A self-styled Indian spiritual guru who claims millions of followers worldwide has been given a life sentence for raping a 16-year-old girl.Asaram Bapu was convicted of the 2013 attack on the girl, a devotee at his ashram in Jodhpur, by a court in the city's jail. He is expected to appeal.The guru, who is 77, has 400 ashrams around the world where he teaches meditation and yoga.He is also on trial in another rape case in western Gujarat state.Jodhpur is on high alert because of concerns there could be violence from the guru's supporters, reports BBC Hindi's Priyanka Dubey who is in the city. The judge delivered his verdict from the city's jail because of concerns that it could provoke riots. How a divided India fuelled the rise of the gurus Why so many Indians flock to gurusn Two of the guru's aides were also convicted and given 20-year jail terms. Two more were acquitted."Nothing can compensate for the trauma that the victim and the family have gone through," Utsav Bains, the victim's lawyer, told NDTV ahead of sentencing.The security measures come after followers of another guru, Gurmeet Ram Rahim, ran amok after he was found guilty of rape last year. The resulting violence killed 23 people. Asaram was arrested in 2013 after a case of sexual assault was filed against him by two of his followers, who alleged that he had assaulted their daughter. Police say that the couple, who had sent the girl to one of his ashrams for spiritual lessons, were summoned to see her as she was "under the influence of some supernatural ghostly powers". They were then told to take their daughter to Jodhpur to meet the guru.The family reached the Jodhpur ashram on 14 August. The following night, Asaram called the victim to his room on the pretext of "curing" her. He then raped the victim while her parents waited outside chanting his prayers, police say.Police say the guru forced the victim to perform sexual acts on him and threatened to murder her family if she spoke about the incident. The victim told her parents what had happened the following day. They tried to confront Asaram, but were refused entry to his ashrams.Asumal Harpalani was born in April 1941 in a village called Bernai in Sindh region in present-day Pakistan. His family migrated to Ahmadabad city in Gujarat after the partition of India. In the 1960s, he started practising spiritualism with different gurus - one of whom gave him the name Asaram. He formed his first ashram in 1972 on the banks of the Sabarmati river in Motera town of Gujarat. His influence spread to different parts of India and around the world in the following decades. According to his website, he has 40 million followers around the world and has built 400 spiritual retreats across 19 countries. Important Indian politicians, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, have attended his sermons in the past.He also has properties worth millions of dollars across India. The police are also investigating him for corruption and forgery. Asaram is also accused of raping another woman in Surat city in Gujarat between 2002 and 2004. The trial in this case is under way.At least nine witnesses in both cases have been attacked over the past five years - three of them have since died.Police are investigating these attacks. The victims' families insist that the guru and his followers are behind these attacks - an allegation he denies.The Jodhpur rape case, for which he has been convicted, has also seen the victim's family threatened by his followers. Asaram is far from being the first self-styled Indian holy man to be accused and found guilty of crimes. The Hindustan Times lists a string of controversial gurus who have been in the news for the wrong reasons in recent years. Charges have included murder, sexual assault and corruption. In 2017, Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison for rape. He has also been investigated for murder and has been accused of forcing followers to undergo castrations to "get closer to god". Baba Rampal is currently in jail facing a number of serious charges, including murder, attempted murder and sedition. He was accused of operating an illegal abortion centre in his ashram where a number of weapons were also confiscated. Swami Nithyananda was charged with obscenity after a video apparently showed him engaging in a sexual act with a film actress. He said he was innocent and the video was a fake. He was detained in 2010 but released on bail. He's still awaiting trial in several cases. Many Indian spiritual figures have large international followings. One of the most memorable was Rolls Royce-loving Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who died in 1990 and taught his devotees that free love was the path to enlightenment. A Netflix documentary series recently brought Rajneesh back into the public eye, reminding viewers of the utopian community he set up on an Oregon ranch before it descended into assassination plots and the largest bio-terrorist attack in US history.He's now been renamed "Osho". Tens of thousands of people continue to visit the movement's centre in Pune in India every year.

A red bandana has become the new symbol of protest in Mogadishu as anger over the city's most destructive bomb attack is boiling over on to the streets.Men and women in the city, security officers, even government officials - all are wearing a piece of red cloth around their foreheads to show unity and solidarity for the hundreds of people killed and injured in Saturday's massive truck bombing."It represents the blood of my people who have been killed in the explosion," said one girl pressed up against the fence at the national stadium for a demonstration organised by the city."If the Somali people unite they can defeat everything," another said, red cloth wrapped around her hijab.The crowd chanted anti-al-Shabab slogans as they waited for the mayor of Mogadishu, the prime minister and the president to arrive.Thousands came. It was something never seen before in the aftermath of a bomb attack.There have been small protests in the past but people have been afraid of being targeted by the Islamist group.This demonstration, and the rioting in the streets at the scene of Saturday's blast, betrayed a real change of atmosphere in Mogadishu - from fear to anger.And that's why this bomb attack is different - why this could be a turning point. "Al-Shabab started to kill 10 people, we kept silent, then they killed 20, and next they killed 100," said Somali President Mohamed Abdullahi "Farmajo" Mohamed. "Now, they killed 300 innocent Somali civilians. The victims: Searching for clues Why 'Pray for Mogadishu' isn't trending Who are al-Shabab? "We are telling [al-Shabab] that from now on, we are all soldiers and will come to you. We will no longer tolerate a Somali boy being killed and a Somali girl being killed. And we'll defend this flag."But the crack of gunfire near the scene of the blast at K5 - the Kilometre Five junction - was perhaps a stronger indication of public feeling. Stones were thrown, guns fired, people killed - for no reason other than the crowd was angry and had only a few security officers to channel that anger against.That anger needs to be handled carefully and directed well - against al-Shabab, not the government or security forces for not doing enough to stop these attacks.Al-Shabab have not said they carried out this attack, perhaps because of the number of civilians killed.K5 was probably not the target. Security sources say the truck had travelled through a number of lighter checkpoints, with its cargo of homemade and some military grade explosives disguised with sacks of rice. When it reached Kilometre Six, suspicions were raised and the security forces called ahead.The driver detonated his explosives before he could be stopped. It seems to have been a coincidence that he did so next to a petrol tanker, upping the death toll.At one of Mogadishu's busiest junctions at one of the busiest times of the week, the blast tore through the traffic-jammed streets and crowded pavements.Security sources disagree over the intended target.In the past, "complex" al-Shabab attacks involved a first, smaller bomb at a security gate allowing a second, larger bomb to get through and cause greater damage.In this case a second, smaller car bomb was intercepted and the driver arrested just before it exploded - killing and injuring a number of people. The driver is accused of taking part in a previous large-scale attack in Mogadishu and is believed to be a member of al-Shabab.The vehicles were travelling along different routes but they appeared to be moving towards the airport - the "green zone" of Mogadishu where the UN and many international embassies are based. This may have been the target or maybe the foreign ministry or a new Turkish military base.A third explosion further out of town has not been widely reported but it happened around the same time as the second blast, so could have been part of a botched plan.The security forces are expected to release more information about the blast and about the efforts being made to stop al-Shabab from striking again.Amid the anger and determination among those wearing red bandanas was a man who also gave a realistic picture of the fight against al-Shabab."We can't stop these people - they live among us - only God can stop them," he said.

Indian police say they have arrested the main suspect in an alleged gang-rape and murder of a teenage girl.Dhanu Bhuiyan and his accomplices are accused of burning the 16-year-old alive on Friday in the state of Jharkhand.She was killed after her parents complained to village elders that she had been raped, according to police.The elders had told two accused rapists to do 100 sit-ups and pay a 50,000 rupee (£550; $750) fine as punishment.The men were allegedly so enraged by the penalty that they beat the girl's parents then set her on fire."The two accused thrashed the parents and rushed to the house where they set the girl ablaze with the help of their accomplices," Ashok Ram, the officer in charge of the local police station, told the AFP news agency.Police say they have arrested 15 of the 18 people they want to investigate in connection with the incidents.They say Mr Bhuiyan was arrested at a relative's house where he was hiding. The suspect has not commented on the accusations. Why India's rape crisis shows no signs of abating How do Indian parents talk to their children about rape? The girl was believed to have been abducted from her home while her parents were attending a wedding.She was then allegedly raped by two men in a forested area near the village of Raja Kendua.Upon discovering the assault, the 16-year-old's parents went to village elders to pursue charges against the suspected perpetrators.The victim and the accused appeared to have known each other, police inspector-general Shambu Thakur told AFP. Councils of village elders carry no legal weight. However, they have significant influence in many parts of rural India and are a way of settling disputes without having to go through India's expensive judicial system.However, several village elders have been charged with passing unlawful orders and tampering with evidence.The latest incident comes as India reels from a string of violent sexual crimes.About 40,000 rape cases were reported in India in 2016.Many cases, however, are believed to go unreported because of the stigma that is attached to rape and sexual assault.

Enlarge this image Men walk near the site where the body of an 8-year-old girl, who was raped and murdered, was found. Channi Anand/AP hide caption toggle caption Channi Anand/AP Men walk near the site where the body of an 8-year-old girl, who was raped and murdered, was found. Channi Anand/AP She was 8 years old and wearing a purple salwar kameez when she disappeared on Jan. 10.A week later, on Jan. 17, her mutilated and lifeless body was found in a forest near Kathua in the Indian-controlled region of Kashmir. It was a mile away from Rasana, the village where her family was currently living.Reports say she was abducted while grazing her horses in a meadow, taken to a prayer hall nearby, sedated for three days, tortured and brutally gang-raped. She was eventually strangled and hit on the head several times with a stone to ensure that she was dead.On Wednesday, graphic details of the crime and its perpetrators emerged in a charge sheet filed by the Jammu and Kashmir state police. Its contents sparked massive outrage across the country. People gathered for candlelight vigils in protest. On social media, citizens are condemning the crime and encouraging each other to speak up to authorities.Details from the report revealed that the crime was fueled by religious and political tensions between the young girl's tribe, a group of Indian Sunni Muslims called the Bakarwal, and local Hindus who saw them as a threat.The conspirators' motive for raping the child, according to the charge sheet, was to drive the Muslim family out of the area.It also showed that local policemen were accused of perpetrating the crime. When the girl's family reported her missing in January, among those sent to find her was Deepak Khujaria, a 28-year-old special police officer. Based on DNA evidence, he has since been accused of committing the crime. Three other policemen have been charged with hindering investigations and tampering with DNA evidence, including washing the girl's clothes before sending them in for forensic testing.Indians were furious that politicians were silent over the issue and that some locals even defended the accused, since they were Hindu. Two Bharatiya Janata Party ministers from India's ruling party, who seek to preserve Hindu ideals, even attended a rally to support the accused. They have since resigned. Perhaps it’s for the first time in the history of any civilised nation that some people are actually speaking in support of rape accused & murderers. We hang our heads in shame #SpeakUp— Sharmistha Mukherjee (@Sharmistha_GK) April 13, 2018 For many citizens, the case was another painful reminder of how prevalent sexual violence is across the country.It seems the country had not learned its lesson after the brutal gang rape and death of physiotherapy student Jyothi Singh in 2012, says Jasodhara Dasgupta, human rights activist and founder of SAHAYOG, an advocacy group for gender equality and women's rights based in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh."We thought we had made progress in preventing violence against women, but this is a cruel reminder of how little has changed," she says.As a result of Singh's death, more stringent legal provisions were taken by the Indian government in 2012 to curb sexual violence. The Ministry of Women and Child Development in India, for example, introduced the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act. Goats and Soda In Interviews With 122 Rapists, Student Pursues Not-So-Simple Question: Why? Perhaps that's why the complicity of the police in the 8-year-old's case "has been very painful," says Dasgupta.Laws against sexual violence aren't enough, says Jayshree Bajoria, author of the Human Rights Watch report Everyone Blames Me--Barriers to Justice and support Services for Sexual Assault Survivors in India — they must also be enforced. "Police often try to shield influential perpetrators. And there are numerous instances in which victims are unduly pressured to withdraw complaints. We are clearly lacking in fair, transparent, time-bound investigations," she says.Friday, Yuri Afanasiev, the U.N. resident coordinator in India, condemned the crime and called for leadership at the highest level to address sexual violence and ensure accountability.Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke out about the case Friday: "I want to assure the country that no culprit will be spared, complete justice will be done. Our daughters will definitely get justice."Editor's Note: We removed the name of the victim from this post because of Indian laws about naming victims of rape.Kamala Thiagarajan is a freelance journalist based in Madurai, South India. Her work has appeared in The International New York Times, BBC Travel and Forbes India. You can follow her @kamal_t

AIN ISSA, Syria/BEIRUT (Reuters) - U.S.-backed militias launched their “final” assault on Syria’s Raqqa on Sunday after letting a convoy of Islamic State fighters and their families quit the city, leaving only a hardcore of jihadists to mount a last stand. “The battle will continue until the whole city is clean,” said a statement by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a U.S.-backed alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias. SDF spokesman Talal Selo told Reuters that “no more than 200-300” foreign militants remained to fight on in the city after the convoy left. “This is the final battle,” he said. Under the withdrawal deal between Islamic State and tribal elders, the jihadists would let all other civilians trapped in Raqqa have safe passage out of the city, he said. Selo added that he believed only a few may have remained. Raqqa’s fall to the SDF now looks imminent after four months of battle hemmed the Islamic State jihadists into a small, bomb-cratered patch of the city. “We still expect there to be difficult fighting,” said Colonel Ryan Dillon, spokesman for the U.S.-led international coalition backing the SDF in the war against Islamic State with air strikes and special forces. The coalition will continue to operate on the basis that civilians remain in Raqqa, he said. Raqqa was the first big Syrian city that Islamic State seized as it declared a “caliphate” and rampaged through Syria and Iraq in 2014, becoming an operations center for attacks abroad and the stage for some of its darkest atrocities. But Islamic State has been in retreat for two years, losing swathes of territory in both countries and forced back into an ever-diminishing foothold along the Euphrates river valley. “Last night, the final batch of fighters (who had agreed to leave) left the city,” said Mostafa Bali, another SDF spokesman. There were conflicting accounts as to how many people left in the convoy. Selo said 275 Syrian militants left along with their family members. Laila Mostafa, head of the Raqqa Civil Council formed under SDF auspices to oversee the city, said that figure included both the fighters and their family members. In a statement, she denied an earlier comment by another council member that some foreign fighters had left in the convoy. Before the evacuation, the coalition estimated that about 300-400 fighters were still holed up in the Islamic State enclave. Fighters who left in the convoy, which the coalition is tracking, had given biometric data including fingerprints, Dillon said. The convoy was still in territory held by the SDF on Sunday morning, Selo said. Related CoverageU.S.-backed SDF launch final assault in Syria's Raqqa cityFactbox - Battle for Raqqa, Islamic State's Syrian HQ near endBali described the civilians who left with Islamic State fighters in the convoy as human shields. The jihadists had refused to release them once they left the city as agreed, wanting to take them as far as their destination to guarantee their own safety, he said. Such withdrawals of fighters along with groups of civilians have grown commonplace in Syria’s six-year war, as a way for besieging forces to accelerate the fall of populated areas. The convoy would head to the remaining Islamic State territory in eastern Syria, Omar Alloush of the Raqqa Civil Council had said on Saturday. The agreement was brokered by the council and tribal elders to “minimize civilian casualties”, the coalition has said. Tribal leaders from Raqqa said they sought to prevent bloodshed among civilians still trapped in the city. “If there are any civilians remaining (in the enclave) they would be the families of those foreigners. The civilians exited completely,” Selo said on Sunday. The SDF’s decision to hasten the battle’s end by allowing Islamic State fighters to leave Raqqa was at odds with the stated wishes of the U.S.-led coalition that backs the militias. Dillon said it was not involved in the evacuation but added: “We may not always fully agree with our partners at times. But we have to respect their solutions.” In August, the coalition spent weeks preventing a convoy of Islamic State evacuees from an enclave on the Syrian-Lebanon border from reaching jihadist territory in eastern Syria. The SDF launched the battle for Raqqa on June 6 after a months-long campaign to isolate the city against the north bank of the Euphrates. Islamic State, then known as Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, had captured the city in January 2014, seizing it from rebel factions which had ousted the Syrian army a few months earlier. As the group became more entrenched in Syria and Iraq leading up to its capture of Mosul in June that year, Raqqa became its most important center, and it celebrated its series of victories with a massive parade through the city. Many of its top leaders were at times based there, and former hostages said Mohammed Emwazi, better known as Jihadi John, imprisoned them along with those he later executed, in a building near an oil installation near the city. The group killed dozens of captured Syrian soldiers there in July 2014 and it was also the site of a slave market for Yazidi women captured in Iraq and given to fighters. The coalition has said Raqqa was a hub for attacks abroad, and in November 2015, after militants killed more than 130 people in Paris, France launched air strikes on Islamic State targets inside Raqqa. Members of Syrian Democratic Forces escort a blindfolded civilian detainee suspected to be a member of Islamic State militants in Raqqa, Syria October 12, 2017. REUTERS/Issam AbdallahBut the group is now in disarray. In Syria it does not only face the U.S.-backed SDF offensive but a rival one by the Syrian army supported by Russia, Iran and allied Shi’ite militias. A Syrian military source said on Saturday the army had captured the city of al-Mayadin in the Euphrates valley, leaving Islamic State only a few more towns and villages, and surrounding desert territory, in Syria. But the battle for Raqqa has come at great cost to its people. Intense coalition air strikes and the months of street-to-street fighting have pulverized much of the city. Thousands of people have fled as refugees and hundreds of civilians have died. Reporting by John Davison in Syria and Ellen Francis in Beirut; Writing by Angus McDowall; Editing by Janet Lawrence and Mark PotterOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

In Syria, people disappear. Tens of thousands of Syrians are missing. We don’t know where they are being held or whether they are dead or alive. For the disappeared, the situation is life-threatening. For their families and friends, the uncertainty is agonising. President Assad’s regime is responsible for the vast majority of disappearances, through its network of detention centres. Armed opposition groups and jihadist extremists have also captured and detained people. The disappeared are the most forsaken and vulnerable of all Syria’s victims. Their plight is compounded by political neglect.There is no shortage of evidence about the horrors of detention in Syria. Witnesses have described the inhuman conditions, torture and brutal deaths, to journalists, human rights organisations and lawyers. The United Nations has accused the Syrian government of the murder, rape, torture and extermination of detainees.Shocking official photographs taken by military police were smuggled out of the country by a whistleblower codenamed Caesar, showing more than 6,700 bodies of individuals who died in government custody, many emaciated and disfigured. The photographs are reminiscent of images from the Holocaust. We can’t look back and say, “If only we knew, never again”. We know. How long will we tolerate torture and death on this industrialised scale?Most Syrians know somebody who has been disappeared. This issue affects all layers of Syrian society and is consequently of primary concern. Unfortunately, this is not reflected in the political discussions taking place in Geneva or Astana. The issue is marginalised. To date, the rounds of UN talks in Geneva have produced no notable progress whatsoever for detainees or their families and the subject remains largely off the agenda.Earlier this month, 169 Syrian civil society organisations wrote to the UN special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, to say that the Syrian people feel “increasingly disillusioned with a process that continues to fail them”. They want the Geneva process to prioritise the protection of civilians and they want detainees to be one of the central issues “at the heart of the Geneva negotiations”.Of course, the UN is only as powerful as its member states – and political will to deal with this issue is woefully lacking. Increased public pressure, led by survivors and groups such as Families for Freedom, could push nation states to do more to increase pressure on the Syrian regime to act. In the meantime, the UN has been reduced to making statements and recommendations with little hope of enforcement.The UN has long called for international monitors to be granted access to Syrian detention centres, yet this still hasn’t happened. Why? Given that the Syrian regime denies allegations of wrongdoing and claims it has nothing to hide, why won’t they allow independent monitors to inspect their facilities? If they are (as all the evidence suggests) hiding gruesome systematic abuses, when will they face consequences for violating international law?Human rights groups and the UN have also demanded that the government and all parties to the conflict provide a list of who they have detained and where they are being held (and if they’ve died, what has happened to their bodies). They want an immediate end to torture and executions and they want political prisoners to be released.The fate of detainees should be integral to discussions about Syria’s future. If it goes unaddressed, how can families heal and recover? Why would exiled Syrians return to their homeland when terror still exists in such a form, without repercussions? Failure to achieve any progress on this issue through diplomatic means leads to disengagement, despair and desperation. This feeds extremism. It is increasingly difficult for Syrian civil society to be able to make a convincing argument for sticking with these political processes, which consistently fail to deliver on the issues most important to Syrians.When Syrians peacefully protested in 2011, they asked for freedom and dignity. Their demands were met with incarceration and degradation. Over six years have passed and the conflict has grown ever nastier and more complex. It’s easy to feel powerless in the face of the seemingly intractable politics, but nobody is so powerless as a detainee hidden in the dark with all rights stripped away and no means of communicating with the outside world. They’re dependent on us. Are we doing enough? Many of those Syrians risked their lives for the dream of freedom for all. We must decisively ask for theirs.• Nicola Cutcher is a freelance journalist and co-produced the documentary Syria’s Disappeared: The Case Against Assad Topics Syria Opinion Bashar al-Assad United Nations Torture Human rights comment

Asian countries are surging ahead in innovation and India’s struggling to keep pace.A recent survey by Swiss investment firm UBS Research noted that India “badly” lags other Asian countries in terms of innovation on a per capita basis. India ranked 13th among 18 countries—including 14 Asia-Pacific nations, alongside the US, the UK, Germany, and Israel. The report tracked research & development (R&D) spending, education, funding, and patents in each region.By 2020, Asia, on the whole, is likely to outdo the combined R&D spending by the European Union and the US, UBS Research forecasts. However, the boost comes mostly from the north of the continent—China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. South Asia, meanwhile, “is in danger of missing out on an innovation dividend,” it said.India’s R&D spend is dismal—a meagre 0.6%—compared to the size of its economy. Currently, there is only one active researcher per thousand workers in the country. By comparison, Israel, the winner in both categories, spends 4.27% of its GDP on research and has over 23 researchers per thousand workers.Judged on an absolute scale, though, the story changes.With $50.3 billion (Rs3.3 lakh crore) allocated for research spending, India’s R&D budget shows promise. It lags just Japan and Korea in Asia. With 546 researchers currently active in India, the country has the third-biggest research manpower in the continent.The availability of elite educational institutions is listed as another high point for India. India beats Israel and is neck-to-neck with Taiwan, which hold the 3rd and 4th spot in UBS’s innovation ranking, respectively.✊ = countries India beats when judged on an absolute scale UBS Innovation Rank Country Absolute R&D ($b) Number of researchers QS ranking 1 US 503.9 1477 99 2 Korea 74.2 465 ✊ 75.7 3 Israel 13.1 ✊ 90 ✊ 48.4 ✊ 4 Taiwan 33.6 ✊ 151 ✊ 49 ✊ 5 Japan 169.9 910 79.7 6 Germany 112.8 651 70.8 7 Singapore 10.5 ✊ 44 ✊ 70.3 8 UK 46.3 ✊ 443 ✊ 96.5 9 China 409.2 3,926 82.2 10 Australia 24.3 ✊ 112 ✊ 81.6 11 New Zealand 2 ✊ 27 ✊ 54.7 12 Hong Kong 3.2 ✊ 28 ✊ 81.8 13 India 50.3 546 49 14 Malaysia 10.6 ✊ 84 ✊ 44.4 ✊ 15 Thailand 7 ✊ 91 ✊ 39.1 ✊ 16 Vietnam 2.1 ✊ 83 ✊ – 17 Indonesia 2.4 ✊ – 32.5 ✊ 18 Philippines 1 ✊ 30 ✊ 31.5 ✊

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Air strikes hit parts of Syria’s rebel-held Idlib province on Friday, a war monitor said, as the presidents of Iran, Russia and Turkey met in Tehran to discuss the fate of the enclave. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the strikes targeted positions belonging to rebel groups in the northern Hama and southern Idlib provinces. Around 3 million people live in the last major stronghold of active opposition to President Bashar al-Assad’s rule, which comprises most of Idlib province and adjacent small parts of Latakia, Hama and Aleppo provinces. Damascus, backed by allies Russia and Iran, has been preparing an assault to recover those rebel-held parts of the northwest, and resumed air strikes alongside Russia on Tuesday after weeks of lull. On Friday evening, nine people were killed, mostly women and children, and 20 injured due to the sudden shelling of a Christian majority city in the north western countryside of Hama province, the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency(SANA) said. A small jihadist faction in Idlib claimed responsibility for the shelling of the government-controlled city of Meherdeh, according to the war monitor. The Syrian army responded by shelling opposition-controlled Qalaat al-Madiq area in north western Hama, killing a child and a fighter, the SOHR said. Earlier in the day, thousands of people in rebel-held Idlib took to the streets after Friday midday prayers to protest any upcoming military action or evacuation plans, the Observatory and opposition news channel Orient News said. The Britain-based Observatory said strikes on Friday had destroyed a building used by the Islamist Ahrar al-Sham group near the town of al-Habeet, resulting in a number of casualties. Ahrar al-Sham is part of the Turkey-backed National Liberation Front alliance, which formed earlier this year. In addition to supporting rebels in Idlib, Turkey has also created a buffer zone along its border in an area north of Aleppo that adjoins Idlib, where it has set up a local administration alongside Syrian rebel groups. Russia and Iran have said they want all militants to be pushed out of Idlib. The United Nations has warned that a military offensive in Idlib could cause a humanitarian catastrophe. Reporting by Lisa Barrington and Dahlia Nehme; Editing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Catherine Evans and Dan GreblerOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

The investigation also found that although the high number of patients dying under Mr. Högel’s care was noticed by other staff members in Oldenburg, no action was taken to understand why.As suspicions began to swirl around the nurse, he was later transferred from a ward to a position in an anesthesiology unit, according to the public broadcaster NDR.There, a doctor who worked with him at the time told Mr. Högel that his services were no longer wanted, because he was always forcing himself into the spotlight when trying to revive a patient, the broadcaster reported.Nevertheless, after the nurse quit his job in Oldenburg, he was issued a recommendation that bore no indication of any concerns about his ability to carry out his duties, the broadcaster said.In December 2002, Mr. Högel then took up a new job as a nurse at the hospital in Delmenhorst.In 2005, a senior physician at the Delmenhorst hospital, acting on concerns about the nurse, looked at the death records and medicines administered by Mr. Högel and came to the conclusion that he may have killed as many as 100 people. He alerted authorities.Mr. Högel later confessed to killing two patients at the clinic, which led to his conviction by the court in Oldenberg. But the conclusions of the investigation announced on Monday make clear those deaths were just the tip of the iceberg. The authorities are continuing to look into how he was able to kill so many people for so long without being stopped by hospital administrators.In October 2016, prosecutors brought charges against six employees of the hospital in Delmenhorst, on suspicion of negligent manslaughter, for failing to take action despite their suspicion regarding the nurse’s actions.

You may know GrubHub as a food delivery service. Right now, however, the company is intent on convincing a federal court in California that delivery isn’t really what it does.The case, Lawson v. Grubhub, has major implications for companies and gig workers in California, the US, and even abroad. If GrubHub succeeds with its argument, then its classification of delivery drivers as 1099 independent contractors (rather than W-2 employees) is legal under state employment law. If it doesn’t, the verdict could lead to a deluge of lawsuits from contractors who don’t feel quite as independent as their companies say they are.Former GrubHub delivery driver Raef Lawson claims that he was classified, for tax purposes, as a 1099 independent contractor, but worked like a W-2 employee. Specifically, Lawson says he wasn’t a free agent, and instead worked under the company’s control. California law distinguishes employees from independent contractors based on a control test (pdf) that includes eight factors, one of which is whether the work being done by the plaintiff worker is part of the company’s core business. If it isn’t, then an independent contractor status is appropriate.That distinction is why GrubHub COO Stan Chia testified last week that the company doesn’t really do delivery. Instead, Tech Crunch reports, he said that GrubHub considers itself ”the premiere marketplace connecting diners with restaurants.” Chia noted that the company started in 2004 as a marketing tool for restaurants and only added delivery services in 2015.Counterpoint: In 2013, GrubHub merged with Seamless, which is a food-delivery service. The company is also acquiring Eat24, a Yelp food-delivery service, for about $287 million. When questioned about these moves on cross-examination, Chia told Lawson’s lawyer, “I don’t know that I would say we’re doing any of this to grow a delivery business.” (Counterpoint: GrubHub commands nearly a quarter of the digital ordering and delivery market in the US, second only to Domino’s Pizza, according to 2016 research from Morgan Stanley.)While Lawson doesn’t officially represent anyone but himself—efforts to certify his claim (pdf) as part of a class-action lawsuit failed in 2015—his case matters to many. There are about 7,000 GrubHub drivers claiming the same in a pending class-action suit, according to Lawson’s lawyer Shannon Liss-Riordan, who has represented workers in cases against FedEx, American Airlines and Starbucks, and has of late fought for contractors against newer companies, like Uber and Lyft.For them, the stakes are high. If delivery drivers aren’t part of GrubHub’s core business, they’ll continue to miss out on the protections that W-2 employee classification offers: minimum-wage guarantees, paid breaks and leave, unemployment insurance, and reimbursement for work-related expenses, among others. Indeed, hiring free agents costs a lot less for companies than taking on employees for whom they’ll owe payroll taxes and more. That’s why, as Tech Crunch reports, Uber’s employment counsel has been in court taking notes.Companies tend to respond to these contractor claims the same way, essentially by denying that they’re in the business of doing what consumers know them for. Uber, for example, has argued that it’s a tech company, not a taxi service; that would justify its drivers being independent contractors, because driving is “not its core business.” (So far, Uber has settled US independent contractor claims, so the issue hasn’t been litigated.)Still, the same argument in a slightly different context didn’t fly with the advocate general of the European Court of Justice, Maciej Szpunar. On May 11, Szpunar issued an advisory opinion (pdf) in Asociación Profesional Elite Taxi v Uber Systems Spain, SL, a case brought by the Spanish taxi drivers’ association arguing that Uber and its drivers lack the licensure required to participate in the transport business. Uber claimed driving isn’t its business, so it needn’t follow transport industry laws. Szpunar found, however, that “the Uber electronic platform, whilst innovative, falls within the field of transport.”In his testimony, Chia said that most of GrubHub’s drivers like their independent contractor status. When Liss-Riordan questioned him about the thousands of former drivers suing the company over this very classification issue, Chia said he didn’t know the details but is “aware broadly of lawsuits against us.”A verdict in Lawson v. GrubHub is expected this fall. Lawson is only asking for about $600 in reimbursement expenses, which is peanuts for the company. Yet the outcome of this case, if he’s successful, could be far more costly.

Israel’s military has gone public for the first time to confirm a 2007 airstrike on a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor, announcing details of a night-time attack its intelligence minister said provides a clear warning to Iran.In a secret operation that has been extensively speculated on for a decade, Israel said it sent four F-16 fighters hundreds of miles into Syria on 6 September 2007, to bomb the partially completed al-Kubar facility near Deir ez-Zor.Previously-classified footage, images and intelligence documents on the plan showed how Israel had monitored the site for several years and feared it could become operational within months.One report, dated 30 March 2007, said: “Syria has set up, within its territory, a nuclear reactor for the production of plutonium, through North Korea, which according to an (initial) worst-case assessment is liable to be activated in approximately another year.”The military said that following the four-hour operation, the reactor “had been totally disabled”, and the damage done “was irreversible”. Black and white aerial images showed a box-like construction close to the Euphrates river in the desert, while video showed the structure exploding in a cloud of smoke following a countdown by a male voice.The move to go public with the strike, which has already been widely reported and cited to US officials, comes amid repeated warnings by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for the United States and others to take more robust action on Syria’s ally, Iran. Netanyahu shares Donald Trump’s view that world powers need to scrap or rewrite the 2015 accord with Tehran that curbs its nuclear ambitions, as he believes it to be ineffective.Israel’s intelligence minister, Yisrael Katz, made a direct warning to Iran in a tweet on Wednesday morning, saying the raid provided a clear message that Israel would not allow “nuclear weapons to countries like Iran who threaten its existence.”The defence minister, Avigdor Lieberman, stopped short of suggesting the possibility of a similar strike on Iranian facilities, but made clear the 2007 attack proved Israel was willing and able to act militarily.“The motivation of our enemies has grown in recent years, but so too the might of the (Israel Defence Forces),” he said. “Everyone in the Middle East would do well to internalise this equation.”Israel had acted before against the nuclear ambitions of its neighbours, notably in 1981 when it attacked a reactor under construction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.Syria signed the 1970 nuclear non-proliferation treaty and had always denied the site was a reactor or that Damascus cooperated with North Korea to build nuclear weapons. At the time of the 2007 attack, Syria accused Israel of invading its airspace without providing further details.Israel’s military sought to justify the strike on Wednesday further, noting that the Islamic State group captured the area around the facility during Syria’s civil war.“The security implications of a nuclear reactor falling into the hands of Isis or other extremist groups during the war in Syria are vast,” it said.Israel is not a signatory to the NPT and has long refused to confirm or deny reports by foreign governments that it holds nuclear weapons.The military did not specify why it chose to go public with the material. As well as speculation that it was released as a warning to Iran, the move may be related to the upcoming memoir by Ehud Olmert, Israeli prime minister at the time, who ordered the strike.As Iran becomes increasingly engaged in Syria’s seven-year conflict, Israel has grown distressed that its most potent foe has a military presence in a country with which it shares a border.The Israeli air force has conducted well over 100 airstrikes in Syria, most believed to target suspected weapons shipments destined for the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militant group. Last month, Israel downed a drone in its airspace that it claimed was Iranian, triggering a clash in which an Israeli jet was struck by Syrian anti-aircraft fire and “large-scale” strikes on targets near Damascus. Topics Israel Iran Nuclear weapons Middle East and North Africa Syria Benjamin Netanyahu Donald Trump news

每经编辑 刘春山 张斯 每经实习记者 刘春山 每经记者 张斯 每经编辑 赵桥像一部手机那样打电话、发短信和使用应用，成为苹果旗下Apple Watch 3的最大吸引点。中国联通成为了首批支持这项功能的电信运营商，“一号多终端”的套餐政策，意味着苹果智能手表可以和用户手机共享号码，无需实体SIM卡。然而，在Apple Watch 3仅仅发售一周之后，苹果官网却显示了联通蜂窝网络将于稍后时段开放使用的公告，中国联通也紧急表示针对Apple Watch 3手表9月28日晚十点之后，停止认证申请。10月11日，有用户向《每日经济新闻》记者反映，自己Apple Watch 3通话异常，和手机一同不能实现接打电话功能，多方沟通手机才恢复通信，当初苹果商店承诺的手表蜂窝通信遥遥无期。此次中国联通是第三代Apple Watch在中国地区唯一的首发合作运营商。不过记者注意到，苹果官网前期公布支持地区目前仅适用于归属地为上海、广东、河南、湖北、湖南和天津省份的联通手机账号。作为是上海联通的一名的用户，乐成（化名）向记者介绍，当初是冲着Apple Watch 3的打电话功能，但前几天自己的中国联通SIM卡的Apple Watch 3无法使用手表拨打电话，同时出现了手机通话异常的情况，取消“一号多终端”，多次和联通方面沟通之后才恢复正常。另外有用户在采访时亦表示，“当我在苹果商店购买苹果手表时，当地联通是支持苹果手表上的数据服务的，现在消失了。”微博数码博主“李大锤同学”向记者表示，自己也购置了比GSP版本多出600元的蜂窝通信版Apple Watch 3，本想着联通会及时普及到其他省市，现在这种情况自己也很着急。中国联通在给《每日经济新闻》记者的回复中表示，联通公司针对Apple Watch Series 3开展的为期一周的附属设备通信服务友好用户体验测试已经于9月28日晚10点结束。已经申请开通了此项体验服务的用户依然可以使用业务。乐成对记者表示，按照联通当初的套餐说明，其就是按着正式运营来的，并非体验测试，现在的结果大失所望。在Apple Watch 3开卖之初，曾标注有中国联通服务支持的六个省市而目前苹果官网上显示电信、移动、联通三家运营商均处于“今年稍后推出”状态。联通放了苹果鸽子，让苹果叫苦不迭，同样也让广大中国消费者心碎。电信行业专家付亮对此表示，Apple Watch 3所使用的e-SIM独立蜂窝数据，需要开通中国联通的“一号多终端”业务，而目前联通的“一号多终端”业务只接到了工信部的“试用”许可，还未通过正式的审批。不过根据苹果官网的消息，三大运营商正式商用该业务应该很快了。智能手表可以打电话早已不是新鲜事，其中儿童电话手表最为火热，不过多采用和手机一样实体SIM卡的方式。另外三星的GearS3、华为的HUAWEIWATCH2都有e-SIM卡版，但是目前国内的运营商还未正式支持这种通信方式。近些年，手机卡从Standard SIM到MIni SIM、Micro SIM和苹果发布的Nano SIM卡，在苹果的引领下体积越来越小，但是无论体积多小空间的占用仍然没有改变。而e-SIM卡该卡采用嵌入式技术预装在设备里，通过空中载入，比以往节省90%以上的空间。通信行业专家项立刚对《每日经济新闻》记者表示，e-SIM卡由于基于空中写号，不存在号码卡实体，为各种智能硬件设备缩小了体积，应用广泛，特别是在物联网领域。智能手表、智能手环等产品，本身体积就小，为了追求轻便无卡是发展必然。记者梳理发现，如小米的“小米漫游”、华为的“天际通”等的“国际流量”业务，都是基于了e-SIM卡技术号码写入认证技术。而除了消费电子端，更加庞大物联网市场同样需要e-SIM卡。面向物联网市场，e-SIM卡未来同样前景广阔，包括车联网、可穿戴设备等多种硬件设备。在9月底的“2017年中国国际信息通信展览会”上，中国移动研究院肖善鹏就表示，小型化的e-SIM在产业中需求巨大，现有的SIM卡可能被淘汰，在物联网硬件中更为突出。中国移动内部人士对《每日经济新闻》记者表示，e-SIM卡相应业务目前正在试验阶段，计划年底试商用，可以应用在包括智能手表等其他多种设备上。

Indian cryptocurrency exchanges are not willing to go down without a fight.Following the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) April 05 order, banks have asked cryptocurrency exchanges to close their accounts with lenders. Banks have also been directed to refuse loans to these bourses and to wind down all business relationships within the three-month deadline.Pushed to the wall, the virtual-currency exchanges are now looking to challenge the central bank’s diktat in India’s supreme court.“We are looking at filing a petition to challenge the RBI’s order. At the moment we are working on it and trying to figure out if we should get together with the other exchanges and do it collectively,” the head of a virtual currency exchange told Quartz, requesting anonymity.The head of another such exchange, too, said the legal route was being explored, though he didn’t divulge details.The exchanges believe that the banking regulator has jumped the gun with its new order.“It has come with this overarching order that can be challenged on several counts,” said Anirudh Rastogi, managing partner at law firm TRA that represents several bitcoin exchanges in the country. “There is a right to trade and it cannot be restricted in absolute terms. Only reasonable restrictions can be imposed and applied but a complete prohibition as restrictive as this was unnecessary.”Rastogi added that perhaps the RBI’s motive was to safeguard the economy and investors against money laundering and terror financing, but a complete crackdown isn’t the only way to achieve it.Besides, the government hasn’t banned digital currencies. A committee has been set up under Subhash Garg, secretary of economic affairs in the finance ministry, to prepare a draft law on virtual currency, which is likely to be submitted by March 2019.Under these circumstances, players in the Indian virtual currency ecosystem believe that the RBI’s crackdown was unwarranted.Meanwhile, an online petition urging the RBI to withdraw its decision is being circulated. Launched by Bitbns, another cryptocurrency exchange, it has already received over 26,000 signatures. “This is clearly stifling innovation around blockchain,” the petition says. “If a government does not facilitate adoption of new technology the country stands to (be) left behind.”

North Korea has expelled a US citizen who tried to enter illegally, an unusually swift resolution of a case that could have further complicated reconciliation moves between the two countries.The man, identified as Lawrence Bruce Byron, had been in custody after crossing into North Korea from China on 16 October, the official Korean Central News Agency said.“While being questioned, he said he had illegally entered the country under the command of the US Central Intelligence Agency,” KCNA said.“Relevant authorities have decided to expel him from the country.”A man with the same name was arrested in South Korea while trying to sneak over the inter-Korean border in November last year.Byron, who is in his late 50s and from Louisiana, was later deported back to the United States.The secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, who has travelled four times this year to Pyongyang on his diplomatic drive, sounded relieved at the quick resolution of the case.“The United States appreciates the cooperation of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the embassy of Sweden in facilitating the release of an American citizen,” Pompeo said, using the North’s official name.Sweden represents US interests in North Korea in the absence of diplomatic relations.“The United States is grateful for the sustained support of Sweden, our protecting power in North Korea, for its advocacy on behalf of American citizens,” Pompeo said.Media reports said that Byron told South Korean officials he sought to facilitate talks between North Korea and the United States, although he is a private citizen.It is rare for North Korea to release an American detainee so swiftly.“This gesture means the North wants to keep up momentum for dialogue with the US,” Professor Yang Moo-jin at the University of North Korean Studies told AFP.From journalists to missionaries, most Americans held by North Korea have been released after high-profile interventions.The reclusive regime freed three US detainees in May in an apparent goodwill gesture before a summit between the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, and the US president, Donald Trump, in Singapore.There are no known US detainees still held by the rigid communist state. Washington last year banned its citizens from traveling to North Korea without special permission, the only country for which such a restriction exists.At their historic Singapore summit, Trump and Kim signed a vaguely worded document on denuclearisation of the peninsula.Progress has since stalled as Washington and Pyongyang spar over the meaning of the document.KCNA, meanwhile, reported that Kim had overseen the testing of a “newly developed ultramodern tactical weapon”.It marked the first official report of a weapons test by North Korea since it began the delicate diplomatic process with Washington.The US state department played down the announcement, saying it was “confident” that the negotiation process remained on track with North Korea. Topics North Korea Asia Pacific US foreign policy news

Heavy monsoon rains have brought Mumbai to a halt for a second day as the worst floods to strike south Asia in years continued to exact a deadly toll. More than 1,200 people have died across India, Bangladesh and Nepal as a result of flooding, with 40 million affected by the devastation. At least six people, including two toddlers, were among the victims in and around India’s financial capital. The devastating floods have also destroyed or damaged 18,000 schools, meaning that about 1.8 million children cannot go to classes, Save the Children warned on Thursday.The charity said that hundreds of thousands of children could fall permanently out of the school system if education was not prioritised in relief efforts.“We haven’t seen flooding on this scale in years and it’s putting the long-term education of an enormous number of children at great risk. From our experience, the importance of education is often under-valued in humanitarian crises and we simply cannot let this happen again. We cannot go backwards,” said Rafay Hussain, Save the Children’s general manager in Bihar state. “We know that the longer children are out of school following a disaster like this the less likely it is that they’ll ever return. That’s why it’s so important that education is properly funded in this response, to get children back to the classroom as soon as it’s safe to do so and to safeguard their futures.”On Wednesday, police said a 45-year-old woman and a one-year-old child, members of the same family, had died after their home in the north-eastern suburb of Vikhroli crumbled late on Tuesday, and a two-year-old girl had died in a wall collapse. They said another three people had died after being swept away in the neighbouring city of Thane.The rains have led to flooding in a broad arc stretching across the Himalayan foothills in Bangladesh, Nepal and India, causing landslides, damaging roads and electric towers and washing away tens of thousands of homes and vast swaths of farmland.The International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) says the fourth significant floods this year have affected more than 7.4 million people in Bangladesh, damaging or destroying more than 697,000 houses. They have killed 514 in India’s eastern state of Bihar, where 17.1 million have been affected, disaster management officials have been quoted as saying. In the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, about 2.5 million have been affected and the death toll stood at 109 on Tuesday, according to the Straits Times. The IFRC said landslides in Nepal had killed more than 100 people. The IFRC – working with the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society and the Nepal Red Cross – has launched appeals to support almost 200,000 vulnerable people with immediate relief and long-term help with water and sanitation, health and shelter.Streets in Mumbai have turned into rivers and people waded through waist-deep waters. On Tuesday, the city received about 12.7cm (5ins) of rain, paralysing public transport and leaving thousands of commuters stranded in their offices overnight. Poor visibility and flooding also forced airport authorities to divert some flights while most were delayed by up to an hour. The National Disaster Response Force has launched a rescue mission with police to evacuate people from low-lying areas but operations were thwarted by the continuous rain. “The heavy rains, flooding, are delaying our rescue work. Even we are stranded,” said Amitesh Kumar, the joint police commissioner in Mumbai.Images and video posted on social media showed the extent of the flooding. Rainwater swamped the King Edward Memorial hospital in central Mumbai, forcing doctors to vacate the paediatric ward. “We are worried about infections … the rain water is circulating rubbish that is now entering parts of the emergency ward,” said Ashutosh Desai, a doctor in the 1,800-bed hospital. Although Mumbai is trying to build itself into a global financial hub, parts of the city struggle to cope during annual monsoon rains. Floods in 2005 killed more than 500 people in the city. The majority of deaths occurred in shanty town slums, home to more than half of Mumbai’s population.The meteorological department warned that the rains would continue for the next 24 hours. Unabated construction on flood plains and coastal areas, as well as storm-water drains and waterways clogged by plastic garbage, have made the city increasingly vulnerable to storms. Snehal Tagade, a senior official in Mumbai’s disaster management unit, said 150 teams were being deployed to help the population in low-lying residential areas. Low-lying parts of the city with a population of more than 20 million people experience flooding almost every year but large-scale flooding of this magnitude has not been seen in recent years. “We are mapping all the flooding zones to launch a project to build emergency shelters to make evacuation easy,” said Tagade. Many businesses asked employees to leave early in expectation of worsening traffic jams. Rains and a high tide in the western coastal city threaten to overload an ageing drainage system. Several companies have arranged for food and resting facilities for employees stuck in offices. Temples and other Ganesh pandals have been offering food and water to people stranded on streets. People on social media have been offering help to strangers who have been stuck at various locations. The education minister has asked all schools and colleges in the city to remain shut on Wednesday. The flooding led to some power outages in parts of the city and the municipal corporation warned of more such cuts if water levels continued to rise. A spokeswoman for Mumbai international airport said flights in and out of the airport, India’s second busiest, were delayed while some had had to be diverted. Topics India Flooding South and Central Asia Natural disasters and extreme weather news

Donald Trump suggested in tweets early on Wednesday that former FBI director James Comey had decided to spare Hillary Clinton from prosecution “long before investigation was complete” into her government email practices, calling the process “a fix”.“FBI confirms report that James Comey drafted letter exonerating Crooked Hillary Clinton long before investigation was complete,” Trump tweeted, continuing, “Many people not interviewed, including Clinton herself. Comey stated under oath that he didn’t do this-obviously a fix? Where is Justice Dept?”Trump was referring to documents released by the FBI on Monday which show that Comey had composed a draft entitled: “Drafts of Director Comey’s July 5, 2016 Statement Regarding Email Server Investigation Part 01 of 01” about two months before the statement was actually made and before Clinton was interviewed.Trump fired the FBI director in May in what became an increasingly bitter spat between the two men.In the document, the entire content of the draft is redacted, so it does not indicate what that text said or how it may or may not have differed from the statement Comey ultimately released in July.Its release follows concerns that Senate judiciary committee members Chuck Grassley and Senator Lindsey Graham raised in August. The pair accused Comey of prematurely deciding that he would issue a statement “exonerating” Clinton. “Conclusion first, fact-gathering second,” the senators wrote in a letter. “That’s no way to run an investigation.”Multiple news outlets including CNN and the Washington Post reported before the investigation officially concluded that no charges were expected based on the extent of the interviews and other fact gathering that had already been completed.“It’s a bipartisan DOJ conceit. The decision is never ‘made’ until the end, even when there’s a 99% chance it is only going to go one way,” tweeted former DoJ spokesman Matthew Miller in response to the senators’ accusations in September.At a House hearing in 2016, Comey vehemently denied any decision had been made not to charge Clinton before the 2 July interview, but he was not asked at that time when he began to prepare his public statement.“If colleagues of ours believe I am lying about when I made this decision, please urge them to contact me privately so we can have a conversation about this,” Comey said. “All I can do is tell you again, the decision was made after that because I didn’t know what was going to happen in that interview.”Ironically, at the time Trump fired Comey in May, he had accused the former FBI director of exactly the opposite thing, claiming that his termination was in part, because he had treated Clinton “unfairly”. Topics James Comey Donald Trump Hillary Clinton FBI news

An oligarchy rules India’s courtrooms. It dons fancy robes and bills premium fees. Still, litigants desire it, junior lawyers suffer it, and judges respect it. It is the oligarchy of senior advocates.That oligarchy shall continue, India’s supreme court recently decided. But key changes are afoot. Achieving seniority, until now, meant threading a black box. Few understood how the system worked and why.Not anymore.Now, advocates aspiring to an elevated status have an open, orderly path to it. This is a big bang reform. A new cast of counsels may sprint to prominence, altering how long-litigating Indians access legal services.Courtrooms in India are populated with two types of unequal lawyers: advocates and senior advocates. Engraved in the Advocates Act, 1961, this Indian hierarchy has a very British history.This is a super-elite club, and the law treats members fittingly.In its early days, the legal profession in Britain only distinguished attorneys from pleaders. Attorneys negotiated the bureaucracy of legal paperwork, and pleaders mastered the art of oral advocacy. Soon, a super-selective class of pleaders emerged: serjeants. But their fortunes fell as crown law officers, a class of government lawyers, rose. A new band of barristers followed, the king’s and queen’s counsels (QCs), and this category still endures.QCs are an elite caste. Graduating into it demands professional eminence. In return, the title offers prestige, and catapults barristers to the privileged echelons of the British legal universe. Just about 10% of all barristers in Britain are QCs.India’s senior advocates are like QCs, only rarer. A 2013 report of the Bar Council of India suggested that less than 1% of all enrolled lawyers are senior advocates. Only the supreme court and 24 high courts may ordain lawyers into seniority. Eligibility depends on the counsels’ “ability, standing at the Bar, or special knowledge or experience in law.” Advocates may apply directly, or judges may invite them.This is a super-elite club, and the law treats members fittingly. Senior advocates enjoy a suite of privileges and few restrictions. They have a right of pre-audience in courtrooms: judges must hear them first. They do not file cases or handle legal paperwork; they only argue. And the law bars them from entertaining litigants directly. Instead, clients come through briefing counsels who act as go-betweens.Seniority magnifies a lawyer’s social capital. It brings contacts, experience, and honour. In courtrooms, judges may indulge seniors more. Outside of courtrooms, the media and the public do the same.Naturally, the veneration has consequences.Engaging senior advocates accelerates—sometimes almost doubles—the odds of winning certain types of cases in the supreme court, according to a 2015 analysis by the Viddhi Centre for Legal Policy, a Delhi-based think-tank. Senior advocates demand premium fees for good reason, and clients hanker after them for that very reason.Senior counsels do more than just devour special slots—they devour entire lists of cases pending in courts.They enjoy other perks, too. Courts, for instance, allow lawyers to seek out-of-turn hearings. Last month, a junior counsel in the supreme court protested senior advocates hogging all the time set aside for such pleas. He never had a chance to plead his urgency, he exasperated. His complaint has changed things. Now, senior advocates are barred from raising such pleas.But senior counsels do more than just devour special slots—they devour entire lists of cases pending in courts. A handful of senior advocates are said to dominate the business of litigation. They take on more matters than they can deal with. But they can’t be everywhere every time. So, postponements are sought—and frequently granted. The result? A system of ministering justice that pampers a minority of lawyers over the masses of litigants.The pyramid—this separation of senior and junior advocates—casts an unsavoury shadow on Indian courtrooms. Indira Jaisingh, and the National Lawyers Campaign for Judicial Transparency and Reforms, petitioned the supreme court against the pyramid. Grouping lawyers into classes violates the fundamental right to equality, the latter argued. And the Advocates Act, it claimed, is unconstitutional.Recall the basis on which judges classify lawyers: “ability,” “standing,” “knowledge,” or “experience.” These are vague terms. They drip with discretion. And their abuse is too easy, and common. Judges, some allege, have at times graduated unfit ones into seniority.In 2004, burdened by whispers of corruption, the UK (temporarily) suspended the system of appointing QCs. Would India’s supreme court adopt a similar approach? It turns out not.The court shot down the Campaign’s talking points. Why?Classifying lawyers has a rationale to it. Not all advocates serve their profession equally. Some do better than others—and the elevation rewards that. Judges may now and again err in measuring counsels’ worthiness. But these errors don’t invalidate the power to classify, the court reasoned. It only means that the power is at times misused.Consider an analogy. The police are authorised to make arrests. They make wrongful arrests at times. Does that invalidate the very power to arrest? Surely not. The police still have it.When the police err, they are hauled up in courts. Victims have a remedy. But with senior advocates?Anyway, law isn’t the only profession that labels its practitioners. Medicine does it, too. There are “consultants” and “senior consultants,” “surgeons” and “senior surgeons.” So, classifying advocates isn’t new or unique, the court intoned.These are anaemic reasons—they can hardly stand scrutiny.Reconsider the arrest analogy. When the police err, they are hauled up in courts. Victims have a remedy. But with senior advocates? Imagine judges elevate an undeserving advocate. Who should challenge it? And against whom—the same judges who bestowed the lawyer with senior-hood? It doesn’t make sense, and has hardly ever happened. The court’s administrative power to confer seniority is unlike any. Its misuse has no real remedy.The parallel with medical practice is suspect, too. The law makes a provision for seniority in legal practice. Courts confer it. It’s effectively a public (state) title. But medical designations are different. Doctors and their employers decide on them. The law doesn’t meddle.For now, the legal fraternity in India shall remain divided between a smattering of royals and a sea of plebeian lawyers. But things won’t be the same. The court has promised to make the process of seniority less of a black box. The royals must earn their coronets more fairly.Criteria for seniority, until now, varied across courts. Some courts emphasised age, experience, and expertise. A few demanded specific income levels, too. All vested judges with the power to designate seniority.The court has waved away the variations. Now a set of common guidelines shall apply. Only experience and expertise matter, not age or income. And a new method is in place.The supreme court and all high courts shall house a “permanent committee for designation of senior advocates,” alongside a secretariat, the court decided. The committee shall consist of the chief justice and two senior-most judges of the relevant court, the attorney (or advocate) general, and an invited member of the Bar. The secretariat will process applications, prepare dossiers, and, in a radical move, upload all formatted data online. The public is free to comment on it. The committee shall quiz applicants and, in addition, score them on experience, expertise, and publications. Names of shortlisted candidates will be forwarded to the full court—i.e. the collegium of all judges in a court. It shall award seniority by a majority vote polled in secret.A diversified bench of judges can only come from a diversified roster of senior advocates.The procedure is refreshingly nuanced. It has a democratic flavour to it, something the black box didn’t have. Those barred from the old boys’ club now stand a better shot at seniority, especially women and younger lawyers.Much will depend on those who sit on these committees and how they work it. The three senior-most judges in most high courts are men. So are most advocate generals in the states. Introducing gender diversity in the committees may mean proactively recruiting women lawyers to represent the Bar.But that is a first step. Diversifying the current roster of senior advocates may mean encouraging women advocates and those belonging to the lower castes to apply for seniority. This is critical. Among practicing lawyers, only senior advocates are earnestly considered for judgeship. So, a diversified bench of judges can only come from a diversified roster of senior advocates.A collective not always given to candidness has introduced a system of orderly vetting. Feisty local lawyers and global practices helped the supreme court to this moment. It is a welcome move. Still, procedures are as good as the people who apply them. We have a procedure. Now, people who matter must work on it. If applied less in letter and more in spirit, the new system will serve the Bar, bench, and the idea of justice in India better than it now does.We welcome your comments at ideas.india@qz.com.

Since time immemorial, nearly every new iteration of an existing Apple product has faced a chorus of skeptics voicing a reflexive gripe: This isn’t new enough. The iPhone X, which went on sale last Friday, seems specifically designed to be impervious to such criticism. From its shape and size to its screen technology, it departs from iPhones of the past. Possibly the iPhone’s single most iconic element, the home button, is gone. So is one its most useful features, the nearly foolproof Touch ID, replaced by an unproven security measure called Face ID.Judged on traditional checklist items such as screen resolution and camera capabilities, the iPhone X, which starts at $999 for the version with 64GB of storage, is Apple’s top-of-the-line phone. More than that, though, it’s Apple’s most different phone–the one for folks who get giddy at the prospect of trading familiarity for innovation. It’s free to boldly go where no iPhone has in part because Apple’s other two new iPhones, the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, are unapologetically evolutionary.The bottom-line question about the iPhone X is straightforward: Is it worth the starting price of a thousand bucks, an imposing figure even if you pay it chopped into monthly chunks? The answer is yes, if you were already planning to spend at least $699 (the baseline for the iPhone 8), can reasonably swing the additional cost, and aren’t fazed by leaving some old habits behind and dealing with early-adopter glitches as third-party developers tweak their apps for the X’s new screen. In most ways that matter, it really does feel like the two-generations-ahead smartphone that its name suggests.Still, having used all three new iPhones, I’m also more convinced than ever that the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus’s classic-iPhone feel will be a selling point for many people. If you choose one of them–especially as an upgrade for an iPhone that’s at least a couple of years old–it won’t be an embarrassing act of smartphone Luddism.Whatever your preference, there’s a lot to say about the iPhone X. As I write, I’ve spent almost a week with a review unit provided by Apple. That’s been enough to answer some of the questions that have been nagging at me since Apple unveiled the phone on September 12.1. What Does The iPhone X Feel Like In The Hand?Remember the days when Apple helpfully explained that nobody wanted a big phone, before it bowed to the undeniable reality that many people do? The iPhone X feels like a return to the period when the company prized one-handed comfort over raw screen acreage. Though its display’s diagonal measurement of 5.8 inches may make it sound like a phone for big-screen lovers, it’s the 8 Plus’s wider 5.5-inch screen that feels most sprawling.People who think of their phone as a tiny tablet may prefer the iPhone 8 Plus. Those who look at the iPhone 8 Plus as an unwieldy behemoth, however, should find the X to be just right. By squeezing out almost all the front bezel, it offers a screen that’s substantially roomier than the 4.7-inch one on the iPhone 8, in a case that’s only a skosh larger. Though the taller screen requires some readjustment, I was able to cradle the phone in one hand and thumb my way around without resorting to two-fisted use, something that’s tough with the iPhone 8 Plus and other conventional jumbophones.Like the iPhones 8 and 8 Plus, the X has a smudge-resistant back made of an exclusive-to-Apple glass from Corning that Apple says is the most durable ever used for a smartphone. (Which is good, because repairs not covered by AppleCare+ will cost you.) It’s lustrous, pleasant to the touch, and grippy enough to possibly help prevent accidental tumbles. The metal band around the phone’s edge is made of shiny stainless steel rather than the 8 and 8 Plus’s more subdued aluminum—and as with the Apple Watch, I think that aluminum holds its own aesthetically even though it’s on the cheaper versions of each device.[Photo: courtesy of Apple]2. What’s The Screen Like?Well, the most obvious thing about it is that it reaches nearly to the phone’s curved edges, with the exception of the notch at the top, which makes room for the new depth-sensing camera and the earpiece. Though I’ve been wary of the trend toward front-filling screens—all of which have led to usability compromises, such as Samsung relocating its fingerprint sensor way too close to the rear camera—the iPhone X’s edge-to-edge screen has grown on me as I’ve spent time with it.The more I used it, the less it felt like the primary goal was cramming additional screen real estate into a relatively small phone. (Apple hasn’t fixated on maximizing the available space: The keyboard sits well above the bottom border, suggesting that the company found typing along the edge of the screen too cumbersome.) Instead, it’s the sheer immersiveness that changes the experience. Less bezel and no home button makes for a device that’s even more about whatever app you happen to be using.Then there’s the fact that this is Apple’s first phone with an OLED display. Years ago, the LCD screens favored by Apple and the OLED ones used by companies such as Samsung were worlds apart in pros and cons. As LCDs have gotten brighter and OLEDs have come to render colors more naturally, the differences between the two technologies have shrunk. So the transition from the LCDs used in all previous iPhones to the iPhone X’s Samsung-manufactured “Super Retina” OLED display is not the radical departure it would once have been.That’s not to say it isn’t a noticeable and welcome advance. I plopped the iPhone X next to an iPhone 8 Plus, and the X was the easy winner for display quality, with blacker blacks and more vivid colors. (I was pleasantly dazzled by the snapshot I used as lock-screen wallpaper every time I powered on the phone.) Unlike the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, the screen is also capable of displaying movies with the souped-up brightness and contrast of HDR; when I sampled War for the Planet of the Apes, even the opening 20th Century Fox logo looked more intense than usual.3. How About That Notch?Within a day of using the iPhone X, I stopped fixating on the oddity of a smartphone screen having a dip at its top, and certainly would not consider it an argument against the iPhone X’s design. (It does mean that there’s no room to display the percentage of remaining battery life as a number—a change that at least a couple of my Twitter pals claim is a dealbreaker—though you can still see that percentage by swiping down to reveal the Control Center.) But many third-party apps will need to be rewritten to avoid colliding with the notch; more on that in a bit.The fact that the screen has a bite taken out of it presents some theoretical issues with full-screen apps such as video players and games. But the ones I tried all defaulted to a full-screen mode that doesn’t reach all the way to the notch, which skirts around the problem without being glaringly obvious as a workaround.4. Does Face ID Work?Short answer: yes, with a handful of exceptions, in my experience. The nightmare scenarios conjured up by pundits who hadn’t actually tried the feature will not come to pass.Training Face ID is a lot like training Touch ID, except that you wiggle your face for the new TrueDepth front-facing camera rather than tapping your finger on the home button. Once you do, the feature replaces Touch ID for unlocking your phone, using Apple Pay, and providing an extra measure of security in apps such as password managers and banking apps.When you wake up the iPhone X—which you can do by tapping the screen or pressing the side button—Face ID kicks in, assuming that you have it turned on. Once it’s determined that you’re you, a padlock icon unlocks and you can swipe upward to get to the home screen. I quickly learned that the best way to deal with the technology was to ignore it. I just swiped upward, without checking the lock icon or worrying too much about positioning my face in front of the camera. By the time I was done swiping, I was in.A few days with Face ID are not enough to stress-test the technology, which Apple says can deal with hats, beards, and other elements that change a person’s appearance, as well as some sunglasses. But I did my best. I tried it with the iPhone X off to my side at waist level; I tried it with my glasses propped on my forehead or my chin resting on my hand; I tried it while wearing Ray-Bans; I tried it in rooms that would have been pitch-black if it weren’t for the illumination of the X’s own screen. It almost always worked, as long as I looked in the general direction of the phone and my eyes, nose, and mouth were visible. (Don’t eat an ice-cream cone while trying to unlock your phone, as I did.)In three instances, however, Face ID has failed to identify me, even though I was aiming the phone directly at my face. In each case, turning the screen off and then back on again resolved the issue. (If Face ID fails to quickly identify you, don’t stare at it in hopes that it will eventually come to its senses—just start over.) The overall experience reminds me of the first-generation Touch ID that arrived on the iPhone 5s in 2013; not flawless, but a major advance over earlier technologies such as the facial recognition and iris scanning offered by Samsung phones.Apple says that the odds of Face ID thinking it’s recognized an iPhone X’s owner when someone else is looking at the phone are one in a million, at least for those of us who don’t have an identical twin or other doppelganger. Unlike the Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern, I didn’t go to any extremes to test its security, but I did ask my wife to try to break into the phone by brandishing it in my general direction. She couldn’t make it unlock.[Photo: courtesy of Apple]5. What About The Apple Pay Experience And Touch ID Within Apps And Elsewhere?Unexpectedly, it’s more reminiscent of the Apple Watch than of Touch ID-enabled iPhones. As with the watch, you press the side button twice and then hold your device up to the payment terminal. Assuming that you’re looking in the general direction of the screen, Face ID should kick in and authenticate the transaction. Done.In my first three acts of commerce with the iPhone X—at McDonald’s, Trader Joe’s, and Walgreens—the new Apple Pay regimen was unfamiliar enough to me that I futzed slightly more than I did with Touch ID. But it worked. And now I have the knack for doing it without thinking about it.Apps that call on Touch ID for security should support Face ID automatically, though they may caution you that they haven’t been updated for Face ID the first time you tried them. 1Password and Ally Mobile both worked perfectly with Face ID, providing a hands-free experience that’s even slicker than Touch ID.One other thing: Face ID is a boon when it comes to dealing with notifications on a locked iPhone. You can just tap one to go to the corresponding app, and Face ID will perform hands-free authentication along the way. Much nicer than having to touch the home button as on Touch ID-equipped iPhones.6. Face ID Aside, Will I Miss The Home Button?If you do at first, it’s understandable: It’s among the most intuitive pieces of user-interface design ever invented. But I quickly took to swiping up from the bottom to get back to the home screen. Siri and Apple Pay access have been relocated to the power button—now dubbed the “side button” and a tad elongated—and that’s fine. The one new substitute for home-button functionality that I had any trouble acclimating myself to was the gesture for pulling up the app switcher: You swipe up from the bottom and then pause midscreen. It turns out that it works most predictably if you arc your finger gracefully to the right as you swipe.A horizontal line sits at the bottom of the screen as a reminder of the swipe-upwards gesture. I found it a superfluous distraction and hope that Apple will eliminate it once it grows confident that the average iPhone user knows how to live without a home button.7. Will Apps Need To Be Rewritten To Be iPhone X-friendly?In many instances, definitely. Most of Apple’s own wares look great on the phone, stretching to make use of the additional screen headroom without colliding with the notched screen top. Some of the third-party offerings I tried, including Twitter, Instagram, and Lyft, were iPhone X-friendly from the first time I tried them.Other apps–including Flipboard, Netflix, 1Password, and Spark–were initially glitchy in various ways on the X, usually involving their interfaces colliding with either the notch on the top or the swipe-up reminder bar on the bottom. But in the few days I used the phone, those four apps and others released updates that accommodate the new display. The big remaining problem is that many apps, such as Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Kindle, Outlook, and Texture–and even Apple’s own iMovie–don’t yet take advantage of the extra screen height available on the iPhone X. They display with padding in the form of black bars at the top and bottom.Flipboard and Spark both initially had trouble dealing with the iPhone X notch; both apps have released X-friendly updates since I took these photos. [Photo: Harry McCracken]Apple has been through this before, such as with 2012’s iPhone 5, which similarly introduced additional vertical display height that required apps to be rejiggered. Developers have a pretty good track record of doing the necessary work. And hey, if you can’t get your hands on an iPhone X for a few weeks, some of the required updates may show up in the App Store before your phone arrives.[Photo: courtesy of Apple]8. How Are The Cameras?This is Apple’s best phone yet from a photography standpoint, though its advantages over the iPhone 8 Plus are not dramatic. The iPhone X’s wide-angle rear camera is the same one as on the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, which means that it’s excellent, and a peer of those on Samsung’s current Galaxy phones and Google’s new Pixel phones. The X’s telephoto rear camera lets in more light and has optical stabilization than that of the iPhone 8 Plus, which helped me get better shots of farther-away, poorly lit subjects without having to hold my hand perfectly still. The further you go past 2X, however—all the way to the maximum 10X digital zoom—the fuzzier your photos will be.I did notice one apparent bug: The camera’s occasional tendency to fire off photos continuously, as if my finger was on the shutter button when it wasn’t–which I imagine Apple will fix in a software update.9. What’s The Deal With Animoji?Aside from unlocking your phone with your face, the one thing that an iPhone X can do and the 8 and 8 Plus cannot is create Animoji: floating animated heads (including animals, a robot, an alien, and, most notoriously, a pile of poop) that mimic your expressions, head motion, and mouth movements with uncanny accuracy. The motion-capture is done via the new TrueDepth camera, and the attention to detail is gobsmacking, like the way the cute little bunny’s ears flap as you wiggle your head.You can record 10-second Animoji clips and send them to friends (including those with other iPhones) via the iMessage service. Or you can fool around with the feature in more time-consuming ways, as I did. More Animoji Karaoke for you. pic.twitter.com/pxvxfCUTi2 — Harry McCracken ???????? (@harrymccracken) November 2, 2017Some people think that Animoji are creepy or likely to be soon forgotten. To me, they’re significant as Apple’s most impressive demo of a new technology in a long time. Like Animoji, third-party apps have access to the 3D data captured by the TrueDepth camera, and can incorporate their own features using it, as Snapchat is doing. If nothing else, Animoji show that some startling things can be achieved through that capability.10. Anything Else Worth Mentioning?A few stray notes: Unlike many other phones with OLED screens, the iPhone X doesn’t take advantage of the technology’s ability to show a dash of always-on information—such as a handy clock—even when the screen is otherwise turned off, without decimating battery life. Here’s hoping that Apple comes back to this idea. I’ve never met a smartphone that makes it as simple to whip the device out of my pocket and instantly launch the camera as I’d like. But the iPhone X uses 3D Touch to let you open the camera from the lock screen by pressing the camera icon firmly—which my fingers find much easier to do in a hurry than swiping to the left, as you must do on other iPhones. I’m still not sold on the immediate benefit of the wireless charging offered by all three new iPhones. However, compared to the Belkin charging base I tried with the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, the Mophie base that Apple supplied with my iPhone X review unit makes it easier to charge a phone without gingerly positioning it in the pad’s sweet spot and verifying that it’s working. Right now, the iPhone X is defined by its sheer newness. Odds are, however, that its key distinguishing characteristics—from the OLED screen technology to Face ID to, yes, the notch—will come to all iPhones. Maybe not in 2018, but eventually.When they do, the novelties the iPhone X introduces may become as reassuringly comfy as the home button has been. And if Apple releases another new iPhone that is not afraid to tamper with iconic success, it will show that this phone has had a lasting impact on how the company transitions from one iPhone era to the next.

Google's first foray into Chinese markets was a short-lived experiment. Google China’s search engine was launched in 2006 and abruptly pulled from mainland China in 2010 amid a major hack of the company and disputes over censorship of search results. But in August 2018, the investigative journalism website The Intercept reported that the company was working on a secret prototype of a new, censored Chinese search engine, called Project Dragonfly. Amid a furor from human rights activists and some Google employees, US Vice President Mike Pence called on the company to kill Dragonfly, saying it would “strengthen Communist Party censorship and compromise the privacy of Chinese customers.” In mid-December, The Intercept reported that Google had suspended its development efforts in response to complaints from the company's own privacy team, who learned about the project from the investigative website's reporting.Observers talk as if the decision about whether to reenter the world’s largest market is up to Google: will it compromise its principles and censor search the way China wants? This misses the point—this time the Chinese government will make the decisions.Google and China have been locked in an awkward tango for over a decade, constantly grappling over who leads and who follows. Charting that dance over the years reveals major shifts in China’s relationship with Google and all of Silicon Valley. To understand whether China will let Google back in, we must understand how Google and China got here, what incentives each party faces—and how artificial intelligence might have both of them dancing to a new tune. When www.google.cn launched in 2006, the company had gone public only two years before. The iPhone did not yet exist, nor did any Android-based smartphones. Google was about one-fifth as large and valuable as it is today, and the Chinese internet was seen as a backwater of knockoff products that were devoid of innovation. Google’s Chinese search engine represented the most controversial experiment to date in internet diplomacy. To get into China, the young company that had defined itself by the motto “Don’t be evil” agreed to censor the search results shown to Chinese users.Central to that decision by Google leadership was a bet that by serving the market—even with a censored product—they could broaden the horizons of Chinese users and nudge the Chinese internet toward greater openness.At first, Google appeared to be succeeding in that mission. When Chinese users searched for censored content on google.cn, they saw a notice that some results had been removed. That public acknowledgment of internet censorship was a first among Chinese search engines, and it wasn’t popular with regulators.“The Chinese government hated it,” says Kaiser Kuo, former head of international communications for Baidu. “They compared it to coming to my house for dinner and saying, ‘I will agree to eat the food, but I don’t like it.’” Google hadn’t asked the government for permission before implementing the notice but wasn’t ordered to remove it. The company’s global prestige and technical expertise gave it leverage. China might be a promising market, but it was still dependent on Silicon Valley for talent, funding, and knowledge. Google wanted to be in China, the thinking went, but China needed Google.Google’s censorship disclaimer was a modest victory for transparency. Baidu and other search engines in China soon followed suit. Over the next four years, Google China fought skirmishes on multiple fronts: with the Chinese government over content restrictions, with local competitor Baidu over the quality of search results, and with its own corporate leadership in Mountain View, California, over the freedom to adapt global products for local needs. By late 2009, Google controlled more than a third of the Chinese search market—a respectable share but well below Baidu’s 58%, according to data from Analysys International.In the end, though, it wasn’t censorship or competition that drove Google out of China. It was a far-­reaching hacking attack known as Operation Aurora that targeted everything from Google’s intellectual property to the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The attack, which Google said came from within China, pushed company leadership over the edge. On January 12, 2010, Google announced, “We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.”The sudden reversal blindsided Chinese officials. Most Chinese internet users could go about their online lives with few reminders of government controls, but the Google announcement shoved cyberattacks and censorship into the spotlight. The world’s top internet company and the government of the most populous country were now engaged in a public showdown.“[Chinese officials] were really on their back foot, and it looked like they might cave and make some kind of accommodation,” says Kuo. “All of these people who apparently did not give much of a damn about internet censorship before were really angry about it. The whole internet was abuzz with this.”But officials refused to cede ground. “China welcomes international Internet businesses developing services in China according to the law,” a foreign ministry spokeswoman told Reuters at the time. Government control of information was—and remains—central to Chinese Communist Party doctrine. Six months earlier, following riots in Xinjiang, the government had blocked Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s YouTube in one fell swoop, fortifying the “Great Firewall.” The government was making a bet: China and its technology sector did not need Google search to succeed.Google soon abandoned google.cn, retreating to a Hong Kong–based search engine. In response, the Chinese government decided not to fully block services like Gmail and Google Maps, and for a while it allowed sporadic access from the mainland to the Hong Kong search engine too. The two sides settled into a tense stalemate.Google’s leaders seemed prepared to wait it out. “I personally believe that you cannot build a modern knowledge society with that kind of [censorship],” Google chairman Eric Schmidt told Foreign Policy in 2012. “In a long enough time period, do I think that this kind of regime approach will end? I think absolutely.”But instead of languishing under censorship, the Chinese internet sector boomed. Between 2010 and 2015, there was an explosion of new products and companies. Xiaomi, a hardware maker now worth over $40 billion, was founded in April 2010. A month earlier Meituan, a Groupon clone that turned into a juggernaut of online-to-offline services, was born; it went public in September 2018 and is now worth about $35 billion. Didi, the ride-­hailing company that drove Uber out of China and is now challenging it in international markets, was founded in 2012. Chinese engineers and entrepreneurs returning from Silicon Valley, including many former Googlers, were crucial to this dynamism, bringing world-class technical and entrepreneurial chops to markets insulated from their former employers in the US. Older companies like Baidu and Alibaba also grew quickly during these years.The Chinese government played contradictory roles in this process. It cracked down on political speech in 2013, imprisoning critics and instituting new laws against “spreading rumors” online—a one-two punch that largely suffocated political discussion on China’s once-raucous social-media sites. Yet it also launched a high-profile campaign promoting “mass entrepreneurship and mass innovation.” Government-funded startup incubators spread across the country, as did government-backed venture capital.That confluence of forces brought results. Services like Meituan flourished. So did Tencent’s super-app WeChat, a “digital Swiss Army knife” that combines aspects of WhatsApp, PayPal, and dozens of other apps from the West. E-commerce behemoth Alibaba went public on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2014, selling $25 billion worth of shares—still the most valuable IPO in history.Amidst this home-grown success, the Chinese government decided to break the uneasy truce with Google. In mid-2014, a few months before Alibaba’s IPO, the government blocked virtually all Google services in China, including many considered essential for international business, such as Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Scholar. “It took us by surprise, as we felt Google was one of those valuable properties [that they couldn’t afford to block],” says Charlie Smith, the pseudonymous cofounder of GreatFire, an organization that tracks and circumvents Chinese internet controls.The Chinese government had pulled off an unexpected hat trick: locking out the Silicon Valley giants, censoring political speech, and still cultivating an internet that was controllable, profitable, and innovative.With the Chinese internet blossoming and the government not backing down, Google began to search for ways back into China. It tried out less politically sensitive products—an “everything but search” strategy—but with mixed success.In 2015, rumors swirled that Google was close to bringing its Google Play app store back to China, pending Chinese government approval—but the promised app store never materialized. This was followed by a partnership with Mobvoi, a Chinese smart-watch maker founded by an ex-Google employee, to make voice search available on Android Wear in China. Google later invested in Mobvoi, its first direct investment in China since 2010.In March 2017, there were reports that authorities would allow Google Scholar back in. They didn’t. Reports that Google would launch a mobile-app store in China together with NetEase, a Chinese company, similarly came to naught, though Google was permitted to relaunch its smartphone translation app.Then, in May 2017, a showdown between AlphaGo, the Go-playing program built by Google sibling company DeepMind, and Ke Jie, the world’s number one human player, was allowed to take place in Wuzhen, a tourist town outside Shanghai. AlphaGo won all three games in the match—a result that the government had perhaps foreseen. Live-streaming of the match within China was forbidden, and not only in the form of video: as the Guardian put it, “outlets were banned from covering the match live in any way, including text commentary, social media, or push notifications.” DeepMind broadcast the match outside China.During this same period, Chinese censors quietly rolled back some of the openings that Google’s earlier China operations had catalyzed. In 2016, Chinese search engines began removing the censorship disclaimers that Google had pioneered. In 2017, the government launched a new crackdown on virtual private networks (VPNs), software widely used for circumventing censorship. Meanwhile, Chinese authorities began rolling out extensive AI-powered surveillance technologies across the country, constructing what some called a “21st-century police state” in the western region of Xinjiang, home to the country’s Muslim Uighurs.Despite the retrograde climate, Google capped off 2017 with a major announcement: the launch of a new AI research center in Beijing. Google Cloud’s Chinese-born chief scientist, Fei-Fei Li, would oversee the new center. “The science of AI has no borders,” she wrote in the announcement of the center’s launch. “Neither do its benefits.” (Li left Google in September 2018 and returned to Stanford University, where she is a professor.)If the research center was a public symbol of Google’s continued efforts to gain a foothold in China, Google was also working quietly to accommodate Chinese government restrictions. Dragonfly, the censored- search-engine prototype, which has been demonstrated for Chinese officials, blacklists key search terms; it would be operated as part of a joint venture with an unnamed Chinese partner. The documents The Intercept obtained said the app would still tell users when results had been censored.Other aspects of the project are particularly troubling. Prototypes of the app reportedly link users’ searches to their mobile-phone number, opening the door to greater surveillance and possibly arrest if people search for banned material.In a speech to the Dragonfly team, later leaked by The Intercept, Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, explained Google’s aims. China, he said, is “arguably the most interesting market in the world today.” Google was not just trying to make money by doing business in China, he said, but was after something bigger. “We need to understand what is happening there in order to inspire us,” he said. “China will teach us things that we don’t know.”In early December, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told a Congressional committee that "right now we have no plans to launch in China," though he would not rule out future plans. The question is, if Google wants to come back to China, does China want to let it in?To answer that question, try thinking like an advisor to President Xi Jinping.Bringing Google search back certainly has upsides. China’s growing number of knowledge workers need access to global news and research, and Baidu is notoriously bad at turning up relevant results from outside China. Google could serve as a valuable partner to Chinese companies looking to expand internationally, as it has demonstrated in a patent-sharing partnership with Tencent and a $550 million investment in e-commerce giant JD. Google’s reentry would also help legitimize the Communist Party’s approach to internet governance, a signal that China is an indispensable market—and an open one—as long as you “play by the rules.”But from the Chinese government’s perspective, these potential upsides are marginal. Chinese citizens who need to access the global internet can still usually do so through VPNs (though it is getting harder). Google doesn’t need to have a business in China to help Chinese internet giants gain business abroad. And the giants of Silicon Valley have already ceased their public criticism of Chinese internet censorship, and instead extol the country’s dynamism and innovation.By contrast, the political risks of permitting Google to return loom large to Xi and his inner circle. Hostility toward both China and Silicon Valley is high and rising in American political circles. A return to China would put Google in a political pressure cooker. What if that pressure—via antitrust action or new legislation—effectively forced the company to choose between the American and Chinese markets? Google’s sudden exit in 2010 marked a major loss of face for the Chinese government in front of its own citizens. If Chinese leaders give the green light to Project Dragonfly, they run the risk of that happening again.A savvy advisor would be likely to think that these risks—to Xi, to the Communist Party, and to his or her own career—outweighed the modest gains to be had from allowing Google’s return. The Chinese government oversees a technology sector that is profitable, innovative, and driven largely by domestic companies—an enviable position to be in. Allowing Google back in would only diminish its leverage. Better, then, to stick with the status quo: dangle the prospect of full market access while throwing Silicon Valley companies an occasional bone by permitting peripheral services like translation.Google does have one factor in its favor. If it first entered China during the days of desktop internet, and departed at the dawn of the mobile internet, it is now trying to reenter in the era of AI. The Chinese government places high hopes on AI as an all-purpose tool for economic activity, military power, and social governance, including surveillance. And Google and its Alphabet sibling DeepMind are the global leaders in corporate AI research.This is probably why Google has held publicity stunts like the AlphaGo match and an AI-powered “Guess the Sketch” game on WeChat, as well as taking more substantive steps like establishing the Beijing AI lab and promoting Chinese use of TensorFlow, an artificial-intelligence software library developed by the Google Brain team. Taken together, these efforts constitute a sort of artificial-intelligence lobbying strategy designed to sway the Chinese leadership.This pitch, however, faces problems on at least three battlegrounds: Beijing; Washington, DC; and Mountain View, California.Chinese leaders have good reason to feel they’re already getting the best of both worlds. They can take advantage of software development tools like TensorFlow and they still have a prestigious Google research lab to train Chinese AI researchers, all without granting Google market access.In Washington, meanwhile, American security officials are annoyed that Google is actively courting a geopolitical rival while refusing to work with the Pentagon on AI projects because its employees object to having their work used for military ends.Those employees are the key to the third battleground. They’ve demonstrated the ability to mobilize quickly and effectively, as with the protests against US defense contracts and a walkout last November over how the company has dealt with sexual harassment. In late November more than 600 Googlers signed an open letter demanding that the company drop the Dragonfly project, writing, “We object to technologies that aid the powerful in oppressing the vulnerable.” Daunting as these challenges sound—and high as the costs of pursuing the Chinese market may be—they haven’t entirely deterred Google’s top brass. Though the development of Dragonfly appears to have, at the very least, paused, the wealth and dynamism that make China so attractive to Google also mean the decision of whether or not to do business there is no longer the company’s to make.“I know people in Silicon Valley are really smart, and they’re really successful because they can overcome any problem they face,” says Bill Bishop, a digital-media entrepreneur with experience in both markets. “I don’t think they’ve ever faced a problem like the Chinese Communist Party.”Matt Sheehan is a fellow at MacroPolo and worked with Kai-Fu Lee on his book AI Superpowers.

This is a perilous situation and it threatens to become even more hazardous as our economy gets better and better - we have the hottest economy in the world, and the jobs and unemployment, you look at any numbers right now, we have more people working than at any time in the history of our country. And people want to come in and in some cases they want to take advantage of that and that’s okay and we want them to come in but they have to come in through merit and they have to come in legally.Large organized caravans of migrants are marching towards our southern border, some people call it an invasion, it’s like an invasion and they violently overrun the Mexican border, these are tough people in many cases lots of young men, strong men and a lot of men maybe we don’t want in our country.