I am white. As an academic, consultant and writer on white racial identity and race relations, I speak daily with other white people about the meaning of race in our lives. These conversations are critical because, by virtually every measure, racial inequality persists, and institutions continue to be overwhelmingly controlled by white people. While most of us see ourselves as “not racist”, we continue to reproduce racist outcomes and live segregated lives.In the racial equity workshops I lead for American companies, I give participants one minute, uninterrupted, to answer the question: “How has your life been shaped by your race?” This is rarely a difficult question for people of color, but most white participants are unable to answer. I watch as they flail, some giving up altogether and waiting out the time, unable to sustain 60 seconds of this kind of reflection. This inability is not benign, and it certainly is not innocent. Suggesting that whiteness has no meaning creates an alienating – even hostile – climate for people of color working and living in predominantly white environments, and it does so in several ways.If I cannot tell you what it means to be white, I cannot understand what it means not to be white. I will be unable to bear witness to, much less affirm, an alternate racial experience. I will lack the critical thinking and skills to navigate racial tensions in constructive ways. This creates a culture in which white people assume that niceness is the answer to racial inequality and people of color are required to maintain white comfort in order to survive.An inability to grapple with racial dynamics with any nuance or complexity is ubiquitous in younger white people who have been raised according to an ideology of colorblindness. I have been working with large tech companies whose average employees are under 30 years old. White employees are typically dumbfounded when their colleagues of color testify powerfully in these sessions to the daily slights and indignities they endure and the isolation they feel in overwhelmingly white workplaces. This pain is especially acute for African Americans, who tend to be the least represented.While the thin veneer of a post-racial society that descended during the Obama years has been ripped away by our current political reality, most white people continue to conceptualize racism as isolated and individual acts of intentional meanness. This definition is convenient and comforting, in that it exempts so many white people from the system of white supremacy we live in and are shaped by. It is at the root of the most common kind of white defensiveness. If racists are intentionally and openly mean, then it follows that nice people cannot be racist. How often will a white person accused of racism gather as evidence to the contrary friends and colleagues to testify to their niceness; the charge cannot be true, the friend cannot be racist, because “he’s a really nice guy” or “she volunteers on the board of a non-profit serving under-privileged youth”. Not meaning to be racist also allows for absolution. If they didn’t mean it, it cannot and should not count.Thus, it becomes essential for white people to quickly and eagerly telegraph their niceness to people of color. Niceness in these instances is conveyed through tone of voice (light), eye contact accompanied by smiling and the conjuring of affinities (shared enjoyment of a music genre, compliments on hair or style, statements about having traveled to the country the “other” is perceived to have come from or knowing people from the other’s community). Kindness is compassionate and often implicates actions to support or intervene. For example, I am having car trouble and you stop and see if you can help. I appear upset after a work meeting and you check in and listen with the intent of supporting me. Niceness, by contrast, is fleeting, hollow and performative.In addition to niceness, proximity is seen as evidence of a lack of racism. Consider the claims many white people give to establish that they aren’t racist: “I work in a diverse environment.” “I know and/or love people of color.” “I was in the Peace Corps.” “I live in a large urban city.” These are significant because they reveal what we think it means to be racist. If I can tolerate (and especially if I enjoy and value) proximity, claims of proximity maintain, I must not be racist; a “real” racist cannot stand to be near people of color, let alone smile or otherwise convey friendliness.In a 1986 article about black students and school success, Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu describe a “fictive kinship” between African Americans, a kinship that is not consanguineal (by blood) or affinal but derived from the assumption of shared experience. The racial kinship white people attempt to draw from niceness might be seen as a false or fabricated affinity. Most white people live segregated lives and in fact have no lasting cross-racial relationships. We are in the position to choose segregation and often do. The claims of non-racism that we make are therefore based on the most superficial of shared experiences: passing people of color on the street of large cities and going to lunch on occasion with a co-worker.Note that our cursory friendliness does not come without strings. Consider the case of a white California woman who called the police this past May when a group of black Airbnb guests did not return her smile. The expectation is that the “nod of approval”, the white smile, will be reciprocated. This woman, like all the other white people who have called the police on people of color for non-existent offenses, vigorously denied she was racist. After all, she did smile and wave before reporting them.I have heard many black Americans talk about the awkwardness of white people “over-smiling”. The act is meant to convey acceptance and approval while maintaining moral integrity, but actually conveys white racial anxiety. Over-smiling allows us to mask an anti-blackness that is foundational to our very existence as white. A fleeting benevolence, of course, has no relation to how black people are actually undermined in white spaces. Black friends have often told me that they prefer open hostility to niceness. They understand open hostility and can protect themselves as needed. But the deception of niceness adds a confusing layer that makes it difficult for people of color to decipher trustworthy allyship from disingenuous white liberalism. Gaslighting ensues.The default of the current system is the reproduction of racial inequality. To continue reproducing racial inequality, the system only needs for white people to be really nice and carry on – to smile at people of color, to go to lunch with them on occasion. To be clear, being nice is generally a better policy than being mean. But niceness does not bring racism to the table and will not keep it on the table when so many of us who are white want it off. Niceness does not break with white solidarity and white silence. In fact, naming racism is often seen as not nice, triggering white fragility.We can begin by acknowledging ourselves as racial beings with a particular and limited perspective on race. We can attempt to understand the racial realities of people of color through authentic interaction rather than through the media or through unequal relationships. We can insist that racism be discussed in our workplaces and a professed commitment to racial equity be demonstrated by actual outcomes. We can get involved in organizations working for racial justice. These efforts require that we continually challenge our own socialization and investments in racism and put what we profess to value into the actual practice of our lives. This takes courage, and niceness without strategic and intentional anti-racist action is not courageous. Topics Race Antiracism and America Inequality comment

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh will begin on Sept. 4, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley announced in a statement on Friday. FILE PHOTO: With the U.S. Supreme Court building in the background, Supreme Court nominee judge Brett Kavanaugh arrives prior to meeting with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., July 10, 2018. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts/File PhotoOpening statements by committee members will take place on Sept. 4, and the questioning of Kavanaugh will start the following day, the committee statement said. The hearings are expected to last three or four days. Republican President Donald Trump nominated Kavanaugh, 53, on July 9 to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. Before he can assume the lifetime job on the nine-member court, the Republican-controlled Senate must vote to confirm him. “He’s a mainstream judge. He has a record of judicial independence and applying the law as it is written,” Grassley said in a statement, noting that Kavanaugh has met with dozens of senators. “With the Senate already reviewing more documents than for any other Supreme Court nominee in history, Chairman Grassley has lived up to his promise to lead an open, transparent and fair process,” White House spokesman Raj Shah said in a separate statement. But Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, who has promised to fight Kavanaugh’s nomination, said in a statement that Republicans were in a “mad rush” to hold hearings after deciding to block nearly all of Kavanaugh’s records from public release. Democrats are seeking documents from Kavanaugh’s service from 2001 to 2003 as a White House lawyer under Republican former President George W. Bush. Earlier this week, several Democratic senators filed requests under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act to try and compel the government to release the records. Schumer said on Friday that Republicans were only planning to release a small portion of documents that would be “cherry-picked by a Republican operative” currently working for the former president Bush. Kavanaugh has amassed a solidly conservative judicial record as an appeals court judge for 12 years. His confirmation will require a simple majority in the 100-seat Senate, where Republicans hold a 51-49 edge over Democrats and independents. If the Republicans stick together, they can get Kavanaugh confirmed, but that could be a challenge, given the divisive issues swirling around the conservative nominee, including abortion, gay rights, healthcare and tariffs. Conservatives also hope to pressure some Democrats into voting for Kavanaugh, especially those who are up for re-election this year and come from states that voted for Trump in 2016, like Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Joe Donnelly of Indiana. All three voted last year for Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch. Reporting by Susan Cornwell Editing by Jonathan OatisOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Before Trump, before the Kavanaugh hearings, the book tour, the “she’s running” memes, the California senator Kamala Harris sat in St Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco amid a sea of blue-uniformed police officers.The year was 2004, just a few months into Harris’s first term as San Francisco district attorney – her first elected position. A young police officer, Isaac Espinoza, had been gunned down on the job, and the city’s rank-and-file were out for blood.Harris had unseated the incumbent (albeit unpopular) district attorney in part by campaigning to not seek capital punishment. Three days before the funeral at St Mary’s, Harris announced that she intended to keep her campaign promise, much to the fury of the police. But as she sat in the cathedral, the woman who would later become her colleague, Senator Dianne Feinstein, veered from the script and called for the death penalty, prompting thousands of officers to their feet.Harris remained sitting.To this day, some city police officers will still clench their teeth when Harris’s name comes up in conversation, recalling what they describe as a betrayal 15 years prior.But Harris took the political hit. She stayed the course, as she always had in her meteoric rise in San Francisco and California politics. Her career has been dotted with moments like the one in St Mary’s, but her track record shows that she has grand ambitions and a plan on how to achieve them, making both friends and enemies along the way.And now, as she eyes the highest office in the land, few doubt her ability to eventually get where she wants to go.“Nobody works harder than Kamala Harris,” said Lateefah Simon, Harris’s longtime friend. “She’s a strategist. She has a memory like nobody you’ll ever meet. But more than that, I think she cares. She cares about what happens in the lives of the people in our community.”San Francisco has long been considered a liberal bastion, but it’s taken time for the city’s power structure to reflect the diversity of the people. But until Harris was elected district attorney in 2003, only white men had held that office. Born in Oakland in 1964, at the height of the Bay Area’s anti-war and civil rights activism, she was bussed to an elementary school in Berkeley as “part of a national experiment in desegregation”, according to her political memoir, The Truths We Hold.Her parents – Shyamala Gopalan, an Indian immigrant, and Donald Harris, who was born in Jamaica – would often bring her to marches and protests at UC Berkeley.After her parents divorced, Harris and her younger sister, Maya, who would go on to become a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign, were primarily raised by their mother. Harris attended high school in Montreal, where her mother had a job teaching at McGill University, and went on to study at Howard University before returning to the Bay Area for law school at UC Hastings.There, she met Jeff Adachi. Later on, as the city’s public defender, he would face off with Harris as her chief in-court adversary when she became the city’s top prosecutor. But at UC Hastings, he was just a tutor.“Even then, she was an extremely talented, charismatic person who had a very strong ambition. That was something that struck me right away,” Adachi said. “She was always a people person, as she is now, but always very focused on whatever it was that she wanted.”In her last summer in law school, she went on to intern at the Alameda county district attorney’s office, where she spent a few years after she passed the bar. She later went on to the San Francisco district attorney’s office as a line prosecutor, eventually taking over the office’s career criminal unit.“I remember asking her why she wanted to be a prosecutor,” Adachi said, “and she said, ‘That’s how I’m going to change the world.’”In 1994, Harris met then state assembly speaker Willie Brown, a controversial figure in California politics.Back then, he was called the “Ayatollah of the Assembly”. In San Francisco, a city defined by its great wealth and even greater economic disparities in part because of its rich history of political back-scratching, he’d go on to be known by many names: “Da Mayor” (he was mayor of San Francisco from 1996 to 2004); the kingmaker; the puppetmaster.Anybody in Brown’s orbit is considered part of the Willie Brown machine – which, depending on who you ask, is either merely an influential, moderate-leaning branch of the California Democratic party, a self-serving cartel with the lobbying and fundraising skills to make or break careers, or both.Brown’s proteges soar high, but the whispers follow. This rang especially true for Harris, who dated Brown for about a year. He was 60 and she was 29. During this time, Brown appointed her to the state Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission, both high-paying positions.Many politicians owe their success to Brown. He launched the careers of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, the former California state senator Mark Leno, and the former San Francisco mayor Ed Lee, but when discussing Harris, the talk gets particularly nasty, in part because of their romantic history.Harris has spent much of the past 25 years distancing herself from Brown – she doesn’t mention him once in her political memoir. But much like he did for Newsom and Leno, Brown opened doors. And when it came time for her to run for district attorney after a stint working in the city attorney’s office, she won.“In those days, when you were supported by Willie Brown, it came with all the support and money of the San Francisco establishment,” said Aaron Peskin, a current member of the San Francisco board of supervisors.In San Francisco, where only less than 7% of all registered voters are registered Republican, the political spectrum spans mostly between moderate and progressive Democrat. Peskin, a longtime progressive stalwart in city government with healthy skepticism of Willie Brown’s influence, found himself aligned with Harris, despite their political differences.“I was an early enthusiast for Kamala Harris for district attorney, even though I’m a self-professed leftie and she came from the Willie Brown moderates,” Peskin said. “All things being equal, I’d rather have a district attorney that is independent of the mayor [Brown was still mayor at the time Harris was elected]. Mayors want to have influence over the legislative body, but how often do mayors call upon the district attorney?”Harris ran for district attorney at a contentious time for the office. The incumbent, Terence Hallinan, a prominent progressive, had unsuccessfully tried to indict the entire command staff of the San Francisco police department.Hallinan was unpopular, but it was still shocking for a first-time candidate to beat not just a sitting official, but also a serial candidate for district attorney, Bill Fazio.“She had a lot of support,” said Fazio, a former prosecutor and the third candidate in the race. “She was a new face, an attractive candidate, and I don’t just mean in a physical sense. For San Francisco, she fit in well. She had connections through Willie Brown. She was introduced to a lot of moneyed people.”Harris had campaigned on the promise to repair relations between her office and the embattled police department – and then, on her 100th day in office, there she was in St Mary’s Cathedral, watching as thousands of cops cheered against her. Peskin had attended the funeral and remained seated as well, and remembered seeing her a few rows in front him, her face ashen.“It was so hard and painful,” said Lateefah Simon, Harris’s longtime friend. “She was new to the office and she had always been clear: she was anti-death penalty. But you know, I never saw Kamala bow her head down in any kind of shame. I think during this time, she began to deeply understand the power of her voice and how she could move through situations.”A few months later, Harris called Simon up and asked her if she wanted to run her re-entry services. Simon told Harris it would be risky to hire her, “a teen mom with no college degree”. (Simon is selling herself short here – she is the youngest woman to receive the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship). But Harris refused to let Simon settle, and part of her employment agreement included the requirement to get her degree. “She made me show her my report cards!” Simon laughed.“Listen, Kamala Harris is the toughest person that you’ll ever work for,” Simon said. “She is just a zealot about public service, and it’s intense. But everybody who works for Kamala is forever transformed. I know it’s not just me. There were many others.”Harris regularly put in 12- to 14-hour days, talking to victims’ families “and promising them justice”, Simon said. She held her employees to high standards, but herself to even higher ones.“One day, she had a really bad cold,” Simon said. “It was like the flu. She had tissues, but she was still impeccably dressed, and she had a bowl of clementines on her impeccably organized desk. It was like 4.50pm. I said, ‘Ms Harris’ – because I always called her Ms Harris when I worked for her – ‘it’s almost quitting time, and you’re sick.’ She took a sip of water, looked at those bowls of clementines and then looked me dead in the eyes and said, ‘I don’t get sick.’”Harris has received criticism for her record as district attorney, for which she was re-elected in 2007. While Harris has been outspoken about her progressive values on police reform and criminal justice, her critics say her time as district attorney does not reflect that.“In many respects, she was a traditional prosecutor, concerned with conviction rates and victims’ rights,” Adachi said. “This was before the criminal justice reform movement and Black Lives Matter had really taken hold, and she pretty much ran the office as you would expect a prosecutor to run an office. But she was also open to programs that helped individuals turn their lives around.”One of the biggest missteps of her tenure as district attorney arose as she was running for attorney general in 2010. Ahead of the primary, the San Francisco police department became embroiled in a scandal. A criminalist at the department admitted to regularly stealing cocaine from evidence. The woman also implicated other analysts in poor investigative work, resulting in the dismissal of hundreds of pending cases.A superior court judge pilloried Harris’s office in a scathing ruling on the case and essentially accused her office of violating defendants’ constitutional rights by not informing them of the issues, as prosecutors are obligated to.Entering the race with this scandal hanging overhead, the odds were against Harris.Yet she won. The race was so close that it was not until three weeks after the election and the provisional ballots were counted that the former Los Angeles county district attorney Steve Cooley conceded.“You got to remember, Kamala Harris is all politics all the time,” Cooley said. “There’s no question when it comes to being a politician, she is very committed and hardworking, whereas I was a career prosecutor. I never perceived myself as a politician.”Nine years later, Cooley still expresses some bitterness over the loss, and Harris’s criminal justice record, saying that he’s heard from “many elected DAs” around the state who believe she was “the worst attorney general ever”.But underneath the bitterness is a grudging respect.“She looked at everything she did as DA from a political prism,” he said. “Attorney general is a pretty powerful position in California. I think when she was DA, she was already looking at it as the next step up the ladder. Watch her now. She’s in the Senate and now apparently she’s going for president.”He laughed. “I’ll hand that to her. Her ambition is without equal.”Ambitious women get a bad rep in this world, especially ambitious politicians who are women, and Harris and her supporters have heard it all. Calculating. Untrustworthy. Unlikable. “This is what happens when you have a dynamic and gifted woman of color who goes into her job and does her job,” Simon said.Bill Fazio, the attorney who Harris defeated in her first race for district attorney, still balks when he hears people describe Harris as “guarded” or “cold” because he knows that she is anything but that.In March 2009, Fazio’s wife died and out of the blue, he received a call from Harris. “Her mom passed away about the same time, and she was very close to her mom.” Fazio said. “All she wanted to do was to talk about our personal losses in a very personal way.”He continued: “People always call me up thinking I’m going to trash her. But I still feel really positive about her.”In a prime example of the insular and small-world nature of San Francisco politics, the San Francisco supervisor Aaron Peskin and Harris had not only attended Thousand Oaks elementary school together in Berkeley, but were in the same class from kindergarten through third grade. “Her mother was Shyamala, from India, and my mother was Tsipora, from what was then Palestine, now Israel,” Peskin said. “It’s a total Bay Area story.”When Peskin’s father died in April, he was surprised to get a text message from Harris containing a snapshot of a class book they had put together as kids with the message: “Thinking of you.”It’s telling that even her former adversaries are reluctant to speak too badly of her, in part because many believe that like every other goal she’s met in her life, she’s destined for higher office, whether in this race or the next.But for more, there’s an aspect of game recognizing game. No matter the criticism of Harris, no one can deny that she stayed the course, in a time when few have the necessary discipline, dedication or political knowhow to do so.“She didn’t come from a place of privilege or money,” said Adachi, the public defender. “She wasn’t a Kennedy. She had to work hard to get to where she is. A lot of people say she coasted into the Senate position. No, it was because of the political capital she built from those other races. And since then, she has been able to take the political capital, and amplify it. And she’ll do it for every office she’ll run for.” Topics US elections 2020 California US politics San Francisco Democrats features

The United Nations has defended its new global estimates on slavery after reports that India’s intelligence agency advised Prime Minister Narendra Modi to discredit the research, saying it may tarnish the country’s image and exports. A report by Australian rights group Walk Free Foundation and UN bodies the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) published on 19 September found more than 40 million people across the world were victims of modern day slavery last year. The report said 62% of those in forced marriages or forced labour such as construction or domestic work were in the Asia-Pacific region. It did not provide country-specific data. But in a memo from India’s Intelligence Bureau to Modi’s office, the agency questioned the report’s methodology, claiming the data “has enough potential to substantially harm India’s image and exports,” the Indian Express reported on Wednesday.The bureau warned that “global documentation on slavery is increasingly targeting India as home to the highest number of slaves in the world,” and called for a strong campaign to “discredit” the information, the newspaper report added. A home ministry official said that he could not confirm or deny inputs from security agencies. ILO officials rejected claims India was being targeted and said they had full confidence in the report’s findings. “The memo is based on a misunderstanding. There are no national figures in the data. We don’t single out any country,” Beate Andrees, ILO’s chief of the Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, said. “We collaborated with Walk Free for a global figure as there was there was a strong demand among practitioners who found it unhelpful to have competing numbers on this.“ According to the Indian Express, the memo cited figures from a 2016 report by the Walk Free Foundation which estimated that 40% – more than 18 million – of the world’s estimated 45.8 million slaves were in India. The ILO’s senior statistician, Michaelle De Cock, said the security agency had confused data from last year’s Walk Free Foundation with this year’s new global estimates. “There has been some confusion over the data. We do not endorse the data from the Walk Free report last year. Our global estimates are based on a completely new methodology which has to go through all the usual ILO procedures.“ There are no national figures on the number of people in slavery in India, but the labour ministry recently announced plans to identify, rescue and help over 18 million bonded labourers by 2030. In India, many victims are villagers lured by traffickers with the promise of a good job and an advance payment, only to find themselves forced to toil in fields or brick kilns, enslaved in brothels or confined as maids to pay off debt. Others work at the bottom of complex and often untransparent supply chains - producing everything from jewellery, cosmetics and garments - where they work long hours under strenuous condition for a meagre wage and with little freedoms. According to the newspaper report, the intelligence agency said the data from the ILO-Walk Free Foundation report was based on “questionable statistics” with interviews with over 17,000 people in India, but only 2,000 or less in other countries. But Walk Free Foundation’s head of global research, Fiona David, said the global estimates were drawn from the best data available on modern slavery today. “We welcome the Indian government’s continued focus and commitment on this issue,” said David. “We would be delighted to work with the Indian government on national estimation efforts.” Campaigners say the leaked memo may be part of a wider policy by the Indian government to crack down on civil society groups which voice dissent or attempt to show India in a poor light. In 2014, the security agency questioned the motives of foreign-funded charities such as Greenpeace claiming that their campaigns against mining, genetically modified crops and nuclear power was harming India’s development. Topics India Slavery South and Central Asia United Nations news

The final day of US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings began with a bang.Democratic senators started the judiciary committee session today (Sept. 7) with an eloquent rebellion decrying that too many documents deemed “committee confidential” can’t be discussed in open session. Their presence at the hearings doesn’t indicate consent to a “sham” process, they said.Cory Booker of New Jersey—who has vowed to release documents despite the confidential designation—began by complaining to committee chairman Charles Grassley, a Republican, about “the absurdity of the process.” Booker bemoaned the fact that committee members have to identify documents they want released by number and name, and “so long as it’s a reasonable request” Grassley will send it for review to Bill Burke, a private attorney designated by Donald Trump for the process. Senators have little time to review the documents and no chance to follow up on new discoveries.“This process is a bit of a sham,” Booker contended. He reiterated his willingness to disobey the confidentiality rules and risk explusion. “No senate rule accounts for Bill Burke’s partisan review of documents..I understand what civil disobedience is and I understand the consequences…I am going to release the email and I understand that comes with potential ousting from the Senate…I’m releasing it to expose that emails being withheld from the public have nothing to do with national security.”Grassley was unmoved by the threat, asking only, “How many times are you going to tell us that?”The chairman was unhappy about the word “sham” though and told Booker, “We don’t go to Burke. We go to the Department of Justice.” He noted that DOJ civil servants “work late into the night” to accommodate the document requests, that they are apolitical, and should be respected.Texas Republican John Cornyn didn’t call Booker out by name in noting that one of his colleagues was displaying “conduct unbecoming to a senator.” Releasing documents deemed confidential, he said, “is irresponsible and outrageous.”At this, the Democrats became animated, eager to align themselves with Booker.“Lest silence imply consent, speaking for myself, I want to make it absolutely clear that I do not accept the process, ” Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said. “I do not accept its legitimacy or validity…I’ve not made a big fight…but it’s as if the committee unilaterally repealed the law of gravity…I am not willing to concede that there is any legitimacy to this entire committee confidential process.”Democrat Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said the hearings seemed to echo the chaos in a nation where “the process has broken down.” Blumenthal argued that there are no rules on committee confidentiality mutually agreed upon by both Democrats and Republicans—and no need to conceal Kavanaugh’s documents: “All these documents belong to the people of the United States…so shame on my colleagues if they conceal them now and deny us the benefit of questioning this nominee who comes before us for the last time today.”He clarified his position, “We’re making this protest and are here under protest.”Republican Mike Lee of Utah said he and Booker spoke the night before and agreed upon a document release, which is proof that process is not “rigged.” Lee said, on the contrary, it’s not fair to Kavanaugh if he doesn’t have access to the documents he’s being questioned about.California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who has been cordial to Kavanaugh but vocal in her opposition, was having none of that: “It’s my understanding that by agreement with private lawyer Bill Burke, the chairman has designated 190,000 pages committee confidential.” Previously, the committee has made material confidential only through bipartisan agreement, she argued. Feinstein pointed out that only seven percent of Kavanaugh’s record has been released in total and only four percent has been made public, compared to 99% of Elena Kagan’s record when she was under consideration for the bench as a nominee of Barack Obama.“This is without precedent,” Feinstein contended. “I do think we have a problem and for the future we oughta settle the problem with agreement between the two sides…the fact is we should agree on who determines something is committee confidential and what the criteria are.”Dick Durbin, the democratic senator from Illinois echoed Whitehouse, saying, “I don’t want my silence to indicate consent…Lest you think we’re carping on a trifle here, we’re talking about whether the American people have the right to know.” He threw his lot in with Booker, saying, “Let’s jump into this pit together…if there’s going to be some retribution against the senator from New Jersey, count me in.” Hawaii Democrat Mazie Hirono interrupted Grassley on several occasions. “Count me in too,” she said. “I would defy anyone reading this document to be able to conclude this document should be deemed confidential in an way shape or form.”Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar then reiterated her opposition, saying the Democrat’s rebellion was happening only because “this hearing was ramrodded through.” She offered a solution: “You must somehow expedite review and we must have some kind of rule in place to get the documents out. We simply cannot hide these documents from the American public.”All of that said, the rebellion isn’t likely to stop Kavanaugh’s confirmation. And the Democrats’ displays may just be a kind of political theater ahead of midterm elections in November. The Senate is controlled by Republicans, who hold a 51-49 margin as Jon Kyl fills John McCain’s vacant seat in Arizona, and all Kavanaugh needs is a simple majority.Still, a handful of senators—Republican and Democrats—have not committed to a “yes” or “no” vote. So Democrats on the judiciary committee need to be dramatic, hammering home the illegitimacy of the confirmation process and the fact that much remains unknown about Kavanaugh to secure the few who are undecided. Or, at the very least, to win the hearts of their constituents with impressive displays of commitment to transparency and to American ideals.

Bkav Corp YouTube Less than a week after the iPhone X release, a Vietnamese security firm says it has done what others couldn't — trick the phone's facial recognition software. How? One very creepy mask.In a video released by the company Bkav, an employee unshrouds the mask, to which the phone apparently responds to by unlocking. "Face ID on this iPhone X is not as secure as Apple has announced," the employee says. The employee then unlocks the phone again with his own face.On its website, Bkav says it made the mask with two- and three-dimensional printers, silicone and "hand-made" skin to "trick Apple's AI."The whole thing cost about $150, the company says.A feature of the iPhone X, Face ID uses facial recognition rather than a passcode or fingerprint to unlock the phone. It can also be used to confirm identity to make purchases and sign in to other apps.Of course, a feature like that has attracted a few skeptics.Wired made an array of deeply creepy masks, hiring a special effects makeup artist who spent 17 hours embedding thousands of eyebrow hairs with a needle — all of which failed to unlock the phone. The Wall Street Journal tried to fool it, and succeeded — but only by using 8-year-old identical triplets.Apple would not comment on the video for this story. And NPR was not independently able to verify the claims.When the iPhone X was unveiled in September, Apple marketing executive Philip Schiller said that Face ID's creators had developed a "neural engine" to process facial recognition that wouldn't "easily be spoofed by things like photographs," he said."They've even gone and worked with professional mask-makers and makeup artists in Hollywood to protect against these attempts to defeat Face ID. ... We require user attention to unlock. That means if your eyes are closed, you're looking away, it's not going to unlock," Schiller said at the time.Schiller also put the odds of a random person being able to unlock your phone's Face ID at 1 in 1,000,000.But Bkav, the security firm, said hacking Face ID wasn't as hard, pointing out that the software would recognize the owner's face even if half-covered."It means the recognition mechanism is not as strict as you think, Apple seems to rely too much on Face ID's AI. We just need a half face to create the mask," the firm asserted. Enlarge this image Apple's Philip Schiller unveiled the Face ID feature in September. Less than a week after the iPhone X was released, a Vietnamese security firm said it had cracked Face ID using a specially made mask. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Apple's Philip Schiller unveiled the Face ID feature in September. Less than a week after the iPhone X was released, a Vietnamese security firm said it had cracked Face ID using a specially made mask. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Bkav calls its hack proof of concept, "the purpose of which is to prove a principle."Marc Rogers, a researcher at the security firm Cloudflare, told Wired that if Bkav has indeed succeeded in hacking Face ID, the most surprising aspect would be the discovery that printed eyes could deceive it — no eye motion needed.The magazine also notes that Bkav has a history of successfully breaking laptops' facial recognition tools with nothing more than 2-D images of a face.

Today in Washington, DC, Christine Blasey Ford broke down the details of experiencing an attempted rape. She described the traumatizing assault as people around the world watched, and as the Senate Judiciary Committee questioned her, in an effort to establish whether her alleged assailant, Brett Kavanaugh, is fit to sit on America’s Supreme Court’s bench.Although the point of the hearing is to determine whether Kavanaugh is a good choice for a lifelong government appointment, much of the hearing seemed designed to put Ford on trial, with prosecutor Rachel Mitchell attempting to scrutinize every detail of Ford’s memory. Ford was emotional but thorough, clear about what she did and did not remember, and cautious in her descriptions. Alleging that Kavanaugh covered her mouth with his hand to prevent her from screaming, she said she had feared he might kill her. But she qualified that her fear was that he might do so “accidentally.”For many women, it’s been painful to see Ford compelled to relive such a traumatic event out of her sense of civic duty. The hearing has been a perfect encapsulation of the reality of rape culture and the misogyny we all live with. But it can also be an impactful experience for men—as it is an opportunity for them to witness, in dramatic fashion, what it feels like to be a woman in the world.Both men and women can be victims of sexual abuse and assault. But women bear the additional burden of living in a misogynistic society. And so, whether or not an individual woman has experienced assault, she can likely find something familiar in Ford’s testimony about how she was forced in a room, groped, trapped, and prevented from screaming. She can recognize herself in Ford’s ongoing anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, in the California professor’s claustrophobia and desire to have two front doors. Women live with the constant, quiet fear—a knowledge, really—that something like what Ford described might happen to them.This is what it’s like to exist as a woman in the world.Women are programmed from an early age to take on the responsibility of it. They learn, as little girls, to sit with their legs closed. They are told, as teenagers, that they should not drink too much or stay out too late. And they see, as adults, that if all their caution is not enough, if despite all the planning and fearing they are still attacked, they will be blamed for the harm that came to them. They will be doubted and shamed. A sexual assault will be their failure, their mistake.On that point, too, the investigation into Ford’s claims has been enlightening. She asked the FBI to investigate; the agency did not. So many keep asking why did she not report, but the questions during the testimony should provide at least a clue. To report, amongst other things, meant having to be the subject of any number of questions, all somewhat declining one overarching doubt: Is she worth believing? Had she really, that day, been swimming? Did she have anything to drink before the party? Was she taking any medication at the time? Was it a party? Was it a gathering? What was the purpose? Why did she go? Is she sure she’s not mistaken? Does she really have no doubts?“One hundred percent,” Ford said in her testimony, owning the strength of her truth. Despite all that has happened to her, 36 years ago and then again in the past few weeks, Ford was resolved to go forward out of a sense of civic duty. She withstood scrutiny with compassion and clear determination, asking for nothing but a coffee, if that was convenient, please.And so Ford has taught yet another lesson to anyone watching: Not just about what it’s like for women to live in a man’s world, but about the courage and resilience that women have in spite of this reality.In the word of senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who had listened to Ford in the hearing:No matter what happens at this hearing, to this nomination… There are millions of victims and survivors out there who’ve been inspired by your courage. Bravery is contagious. Indeed that’s the driving force behind the #MeToo movement. And you sharing your story is going to have a lasting positive impact on so many survivors in this country. We owe you a debt of gratitude for that, doctor.

Cryptology is code breaking; sigint is signals intelligence, like intercepting and interpreting phone calls and other communications; humint is human intelligence, the art of persuading people, against their instincts, to provide information.At 35, Shannon Kent was expert in all three. Her husband credits a knack for gleaning information picked up from her father, a lifelong police officer.“She understood how all the pieces came together,” he said. “She wasn’t just relying on local informants. She knew how to fill in the gaps through her knowledge of different intelligence capabilities. She was kind of a one-stop-shop for finding bad guys.”Chief Kent spoke a half-dozen Arabic dialects and four other languages. She was one of the first women to complete the rigorous course required for other troops to accompany Navy SEALs on raids. She could run a 3:30 marathon, do a dozen full-arm-hang pull-ups and march for miles with a 50-pound rucksack.She did this while raising two boys, now ages 3 and 18 months, and, for a time, battling cancer.She used her five overseas combat deployments to master the collection of human intelligence, gaining the trust of tribal leaders, merchants, and local government officials who confided in her, often at great risk to themselves.That is the kind of mission she had been on Jan. 16, when a bomber killed her and three other Americans at a restaurant in Manbij, Syria. The Islamic State claimed credit for the attack. She became the first female service member to die in Syria since American forces arrived in 2015.More than 1,000 people attended Chief Kent’s memorial service on Friday at the United States Naval Academy Chapel in Annapolis, Md., where she was posthumously promoted to senior chief petty officer and awarded five medals and citations. The awards described her Special Operations work and also said she had been the noncommissioned officer in charge at the N.S.A.’s operations directorate for four years.

Despite having at least 10 home-grown unicorns, India’s internet startup sector is not ready to face individual investors in the country.Of the hundreds of companies set up in India post-2006, making it the world’s third-largest startup hub, just five have been listed on stock exchanges so far. Company Founding year Listed on Date of listing Infibeam Incorporation 2007 NSE, BSE Apr. 04, 2016 Intellect Design Arena 2011 NSE, BSE Dec. 18, 2014 Koovs 2010 LSE March 10, 2014 7Seas Entertainment Ltd 2005 BSE Sept. 25, 2010 Yatra Online Inc 2006 NASDAQ Dec. 01, 2016 Source: TracxnThis number is unlikely to change much over the next few years, experts say.“A lot of conversations are happening, but my sense is that actual IPOs (initial public offerings) are still some time away. Companies are not ready and they need to do a lot more preparation before thinking of an IPO,” said Pranjal Srivastava, senior vice-president and head of equity capital markets at ICICI Securities. Srivastava and his team recently worked on the IPO of online matchmaking firm Matrimony.com—the latest internet company to list in India.The chatter around IPOs has risen over recent years as private investors look for exit routes. Only a few, like e-commerce unicorn Shopclues and online furniture seller Pepperfry, have so far gone on record about their plans. In contrast, seven Silicon Valley firms went public in just the first three months of 2017.So what’s stopping Indian entrepreneurs?Attracting funds from private investors like venture capital firms (VCs) and private equity funds (PEs) has not been a challenge. Some of the world’s biggest investors—Tiger Global, Softbank, Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, IDG Capital Partners, and DST Global—have placed bets on Indian startups.In the six months between January and June, around 450 Indian tech startups raised over $5.56 billion (Rs36,203 crore) from VCs and PEs.Meanwhile, raising money through IPOs requires a more robust balance sheet.Unlike VCs or PEs who are willing to put in money even at the idea stage, retail investors focus more on revenues and profitability.“Even if the company is not making profits right now, there needs to be a definitive path towards getting there. And that is the biggest impediment for Indian startups to list,” said Arun Mantena, associate director for valuation advisory at research and advisory firm Aranca.Varun Kohli, vice-president at startup advisory firm, Acquisory, said, ”The main challenge we see is lack of consistency in financial performance.”Most Indian startups are far from reaching break-even. What’s worse, losses run into eye-popping millions.In financial year 2016, Flipkart, the posterboy of Indian internet firms, posted a net loss of Rs5,768.8 crore ($882.6 million), 86% higher than a year ago. Snapdeal, the second-largest homegrown e-commerce firm, lost Rs3,316 crore in the same period, more than double the loss in the previous corresponding period.Several Indian tech startups have failed to carve out a niche for themselves. From food technology to hyperlocal delivery to hotel bookings, they are often just following the herd.In 2016, the founder of a Bengaluru-based hyperlocal grocery delivery startup had told Quartz that his and his competitor’s business models, mobile apps, targeted customers, and potential vendors are all the same. And yet he was hopeful of success because “it’s become a game of funding now. Whoever raises more money and can stay in the game for longer will win. The other will run out of cash and eventually shut shop.” The founder had requested anonymity.While this strategy may work for private investors, retail investors typically look for differentiators that help firms succeed in the long-term, experts said.“The barriers to entry in several internet businesses are really low,” Aranca’s Mantena said. “Any competitor can come at any time and start the same business and do something better than the existing player and overtake it. No one has patent protection as such.” Mantena cites the example of Flipkart, which started the marketplace model in India in 2008. But four years later, in 2012, Amazon entered the country and is now giving it tough competition.On Sept. 11, India saw its latest internet IPO with the listing of Matrimony.com. It took the company 17 years to go public. The over Rs500 crore IPO, received an enthusiastic response as its offer was oversubscribed 4.41 times.While this signals a strong investor appetite, experts believe this could well be a one-off.In September 2015, when Ahmedabad-based e-commerce firm Infibeam received regulatory approval for a Rs450 crore IPO, there was a lot of excitement, too. However, when the IPO opened, the response was lukewarm. No mutual fund applied for a single share.This may be due to a lack of faith in e-commerce and not the entire startup ecosystem.“Investors’ appetite will depend on the sector they (companies) are operating in. Investors will have reservations about some sectors and a liking for others,” Sreedhar Prasad, partner for internet business and startups at KPMG in India.It doesn’t help many young firms have complex structures intended to circumvent investment norms. This can put off retail investors.“It will be a challenge to educate investors of what are the positives in the company,” Srivastava of ICICI Securities said.Among the top reasons cited for the dearth of startup IPOs in India were unfavourable regulations, including rules that measure startups on the same parameters as legacy companies with entirely different business models and growth trajectories.Over the last few years, though, the Indian government and stock market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) have worked to make things easier.The NSE and BSE have also launched separate platforms to list and trade startup shares.Another thing that has kept entrepreneurs away is the low investor appetite for high-risk young businesses with evolving or business models without precedent.That has led to rumours that Indian unicorns may eye listing on US-based Nasdaq, which is famous for successful IPOs by new technology startups.But that may not be the best option, say experts.“The benefit of listing in India is that a lot of investors will know them (companies) as consumers. It’s a big benefit to list in a geography that understands your business model rather than going to another country and trying to explain to them what you do,” said KPMG India’s Prasad. “Companies catering to consumer needs are geography-centric, (and) may initially find it difficult to make a foreign investor understand the market opportunity.”Take Matrimony.com, for instance. Its IPO success could largely be attributed to the fact that Indian investors understand the importance of matchmaking, a banker who worked on the IPO said, requesting anonymity. “If this company had tried listing on Nasdaq, they would have not done so well because it would be very hard to explain India’s arranged marriage system and its importance to American investors,” he said.

By Lawrence Hurley, Andrew Chung and Amanda Becker WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Fighting to salvage his U.S. Supreme Court nomination, Brett Kavanaugh angrily denied on Thursday a university professor’s accusation that he sexually assaulted her 36 years ago in a day of dramatic testimony that gripped the country. Christine Blasey Ford, her voice sometimes cracking with emotion, appeared in public for the first time to detail her allegation against Kavanaugh, a conservative federal appeals court judge chosen by President Donald Trump for a lifetime job on the top U.S. court. Ford told the Senate Judiciary Committee she feared Kavanaugh would rape and accidentally kill her during the alleged assault in 1982, when both were high school students in Maryland. She said she was “100 percent certain” it was Kavanaugh who assaulted her. Kavanaugh testified after Ford finished her appearance, claiming he was the victim of “grotesque and obvious character assassination” orchestrated by Senate Democrats. He said he “unequivocally and categorically” denied Ford’s allegation and vowed he would not back down. “I will not be intimidated into withdrawing from this process,” Kavanaugh added. Although they were at no point in the hearing room together, the clash pitted his word against hers. The almost nine hours of intensely emotional testimony came against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment and assault and had millions of Americans riveted to their TV screens and smart phones. Ford has emerged in the eyes of many American women as a compelling figure in the #MeToo movement that is usually associated less with the names of victims and more with a list of high-profile men accused of misconduct. It was not clear, however, if the drama changed the views of any senators. The Senate, controlled 51-49 by Trump’s fellow Republicans, must now decide whether to vote to confirm Kavanaugh after the extraordinary nearly nine-hour hearing. Four senators — Republicans Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Jeff Flake along with Democrat Joe Manchin — are seen as possible swing voters whose decisions will determine whether Kavanaugh is approved or rejected. Kavanaugh was nominated by President Donald Trump and his confirmation would cement conservative control of the Supreme Court with disputes over abortion rights, immigration, gay rights, voting rights and transgender troops possibly heading toward the justices soon. The Judiciary Committee, on which Republicans hold an 11-10 majority, was to meet on Friday morning and several senators said they expected it to vote then. The full Senate could vote within days. Writing on Twitter after the hearing, Trump said of Kavanaugh: “His testimony was powerful, honest, and riveting. Democrats’ search and destroy strategy is disgraceful and this process has been a total sham and effort to delay, obstruct, and resist. The Senate must vote!” Kavanaugh at times choked back tears, especially when he mentioned that his daughter suggested they pray for Ford, when he spoke of his father and when he mentioned women friends who had rallied to support him. Kavanaugh sharply attacked Democratic senators, calling himself the victim of “a calculated and orchestrated political hit” fueled by anger on the left at Trump’s 2016 election win over Democrat Hillary Clinton, his conservative judicial record, and revenge on behalf of Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton. “I swear today, under oath, before the Senate and the nation, before my family and God, I am innocent of this charge,” Kavanaugh told the Judiciary Committee. Ford, a psychology professor at Palo Alto University in California, said over four hours of testimony that a drunken Kavanaugh attacked her and tried to remove her clothing at a gathering of teenagers when he was 17 years old and she was 15. “With what degree of certainty do you believe Brett Kavanaugh assaulted you?” Democratic Senator Dick Durbin asked Ford. “One hundred percent,” she replied, remaining firm and unruffled even under questioning by a sex crimes prosecutor hired by the committee’s Republicans. When Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein asked her if it could be a case of mistaken identity, as Kavanaugh and some Republican senators have suggested, Ford replied: “Absolutely not” . U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh testifies before a Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing for Kavanaugh on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., September 27, 2018. REUTERS/Jim BourgMurkowski, one of the three moderate Republican senators who have not announced whether or not they will support Kavanaugh, told Reuters: “I find Dr. Ford’s testimony to be credible.” For his part, Kavanaugh testified he was “100 percent certain” none of the alleged incidents of sexual misconduct occurred. Democrats lauded Ford’s testimony as credible, brave and, in the words of Senator Cory Booker, “nothing short of heroic.” “I want to thank you for your courage. And I want to tell you I believe you. ... And I believe many Americans across the country believe you,” Democratic Senator Kamala Harris said. While some Republicans and Trump have called the allegations by Ford and the two other women part of a smear campaign, Ford told the committee she had no political motivation, adding: “I am an independent person and I am no one’s pawn.” Ford was seated at a table in the packed hearing room flanked by her lawyers, facing a bank of senators. She told the senators she was “terrified” to testify but felt it was her civic duty to come forward. “Brett groped me and tried to take off my clothes. He had a hard time because he was very inebriated and because I was wearing a one-piece bathing suit under my clothing. I believed he was going to rape me. I tried to yell for help,” Ford said, adding that Kavanaugh and a friend of his, Mark Judge, were “drunkenly laughing during the attack.” Democratic senators sought to score political points during their five minutes apiece of questioning Ford. The panel’s Republican senators, all men, did not question her, assigning that task to Rachel Mitchell, a sex crimes prosecutor. While Mitchell probed Ford’s account looking for gaps, her questioning seemed disjointed. She took turns with the Democratic senators to ask questions in five-minute segments, disrupting her flow. During Kavanaugh’s testimony, Republican senators sidelined Mitchell and asked their own questions. The bitter fight over Kavanaugh’s nomination is unfolding just weeks before the Nov. 6 congressional elections in which Democrats are trying to seize majority control of Congress from the Republicans. It has also deepened the country’s political polarization. Kavanaugh, sitting alone at the witness table, said he wanted to testify as soon as Ford’s allegation emerged last week and was not surprised other allegations followed. “In those 10 long days, as was predictable and as I predicted, my family and my name have been totally and permanently destroyed by vicious and false additional accusations,” he said, as his wife sat behind him. Kavanaugh repeatedly tangled with Democratic senators, interrupting several of them, including Feinstein and Amy Klobuchar, during testy exchanges. When Klobuchar asked him about his teenage drinking, he threw the question back at her, asking her whether she had ever been blackout drunk. He later apologized for the question. Kavanaugh was careful not to denounce Ford, noting he wished her “no ill will.” He said he was not questioning that Ford may have been sexually assaulted by someone in some place at some time, but that he had never assaulted her or anyone else. Some Democrats have called on Kavanaugh to withdraw in light of the allegations. At the hearing, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham castigated Democratic senators, seeking to rally Republicans not to abandon the nominee. “This is the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics,” Graham said. Ford said Kavanaugh put his hand over her mouth to stop her from screaming during the assault. She added: “This was what terrified me the most, and has had the most lasting impact on my life. It was hard for me to breathe, and I thought that Brett was accidentally going to kill me.” Her strongest memory of the incident, Ford said, was the “uproarious laughter between the two (Kavanaugh and Judge) and their having fun at my expense.” She said the laughter had haunted her ever since. Two other women, Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick, have accused Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct in the 1980s. Slideshow (14 Images)Ramirez accused Kavanaugh of exposing himself during a drunken dormitory party during the 1983-84 academic year when both attended Yale University. Swetnick said she witnessed efforts by Kavanaugh and others to get girls drunk at parties so they could be raped. She said Kavanaugh was present at a 1982 party where she was raped. Trump, who has himself faced accusations of sexual misconduct, chose Kavanaugh to succeed Justice Anthony Kennedy, who retired effective in July. Reporting by Lawrence Hurley, Andrew Chung and Amanda Becker; Additional reporting by Richard Cowan, Makini Brice, Steve Holland, David Morgan and Susan Heavey; Editing by Will Dunham, Kevin Drawbaugh and Peter CooneyOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

The main suspect in the latest rape and murder to shock India has been arrested, police said on Sunday, as protests took place over a separate high-profile sexual assault case.Dhanu Bhuiyan is accused of raping a 16-year-old girl, who was later burned to death, in the eastern state of Jharkhand on Friday. He was found hiding at a relative’s house.The local village chief was also among 15 people detained in the case, and the victim’s family have been given special police protection.Police said Bhuiyan had become enraged after the local village council ordered him to do 100 sit-ups and pay a 50,000-rupee (£550) fine following the rape. He and his accomplices then allegedly attacked the girl’s parents before setting their home on fire with the girl inside.Inspector general Shambhu Thakur said: “We are on the case and we promise the family that the guilty won’t be spared.”The village chief had been arrested because he “announced a punishment that led to the murder”.Village councils often settle disputes in rural India, bypassing a lengthy and expensive judicial system. Although they carry no legal weight, they exert significant day-to-day influence.The chief minister of Jharkhand, Raghubar Das, has called for stringent punishment in what he called a barbaric case, and announced compensation of 100,000 rupees for the victim’s family.Indian authorities have faced renewed pressure to act over sexual assault since the recent gang rape and murder of an eight-year-old Muslim girl by a group of Hindus in Jammu and Kashmir state.The Jammu case has revived communal tensions. Protesters backing the Hindu suspects threw stones at the car of a Jammu and Kashmir state minister, Sham Lal Chaudhary, on Sunday, demanding a new inquiry into the case, media reports said. Topics India South and Central Asia news

Mexico’s foreign minister has warned that terminating Nafta could bring relations with the US to a breaking point, raising the prospect that bilateral cooperation against drug trafficking and illegal migration could be adversely affected by Donald Trump’s bellicose trade rhetoric.The threat from the foreign minister, Luis Videgaray, came as Donald Trump once again threatened to tear up the three-country trade treaty between the US, Canada and Mexico ahead of a fourth round of Nafta negotiations.Mexico and the US work closely on issues such as border security, combatting drug cartels and efforts to stop migrants reaching the US border, but relations between the two neighbors have grown increasingly tense since Trump launched his election campaign on a wave of anti-Mexican sentiment.Speaking in a senate hearing on Tuesday, Videgaray stressed that Mexico “wants an agreement” on Nafta – but also warned that Mexican officials were ready to walk away from negotiations or even withdraw entirely from the deal.“We always have to be ready to get up from the table. This is a logical posture in any negotiation. It’s also a principle of dignity and sovereignty,” Videgaray said. “Mexico is much bigger than Nafta and we have to be ready for any scenario in the negotiations.”He added that the end of Nafta “won’t be the end of the world”.Videgaray’s comments departed sharply from Mexico’s previous strategy of trying to avoid antagonizing Trump. Officials have gone out of their way to ignore the US president’s repeated insults and his promisethat Mexico will pay for the construction of a border wall.Analysts said that Mexico’s apparent patience with Trump’s rhetoric suggested it was trying to keep the treaty at any cost – and for understandable reasons: more than $1m a minute in merchandise crosses the US-Mexico border. Mexican business also bet big on Nafta, which was enacted in 1994 and turned Mexico into an outward-looking and manufacturing-oriented economy, with 80% of its exports heading to the US market.Closer economic ties have been mirrored by closer cooperation on law enforcement and migration: traditionally wary of its northern neighbor, Mexico has over the past 15 years allowed much closer US involvement in its efforts to fight criminal groups. Under pressure from Washington, Mexico launched an aggressive campaign against illegal migrants in 2014, and has detained and deported thousands of people fleeing violence and corruption in Central America.But Videgaray’s statements in the senate suggested sentiments in Mexico were turning tougher and patience running out with Trump, whose Twitter attacks and Nafta threats have tormented the Mexican economy and sent the peso plunging.Mexican officials have traditionally kept trade negotiations separate from talks on security issues, but Videgaray appeared to be playing hardball, said Brenda Estefan, former security attaché at the Mexican embassy in Washington.“Videgaray is stressing now that the entire bilateral relationship is on the table,” she said. “With the whole bilateral relationship on the table, Mexico has more leverage – it makes it more costly for the US to walk away.”The escalation in rhetoric followed the publication of an interview with Trump in Forbes magazine, in which the US president mused openly of ending Nafta.“I happen to think Nafta will have to be terminated if we’re going make it good. Otherwise, I believe you can’t negotiate a good deal,” Trump said.“[The Trans-Pacific Partnership] would have been a large-scale version of Nafta. It would have been a disaster,” he added. “I like bilateral deals.”Business leaders meeting in Mexico City on Monday at a US Chamber of Commerce gathering warned that US negotiators had introduced several “poison pills” to sabotage the Nafta negotiations, including a sunset clause and the elimination of dispute resolution mechanisms.Speaking in Mexico City, Thomas Donohue, the president of the US Chamber of Commerce in Mexico, warned that the “existential threat” to Nafta endangered regional security, Reuters reported. Videgaray also described several deal breakers being brought to the negotiating table, such as “administered trade, restrictions, tariffs, barriers, which perverts the kind of agreement that it is, and this doesn’t suit Mexico”.“What we cannot lose is that a free trade agreement stops being a free trade agreement,” he said. Topics Mexico Americas Donald Trump Trump administration Nafta news

A global network of anti-Muslim activists is using Twitter bots, fake news and the manipulation of images to influence political discourse, new analysis reveals.Many have recorded significant growth in their social media followings over the past year, co-ordinating to push the message that Islam is an “imminent threat” to western society. Researchers from the anti-racist organisation Hope Not Hate found that the impact of tweets from one controversial US activist, Pamela Geller, who is banned from the UK, is magnified by 102 bots, automated or semi-automated accounts that automatically tweet or retweet their content.Researchers also monitored a sample of popular anti-Muslim Twitter accounts in Britain and the US between March and November this year, and found that, on average, there was a 117% growth in followers.Geller, described by critics as a figurehead for Islamophobic organisations, produces the Geller Report, which doubled its viewers to more than two million people each month between July and October. The Gates of Vienna counter-jihadist blog, described by critics as a training manual for anti-Muslim paramilitaries, also doubled in visitors per month during the same period.Patrik Hermansson, researcher for Hope not Hate, said: “The growth among Twitter accounts and websites spreading anti-Muslim hate is alarming. In such a key area of public interest, it is an indication of increased interest in these views and, as each account or site grows, more people are exposed to deeply prejudiced anti-Muslim views.”The study also charts how terror attacks in the UK have been exploited by anti-Muslim activists over social media, with several prominent anti-Muslim Twitter accounts in the UK acquiring a significant number of followers in their aftermath.During the hours and days following the Manchester attack, Tommy Robinson, former leader of the English Defence League (EDL), gained 40,042 followers, an increase of 17%, with the majority – 29,396 – coming within 48 hours of the attack. Robinson gained 22,365 after the Westminster attack: he had a weekly average increase of 6,422 followers from March to November 2017.The aftermath of the London Bridge attack in June was used to illustrate how anti-Muslim activists took advantage, with 32 of the top 100 most shared tweets about the attack expressing negative sentiments about Muslims.The study also accuses Breitbart, run by Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, of spreading fake news, stating that “its reporting on Islam and Muslims is largely indistinguishable from the anti-Muslim movement’s rhetoric or even that of the far right”.The study says a network of online forums and image boards serves as an echo chamber to amplify and spread fabricated anti-Muslim social media campaigns. The most notorious recent example was the exploitation of a photograph of a Muslim woman walking past a group of people helping a victim of the Westminster attack in March 2017.The image gained traction after a Twitter user called @Southlonestar claimed the image revealed the woman’s indifference to the victim being treated. It was recently revealed that @Southlonestar was one of 2,700 accounts handed over to the US House Intelligence Committee by Twitter as a fake account created in Russia to influence UK and US politics.The image of the Muslim woman – who has since spoken of her distress at the attack and the abuse she suffered afterwards – was later superimposed on pictures after the Manchester attack.Researchers claim in their report that bots were employed to amplify Geller’s messages on Twitter, identifying at least 102 accounts that exhibit characteristics of bots, including only exclusively posting content with links to Geller’s website and being highly synchronised, meaning they post the same content at almost the same time.The simplest bots follow and retweet other users. A user with a large number of followers is generally easier to trust and may seem more “legitimate”. The more advanced bots often mix human control with artificial intelligence, and are notoriously difficult to detect. Topics Social media The Observer Twitter Race & religion news

Half of Californians support the travel ban on Muslim-majority countries and 59% are in favor of increased deportations, according to a new survey that suggests there are widespread conservative and xenophobic views in one of the most progressive US states. The poll, conducted by the University of California, Berkeley, found that while a majority of Californians say they broadly support immigrants’ rights and refugees, many also back signature features of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda in a state that has served as the leader in opposing the president’s policies. “In this period when immigrants are being attacked, Californians felt that it’s important to increase deportations,” said Olivia Araiza, the director of the Haas Institute’s Blueprint for Belonging Project, which commissioned the survey alongside the polling group Latino Decisions. “Even Californians are sensitive to rhetoric that excludes people.” The poll was released at a time of intensifying disputes between the Trump administration and the Golden State, which is home to more than 2 million undocumented people, nearly a quarter of all unauthorized immigrants in the US. Last year, the state passed a landmark “sanctuary” law meant to limit local police cooperation with federal immigration authorities, sparking a US justice department lawsuit and mass arrests and raids. While the state’s urban centers like San Francisco and Los Angeles are known as liberal havens, there are some signs of rightwing rage brewing in certain conservative regions under Trump.Araiza emphasized that the results of the survey of 2,440 residents (conducted in English and Spanish in December) were largely pro-immigrant. The poll found that 71% think establishing a pathway to citizenship is important, 79% support citizenship for Dreamers, undocumented people brought to the US as children, 64% agree the state should limit local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, and 66% reject Trump’s US-Mexico border wall as an important immigration policy. While 79% also said they think it’s important to take in immigrants and refugees escaping war and violence, the number fell to 66% when Muslim-majority countries were specified, and 49% said they support Trump’s travel ban. Only 54% said they have “positive views” of Muslims. “People hold inconsistent and contradictory points of views at once,” said Araiza, adding, “We have a job to do to ensure that we use any pulpit we might have to steer people toward belonging and inclusion.” Trump and his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, have argued that a crackdown on immigrants prevents violent crime, but numerous studies have contradicted that narrative – finding that cities with sanctuary policies have significantly lower crime rates and that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit serious crimes than people born in the US. The survey also found contradictory views about race and prejudice. While 68% of respondents said they support race-conscious policies like affirmative action, about half said they agreed with the racist idea that black people need to “try harder”. Topics California US immigration Trump administration Mexico Trump travel ban Refugees Migration news

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: We begin this hour in Syria. Eastern Ghouta is a suburban area just half an hour by car from the capital, Damascus. It used to be a green place full of parks, trees and creeks - not today. Dr. Hamza Hasan has worked in Ghouta's hospitals for the last six years.HAMZA HASAN: (Through interpreter) Spring in Eastern Ghouta is very, very beautiful. Honestly I wish any journalist would go to Ghouta and ask people, what's spring like now? I think 90 or 95 percent would say, there there's no such thing as spring because they're in basements, sitting underground, sitting in holes.SHAPIRO: The Syrian government with the aid of Russia has been shelling Eastern Ghouta for months, and it's been especially relentless in the last two weeks. They're retaliating against rebels based in the area who have been attacking Damascus. We spoke with a handful of people who live in Eastern Ghouta and asked them to describe what life has been like under siege.HIBA ALJAZZAR: The situation in Eastern Ghouta - very, very bad. It is difficult how we'd describe it.SHAPIRO: That's the sound of bombing behind 24-year-old Hiba Aljazzar, a laboratory analyst. She had to cancel her wedding. The house she was planning to get married in has been destroyed.ALJAZZAR: I want to live with my family in my house safely. I feel suffocated. Smell of this fill my chest. For last seven days, I lost my uncle. He is bleeding here in basement, and then he die.FIRAS ABDULLAH: What I see usually after shelling is the debris. I smell the ash, and I see the bloods. My name is Firas Abdullah. I am a Syrian freelance photojournalist. I am from Douma city, one of the cities of Eastern Ghouta. And I am 24 years old. Our children, our families have been underground for about two weeks so far. Some families haven't seen the sun for five days.SHAPIRO: Students try to focus on their studies while bombs are falling around them. Mahmoud Bwedani is 20 years old, studying computer science.MAHMOUD BWEDANI: When the shelling and bombardment gets heavy, we have nothing on our minds except that we are all safe. We don't think about anything else. But when the situation settles down even for a little bit, we get back to thinking about our studies, thinking about the future. So this situation made me think that our minds are wandering between two separate lives.SHAPIRO: Earlier this week, a U.N. aid convoy reached Eastern Ghouta, but then the shelling started again, and Bwedani says the aid workers left, taking the food and other supplies with them.BWEDANI: They got out of the city before unloading all of the cars. I mean, isn't it the United Nations' job to stop the shelling on civilians or to escape the area when the shelling comes?SHAPIRO: These last two weeks have been especially difficult for the children. Maram is an English teacher and mother of two. She asked us to only use her first name out of fear that her family could be targeted. Her kids are 2 years old and 8 months old. The baby is teething. She described emerging from the underground shelter for the first time in five days.MARAM: When we get out, we were surprised. We were shocked. Whole buildings were on the ground - especially when you try to imagine there were people under those buildings.SHAPIRO: She went to the house to get some toys to keep the children entertained.MARAM: I try to play with them, to sing, to do anything to make them forget.SHAPIRO: To make them forget that they are in the middle of a war. When the children get scared, she sings them a lullaby she was raised with, a song by the Lebanese singer Fairuz called "Yalla Tnam" - go to sleep.(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "YALLA TNAM")FAIRUZ: (Singing in Arabic).SHAPIRO: We're joined now by Linda Tom, a U.N. spokesperson in Damascus. Welcome to the program.LINDA TOM: Thank you.SHAPIRO: You just heard that account from the 20-year-old computer science student Mahmoud Bwedani about the aid convoy leaving before food and other supplies were all distributed. Does that match your understanding of what happened?TOM: That is what happened. But what I would say to him is we can't stop the shelling either. What happened was on Monday, after a very, very long wait, the U.N. and partners were finally able to access Douma with humanitarian assistance. And on the day that we were meant to go in, we actually were contacted by the government of Syria, and some of the health supplies - many of the health supplies that were supposed to bring in were not allowed.So three of the trucks were only able to go in half-full. This was of a total of 46 trucks that we were meant to bring in. As soon as we went in, not long afterwards, the fighting resumed. As a result, about 10 trucks were not able to be offloaded, and four trucks were partially offloaded. What that meant was that half the supplies for those 27,500 people were not offloaded.SHAPIRO: What did the aid workers in that convoy tell you they saw in Douma in Eastern Ghouta?TOM: Well, the team said that they saw a desperate situation for people who have endured months of lack of access to humanitarian aid. The food for civilians was in short supply or prohibitively expensive and that there was a high rate of acute malnutrition among children. They met families who said that they had been living underground for weeks and that some basements are now home to almost 200 people.SHAPIRO: Do you have any hope of getting back in with aid soon?TOM: We're absolutely going to be trying again. I mean, we can't leave this like this. We've been trying to reach East Ghouta for weeks, for months. We continue to keep trying because the needs are so desperate inside.SHAPIRO: We've been describing a siege that's lasted two weeks, but clearly the situation has been dire for much longer than that. Can you give us some context?TOM: Yeah, sure. East Ghouta, which is an area where we estimate that there are 400,000 people, has been completely besieged, and there are some areas of East Ghouta that have been besieged for years. And when we talk about besiegement, what that means is that people cannot go in and out. People are not able to have access to food, to basic medicines. They're - if they're sick, they are not able to go out even for medical treatment.SHAPIRO: And so what has changed in these past two weeks that's made it so much worse?TOM: Well, a couple of things. The fighting has gotten much, much worse. Since mid-February, we estimate about 700 people have been killed, and over 3,000 people have been injured. But those estimates may not even be correct. They may be well under what is actually happening.SHAPIRO: We're now coming up on seven years of war in Syria. And in that time, people have heard many terrible stories of people under siege. Is there anything specific about the situation in East Ghouta right now that distinguishes it from the other humanitarian catastrophes that have unfolded across the country?TOM: Well, I think that the situation here is particularly serious and particularly dire for many reasons. East Ghouta's really not very far from Damascus. So we have warehouses full of humanitarian assistance that we can bring in if we were given the opportunity to do so. The siege is tightening. And the longer that the siege lasts, the worse the situation is for the people inside. I talked earlier about people who are waiting to be medically evacuated. Some of those people - and some of them are children - died while waiting to be medically evacuated.SHAPIRO: Linda Tom, thank you for speaking with us today.TOM: You're welcome.SHAPIRO: She's a spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and we reached her on Skype in Damascus.Copyright © 2018 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

More than 26 years ago, Indian soldiers allegedly raped more than 30 women in the Kashmiri villages of Kunan and Poshpora. Those who survived the attack are still fighting for justice, as Aliya Nazki from BBC Urdu reports. It was 23 February 1991. The people of Kunan, a tiny village in Indian administered Kashmir's Kupwara district, were retiring for the night after a cold winter day. Zooni and Zarina (not their real names) were also getting ready to go to bed when they heard a series of loud knocks on the door.At the time, India had started a large scale military operation in an attempt to control a popular armed insurgency against Indian rule in Kashmir. So-called "cordon and search" operations, locally called "crackdowns", were becoming routine and still persist to this day. In the 1990s, this would entail Indian security forces isolating an area, getting all the men out, and then searching the houses. The men would be paraded in front of an informer - and suspected militants or those deemed sympathisers would be picked up and taken away.When Zooni and Zareena saw soldiers on their doorstep that night, they thought it was the beginning of another of these so-called crackdowns. The men were taken away, and the soldiers came in, as was the established practice. But remembering that day makes their eyes fill with tears even now."We were getting ready for bed when the soldiers came. They took the men away. Some started drinking alcohol. I was holding my two-year-old daughter in my arms when they tried to grab me. "I resisted, and in the scuffle she fell out of my arms, and out of the window. She was crippled for life. "Three soldiers grabbed me, tore my pheran, my shirt - I don't even know what all happened after that. There were five of them. I still remember their faces."Zareena was also in the same house. It had only been 11 days since her wedding. "I had returned from my parents' house that very day. "Some soldiers asked my mother-in-law about all the new clothes hanging in the room, so she told them, 'here, she is our new daughter-in-law, our new bride'. "What happened after that, I cannot begin to describe it. We haven't just been wronged, what we have faced is an infinite injustice. Even today when we see soldiers we start shaking with fear."The people of Kunan and neighbouring Poshpora accuse the Indian army of carrying out a planned mass rape of the women in these two far-flung villages. They also claim that while the women were gang-raped, the men were subjected to horrific torture, and that they have been fighting for justice these last 26 years.In Srinagar when I spoke with a minister in the state government, Naeem Akhtar, about these allegations he said that in conflicts like Kashmir truth often gets obscured by the layer of dust that settles on it. And now it seems a group of young Kashmiri women are determined to wipe this dust away.In 2013 they filed a petition to reopen the case in the state High Court. Natasha Rathar, a young scholar, is one of those women who put their names on that petition. Natasha, along with four other young Kashmiri women, has also authored an award-winning book on this case, called Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora?Natasha said that their motivation for reopening the case was quite simple. "This was such a big case of mass rape, in which those affected had actually come forward and had demonstrated so much courage. "And there was a huge body of evidence too. So we felt that this case needed to be reopened."And it was reopened. After a long and difficult process the Jammu and Kashmir High Court directed the state government to pay compensation to those affected. The state government initially agreed, but then changed its mind, and challenged the High Court's decision in the Supreme Court of India, where the case is still being heard.The Indian Army has always denied the allegations. When we requested an interview, they sent us a statement. An army spokesperson told us that these allegations had been independently investigated three times, and that the case had been closed due to conflicting statements. In Kashmir most officials seem to speak in what sound like cautious parables. But not all. We spoke with Nayeema Ahmad Mahjoor, who heads the state commission for women's rights. She told us very clearly that she believes that this crime was committed against the people of Kunan and Poshpora, and that this should be proved in court. She however stressed that the state government cannot interfere in the legal process. What really happened in Kunan and Poshpora that fateful winter night is something we might never find out. But a new generation is coming of age here now. The village and its houses are changing, and yet there are some painful memories that continue to haunt the residents.

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Mel Gibson has spoken out about the sexual harassment scandal in Hollywood, saying the wave of accusations against Harvey Weinstein have been “painful” but will lead to change in the industry.The actor and Oscar-winning director, who has faced repeated damaging allegations of racist and misogynistic behaviour, said: “Things got shaken up a little bit and there is a lot of light being thrown into places where there were shadows and that is kind of healthy. It’s painful, but I think pain is a precursor to change.”Gibson was speaking while promoting his latest film, Daddy’s Home 2, his first family comedy in more than a decade after he was convicted of driving under the influence.He pleaded no contest to a misdemeanour battery charge in 2011 against his former girlfriend and mother of his child, Oksana Grigorieva. In 2010, it was reported that tapes had been submitted to the courts of Gibson allegedly using racist language and threatening to kill Grigorieva. He is also alleged to have said she deserved a beating.In one of the most notorious incidents involving the actor and director, Gibson unleashed an antisemitic rant in 2006 against a police officer in Malibu, California, who had pulled him over for drunk driving. He accused Jews of being responsible for “all the wars in the world”. He was convicted of driving under the influence.His latest comments come after dozens of women alleged they had been sexually harassed or assaulted by Weinstein. Weinstein’s spokesperson said: “Any allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied.” They also come just days after the Old Vic theatre revealed that 20 men had come forward to claim they were harassed by House of Cards star Kevin Spacey when he was its artistic director. Spacey was also accused of making unwelcome sexual advances towards actor Anthony Rapp when he was only 14 years old. Spacey, who was 26 at the time, said he did not remember the incident but if it did happen it was likely “deeply inappropriate drunken behaviour” and said he was sincerely apologetic.Last year, Gibson spoke about his notorious 2006 comments about Jewish people, claiming he has “never discriminated against anyone”.He said: “It was an unfortunate incident. I was loaded and angry and arrested. I was recorded illegally by an unscrupulous police officer who was never prosecuted for that crime. And then it was made public by him for profit, and by members of – we’ll call it the press. So, not fair. I guess as who I am, I’m not allowed to have a nervous breakdown, ever.” Topics Mel Gibson Harvey Weinstein Sexual harassment Film industry news

After almost three-and-a-half years in power, the Narendra Modi government is making an audacious bet on infrastructure to try and kickstart India’s sputtering economy.The plan includes the Bharatmala Pariyojana, involving an extensive highway network of 34,800km connecting India’s western border to the eastern one, with a likely investment of Rs5,35,000 crore. Another Rs157,000 crore will go towards building 48,877km of roads by the state-run National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) and the ministry of road transport and highways.“The huge spending on infrastructure announced today will give a fillip to private sector investment,” finance minister Arun Jaitley said in a press conference on Oct. 24.India, the world’s fastest-growing economy until earlier this year, hit an air pocket after the Narendra Modi government decided to demonetise two of the country’s high-value currency notes last November and introduced a new tax regime in July. Private investment and consumption have shrunk while industrial production has remained low. The agriculture sector, too, has been in the doldrums. So it’s now up to the government to increase public sector spending to turn around the economy.India’s road sector began recovering only recently from years of stagnation. Between 2012 and 2014, the government could only award 5,000km of road projects. Prime minister Modi, on the other hand, promised to build 41km a day after he came to power. However, his government has been constructing only 25km a days so far, totalling around 8,200km in the last financial year. Given that performance, building 16,700km of roads every year for the next five years to meet the 83,677km target won’t be easy for the government.This slow expansion is also due to a lack of private sector funding, even as the government has tried out various financing models. This includes the engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) model where road-building is done by private developers and funded by the government. It has also devised the new hybrid annuity model wherein the government would share project costs with the private sector in a 40:60 ratio.“The road sector has one of the highest economic and employment multiples in the country. In that sense, this is possibly the best stimulus that we can get,” Vinayak Chatterjee, chairman at Gurugram-based infrastructure services company, Feedback Infra said. “With most of these projects likely to be undertaken by EPC and hybrid annuity, and the involvement of numerous agencies such as the national highways authority and state road agencies, it is possible to achieve the target of 83,000km in the next five years.”

It was a pioneer in two of the most significant technology categories of our time: PDAs and smartphones. It was sold to a company that then sold itself. It went public, was split in two, reunified, and sold itself off again. Along the way, it lost its original team, then got them back. Then they left again.Oh, and it died. Until this year, when it came back.Even by the fast-moving standards of Silicon Valley, the history of Palm is a little dizzying. In our new cover story, I write about its latest chapter: The brand has returned, on a new kind of portable gadget designed to help keep you in touch without distracting you too much from the real world. Here’s a look at some of the milestones in Palm’s story thus far–and until recently, who would have guessed that there was more to come?1992Jeff Hawkins launches Palm Computing, which helps create the Casio Zoomer, a rival (sold at RadioShack stores) to Apple’s Newton “Personal Digital Assistant.” Palm also devises Graffiti, a simplified handwriting-input system, which it sells as add-on software for the Newton. Acknowledging that he’s an idea guy rather than a manager, Hawkins hires Donna Dubinsky, a former executive at Apple software arm Claris, as Palm’s CEO. Ed Colligan, previously of display maker Radius, joins as VP of marketing, and eventually becomes CEO himself.Palm’s original Pilot organizer and its immediate successors were a tad boxy—but the pocketable form factor worked in ways that Apple’s Newton and other early PDAs had not. [Photo: Rama & Musée Bolo/Wikimedia Commons]1996Now part of modem maker USRobotics (itself swallowed by 3Com in 1997), Palm releases its own PDA, the $299 Pilot. (The name it had planned to use–“Taxi”–was abandoned at the last moment over trademark concerns.) Small, affordable, and–above all–easy to use, the Pilot is the industry-changing blockbuster that the Newton and Zoomer were not. A 1997 update is officially called the PalmPilot; the “Pilot” part of the brand goes away after a lawsuit by the pen manufacturer of the same name, but consumers never stop using the “PalmPilot” term for Palm’s devices–and even PDAs from other manufacturers.Handspring’s Visor ran the same software as Palm’s PDAs, but sported its own iMac-like aesthetic–and a clever expansion slot. [Photo: Flickr user Yuri Litvinenko]1998Hawkins, Dubinsky, and Colligan depart to found Handspring, which licenses Palm’s software for its own PDA, the Visor. Its biggest selling point over Palm’s own PDAs is its Springboard slot, which lets you add modules to give the Visor new features such as a camera or even cell-phone capability. When Palm acquires Handspring in 2003, it gets the execs back—along with Handspring’s Treo, the best smartphone of its era.Like many a svelte mobile gadget, the Palm V wasn’t quite so portable once outfitted with a full complement of accessories. [Photo: FLC/Wikimedia Commons]1999Palm releases the Palm V, whose sleek aluminum case makes earlier Palm Pilots look like plasticky Fisher-Price toys. To achieve the slimmest possible profile, it dumps earlier Palms’ AAA batteries for a sealed-in battery, a controversial design move at the time. “The goal was beauty,” Hawkins later explains. “Beauty, beauty, beauty.” Perhaps the most lustworthy pre-iPhone handheld device, it’s a smash.20003Com spins off Palm as an independent public company. In the wake of IPO frenzy, it’s not just worth almost twice as much as 3Com–as the New York Times notes, it’s worth more than General Motors, Chevron, and McDonald’s.2003’s Zire 71 was Palm’s first PDA with a camera; the LifeDrive was a short-lived super-PDA with a whopping–for 2005–4GB of storage. [Photo: Wikimedia Commons]2003Pursuing a Microsoft-like software licensing strategy, Palm rebrands as PalmOne and spins out its software arm into a company called PalmSource. The idea is that PalmSource will sell its operating system to third-party manufacturers such as Sony, which has already been using it for its innovative Clie handhelds. The gambit disappoints, prompting Palm to revert later to its original name and reacquire perpetual rights to its own platform.Everything about the Treo 650, from its jellybean keyboard to stubby antenna, may mark it as an antique, but it was a delight when it came along. [Photo: ScaredPoet, ScaredPoet.com/Wikimedia Commons]2004The smartphone era is well underway, and Palm is a leader. The Treo 650 may be the hottest model of the moment, boosted by its impressively expansive software library: 20,000-plus apps that let users do everything from crunch spreadsheets to zap aliens.A Palm running Windows? The Treo 700w was a good Windows Mobile device but a grim move for Palm. [Photo: Wikimedia Commons]2005Bowing to the corporate world’s predilection for Microsoft products, Palm introduces a Treo that runs Windows Mobile. The company continues making Palm OS–based Treos, but after years of heated battle with Microsoft, embracing Windows feels like spiritual surrender, complete with Bill Gates showing up at Palm’s press conference.The Foleo was a laptop with the brains of a Treo, an idea Palm had second thoughts about before it had ever shipped a single unit. [Photo: Flickr user Thom Cochrane]2007At the Wall Street Journal’s D conference, Palm founder Hawkins proudly demos the Foleo, a laptoplike shell that lets you use your Treo with a big screen and real keyboard. Though clever, it’s a distraction from the smartphone wars–which, with the iPhone’s arrival, are entering a new phase. Palm kills the Foleo without ever having shipped it. Though it insists it will someday be back with a Foleo II, that never appears either.Also in 2007, Palm hires former Apple executive Jon Rubinstein–one of the masterminds of the iPod–as its executive chairman. He replaces Colligan as CEO two years later. Steve Jobs is not pleased by his former lieutenant’s new affiliation.For one moment, it looked like the Pre stood a chance of restoring Palm’s faded glory. [Photo: Flickr user GillyBerlin]2009At the annual CES gadget-palooza in Las Vegas, in a launch event with Apple-esque flair, Palm reveals the Pre, a smartphone based on an all-new operating system called WebOS. The software is gorgeous and innovative. The Pre, however, has a form factor–small screen, slide-out keyboard–which feels out of date from the moment it ships. Initially available only on Sprint, the phone never threatens the iPhone and Android.2010Weakened by the Pre’s lackluster reception, Palm sells itself to HP for $1.2 billion. The computing giant says it plans to launch phones, tablets, PCs, and other products built around WebOS. (Under the HP name, that is–it retires the Palm brand.) But then it fires Mark Hurd, the CEO behind the deal. Under new chief Léo Apotheker, the company launches a would-be iPad killer called the TouchPad in 2011. But seven weeks later, it shutters the WebOS business.2013HP sells WebOS to LG, which adapts it to power smart TVs–and continues to use it for that purpose today. It’s not much, but it’s a whole lot better than if WebOS had never found any success at all.2014Chinese electronics giant TCL purchases the rights to the Palm brand from HP. It talks about using it on new phones, but doesn’t actually do so.Palm’s comeback device runs Android and isn’t an exact counterpart to anything the original company ever shipped–but the spiritual linkage is there. [Photo: courtesy of Palm]2018A new startup backed by TCL–and Golden State Warrior Stephen Curry–adopts the Palm brand for a tiny Android-powered device designed for use when you’re working out, out on the town, or otherwise more interested in living in the moment than keeping your eyes glued to a screen. Though hardly the first time an old name has been applied to a new gadget–hello, Polaroid drones–it’s far more intriguing than most.