer jail term.Singh, one of the most powerful men in India, ran the 69-year-old sect from its ashram headquarters on a sprawling, 400-hectare (1,000-acre) Haryana property which includes a hotel, cinema, cricket stadium and schools.The rape allegations surfaced in an anonymous letter sent in 2002 to the then prime minister, Atal Vajpayee. Scrutiny of the ashram grew when a journalist investigating the sect was shot dead the same year.The CBI, India’s domestic security agency, alleges Singh was involved in murdering the journalist after suspecting he was responsible for helping to circulate the anonymous letter, according to the Hindustan Times. He faces a separate trial in that case and denies the charges.Singh is one of only a few Indian gurus to openly back political parties. In 2014 he threw his support behind the Narendra Modi government, and announced last November that its controversial demonetisation policy was “in the national interest”.In the decade that the rape trial has been running, Singh has continued courting both followers and controversy.In 2014 he starred, encrusted in rhinestones, in the first of two hagiographic films about his life, in which he was credited for 30 roles including director, producer and choreographer.Ticket sales were initially strong – more than 150,000 attended the first film’s premiere – but reportedly flagged after the CBI went public with accusations that Singh had been organising “mass castrations” of his followers since at least 2000. He denies this.Before the sentencing, train and bus services to Rohtak were suspended to prevent the guru’s supporters from gathering in the town, and a curfew was also imposed.Local police said several layers of security were in place around the prison and that government troops had permission to use firearms if any violence erupted. All cars entering the town were being searched. Topics India South and Central Asia Religion news

Donald Trump’s administration is struggling with Asian geography—not a good idea in an area of the world where sensitive territorial disputes abound. India regularly punishes people who show disputed territories as not belonging to its landmass. Vietnam refused to stamp Chinese passports that depicted a disputed area as belonging to its larger neighbor.The administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, first leaked to The Huffington Post, had to go through multiple revisions before getting Asian geography right.The initial leaked version made an egregious error: it labeled the entire Korean peninsula as “North Korea.” This is not just some obscure disputed territory; it threw all of South Korea in with the North, with the latter’s flag superimposed. It was if Kim Jong-un had finally made good on his family’s long-standing promise to unify the Koreas.The official version released online fixed that problem, showing just the North. But it introduced another major mistake by including Taiwan in the map of China. “There was an error printed in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review,” a Pentagon spokesperson told the Japan Times when they asked about the inclusion of Taiwan. It was as if China had finally invaded the self-governing island it has long considered a renegade province.That second version was taken down for several hours. Then a third was released, which removed Taiwan from the China map. But that latest version also removed the entire Kuril island archipelago. These islands are under Russian jurisdiction, but the two furthest south are claimed by Japan. It was as if the Pentagon didn’t want to get involved in any more mapping disputes.

Apple Inc. issued a software update Wednesday that it said addresses some cellular-connectivity issues that have affected its newest smartwatch.The update comes two weeks after the company acknowledged some of its new Series 3 model watches—the first to feature an LTE chip for cellular service—had trouble connecting to cellular networks because they were trying to join “unauthenticated Wi-Fi wireless networks” in public places such as hotels and coffee shops....

The last several years have been, for those who have cared to learn, a brutal education in how pervasive rape and violence against women is. We saw how the perpetrators are so often believed, the victims blamed and discredited, and how various powers – employers and institutions, universities, media, law enforcement – have protected perpetrators, especially high-status perpetrators and allowed their abuses to continue. Bringing this system to light has changed it – but not enough.The hearings about whether Brett Kavanaugh is fit to be a US supreme court justice feel like the finale of this education: the test. Will what we have learned matter? Or will a Republican party that has, with minor exceptions, made itself one with rape culture, prevail?When the Anita Hill hearing happened 27 years ago, we were as a nation ignorant about the prevalence and nature of sexual harassment. Though many women had experienced it, it had not been established that sexual harassment violated our legal rights and was something that could and should be publicly and officially remedied. It was just something you dealt with yourself or accepted as part of the tax on being female.The Hill hearings were a massive education in not only the awful reality of sexual harassment but why women might do nothing about it. You could say of Hill what someone joked about Christine Blasey Ford the other day: “Why didn’t she report it earlier so they could start attacking her earlier?” The way the all-white, all-male senators treated Hill is now widely regarded as despicable; that three of them – Orrin Hatch, Chuck Grassley, Patrick Leahy – are still on the committee is dismaying.It’s worth remembering that, though Clarence Thomas was confirmed to the supreme court, Anita Hill did not testify in vain. The indirect consequences of her testimony included what’s called The Year of the Woman, the 1992 elections that sent more women to the House of Representatives and US Senate than ever before. That year also saw improved federal sexual harassment legislation passed, which was clearly in response to her courageous testimony. Reports of sexual harassment in the workplace soared, as women recognized themselves in her story and recognized that their rights had been trampled on. The seldom remembered Civil Rights Act of 1991 was passed in the wake of her appearance, “to provide appropriate remedies for intentional discrimination and unlawful harassment in the workplace … because of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin”.Each of the three women who has emerged to accuse supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual crimes has been, as so many anticipated, blamed and attacked and, in the case of Ford, threatened so gravely that she and her family are essentially in hiding.You’d think that if they had so much faith in Kavanaugh’s innocence they wouldn’t be trying to scare these women back into silence and prevent investigations. With the newest bearer of allegations – Julie Swetnick, who on Tuesday claimed she was at about 10 drinking parties with Kavanaugh at which young women were drugged and sexually assaulted – an attack framework appeared so quickly and widely it seemed planned. As one person put it on Twitter: “Julie Swetnick says girls drink spiked drinks, men gang rape, and does nothing, She should be arrested for being complicit and a co-conspirator.”There’s a lot to unpack there. One quirk is that the same people who insist these things didn’t happen blame the women for them happening – it’s the logical incoherence of multiple contradictory defenses common in cases of sexual assault: it didn’t happen and it was her fault anyway. Or perhaps it’s that she’s guilty even if nothing happened and he’s innocent no matter what did, and we’ve certainly heard a lot of elected officials say that an attempted rape in your youth shouldn’t disqualify you.But the people who blame the victims for not reporting are ignorant or conveniently forgetting what it was and is like: rape has been a crime in which prosecutions and conviction levels are extremely low in this country, women have been disbelieved or punished for coming forward or both, perpetrators have been furiously defended whether they’re high school athletes or famous public figures, and even what we consider rape has been radically revised in recent years.Take the last part first. We have only recently arrived at the idea of “affirmative consent”, the idea that someone has only consented to sex if they affirmatively agree and are competent to do so. If they are drugged, intoxicated, or unconscious then they may not have resisted or said no, but they did not consent. Before feminists pushed for affirmative consent, you were fair game, and you’d be blamed if you had gone to a party and became inebriated or passed out. You still are, as Deborah Ramirez, who alleges that Kavanaugh put his penis in her face at a Yale drinking party, has been since she came forward.Actress Molly Ringwald recently wrote in the New Yorker about how the movies that made her a star look to her now. The film 16 Candles, which came out in 1984, two years after the parties that Swetnick describes, around the time of the incident Ramirez describes, has a scene in which, as Ringwald put it “the dreamboat, Jake, essentially trades his drunk girlfriend, Caroline, to the Geek, to satisfy the latter’s sexual urges, in return for Samantha’s underwear. When she wakes up in the morning with someone she doesn’t know, he asks her if she ‘enjoyed it’.” That’s rape just as much as what Brock Turner, the now-notorious Stanford rapist did to his unconscious victim, except in 1984 they thought it was funny-cute. How could you report something people chuckled over?Blasey Ford, who was two years younger than Kavanaugh, reports the kind of incident that was almost never taken seriously then and is still being dismissed and trivialized and legitimized even now. Swetnick has been criticized for being a college-age woman attending parties with high-school boys; it’s also worth noting the Stanford victim was a college graduate who went to an undergraduate party held by the fraternity Kappa Alpha, where the victim had rebuffed Turner twice before she became too intoxicated to resist. Swetnick has been criticized for attending parties at which she claims young women were gang-raped, but if you want to criticize young women for that – rather than young men – you may be criticizing a significant percentage of past and present undergraduate women, especially sorority women.The last time sexual assault allegations were made against Kavanaugh’s own Yale fraternity was 2018. And 41% of Tulane University undergraduate women and 18% of undergraduate men reported being sexually assaulted in a survey early this year. You can debate why young women go to drinking parties hosted by men with a propensity for sexual assault, but it’s common – and as the Washington Post reported earlier this year, “the National Panhellenic Conference, which governs the country’s 26 major sororities, maintains that sisters can’t swig booze in sorority houses — even as the fraternity down the street throws a keg party.”This puts the fraternity brothers in charge of all alcohol-soaked parties, so that the women are not in charge of the space, the schedule, the substances or the rules. It’s a perfect set-up for victimizing women. It’s worth remembering that the tidal wave of feminist activity and ideas of the past six years was started, in no small part, by campus anti-rape activists, many of them young women who were themselves survivors.The bad old days are today. But they were worse then. Kavanaugh is a test of whether we’re still mired in them or moving forward, whether women have gained any credibility and high-status men lost any impunity.• Rebecca Solnit is the author of Men Explain Things to Me, and The Mother of All Questions Topics #MeToo movement Opinion Brett Kavanaugh Rape and sexual assault Women US supreme court comment

Delhi, considered among India's worst cities in terms of air quality, is on the front line in battling these harmful effects. But at present, the Delhi government's pollution policy is largely reactive, rather than proactive.Emergency smog-reducing measures, which include banning trucks from the city's roads and closing coal-fired power plants, are only implemented during periods of extreme pollution.Air quality measurements provided by theDelhi Pollution Control Committeetrack smog levels across the city in real time.Those levels are based on the concentration of fine particle matter, known as PM2.5, per cubic meter. The microscopic particles, which are smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, are considered particularly harmful because they are small enough to lodge deep into the lungs and pass into other organs, causing serious health risks. The World Health Organization considers a PM2.5 density above 25 micrograms per cubic meter within a 24-hour period as unsafe. In Delhi, an "emergency" level is anything above 300. In 2014, 2015 and 2016, the average daily level of PM2.5 was 132.During the Hindu festival of Diwali fumes from millions of fireworks create a dense layer of pollution over the Indian capital.The sale of fireworks was outlawed last November following a petition highlighting dangerously high PM2.5 levels immediately after Diwali. The restrictions were eased last month, however, with a two-judge bench of the Indian Supreme Court saying a complete ban would be an "extreme step," according to the Press Trust of India. Monday's ruling by a larger, three-judge bench reversed that order. But fireworks aren't the only reason behind New Delhi's toxic smog -- in fact, aside from periods of intense use, such as Diwali, they don't have much of an impact. Pollution in India's capital is driven by larger, more systemic problems, such as poor infrastructure and clogged roads.A report by the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur carried out in 2014, found that vehicle omissionsaccounted for 20% of Delhi's annual PM2.5levels.Nevertheless, the number of cars on the city's roads has continued to rise. According togovernment statistics, the total number of vehicles in Delhi exceeded 10 million for the first time in 2016.In the wider Delhi-National Capital Region (NCR) -- a sprawling area that encompasses Delhi, as well as satellite districts in the neighboring states of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, and is home to some 46 million people -- a lack of effective public transportation has meant that workers are forced to drive to and from jobs in the city, further exacerbating the problem.In a bid to improve air quality, in January and April 2015, the Delhi government temporarily pulled millions of cars off the roads as part of a car rationing scheme.But later studies found that while traffic eased during the experiment, potential emissions improvements were offset by an increase in the number of motorcycles and autorickshaws. Anumita Roy Chowdhury from the New Delhi-based Center for Science and Environment think tank, believes court orders and short-lived restrictions are "temporary measures" and unlikely to provide a lasting transport solution. Delhi's pollution is also aggravated by its unfortunate geography.The landlocked city sits in a natural bowl and is surrounded by industrial and agricultural hubs.Without the coastal breeze of cities such as Mumbai and Chennai, much of the pollution settles.Every year, farmers across fertile neighboring states set fire to their fields to clear them for the next season. Pollution levels regularly exceed recommended safe levels in the Indian capital.Known as stubble burning, millions of tons of crop residue are set alight and it usually coincides with Diwali.According to a2015 studyon the socioeconomic and environmental implications of agricultural residue burning, one ton of burning straw releases 3 kg of particulate matter, 60 kg of cobalt, 1,460 kg of carbon dioxide, 199 kg of ash and 2 kg of sulfur dioxide.Stubble burning was made illegal in the Delhi-NCR and Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan following a December 2015 government order. However, implementation has been patchy, as highlighted by NASA's real time satellite fire tracker that shows the locations of agricultural fires in India."We need to ensure that farmers have access to the machines which allow them to mix the straw with the soil so that it can made into a fertilizer or to convert the straw into biomass," says Chowdhury.Indian commuters wait for a bus on a polluted morning in New Delhi.For this the governments need to give proper infrastructure support and financial subsidies to the farmers. "We're looking at how to scale up the links with the market so that the straw has an economic value, the farmers can sell the straw and it can be used for other purposes," added Chowdhury. "It is clear what needs to be done (to solve the pollution problem), but the support required to enable the solution needs to be scaled up."

It has love but also hatred, intrigue, revenge, poisoning rivals and even killing babies. The Chinese drama Story of Yanxi Palace is the most Googled TV show of 2018 globally, despite Google being largely blocked in the country. The search engine's analytics suggested that the top interest in the drama has come from Asian regions like Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei and Hong Kong, but its popularity in mainland China has been overwhelming as well.The series has been streamed more than 15 billion times on iQiyi, China's Netflix-like site where the show premiered in July before it reached domestic TV channels and more than 70 markets abroad. It was the most watched online drama in China for 39 consecutive days over the summer. The 70-episode Story of Yanxi Palace fictionalised the power struggles among the concubines of Emperor Qianlong in the 1700s. The protagonist, a smart girl with a humble background, manages to rise through the ranks among the harem and wins both love and respect from the emperor.Its theme may be likened to a Cinderella tale or Netflix's The Crown that chronicles the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. But its own uniqueness has made it the undisputed entertainment sensation of the year.Here's how it took over China and its neighbouring regions.The heroine of the show, Wei Yingluo, is unlike most traditional Chinese female characters who are taught to be tolerant, submissive and fragile. Inspired by the actual real-life consort of Emperor Qianlong, the story follows Yingluo as a woman of Chinese Han ethnicity in the Qing dynasty - the last imperial dynasty in China ruled by the Manchurian ethnicity that suppressed the Han people. But her intelligence, determination and appropriate ferocity meant she was eventually granted her the title of imperial noble consort, the highest possible position for a Han person at that time. Yingluo's most famous line from the show goes like this : "I, Wei Yingluo, am naturally hot-tempered and not to be pushed around. Whoever keeps talking [nonsense], I have all kinds of methods to go against her." The woman she is based on - Xiaoyichun - was posthumously given the title of empress, making her the only Han empress during the Manchu-reigned dynasty.The show comes as the latest example of how feminist-themed soap operas have captured Chinese audiences.Other shows like The Legend of Zhenhuan - another imperial rising-up-the-ranks story bought by Netflix - and The Empress of China, that tells the story of the only female emperor in Chinese history, have also taken off in China.Before the show aired on TV screens, it was shown online. The co-producer and initial distributor of the series, iQiyi, is one of China's most popular online video platforms - helping the show gain large traffic and, more importantly, easier regulatory scrutiny for its debut.In China, the National Radio and Television Administration oversees all content on radio and television. A TV project has to obtain the go-ahead from it even before shooting starts. Reality Check: Why is China censoring Eurovision? Peppa Pig blocked on popular Chinese app When video sites emerged a few years ago, they could publish anything as long as they thought it was within the regulator's rules. In 2016, an online series featuring gay love went viral but was taken off in the middle of the streaming season. A year later, a a ban on homosexual content was issued.Online video platforms can't broadcast shows at will but the censorship they go through is much lighter than TV channels, which are mostly owned by the government.No actor in the show is very famous, except for one Hong Kong actress, Charmaine Sheh, who was willing to play a supporting role.Gong Yu, founder and CEO of iQiyi, said the company had "deliberately cast lesser known actors... rejecting recent trends in the Chinese industry that put too much emphasis of the celebrity appeal of actors in their productions". It came at an essential time when Chinese celebrities' high income and ambiguous tax practices had caught the attention of the authorities. Vanished China star gets 0% 'goodness' rating Where film stars and police chiefs can simply vanish Total spending on the show's cast didn't even reach one tenth of the total production cost, according to Chinese magazine Portrait citing series producer Yu Zheng, who added that the rest of the money was mainly spent on things like costume and make-up.The well-built sets, elaborate costumes, make-up and attention to detail have won viewers' love. For example, concubines in the show wear three earrings on each side, as was the tradition of Manchu women at that time.So if you've never heard of Yanxi Palace, you could try Googling it - you wouldn't be the first.

PingWest品玩8月24日报道，据Patently Apple最新消息，苹果公司又获得了两项专利，这两项专利均与Apple Pencil有关。最新专利信息显示，苹果将会在iPhone上支持Apple Pencil。苹果在2015年和2016年提交的两项专利中就已经涉及过相关的内容。今天，苹果专门用于iPhone的Apple Pencil专利申请正式浮出水面，这也是苹果第一次将iPhone作为Apple Pencil的目标产品。更多精彩请关注我们的微信公众号：PingWest品玩 新闻线索请投稿至：[email protected]

The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R Vance Jr, refused on Saturday to answer questions about contributions to his re-election campaign and decisions to quash a fraud investigation involving Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr and not to prosecute the movie producer Harvey Weinstein over an alleged groping incident.Vance, who will be up for re-election in November, was a speaker at a pro-gun control event in Union Square in New York City, held in the aftermath of the Las Vegas mass shooting. Asked about the campaign contributions, he offered no comment and swiftly left the event.On Wednesday, ProPublica, WNYC and the New Yorker reported that between 2010 and 2012, prosecutors attempted to build a case against the two Trump siblings for allegedly “misleading prospective buyers of units in the Trump SoHo, a hotel and condo development”.Before meeting Vance about the case in May 2012, the report said, Donald Trump’s attorney Marc Kasowitz donated $25,000 to the DA’s re-election campaign. Vance returned the donation, according to what he said was standard practice when a donor has a case before his office. Three months later, the case was dropped. Vance told the three media outlets that was the “right call”, as he “did not at the time believe beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime had been committed”.Subsequent donations to Vance’s campaign by Kasowitz and organised through him, and in excess of $50,000, were accepted. Speaking to ProPublica, WNYC and the New Yorker, Vance said he would return that money. He also said Kasowitz “had no influence, and his contributions had no influence whatsoever on my decision-making in the case”. On Thursday, the International Business Times (IBT) reported that David Boies, a prominent defense attorney who has represented Weinstein’s company, though was not doing so at the time of the alleged groping incident, donated $10,000 in 2015. The donation was made after Vance’s office decided not to prosecute in the case of Ambra Battilana, an Italian model who alleged Weinstein groped her and put his hand up her skirt.Weinstein was this week the subject of a New York Times report that alleged a pattern of sexual harassment, which the 65-year-old producer has disputed. In Union Square on Saturday a spokeswoman, Joan Vollero, said: “There was not a single donation from Weinstein to Cy Vance, and nor a single donation from his attorney on the criminal matter to Cy Vance.”In a statement emailed to the Guardian later, Vollero described the IBT story as “completely false”. A spokesman for Boies’ law firm, Boies Schiller Flexner, said in a statement to the IBT: “David Boies has been a supporter of the District Attorney since long before 2015, including before he was first elected, and has never spoken to him about Harvey Weinstein.”Regarding the Trump SoHo case, Vollero said in her emailed statement: “This was a two-year investigation that never produced sufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution. During the investigation, the luxury apartment purchasers reversed course and took the position that the sellers had not committed any crime against them. No outside attorney influenced any decision in this matter.”The event in Union Square was organised as an attempt to pressure the House speaker, Paul Ryan, not to allow votes on bills designed to expand concealed carry rights and eliminate restrictions on silencers. Another speaker, the Democratic New York congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, told the Guardian she was optimistic both pieces of legislation would be rejected.“The outrage from the American people over this incident is so overwhelming,” she said of the Las Vegas shooting, in which 58 people were killed and nearly 500 injured. “It’s the worst modern massacre of innocent people enjoying a festival. “These guns should not be permitted, this booster that turns a gun into a machine gun should be outlawed. If they pass a silencer bill, they’ll be able to kill even more people. We need to be thinking about how to save lives.”Maloney said DA Vance and other New York law enforcement officials were “apoplectic” over the concealed carry proposals that would “allow the country’s loosest gun laws to prevail in the most populous city in the country”. “That will just make life more dangerous,” she said, adding: “More people will die.” Topics New York Ivanka Trump Donald Trump Jr Harvey Weinstein news

“The body was found on exposed terrain” that appeared to have been covered by recent heavy rains, Capt. Gregory L. Van Patten, field services commander of the sheriff’s office, wrote in the statement.Since identification of the body is pending, all four members of the family — Sandeep, 42, a bank executive; his wife, Soumya, 38; and their children, Siddhant, 12, and Saachi, 9 — are still considered missing. An autopsy is scheduled for next week.It was the second time in a month that rescuers in Mendocino County, north of San Francisco, have searched for a missing family after a vehicle plunged into water. In the earlier crash, the Hart family were believed to have died when their vehicle went over a cliff and into the Pacific Ocean. The bodies of Jennifer and Sarah Hart and three of their six adopted children were recovered. The whereabouts of the remaining three teenagers were unknown, although a body thought to be one of them was found last week.In the latest case, the Thottapilly family had taken a road trip from their home in Santa Clarita, Calif., to Oregon for spring break. On their return on April 5, they spoke of plans to stop and visit relatives in San Jose the following day, the San Jose Police Department said in a statement.But they never made it, and it was the last anyone heard from them, the police said.On April 8, the relatives in San Jose contacted the police department and officially reported the family missing, telling the authorities that the family had been traveling from Portland.

India's Supreme Court has struck down a legal clause that permits men to have sex with their underage wives. The clause, which was part of India's law on rape, said intercourse between a man and his wife was permissible as long as she was over 15 years of age.The legal age of consent and marriage in India is 18 but marital rape is not considered an offence. The verdict has been hailed by women's rights activists but correspondents say the order will be difficult to enforce.The judgement said that girls under 18 would be able to charge their husbands with rape, as long as they complained within one year of being forced to have sexual relations. The child marriage tradition of an Indian tribe India girl ends child 'marriage' "This is a landmark judgement that corrects a historical wrong against girls. How could marriage be used as a criterion to discriminate against girls?" Vikram Srivastava, the founder of Independent Thought, one of the main petitioners in the case, told the BBC. However, the BBC's Geeta Pandey in Delhi says that while welcome, the order will be difficult to implement in a country where child marriage is still rampant."Courts and police cannot monitor people's bedrooms and a minor girl who is already married, almost always with the consent of her parents, will not usually have the courage to go to the police or court and file a case against her husband," our correspondent says.India's government says the practice of child marriage is "an obstacle to nearly every developmental goal: eradicating poverty and hunger; achieving universal primary education; promoting gender equality; protecting children's lives; and improving women's health".

Russian President Vladimir Putin pressed his efforts to shape a postwar political settlement in Syria at a summit Wednesday with the leaders of Turkey and Iran in Sochi.Russian state television showed Mr. Putin greeting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at a palatial Soviet-era sanatorium in the Black Sea resort city on Wednesday afternoon. Mr....

Late-night hosts took one last look at the state of the race before the midterms, criticising the racist tactics of the Republican party.On Late Night with Seth Meyers, the host addressed what the Republicans have been up to in their last weeks of campaigning. “Most of what Republicans have done in office has been deeply unpopular so instead they’re furiously throwing out one new lie after the other,” he said.One of Trump’s many lies was a claim that he would introduce a tax cut for the middle class before the midterms with the president claiming he was studying it around the clock. “I don’t believe you’re studying anything around the clock,” Meyers said. “I mean, your eye bags say all-nighter but your grasp of policy says in bed by 7.”Meyers also spoke about his attempt to stop birthright citizenship and referred to it as “a racist stunt to motivate the GOP base”.Despite Trump now claiming he wants to rewrite a portion of the constitution, when he was campaigning before he became president, he spoke at great length of how important it was and how he would help bring it back.“Bring the constitution back?” Meyers questioned. “It didn’t go anywhere. It’s the founding document of our nation, not the McRib.”He said that “keeping people angry and afraid is one way they can stay in power” while discussing the migrant caravan and referred to the Republicans as “a party that traffics in open racism and sells its voters culture war rhetoric while enriching themselves at taxpayers’ expense”.On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert the host said: “Tomorrow is like Christmas if Santa was going to leave you either some shiny new checks and balances or your stocking just has a lump of clean beautiful coal.”He joked: “In America’s ongoing bitter divorce, the big question is: who’s getting the house?”He then spoke about polling and the many figures that have come out before the midterms. “CNN just released new numbers on their generic ballot where women favour Democrats 62% to 35% but Republicans aren’t worried because they have a history of not believing women,” he joked.At a rally, Trump said that even if the Democrats were triumphant, he would figure out, asking the crowd if that made sense. “Nothing you’ve said for the last two years makes sense,” he said. “You don’t figure anything out. You’re the leader of the free world and you can’t figure out how to close an umbrella.”Trump has also said that while he’s been doing campaigning, he’s also been doing work in the House of Representatives. “You’ve never done house work in your life,” he said. ”Or work work for that matter.”He also joked at a rally that he watched some of Obama’s campaigning as he had nothing else to do.“You had nothing else to do?” Colbert said. “You’re the president of the United States. You could enact meaningful climate change legislation, you could finally make sure Flint has clean drinking water, for God’s sake, they’re making four Avatar sequels, you could stop that!”On The Daily Show, Trevor Noah spoke about the long list of celebrities who have been getting involved in the midterms, including Oprah who was going door to door in Georgia with Stacey Abrams. “Oprah coming to your door and asking for your vote, that has to be the most effective thing ever,” Noah said. “Seriously, if Oprah showed up at my house and asked me to do anything, you better believe I’m doing it.”Noah also reminded audiences that this week will see the return of obnoxious news graphics. “I don’t need graphics to tell you why tomorrow is huge,” he said. “If the Democrats take the House or the Senate, they can block Trump’s nominees, they can block his legislation and Democrats might even be able to see what’s inside his tax returns. Spoiler alert: it’s Hillary’s emails.”In conclusion, he said: “You shouldn’t vote because of what the polls say, you should vote because there’s a message that resonates with you or you want to completely obliterate the other side.” Topics Late-night TV roundup Stephen Colbert US television Trevor Noah Television TV comedy Comedy news

In the 1960s Tilly Blanding, a 13-year-old budding civil rights activist, had to make a life changing decision: stand up or stay home.Tilly had been threatened at gunpoint by a racist earlier that day as she stood on a picket line in her South Carolina hometown. Her mother asked her to consider staying home after the incident. Tilly made the bold choice to go back to the picket line. She knew her brothers and sisters needed her presence to help ensure that working men and women of color would have equal access to good jobs, public schools, healthcare and the election booth. She learned from Martin Luther King Jr and other great leaders that when working people stand united for common cause, we’re unstoppable. Today Tilly, a Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Virginia 512 member, is urging working parents, grandparents and millennials to stand with her this Labor Day as we ignite a new fight for civil rights, and social and economic justice at rallies, protests, townhalls and other events. On Labor Day, Americans traditionally join together for parades and picnics. This Labor Day, Tilly and thousands of other working people are going to stand together and call on elected officials at all levels to deliver on their number one job: raising our standard of living by ensuring good jobs that pay a living wage. There are two main ways to raise wages: increase the minimum wage or bargaining through a union. Over the past five years, people from California to New York and dozens of cities in between have seen the minimum wage put on a path to $15 an hour. But tens of millions still struggle to buy groceries, pay the bills or save a little for retirement. That’s why we’re renewing the call for a union so that no one working full time has to live in poverty.The labor movement has been a bridge between working people of color and economic opportunity since the civil rights era. According to the Center for Economic Policy and Research (CEPR), black union workers on average earn 16.4% higher wages than their non-union counterparts. Black women in unions earn 37% more than their female counterparts, while black men earn 35% more. Black union households aren’t the only ones who have benefited from the labor movement. By standing together with working people who are unable to join a union, we have also begun to make changes in fast-food restaurants, retail stores, airports and institutions of higher learning by successfully fighting for higher wages, safer working conditions and a stronger voice in the workplace.However, labor unions have been under constant attack in recent decades by wealthy corporations – who don’t want to pay family-sustaining wages or treat working people with dignity – and self-interested politicians whose electoral fate rests on contributions from corporations and billionaires. These attacks have led to a decline of union membership among black workers in our country. In 2016, unions represented only 14.2% of black workers, compared to 31.7% in 1983. We see the results of this decline in our everyday lives. 75-year-old David Tucker lives in District Heights, Maryland, less than 10 miles but a world away from the US Capitol building. He still works as a skycap at the same airport members of Congress fly in and out of every week because his low wages and lack of an employer-sponsored retirement plan made it hard to save for the day when he could no longer work. Working parents like Tolanda Barnette, a child care provider in Durham, North Carolina, struggle to cover basic living expenses on a full-time job. Black millennials, like 22-year-old home healthcare provider Tatiana Anderson, worry about their ability to get ahead in this economy even with a college education.These stories are just a few examples of why we can’t afford to stay home this Labor Day. Without unions and a $15 minimum wage, people of color will continue to lose out in our rigged economy at disproportionate rates. Across the country, more than half of black workers and nearly 60% of Latino workers are paid less than $15 per hour.Unless working people in every region of the country can win unions, crooked politicians and corporations will continue to rig the system and communities of color will lose.On the day when a racist threatened 13-year-old Tilly Blanding, she told her mother that she wouldn’t stay home because “that’s what want us to do.” We must follow Tilly’s example the Labor Day weekend by standing up for justice on all fronts and a better way of life for every family. Staying home is no longer an option. Gerry Hudson is the Secretary-Treasurer of the Service Employees International Union Topics US news Opinion US unions comment