聚集全球最优秀的创业者，项目融资率接近97%，领跑行业

聚集全球最优秀的创业者，项目融资率接近97%，领跑行业

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The dollar slid and equities surged on Wednesday, fueled by Boeing and Apple’s results and extended after the Federal Reserve pledged to be patient with future interest rate hikes, a change in tone that stock investors interpreted as a buy signal. A trader works at his desk at the stock exchange in Frankfurt, Germany, January 30, 2019. REUTERS/StaffThe Fed, in its policy statement at the end of a two-day meeting, struck the language from its December policy statement that indicated further rate hikes would be appropriate in 2019. That language had roiled markets amid signs of slower global growth. U.S. stocks extended gains and bond yields fell as markets got what they were hoping for, said Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz in Newport Beach, California. “This marks a full 180 from what the Fed was signaling just a few months ago,” he said. Scott Minerd, global chief investment officer at Guggenheim Partners in Santa Monica, California, said the Fed’s pause will further extend the economic expansion, allowing excesses to continue to build and increasing risks of financial instability. “The Fed refilled the punch bowl and the party goes on. Buy risk assets,” Minerd said. The Fed’s policy statement indicates the U.S. central bank will remain on a dovish path, which is very supportive for risk assets, at least on the short term, said Putri Pascualy, managing director for PAAMCO in Irvine, California. “The back-drop of slowing economic growth on a global basis is the 800 trillion gorilla in the room,” Pascualy said. The MSCI world equity index, which tracks share performance in 47 countries, rose 1.2 percent following gains in Asia overnight. The FTSEurofirst 300 index of leading shares in Europe closed up 0.41 percent. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 434.9 points, or 1.77 percent, to 25,014.86. The S&P 500 gained 41.05 points, or 1.55 percent, to 2,681.05, and the Nasdaq Composite added 154.79 points, or 2.2 percent, to 7,183.08. Upbeat results from Boeing and Apple late on Tuesday provided investors early relief. Boeing shares rose 6.25 percent after the world’s largest planemaker raised its profit and cash flow expectations for 2019 amid a boom in air travel. Boeing also indicated it had overcome supplier delays that snarled 737 production last year. Apple results provided some reassurance as the iPhone maker reported sharp growth in its services business. Its shares gained 6.83 percent Oil prices rose, paring gains of more than 1 percent, as the potential for supply disruptions following U.S. sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry lifted prices. Stocks listed in London jumped more than 1 percent after British lawmakers late on Tuesday rejected a proposal in Parliament that aimed to prevent a potentially chaotic “no-deal” Brexit, a vote that initially pushed sterling sharply lower. The exporter-heavy FTSE 100 in London rose 1.45 percent as its components often are boosted by a weaker pound because its multinational companies earn a large portion of their revenue abroad in foreign currency. Sterling rose 0.04 percent to $1.3071 after sliding about 0.7 percent against the dollar and the euro following parliamentary votes on Brexit. “The vote is not fundamentally changing the way the market’s talking about Brexit,” said Hetal Mehta, Legal & General Investment Management senior European economist. Payrolls processor ADP reported that the U.S. private sector added 213,000 jobs in January, which beat forecasts for gains of 178,000. But the monthly total was lower than the 271,000 jobs added in December. The dollar index fell 0.39 percent to 95.447. Against the yen, the dollar fell 0.33 percent to 109.02. FILE PHOTO - A woman using a smartphone is reflected on a stock quotation board outside a brokerage in Tokyo, Japan, September 29, 2015. REUTERS/Issei KatoThe euro gained 0.39 percent to $1.1475. Benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury notes rose 6/32 in price to push yields down to 2.6900 percent. U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude futures gained 92 cents to settle at $54.23, while international Brent crude futures rose 33 cents to settle at $61.65 per barrel. Reporting by Herbert Lash; additional reporting by Jennifer Ablan; Editing by Will Dunham and Leslie AdlerOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Gold hit an eight-month high while world stock markets were mixed ahead of further U.S.-Sino trade talks, a raft of technology company results, including Apple’s, and a Federal Reserve decision on U.S. interest rates. FILE PHOTO: An employee stores newly cast ingots of 99.99 percent pure gold at the Krastsvetmet non-ferrous metals plant, one of the world's largest producers in the precious metals industry, in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, Russia November 22, 2018. REUTERS/Ilya Naymushin/File PhotoThe U.S. dollar traded little changed and oil prices rose after Washington slapped sanctions on Venezuela’s state-owned oil firm in a bid to curb its crude exports as traders prepared for major events, including a key Brexit vote late in the day. Sterling fell after British lawmakers rejected most amendments that aimed to keep Britain from leaving the European Union without a deal, reviving worries of a chaotic withdrawal from the trading bloc that would damage the UK economy. Sterling fell sharply after a brief rise and was down 0.75 percent. Investors expect the Fed, the U.S. central bank, to show a more cautious stance when policymakers release a statement on Wednesday after a two-day meeting. U.S. economic data in December that was softer than expected and a sharp downturn in financial markets are likely to keep the Fed from raising rates. Equity markets in Europe rose as investors bid up stocks considered safer during times of economic uncertainty, such as utilities. However, a gauge of global stock performance edged lower as stocks on Wall Street fell amid a ream of mixed earnings reports and caution due to the U.S.-China trade spat. MSCI’s gauge of stocks across the globe was little changed, while the FTSEurofirst 300 index of leading regional shares in Europe closed 0.8 percent higher. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 51.74 points, or 0.21 percent, to 24,579.96. The S&P 500 lost 3.85 points, or 0.15 percent, to 2,640 and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 57.40 points, or 0.81 percent, to 7,028.29. The information glut this week will make it hard for people to reach a conclusion but the trade talks with China, which begin Wednesday, are the overriding issue for the world economy, said David Kelly, chief global strategist at JPMorgan Funds in New York. What Washington, and possibly Beijing, fail to understand is that the uncertainty about trade is slowing the global economy, which will show up in East Asian PMI manufacturing data for January to be released on Thursday, Kelly said. “The biggest tax levy by Washington is an uncertainty tax, and it’s the biggest threat to the markets and the economy this year,” Kelly said. Tensions were high after U.S. officials announced criminal charges against China’s telecom giant Huawei for violating U.S. sanctions against Iran. For Asia, the blow was cushioned by promises of more Chinese stimulus but Beijing berated Washington for blocking tactics in its World Trade Organization appeal against U.S. tariffs. Amid the uncertainty, safe-haven gold broke through $1,310 an ounce in spot prices to reach its highest since last May. U.S. gold futures settled up 0.4 percent at $1,308.90 per ounce. Oil price gains were capped by abundant supply and signs of a slowing Chinese economy. Brent crude oil futures rose $1.39 to settle at $61.32 a barrel while U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures gained $1.32 to settle at $53.31. Market participants will have catalysts for trading all week, with more than one-fifth of companies on the benchmark S&P 500 index reporting results, including Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook. Apple Inc reported earnings after the bell and said sales for its fiscal second quarter would most likely be lower than Wall Street expected. The outlook suggested Apple still faces weak demand for its iPhone, especially in China, the world’s biggest smartphone market. But Apple shares rose 4.3 percent in after-hours trading on upbeat comments from Chief Executive Tim Cook. FILE PHOTO: A man looks at an electronic stock quotation board showing Japan's Nikkei average outside a brokerage in Tokyo, Japan, November 13, 2018. REUTERS/Toru HanaiU.S. Treasury yields fell across maturities as investors anticipated strong demand for $78 billion of new issues on sale later in the day and on data showing U.S. consumer confidence at its lowest since July 2017. Benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury notes rose 9/32 in price to push their yield down to 2.7116 percent. The dollar index rose 0.06 percent, while the euro gained 0.01 percent to $1.1434. The Japanese yen weakened 0.01 percent versus the greenback at 109.33 per dollar. Reporting by Herbert Lash in New York; Editing by Diane Craft, James Dalgleish and Dan GreblerOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

[Update: On Thursday, Apple reinstated some of Facebook’s developer certificates.]Apple has revoked Facebook’s developer certificates over a controversial data-gathering project, shutting down the company’s ability to distribute beta and internal iOS apps. That means employees can’t access lunch menus, use early versions of Facebook apps, including Instagram and Messenger, or reportedly catch a bus to and from work.“This is probably one of the worse things that can happen to the company internally,” one employee told Business Insider.“FYI: it’s total chaos over inside FB internal channels right now,” Mike Isaac of the New York Times wrote on Twitter this morning. “half the people are like ‘uhhhh why do none of my apps work'” they rely on this stuff for things as simple as taking the bus congrats Facebook Research for invoking the ire of all your colleagues stuck at the shuttle stop this morning — rat king (@MikeIsaac) January 30, 2019The clampdown comes in response to news that Facebook was sidestepping Apple’s security protocols by paying teens $20 a month to install a “social media research” app on their iPhones that monitors pretty much everything they do online, including their browsing history, their encrypted phone conversations, and online purchases.That app, TechCrunch revealed yesterday, was distributed outside of the App Store through Apple’s enterprise program, which allows developers to use special certificates to install powerful apps onto iPhones. However, those apps are only supposed to be internal, used by a company’s employees, not customers.In a statement to Fast Company, Apple said that Facebook was in “clear breach of their agreement.” While Facebook said late last night that it would shut down the iOS app, Apple is apparently not satisfied and revoked Facebook’s developer licenses on Wednesday.“We designed our Enterprise Developer Program solely for the internal distribution of apps within an organization. Facebook has been using their membership to distribute a data-collecting app to consumers, which is a clear breach of their agreement with Apple,” the company said. “Any developer using their enterprise certificates to distribute apps to consumers will have their certificates revoked, which is what we did in this case to protect our users and their data.”Without the certificate, Facebook’s internal apps no longer work on Apple’s iOS. That means that Facebook would not be able to test its iOS apps internally. It’s also why Facebook’s iPhone-using employees now reportedly can’t even find out what’s on the lunch menu.Facebook employees told Business Insider that their colleagues are “pissed” and “angry,” and have cast blame on Apple or on their own colleagues. One Facebook employee told the publication that “there are conspiracy theories running rampant,” including the idea that “Apple hates Facebook so it is their attempt to take Facebook down.”“We can’t aspire for good press while continuing to not play by the rules,” another employee wrote in an internal discussion on the company’s Workplace app.On the anonymous employee-discussion app Blind, Mashable reported, some Facebook employees argued that Apple’s move was an attempt to distract from an embarrassing FaceTime bug that went public earlier this week. “Anything to take the heat off the FaceTime security breach,” read one employee comment.Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment about internal difficulties caused by Apple’s move. In a memo to employees obtained by Business Insider, Facebook said it’s “working closely with Apple to reinstate our most critical internal apps immediately.”On Tuesday, the company defended the research app, saying that it was up front with participants about how their data would be collected. “Key facts about this market research program are being ignored,” the company said in a statement to Fast Company.Facebook hasn’t said what will become of the Android version of the program, referred to publicly as “Project Atlas.” By Wednesday afternoon, however, a sign-up page for the project on the app testing platform Applause had been updated to say that participant referrals were now closed.“We are currently not accepting any new referrals for our research program,” the page said, without mentioning Facebook. “We will notify you when we re-open the program to new referrals and new participants over the coming months.”(On Wednesday Google apologized for misusing Apple’s developer certificates and said it would shut down a similar app it was using to collect user data after TechCrunch revealed Google’s own research program.)Apple has made user privacy a selling point of its products and services, and CEO Tim Cook has been openly critical of Facebook’s data-collection practices. Yanking Facebook’s developer certificates—probably the largest such action Apple has taken on any developer—is likely to escalate tensions between the two companies. Still, Apple remains a major distributor of the Facebook app via the App Store, where the company’s Instagram and Messenger are currently ranked as the 5th and 9th most popular free apps.While Apple looks to some like Facebook’s strictest privacy regulator at the moment, lawmakers have increased their calls for regulation in recent weeks. Following TechCrunch‘s report, Senator Mark Warner sent a stern letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg with a list of questions about the company’s data gathering practices, and Senator Ed Markey vowed to reintroduce legislation to make it illegal for companies to pay children to hand over their data.“It is inherently manipulative to offer teens money in exchange for their personal information when younger users don’t have a clear understanding of how much data they’re handing over and how sensitive it is,” he said in a statement. His concerns also extended to adult users, he said: “Consumers deserve simple and clear explanations of what data is being collected and how it being used.” —with Alex Pasternack

In a world in which a 1976 Apple-1 computer can fetch $375,000 at auction, it’s not exactly news that people appreciate the value of our technological heritage. But Ariel Fischman, a financial advisor in Mexico City, isn’t just another collector of vintage PCs. Fischman collects spreadsheet software—boxes full of disks, manuals, and other accoutrements that were standard fare in every office until we started downloading most of our apps. It’s a surprisingly rich hobby, given that the 1980s and early 1990s saw booming competition among software giants, startups, and even unexpected contenders such as Boeing (yes, the aircraft company).There may be other spreadsheet collectors out there, but only Fischman has been recognized by Guinness World Records as having the largest such collection on the planet, an honor he received in May of last year. I spoke with him about his trove, how he assembled it, and why a seemingly mundane piece of business software sparked his imagination.Fast Company: Why don’t we start with the most obvious question. Why spreadsheets?Ariel Fischman: I’m a corporate financial advisor, and I’ve been a user of spreadsheets for close to 30 years. One day I was just thinking: Many people use these, and they save so much time from using them, especially as compared to what was available before. So I decided to research a little bit about the history of spreadsheets. And if you go online, there isn’t anything too formal on how they came to be. I decided to focus a bit of an intellectual interest in understanding the history of where they came from and how they got to be such a popular tool.In all honesty, it wasn’t supposed to be a collection at the beginning. I’m not the kind of person that would have, like, a Star Wars collection. I just wanted to find the oldest spreadsheets that I could get my hands on. I found one, and then another, and then quickly discovered that even within Microsoft there was something before Excel called Multiplan. I don’t even know when exactly I decided it would be a collection. I just continued to buy stuff, and I’ve bought as many as I can get.Microsoft’s pre-Excel spreadsheet, Multiplan, came in a seemingly endless array of variants for different computing platforms. [Photo: courtesy of Ariel Fischman]FC: Once one sets out to collect spreadsheets, where does one get them?AF: I’ve bought a lot through eBay. I’ve also invested quite a bit of time in reaching out to the people who did reviews of the software for magazines, mostly in the ’80s and early ’90s, and the people who were on beta tester lists. They’ve been able to send me the rarest items. I have a bunch of demos. Disks with stamps labeled “confidential.” A lot of pre-releases, undocumented, that never went out to the public.FC: How many spreadsheets do you have?AF: Unique items? Close to 800. The official Guinness record count is slightly higher than 500. They’re very strict. They don’t count a disk without a box, for example. And there’s disks that were distributed without a box, because many people programmed software out of their garage and sold it by mail. They were never displayed on shelves.The records team also didn’t count any demos. And I must have three digits of demos. They decided those don’t count because they had limited functionality. The way I see it, if it’s a grid, if it captures numbers and text, if it performs arithmetic calculations, it’s a spreadsheet.The process to attain a Guinness World Record is very complicated. It took me over two years of gathering documentation and letters and recommendations from people in the computing history world.VisiCalc, the PC spreadsheet that started it all. [Photo: courtesy of Ariel Fischman]FC: Is there such a thing as a valuable spreadsheet?AF: There are some that have cost me a lot of money. One person that I bought a few items from owns a lot of software from the first half of the ’80s. She has things I haven’t been able to find anywhere else, and she’s conscious of the imbalance between supply and demand. Not that the demand is so high, but even one person is demand, and that would be me. I’ve paid close to four figures for some items.FC: All it takes is one fanatic.AF: Yes, exactly.FC: How do you even gauge what’s out there to collect? Are there things you know existed that you’ve been unable to find?AF: I started looking for only stand-alone spreadsheets: Excel, but not the entire Microsoft Office package. And then I opened the spectrum to suites that are not stand-alone spreadsheets. Microsoft Works is an example. It’s a suite, and the spreadsheet itself was not sold on its own. That also applies to the 2016 and 2019 versions of Excel. There is no physical media for Excel stand-alone, only for Office.There’s one item that I haven’t been able to find that I know existed: Excel 2001 for the Mac. I have the Office version and I’ve seen pictures of the Excel stand-alone version. I’ve spoken with people at Microsoft; they searched and said “Sorry, we don’t have it.”FC: Of the spreadsheets you do have, do you know which ones are rarest? I know you’ve got a lot of betas, which by definition are fairly rare.AF: Yeah, I think those are the rarest. For example, I have two versions of Excel beta from 1985 with their respective documentation. But I bought the disks and documentation from different people. It was just a happy coincidence that I was able to match them.The other family of rare products is Microsoft’s Multiplan. I exchanged some emails with one of the people who headed the development of Excel and worked on Multiplan as well back in the ’80s. He mentioned an unsubstantiated claim that Multiplan was the program that was ported to the most architectures. I think I have close to 40 versions of Multiplan for different operating systems, including some very strange computer architectures.In 1985, long before Excel ate the spreadsheet industry, it was a humble piece of beta software. [Photo: courtesy of Ariel Fischman]FC: I always thought that Multiplan was a flop. But when I looked at Wikipedia, it said it sold a million copies, which doesn’t sound bad for the early 1980s. Do you have a sense as to why it went away and Excel came around?AF: The explanation that I’ve put together on my own—it’s really a hypothesis—is that Multiplan was sold in so many different versions that it must have been difficult to control quality and releases. It’s not that they didn’t sell enough, it’s just that it was hard to manage.Excel wasn’t really a strong replacement to Multiplan, in my view, until version three. There were spreadsheet wars in the 1980s, where the front runners were Lotus 1-2-3, Excel, Superplan, and Borland’s Quattro. The differentiating factor that led Excel to win that war would be that the fact that Windows 3.0 came out in 1990, and Excel was native. It simply made more sense to have the two products that matched, and Windows 3.0 was a winner in the operating system war.In the early days you just went to the neighborhood store and bought whatever the clerk recommended. With the interconnectivity of computers, it became more relevant to have something that was compatible with what everyone else had. If everyone had Windows, Excel was the more obvious choice.FC: Lotus basically bet on IBM’s OS/2 operating system, which turned out not to be a great idea. They spent years trying to play catch-up on Windows, and by then it was probably too late.AF: Correct. Plus, the obvious point is that Excel and Windows were made by the same company.FC: Do you actually run any of these old spreadsheets? Do you have old computers around, or is it more about the physical products?AF: It’s more about the physical product. I’m sure that because of the humidity of the places where they were stored and simply the passing of time, many of them probably wouldn’t work. I’ve played with a few, in cases where you can emulate the original operating system, but it’s really a limited number. So I have to base my opinions on the documentation that each product has.In most cases, I have the boxes, books, and booklets. They’re interesting to read. In the end, out of the literally hundreds of different products, the bloodline is the same.FC: Do you have a favorite out of all of them?AF: I used Lotus 1-2-3 back in the day. But Excel is the tool that, for me, really made a difference. It’s the top-of-mind spreadsheet. It’s what most people use as their default. There are online spreadsheets today, like Google Sheets, and even Office 365 now comes with an online tool. But Excel is the standard. If you know how to use it well, you can move from one job or one business to another, and it’s to a certain extent universal.Once upon a time, Lotus 1-2-3 came in a classy case designed to look spiffy on your office shelves. [Photo: courtesy of Ariel Fischman]FC: Products like 1-2-3 used to come in really nice cloth boxes, and the documentation was great, and over time, the manuals got bigger and bigger. They were these impressive physical products, and that’s almost totally gone away. Do you have interesting examples of packaging from the old days?AF: I have a ton of those Lotus cloth boxes. There were some that had really interesting art. But we live in a different time right now. If you buy Office today, it’s either a download or an empty box with a card with a key number in it. You’re not even buying media. You’re buying a license.FC: You also paid hundreds and hundreds of dollars back in the day, compared to today when you’re either paying a little bit of money, or in some cases no money if you’re using an online spreadsheet.AF: They were expensive items. Before 1979, people didn’t have a reason to own a computer. And when VisiCalc came out, they understood why they’d want to use one. People started buying $2,000 computers just to use VisiCalc. If you pay attention to advertisements for personal computers in 1980, 1981, the way they would advertise their computers was, “Ours is the best to run VisiCalc.” It was that interesting.FC: I was trying to remember if any of the old spreadsheets are still out there other than Excel. I realized I wasn’t sure if Quattro Pro was around. I looked at the Corel site, and it is, as part of the WordPerfect suite. Do any of the other 1980s and 1990s contenders still exist?AF: I don’t think so, not the old ones. There’s definitely competition, but when compatibility is so critical, it’s basically down to Excel, Numbers, Google Sheets, and there’s a few out there that are more specialized.FC: Was it better for spreadsheet users back when there was lots of competition?AF: In all the economics books, we read that monopolies are detrimental to development and research because essentially the monopoly company can sit in a comfort zone without any need for innovation. I try to be as unbiased as I can with this comment, but the reality is that Excel innovates all the time. I don’t think that we have lost the innovation edge from going from a market with dozens of competitors to one with one, two, or three companies. Again, to my point on compatibility: If you want to create a file and share it with someone else, you couldn’t unless they were using the same software. I don’t think we’ve lost anything. With some products, it’s better not to have too many choices.Ariel Fischman owns more spreadsheet software than you, or anyone else. [Photo: courtesy of Ariel Fischman]FC: What else have you learned from this collection?AF: Not to take any credit at all away from [VisiCalc creators] Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, but I think there are other people in history who should also be recognized for their contributions. There was an article in the Journal of Accounting in 1961 by an academic named Richard Mattessich. He’s in his mid-90s now; I’ve exchanged emails with him. He conceptualized the spreadsheet way before computing power was able to execute it. He wrote in his paper that we were going to be able to use computers to perform business forecasts and budgeting. Essentially, he describes what a spreadsheet was going to be almost 20 years later.Also, in 1969 Rene Pardo and Remy Landau created LANPAR, which I understand was sold mostly to telcos. Rene told me some time ago that the original software was on paper tape since they were paranoid that it could would be stolen by the service provider. They had several thousand lines of code running in 32K of memory, and they would compile the code and store it on a GE 200/400 or Honeywell 6000 computer. I believe they deserve significant recognition as well.People in the earlier days were already thinking about this, and the uses it could have. That’s definitely one thing I’ve learned—not through collecting, but from my research.I have no interest in selling my collection. Right now, I enjoy seeing it in my office. But eventually, I’ll just give it away, if some institution wants it. I think it’s the right thing to do. Physical spreadsheets are finite; they’re getting close to their end.

Enlarge this image An explosion damaged a restaurant in Manbij, Syria, on Wednesday, as shown in a screen grab from the Kurdish Hawar News agency, or ANHA. ANHA/AP hide caption toggle caption ANHA/AP An explosion damaged a restaurant in Manbij, Syria, on Wednesday, as shown in a screen grab from the Kurdish Hawar News agency, or ANHA. ANHA/AP Updated at 5:42 p.m. ET Four Americans were killed in an explosion while conducting a routine patrol in northern Syria, according to the Pentagon. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility.Two U.S. service members, one civilian employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency and one contractor working as an interpreter died in the attack in Manbij. Three service members were injured.A statement from U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle East, says that initial reports indicate an explosion caused the casualties, but that the incident is under investigation. U.S. forces with the international coalition regularly patrol in and around the town."President Trump and I condemn the terrorist attack in Syria that claimed American lives and our hearts are with the loved ones of the fallen," Vice President Pence said in a statement. A local news site reported that a huge explosion erupted in the city center near a girls' school and a restaurant. The site reported that both civilians and troops were killed and wounded. Local groups say at least 16 people were killed in total, according to The Associated Press.ANHA, a news agency in the Kurdish areas in Syria, showed the restaurant's windows blown out, with the twisted metal frame of an awning hanging off the building.The town of Manbij, located close to the Turkish border in northern Syria, was retaken from ISIS in 2016. U.S. troops have been working in the city with the local military council, as well as patrolling outside the city with Turkish troops, NPR's Tom Bowman reports."It's a vibrant, bustling city," says Bowman, who visited in early 2018. "[It] has a huge market selling all sorts of goods and produce.""I was there ... with the U.S. military," Bowman says, "We walked around without body armor. It was remarkably calm. ... You would never get a sense that there was a shot fired in anger there."But some residents and members of the U.S. military have been concerned about ISIS fighters "slipping back into the city" for more than a year, Bowman reports.The U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights group says that a suicide bomber probably carried out the attack.Hassan Hassan, an expert on the Islamic State, says the group has identified the bomber as Abu Yasin al-Shami.The explosion comes shortly after President Trump announced in December that the U.S. would withdraw forces from Syria. The announcement put him at odds with some of his advisers and worried U.S. allies. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the U.S. envoy to the coalition fighting the Islamic State, Brett McGurk, resigned in response to the decision.Pence hinted Wednesday that the fight against ISIS was nearly finished. "Thanks to the courage of our Armed Forces, we have crushed the ISIS caliphate and devastated its capabilities," Pence said. "As we begin to bring our troops home, the American people can be assured, for the sake of our soldiers, their families, and our nation, we will never allow the remnants of ISIS to reestablish their evil and murderous caliphate – not now, not ever." Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle took a different view. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said he believed he had been in the restaurant that was bombed while he visited with Kurds, Arabs and others in Manbij. He urged the president to "look long and hard of where he's headed in Syria." Graham said: "My concern about the statements made by President Trump is that you have set in motion enthusiasm by the enemy we're fighting. ... Every American wants our troops to come home, but I think all of us want to make sure that when they do come home, we're safe."President Trump has said U.S. allies could complete the job of dismantling the extremist group. In December, Trump said, "We'll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon. Let the other people take care of it now."The Pentagon says the U.S. has begun withdrawing troops, NPR reports.About 2,200 American troops serve in Syria, working with Arab and Kurdish rebels to defeat the Islamic State, reports NPR's Tom Bowman. Now that the U.S. is leaving — and no one is offering a timetable, by the way — the concern is that the Arab and Kurdish forces won't be able to finish the job on their own. They just don't have the strength. So ISIS could expand. That's the main concern. And - or there could be some sort of power struggle among the rebels, maybe ethnic cleansing, a possible bloodbath, one official told me. Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., said Wednesday's attack underscores the danger in Trump's policy."The tragic death of three American service members, which has been recently reported, is a reminder both of how lethal ISIS is and how risky an abrupt pullout can be, that it may well encourage ISIS to be more aggressive as our forces begin to depart," he told reporters. NPR's Lama Al-Arian and Jane Arraf contributed to this report.

Tired of cable news talking heads screaming at each other about the border wall crisis and the government shutdown? Overwhelmed by the fusillade of administration lies? Unsure about the real facts?Well, we’ve got a handy guide to all the falsehoods you’ll likely hear tonight in President Trump’s big immigration speech at 9 p.m. And to track the preponderance of mistruths, here’s a bingo board you can print out at home.View larger image here. [Photo Illustration: Samir Abady; Trump: Flickr user Gage Skidmore]The “Crisis” Claim: Trump has consistently expressed alarmist sentiments about illegal immigration across the southern border—calling it an “invasion,” screaming that people are “flooding our country,” and calling it a crisis. Truth: In truth, apprehensions of illegal immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border are at their lowest level since the early 1970s, according to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol statistics. Claim: Trump likes to recite a litany of crimes he claims are committed by Mexicans and Central American immigrants, almost always emphasizing the few tragic cases of Americans injured or killed by illegal immigrants. Truth: In truth, illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans (about 56% fewer convictions, according to the Cato Institute). Claim: Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said on Friday that 3,000 “special interest aliens” had been apprehended trying to enter the country from the southern border, and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed that 4,000 suspected or known terrorists had entered the country illegally, implying that it was through the southern border. Truth: But “special interest aliens” is a term that applies to anyone who comes from a country that has ever produced a terrorist, as Fox News’s Chris Wallace noted. And the overwhelming majority of the 4,000 cited by Sanders were taken into custody at airports. Claim: Trump has also mongered the fear with such claims, including this one in the Rose Garden last Friday: “We have terrorists coming through the southern border because they find that’s probably the easiest place to come through. They drive right in and they make a left.” Truth: Yet that’s not the case according to his own State Department, which issued a report in September finding “no credible evidence indicating that international terrorist groups have established bases in Mexico, worked with Mexican drug cartels, or sent operatives via Mexico into the United States.” Claim: Trump has also repeatedly invoked unbelievably high numbers—up to $275 billion—to express the cost of illegal immigration. Truth: The real cost and benefit of undocumented immigrants is incalculable, since it’s hard to determine, and some crucial metrics are impossible to calculate. (That said, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector did a rough calculus a few years ago of services received minus tax contributions and came up with $54 billion a year, much lower than Trump’s figure.) The Wall Claim: The meme of Trump’s campaign was that Mexico will pay for a border wall. The number of times that he has said, “and Mexico will pay for it!” is countless. Truth: But Mexico has consistently said that it would never pay for such a wall. Claim: More recently, the administration has insisted that it would be paid for through the North American Free Trade Agreement currently being renegotiated, adding that the deal would pay for the structure “many, many times over.” Truth: But trade experts have noted that none of the changes being made to NAFTA will be a major revenue driver. Claim: Trump recently tweeted that only criminals would oppose a border wall. Truth: But polls have consistently showed that a majority of Americans oppose the wall, including a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll in late December and a Reuters/Ipsos poll earlier that month (which found that only 35% supported including money for the wall in a congressional spending bill). Claim: Trump has said that some of his predecessors have “told me that we should have” built the wall. Truth: But all four former living presidents have denied telling him that. The Shutdown Claim: Trump has said that federal workers, many of whom have been furloughed without pay, are the “biggest fans” of the government shutdown. Truth: There’s no evidence for this claim and the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union with more than 700,000 members, has expressed its opposition to the shutdown. The Drugs Claim: At the Rose Garden news conference last Friday, Trump said that drug smugglers “don’t go through the ports of entry. When they do, they sometimes get caught.” Truth: Actually land ports of entry are the primary way that drugs get into the country, not barren stretches of the border, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. According to the DEA, the most common technique is to hide drugs in cars or trucks as they drive into the U.S. through entry ports, where they are subject to inspection.

I first read about Bald Knob, Arkansas, in 2010, after thousands of poisoned blackbirds dropped dead from the sky in nearby Beebe. On first look, Bald Knob has an unsettling aesthetic: a sparsely populated town, a bygone agricultural zone with toppled silos, old trailers, taxidermy businesses, boarded-up shops and a Waffle House. It’s a narrative cliche to present a rural place below the Mason-Dixon line this way, yet the scenery fits the bill.I’ve lived in places like these, where a casual observer sees a weathered town and locals just see home. I proceed with caution anyway. I’m also unsettled by news reports of armed white nationalists marching at the capitol building in nearby Little Rock. I know this is how a lot of people experience the rural south – sorting through stereotypes and history as they go, wondering how much of the old south is present in the new.The 12,900-acre Bald Knob Refuge, which sits about 60 miles north-east of Little Rock, is a blend of both the old and new south. It’s a former rice farm that has grown rice and soybeans in order to provide much-needed habitat and fuel for migratory waterfowl like pintail ducks and snow geese since 1993.A half-mile into the refuge, the truck ahead of me spooks an unfathomable cloud of waterfowl. Hundreds of thousands of ducks rise from the wetlands, calling and circling. It’s breathtaking to witness. Later, a huge flock of lesser snow geese passes above me. My heart pounds; it’s moving to hear so many wingbeats overhead, to see the formations of a thousand white birds in the blue sky.Another truck comes by. The man rolls down his truck window and asks, “You OK?”“Fine,” I tell him, climbing down from the roof of my rental car, and showing him my camera. “Watching birds. You?” I ask even though I can see his rifle in the back.“Out scouting hunting spots,” he says, flashing a charming smile. “You can get a better view if you take the road ’round that way.” He points me toward a new route, then takes off.The relationship between hunters and conservation has always surprised me. Yet it’s often imperative to the success of major initiatives in the south, thanks to the influence of the not-for-profit organization Ducks Unlimited, which has a worldwide membership of 700,000 and has helped conserve over 13m acres of habitat. There are more than 34 million sportsmen and women in the United States.Sportsmen and traditional environmentalists aren’t always mutually exclusive, or easy co-conspirators. But, there is a critical need for information to flow between those on the ground and those in policy. In order to address the urgent realities of climate change, traditional environmentalists must continue to find ways to communicate and partner with non-traditional audiences: hunters, big agriculture, fishermen, corporations and loggers.I wanted to talk to people in the south who already work on these frontlines, and are able to build bridges between seemingly disparate audiences.Charlie Phillips, clammer and entrepreneur, is one of those men who’s lived several lives, as a fishmonger, horse trader and shrimper.“I’m one of those rare Republicans that believe that if you don’t take care of your environment, your environment can’t take care of you,” he says. Phillips, the owner of Sapelo Sea Farms in Georgia, makes his living growing clams, so water quality is crucial to him, which is why he serves on boards and tries to help scientists and fishermen find common ground.He’s frank about climate change and how it’s affecting his industry. He talks about the onset of “king tides”, and fish stock moving north as waters warm. He was working on the back of a shrimp boat in 1968 when Hurricane Camille hit. “I saw the big ships washed up on shore,” he tells me. “I’ve seen what big hurricanes can do. They’re worse now. Things aren’t what they used to be.”“Listen,” he says. “Fishermen just want to be able to catch what they want to catch and be left alone.”He says working fishermen end up not trusting scientists because the scientific reports don’t match up with what they witness firsthand on the water every day. Reports from scientists, he says, “feel three or four years behind what the fishermen see”. He thinks it’s crucial for fishermen and scientists to interact and learn more from each other. “We’ve gotten really good at throwing rocks at each other,” he tells me. “But we need to give up on throwing rocks. It’s not conducive to fixing problems.”Phillips is focused on what he cares most about: water. He’s evangelical about it. “It affects everything,” he says. “Wildlife, business, eco-tourism.” He bought his father’s restaurant, the Fish Dock, and uses the menus to educate customers about local water testing results. “I took poetic license,” he tells me, laughing. “I don’t use the word ‘fecal’, just ‘water quality’.”The following day I talk with Dr Zakiya Leggett, a forester and professor at North Carolina State University whose research focuses on carbon sequestration and soil ecology. She talks about her empathy for freshmen, many of whom tell her at the beginning of her class through a pre-course survey that they don’t believe in climate change. They tell her she shouldn’t try to change their minds.“We have to remember,” she says, her tone compassionate, “especially if these students are coming fresh from home, that they haven’t had time to form their own opinions.” She adds, “Maybe I can’t impress my ‘opinions,’ but I will give them the facts, like graphs of temperatures rising.”Leggett estimates that half of her students are coming from a rural environment. Born in Memphis, she recalls the difficult time she had adjusting when she went from the Tuskegee University to Duke University. She remembers struggling with elitism herself.Now she mentors students through this vulnerable transition, and is able to forge connections with first-generation college students and conservative students, as well as students of color – all groups who might otherwise struggle to join conversations about the scientific realities of climate change.Dr Todd Merendino, the manager of conservation programs in the Ducks Unlimited Texas field office, negotiates strategic partnerships with wildlife state agencies, agricultural producers, hunters, biologists, private landowners, petrochemical companies and the oil industry. A hunter and fisherman, he has a practical, outcomes-focused approach to his work.“Our mission is waterfowl and habitats,” he says. “I look for symbiotic relationships. Common ground. Common goals.”He speaks with corporations about responsible growth and convinces them that “wetlands and marshes are your insurance policy against flooding”. He ticks off the nature of their conversations: flood storage capacity, coastal restoration projects, storm surge abatement, initiatives that keep the marsh healthy.Ducks Unlimited recently completed a beneficial dredge use project near Port Arthur, Texas, which will move 2m cubic yards of dredge material to restore approximately 1,300 acres of the Salt Bayou Marsh watershed, an important migratory bird flyway recently degraded by hurricane damage. It’s generally more expensive to utilize dredge material in this manner, he says, but smarter to move it to a place where it serves a purpose.Merendino’s work has large-scale outcomes, and with that objective in mind he welcomes chances to partner with corporations and big agriculture. “If the rice industry went away,” he points out, “the amount of waterfowl habitat loss would be insurmountable, impossible to overcome.”After seeing the beauty and importance of the Bald Knob Refuge, the scale, necessity and complexity of this work impresses me.It’s easy to be an armchair activist in 2019, or make condescending online comments about the state of climate change activism in the south. But it’s much more difficult to swim against the ideological current, or to operate between two exasperating worlds in a hands-on way, in search of real impact.There is certainly more opportunity for cooperation and partnership, and places where more traditional environmentalists like me could find common ground with a hunter in Arkansas or a fisherman in Georgia, so that we could, quite frankly, save what we both love. Topics Climate Changed Climate change Wildlife Birds Arkansas features

More than 10,000 artists, craftspeople and revellers take part in the carnival, a fusion of different cultural celebrations. It takes place every year from 2 to 7 January in the city of Pasto and is on Unesco’s intangible heritage list

Less than a week after the Canadian government announced Ms. Meng’s arrest, China detained two Canadian citizens, accusing them of undermining Chinese national security. The Chinese authorities have not elaborated on their reasons for holding the men: Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat, and Michael Spavor, a businessman. But the detentions were viewed by many as an effort to seek leverage in negotiations over Ms. Meng’s fate.The standoff escalated after a third Canadian was held in China, on accusations of working without a valid visa. In late December, a Chinese court also ordered the retrial of a Canadian man on a drug-smuggling charge. Prosecutors argued that his original 15-year prison sentence had been too light.Ms. Meng has been released on bail by a Canadian court, and is living under surveillance in one of her homes in Vancouver, British Columbia. Canadian legal authorities will decide whether she should be extradited to the United States; Beijing has called for her immediate release.“It seems that, to some people, only Canadian citizens shall be treated in a humanitarian manner and their freedom deemed valuable, while Chinese people do not deserve that,” Mr. Lu wrote in his op-ed.The ambassador also said that people in the West had applied double standards in their treatment of Huawei itself. Canadians, he wrote, have “conveniently ignored” revelations about global surveillance activities by the United States and its allies.“Something is considered as ‘safeguarding national security’ when it is done by Western countries,” Mr. Lu wrote. “But it is termed ‘conducting espionage’ when done by China.”

Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, a historian who helped bring to light the long-suppressed role of black women in the women’s suffrage movement, died on Dec. 25 at her home in Columbia, Md. She was 77.Her daughter, Jeanna Penn, confirmed the death. The cause had not yet been determined, she said.Dr. Terborg-Penn, a professor of history at Morgan State University in Baltimore for more than three decades, was the author of seven books, most notably, “African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920” (1998).It was one of the first book-length examinations of black women in the suffrage movement, and it challenged the existing narrative that was dominated, and framed, by white activists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.Dr. Terborg-Penn’s book was a counterweight to “History of Women’s Suffrage,” a six-volume work, begun in 1881, that was edited by Anthony, Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage. That opus more or less erased from the picture the many black women who Dr. Terborg-Penn said had attended suffrage meetings, organized suffrage clubs and promoted the cause. Stanton, moreover, had expressed racist views, especially when arguing that women should have the vote before black men.Dr. Terborg-Penn identified more than 120 black women, including Mary Church Terrell and Sarah Parker Remond, and described “hundreds of nameless black women” who had participated in the suffrage fight but whose activity had been little noted and their speeches seldom recorded.Black women, she said, were shunted aside in the history books because their goals had diverged from those of the white, mostly upper-middle-class women who had led the charge. White women wanted parity with white men, while black women, only just emerging from slavery, wanted to use the ballot box to fight the racial oppression that was engulfing the South.ImageDr. Terborg-Penn’s 1998 book was a counterweight to a six-volume 1887 history that had more or less erased from the picture the many black women who fought for the right to vote.The racial split became glaringly obvious in 1913, when the white organizers of a major suffragist parade in Washington ordered black participants to march in the rear.The 15th amendment, ratified in 1870, granted black men the right to vote, outraging some white women, who thought that they should have the vote before black men. As Anna Howard Shaw, president of the National Women Suffrage Association, said at the time, “Never before in the history of the world have men made former slaves the political masters of their former mistresses!”While the 19th Amendment, ratified in 1920, said that the right to vote could not be denied on the basis of sex, in practice this applied only to white women. Blacks of both sexes, especially in the South, were effectively barred from voting by poll taxes, literacy tests and other forms of intimidation, including lynching, until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.Dr. Terborg-Penn was one of a handful of scholars delving into this history. In the predigital age, that meant reading old newspapers on microfiche, unearthing original manuscripts and the minutes of political meetings, and combing through collections at Howard University, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, part of the New York Public Library.“She committed the first decades of her career to the deep research that was required to pull back the curtain, dispel the myths and otherwise challenge the story about the history of women and the vote that had been, to an important degree, crafted by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” Martha S. Jones, a history professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said in a telephone interview.While bringing to life this neglected aspect of American history, Dr. Terborg-Penn and a few others also established a new field of study.“These are people who literally created the field of African-American women’s history, and Dr. Terborg-Penn’s writing on suffrage was a critical part of that,” Francille Rusan Wilson, national director of the Association of Black Women Historians, said in a phone interview. Dr. Terborg-Penn was a founder of the association in 1979 and its first national director.ImageSuffragists marching along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington in 1913 drew an enormous crowd. The march made the racial split between white and black suffragists glaring when black participants were ordered to walk at the rear. The Capitol is in the distance.CreditG. V. Buck, via Library of CongressIn 2008, in a conference titled “Black Women in the Academy” in New Orleans, Dr. Terborg-Penn said it had not been easy to overcome the skepticism and inherent racism expressed by some of her own teachers and colleagues with regard to her work.She said she had to fight “the ivory tower doorkeepers who often overlook or dismiss the works of black women historians, especially those of us who teach at historically black universities and colleges,” of which Morgan State is one.“Nonetheless,” she added, “we have made a way when there was no way.”Rosalyn Marian Terborg was born on Oct. 22, 1941, in Brooklyn. Her father, Jacques Arnold Terborg, was a jazz guitarist who also worked as a skycap at New York airports. Her mother, Jeanne Knox (Van Horne) Terborg, did administrative work.The family moved from Brooklyn to Queens in 1951, and Rosalyn graduated from John Adams High School there in 1959. She earned her bachelor’s degree in history from Queens College in 1963.Her activism, fueled by her father, who believed strongly in civic engagement, blossomed in college. She led a protest when Queens College would not let Malcolm X speak on campus. On weekends, with a handful of other black students, she marched in front of an F. W. Woolworth & Co. store in Manhattan in solidarity with blacks who had staged a sit-in at an all-white Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., where they had been refused service.“We got the same response in New York City as in North Carolina,” Dr. Terborg-Penn recalled at a conference in 2016. “White America was not ready for this. We needed to stay in our place.”She went on to earn her master’s in history from George Washington University and her Ph.D. in history from Howard University in 1977.An early marriage while she was in Queens ended in divorce. In 1968 she married William Thomas Penn; they separated a decade later and were divorced in 1990.In addition to her daughter, Jeanna, she is survived by her brother, Jacques Arnold Terborg Jr., and a grandson.Dr. Terborg-Penn’s graduate years were highly productive. She won an award for an essay, “Discrimination Against Afro-American Women in the Women’s Movement.” She and Sharon Harley, a fellow graduate student, published “The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images.” And her dissertation, titled “Afro-Americans in the Struggle for Woman Suffrage,” became the blueprint for her groundbreaking book two decades later.She began her teaching career at Morgan State as an instructor in 1969 and retired as a professor of history in 2006. She continued to work with graduate students and retired fully from Morgan in 2009 with the title university professor emerita.Dr. Terborg-Penn also studied women in the African diaspora. As part of that work she explored her own family history in the Caribbean, South America and Europe, and helped organize the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora.Shortly before her death, she attended a meeting of the Association of Black Women Historians, held in Los Angeles, to celebrate its 40th anniversary.“Generations of historians regard her as an important figure in their study and scholarship,” her daughter said in a phone interview. “They were so excited to see her. It was like Beyoncé had walked into the room.”

I once made the mistake of going on a Tinder date with an aspiring comedian. By the time our main courses arrived he had shared his full sexual history, including a graphic description of a foursome with some travellers he had met on a couchsurfing site. I had always assumed these were meant for people who needed a cheap place to stay, but apparently at least one doubles as a hook-up app for casual-sex enthusiasts who hate hotel room charges. Eventually, after a long speech on female independence, he told me that he only paid for dinner when the girl was “very attractive”, so I plotted my escape while we split the bill. I thought he would be happy to call it a night, but no such luck. As I scrambled to find an emergency Uber, he grabbed hold of my foot, asking if he could lick my “sexy” toes all night. I declined his offer and spent my journey home wondering if it’s possible to shower your own skin off.There have been plenty of other disappointing dates over the years, including Andy the monosyllabic advertising consultant, Will the food thief who wouldn’t let me finish a sentence, and a Greek racist who would only eat white dairy products. Other encounters have felt more like the icebreaker at a banking conference than the start of a Romeo and Juliet remake.Online dating is useful for older singles like me (I’m 34), whose married friends are too busy cleaning up toddler poo to act as wing woman. These days, everyone I meet in real life is already in a committed relationship. Yet, after 18 months on the scene, I’m struggling to develop any excitement about people I’ve never seen in the flesh. I often end up ghosting people after exchanging a handful of messages. When 90% of dates lead to disappointment, revulsion or a vague sense of doom about the future of the human race, dancing to Taylor Swift in your bedroom and rehearsing an imaginary Oscars speech seems like more fun.We all know a bad workman blames his tools, so I decide to speak to my friends about my dating patterns. Never ones to hold back, they tell me that I am too judgmental, writing off good men for all the wrong reasons. Instead of giving someone a chance, I’ll leave after the first date because he can’t use apostrophes or doesn’t turn my stomach into a butterfly-filled frenzy of passion. They also tell me I’m too forgiving of narcissists and commitment-phobes, willing to make excuses for “complicated” blokes who frequently lose the ability to send text messages.Persia Lawson, dating coach and author of The Inner Fix, says that if you are repeatedly drawn to emotionally unavailable people, it is probably a defence mechanism. “People say they’re looking for a committed relationship, but when an available person comes along, they dismiss them due to lack of ‘spark’,” she explains. “In reality, they’re terrified of real commitment. There’s a sadomasochistic pleasure that comes with dating emotionally unavailable men.”As a dreamy flibbertigibbet who grew up with Disney movies as her primary source of spiritual guidance, it is tempting to wait for a prince to climb my hair and carry me off to an all-you-can-eat cheese restaurant. But instead of going 100mph or avoiding people who don’t take your breath away the second you meet, Persia recommends taking it slow. “Try rotational dating, where you meet different people for coffee, walks or a trip to the cinema or a museum. Anything that doesn’t involve late nights and alcohol is good, as drinking can influence your dating decisions in an unhealthy way and give you false confidence.”Her advice makes perfect sense. You wouldn’t expect to develop a close friendship overnight, so why do we expect so much from the people we date? Some of the best and most solid relationships develop over time, without instant infatuation to cloud your judgment.According to Lawson, it’s also important to be honest and avoid playing games. Provided you don’t turn up to a first date with wedding dress patterns and a list of possible names for your as-yet-unconceived child, there’s no reason you can’t be upfront about what you want.But when you have spent 15 years chasing players who have the emotional intelligence of a toothbrush, how do you change your ways and start choosing better men? Lawson says that rather than looking for the person I fancy the most, I should focus on shared values. “You need to have standards for yourself, but don’t be unrealistic or superficial. It doesn’t matter if a man isn’t three inches taller than you or a woman isn’t a certain weight. You can have preferences, but focusing on them too much is part of love avoidance and you keep people out by having strict specifications. The only thing you need to ask is how your date makes you feel about yourself as person. Do you feel comfortable? Do you share the same values? Do you want the same things?”Taking Lawson’s advice, I refresh my dating profile on Bumble and get swiping. After exchanging messages with a web developer called James, we agree to meet after work at a local pub. There will be booze involved, but I have set myself a deadline to come home at 9pm and finish some work. This also doubles as the perfect escape plan in case he turns out to be a homicidal maniac who collects human hair in jam jars. Although I have zero expectations, the date is a success and it is the most comfortable I have felt with a man in months. He is laid-back and has a good sense of humour, the kind of guy you could introduce to your friends without having to get them drunk first. When we say goodnight, he’s reserved and polite, a stark contrast to the men who have kissed me, declared their undying passion and then disappeared into the sunset in a cloud of sexy cologne. There was no instant chemistry, but we exchange a few messages the next day and he’s keen for us to have dinner together when we’re both free.In the meantime I arrange a coffee date with Luke, who works in advertising. Within the hour it’s clear that, while he’s a perfectly nice guy, there’s very little common ground and we don’t share the same sense of humour. I’m grateful I took Lawson’s advice to arrange a coffee date rather than dinner or drinks, where we might feel compelled to spend longer in each other’s company. We exchange a few messages afterwards, but it soon fizzles out.After a second successful date with James at an Indian restaurant, I arrange to meet up with an actor outside the V&A museum. Usually I would be wary of flamboyant men, but he seems chatty and outgoing, totally different from the dry-humoured type of guy I usually go out with. I’m not sure if I fancy him, but I’m so impressed by his encyclopedic knowledge of Britney Spears albums that I am up for another date.The next week, James and I enjoy a few more PG get-togethers, before agreeing to meet up at the London Wetland Centre to see the otters. To his credit, he doesn’t complain when I insist we queue up in the cold for a good view at feeding time, and we spend the rest of the day sharing newly acquired trivia about mustelids. He also gets bonus points for not pretending to be with someone else when I jump up and down, squealing: “Look how cute the otters are!”I don’t know if my refreshed approach to dating will lead to happily ever after, but keeping an open mind is helping me to enjoy the process again. For now I’m ready to forget the fairytale myth and enjoy online dating for what it is: a chance to meet interesting people and explore new parts of town. If something doesn’t work out I will, in the wise words of Dory the fish, “just keep swimming” until I find what I’m looking for. Perhaps my Disney education wasn’t completely wasted after all.Some names have been changed. Topics Dating Get better for 2019 Relationships features

Sonos is reportedly expanding beyond speakers and soundbars with plans to make its own headphones. Bloomberg reports that the company hopes to distinguish itself through its reputation for audio quality and support for multiple voice assistants, such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. The headphones are reportedly in early development, and could launch next year in the $300 range.All of which is to say that Sonos could need more than just brand appeal to succeed. Still, if the company can somehow tie the headphone listening experience to its speakers–for instance, by handing off from the latter to the former when leaving the house–that might be a start.A Sonos rep said the company doesn’t comment on future product plans.

It has been almost a century since Gladys Franks Bell’s father fled an election day race riot in Florida, clutching his little brothers and sisters and wading through swamps and woodland to safety while the Ku Klux Klan razed the family’s home town of Ocoee.By the end of the night his uncle July Perry was dead, lynched by a white mob and left hanging from a lamp-post next to a sign reading: “This is what we do to niggers who vote.” The murderous rampage, meanwhile, continued unchecked, claiming dozens of other black lives, according to many accounts, while hundreds of survivors were run out of what then became an all-white town for decades.Until recently, one of the most shameful episodes of the deep south’s racist past looked destined to be forgotten forever.But now, thanks to the efforts of local politicians, activists and the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative, there is permanent recognition for the victims and their legacy, and an official expression of “regret and horror” from the city of Ocoee, near Orlando.“It’s been so long, I never thought I’d live to see an acknowledgment that this even happened,” said Bell, who lives in the neighbouring city of Apopka.“It stayed with me over the years, what my daddy shared with us when we were children, when we used to go into Ocoee and he showed us everything that used to be our property, and told us about his life there and everything that went on.“Some of it makes you laugh, some makes you cry, and other parts make you downright mad. But they are the facts. It does bring all the memories back.”A giant step towards healing came in November 2018, when the city of Ocoee – where the census returns between the time of the massacre and 1980 recorded only white residents – adopted a proclamation steeped in symbolism. Ocoee was no longer a so-called sundown city, named for an era when the safety of any black resident could not be guaranteed after dark, the proclamation read. It was henceforth to be “the sunrise city, with the bright light of harmony, justice and prosperity shining upon all our citizens”.The ball was set rolling to reconciliation at the start of the decade when the civil rights historian Paul Ortiz, associate professor of history at the University of Florida, published an essay looking into what he called “the single bloodiest day in modern American political history”.Ortiz chronicled the events in Ocoee surrounding the presidential election of 2 November 1920. Perry and his friend Mose Norman, two prosperous black businessmen, had tried to register African Americans to vote, in the face of fierce opposition from city leaders, and when Norman attempted to vote himself he was turned away.Events degenerated quickly after he returned with a shotgun and was beaten and chased off by a mob who had gathered at the polling station. They raced to Perry’s home, where they thought Norman was hiding, and radioed for reinforcements. Klan members from Orlando and Tampa rushed to the scene where Perry, fearful for his family’s safety, fired at the crowd with a shotgun, killing two men.The mob then overran the house, wounding Perry and pursuing his fleeing family through nearby woods, and expanded their rampage to Ocoee’s northern quarter, burning dozens of homes and two churches, killing an unknown number of people, perhaps as many as 50, according to Ortiz.Perry’s fate was sealed when he was pulled by Klan members from the county jail in Orlando, shot and strung up. In the following hours, the rioting spread to Ocoee’s southern districts, where hundreds of black residents were forced to leave permanently, with no compensation for their lost property.The renewed interest in Ocoee’s grim history sparked a new push for reconciliation, bolstered this April when the election day riot was incorporated into the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, a museum dedicated to victims of racial terror and more than 4,400 black people lynched in the south between 1877 and 1950.And in May, Ocoee voters elected George Oliver as the city’s first African American commissioner, who joined William Maxwell, the longtime chair of the city’s human relations diversity board, as driving forces for the adoption of the proclamation.“It’s not so much righting a wrong as an opportunity to look at ourselves, each person as an individual,” Oliver said. “You’ve got to understand where July Perry and Mose Norman were coming from. They dared to prosper in an era of white privilege, dared to leave their home in North Carolina to seek out prosperity … one generation away from slavery.”“That part became their undoing. They wanted to live the American dream. ”For Bell, the healing process began decades ago when her father Richard, as a teenager, carried his siblings to safety and helped them build their new life in Plymouth, Florida, 10 miles north of Ocoee, memories she records in her book Visions Through My Father’s Eyes.“He went through all of that, he never shared any hatred against any white person and he taught us to do the same,” she said. “He’d tell us all about it and we just knew of it not holding any grudges. That’s just the type of man my father was.” Topics Florida Race news

For most of this century, Apple has been known as the world’s preeminent hardware company. In the last 18 years, the company has given the world the iPod, the flat-screen iMac, the MacBook Air, and the iPad–products almost universally agreed to be the leaders in their fields. But Apple’s biggest product, from both a commercial and critical standpoint, has been the iPhone.Apple’s stock was further hammered late last week when the company issued a rare guidance revision, lowering the current quarter’s revenue estimates by $9 billion. In an open letter to investors from Tim Cook, Apple primarily blamed the economic environment in China for sluggish sales. But Apple, and every other smartphone maker on the planet, knows there’s a bigger problem on the horizon: Twelve years after the first iPhone arrived, smartphones are a mature product category.As a result, people don’t feel the need to upgrade their current iPhones–or other smartphones–as often as they used to. Hardcore fans who used to upgrade every year now may wait two or three years to do so. And other less-techie consumers find that smartphones have advanced so much they can get away with the one they bought four years ago. After all, even 2014’s iPhone 6 still emails, surfs the web, and takes photos just fine.The problem for Apple is that the iPhone is such a large part of its business. If the company is going to continue to grow, what product could step up to take the place of lagging smartphone sales?The answer from every Wall Street analyst, tech pundit, and even Apple itself seems to be: services. In order to continue its growth for the immediate future–short of breakthrough new hardware like AR glasses or a car–Apple will have to grow its subscription-based products, or create new ones. In essence, Apple needs to become a services company on the scale of Netflix, Spotify, and Dropbox.Apple has already started to make serious moves in the direction of becoming a more service-focused company by allowing Apple Music to be streamed on Amazon Alexa and Echo devices last year, enabling the music streaming service to grow beyond only people with Apple or Android devices. Then this week Apple announced it will also bring iTunes movies and TV shows to smart TVs made by third parties, starting with Samsung. Having Apple’s video services accessible on non-Apple products is pivotal if the company wants its upcoming video streaming service to be able to compete with Netflix and other video services that are already available everywhere.But if Apple really wants to become a services company of significance, it needs to up its game. Here’s how:[Photo: Jens Kreuter/Unsplash]Apple must rethink its video content strategyThe worst-kept secret in Hollywood is that later this year Apple is going to launch a video streaming service to compete with Netflix and Hulu. However, the company may be getting off to a wrong start before the service even launches. If rumors are to be believed, it is planning to launch a “family friendly” streaming service. That means no original content with sex, too much violence, or heavy-hitting subjects. In other words, Apple is avoiding the type of original content services that Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are lauded for.While the family-friendly angle isn’t to be dismissed outright, the problem for Apple is that the biggest player in family-friendly content–Disney–will also be launching its new Disney+ streaming service this year. With home budgets already stressed and subscription service fatigue setting in, who will households turn to for their family-friendly needs? Apple? Hell no. They’re going to join Disney+, because that’s the company that offers the most-beloved family-friendly content ever created.So if Apple can’t grab the family-friendly crowd away from Disney, who is it going to attract with its family-friendly lineup? Certainly not current Netflix, Hulu, HBO Go, and Amazon Prime Video subscribers, who enjoy the more adult-themed content. That would leave Apple’s service feeling like it’s the place to go if you want plain vanilla, middle-of-the-road, prime-time network programming. And we already have basic TV for that.It should become a leading news platformFor what it’s worth, I believe Apple already has a product with great services potential. No, not Apple Music–I’m talking about Apple News. The app is found on all devices running the most recent versions of iOS and MacOS, and it’s the one source I go to to read most of my news. If Apple, as is rumored, builds this out into a full-blown paid-for news subscription service, I think people who appreciate good content from varied sources would sign up in droves.Right now, the News app works by aggregating stories from various publications in one very attractive and user-friendly app. The app also allows users to subscribe to individual publications so they can read more articles from, for example, the New York Times. But if Apple could get the buy-in from major publications and websites and launch a news service that gives Apple News subscribers unlimited access from all of those magazines, papers, and sites, it could go a long way to becoming a healthy subscription business for Apple. It would also be another way for publications to earn a profit from their content.Add in video news content from major networks and cable channels and it would be even more tempting to sign up.[Photo: João Silas/Unsplash]It needs to make iCloud pricing more appealingI’ll make this one quick, because there’s no shortage of cloud storage providers. I find Apple’s iCloud to be an incredibly easy-to-use cloud solution with prices similar to other cloud service providers. But that’s just the problem: Apple’s iCloud is at best on-par with the competition–no better, no worse.While iCloud would never be the biggest part of all the services Apple offers, the company could probably double its user base overnight if it slashed its prices well below its competitors. How about 1TB of iCloud storage for $1.99 a month? Dropbox would be shaking in its boots. Apple could open up iCloud storage to Android users–but is that such a stretch? iCloud has long been available on Windows PCs, and Apple already offers Apple Music on Android devices.It ought to bring iMessage to AndroidSpeaking of Android . . . it’s time to bring the iMessage service to the world’s largest computing base. I know, I know, putting iMessage on Android would destroy one of the main reasons people stick with their iPhones. However, with iMessage unavailable on Android, iPhone users with Android friends often have to switch to other apps, such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, to chat with their buddies. These cross-platform apps pull iPhone users out of Apple’s ecosystem, making it easier for them to switch to Android. But the converse would be true with iMessage on Android: Get Android users addicted to the simplicity of iMessage, and it makes it easier for them to jump ship to the iPhone when they buy their next smartphone.But how would bringing iMessage to Android help Apple, the new services company? Simple: It could do what WhatsApp used to and charge Android users an annual $4.99 fee to use the app. Five bucks times a few hundred million Android users on an annual subscription plan brings in a lot of services dough for Apple.[Photo: Flickr user Dru Bloomfield]It could turn the iPhone into a serviceBelieve it or not, the “iPhone as a service” is a real thing already. Apple offers the iPhone Upgrade Program, which allows people to get a new iPhone every year for as low as $37 a month. The problem is the service is underused and outsourced to a third party, Citizens Bank, making it less user friendly than it could be.Instead of continuing down this route, Apple could scrap the current iPhone Upgrade Program altogether in favor of launching a true iPhone subscription service. Imagine a flat $30 monthly fee for the latest Apple flagship–and you get a new flagship every year? Thirty bucks a month over three years is $1,080. Considering people are hanging on to their smartphones that cost less than that for three years or more, wouldn’t it benefit Apple to make a guaranteed grand plus change off of every iPhone owner every three years?And suddenly Apple’s flagship would go from being one of the most expensive phones to own to one of the cheapest (spread out over three years, of course). Allowing subscribers to access the latest flagship for only 30 bucks a month would also mean these new iPhone subscribers would have the latest tech built-in, which would more likely make them buy the latest apps that take advantage of the tech, and subscribe to other services that go along with the tech–all provided by Apple.And if you think consumer hardware as a service is an odd thing, major companies are already doing it, such as Microsoft with its Xbox. Realistically, I think it’s unlikely Apple would turn the iPhone into a service, but if the company is serious about combating falling smartphone sales and becoming a services behemoth, it should give it serious consideration.

For little more than pennies per hour, in homes across India, some of the country’s most vulnerable women and girls do tasks such as embroidery, beading, and lacework, making fringes or tassels, snipping threads, and stitching button holes on garments for big international fashion brands. Many shoppers, however, probably don’t even realize these workers exist.In-depth new research from the University of California, Berkeley, led by Siddharth Kara, an author and expert on contemporary slavery, offers a comprehensive investigation into the lives of more than 1,000 of these women and girls.Between October 2017 and April 2018, the researchers documented 1,452 home-based garment workers in parts of northern and southern India. Nearly all were female, and more than 99%, it turned out, were either Muslim or part of a low Hindu caste, meaning the workers were almost all marginalized members of their communities. For many, the jobs were essential to their survival. In northern India, where most of the workers were located, about 76% started home-based work due to “some form of duress,” including severe financial hardship, family pressure, or lack of alternative income. It could be taboo for them to even leave the home unaccompanied by a man.For their labor, tallied on a piece rate, these workers typically received the equivalent of about $0.13 to $0.15 per hour. “In fact, most workers received between 50% and 90% less than the state-stipulated minimum wages,” the report notes.“This is not a survivable income, even in the most destitute manifestation of survival,” Kara says in an interview.More than half the workers in northern India started work while still minors. “My parents could not afford fees for school, so I do this work instead,” one 13-year-old worker quoted in the report says. About 7% of the workers studied toiled under conditions of forced labor as defined by international law.And far from being disconnected from shoppers in the West, about 85% of them worked on garments meant for export to the US or Europe.Shoppers in those regions may rarely, if ever, hear about homeworkers. They tend to be practically invisible, and there aren’t solid counts of how many there are. According to Kara, the best estimate is “several million” in India, but more specific than that nobody can accurately say.Even the brands they’re producing for may not be fully aware they’re in their supply chains, due to the practice of subcontracting: A brand contracts a factory to produce a number of garments, and then the factory, unable to complete the work itself or seeing a cheaper alternative, subcontracts it to someone else—in this case a homeworker with little bargaining power and dire need of income. A local subcontractor in a village will deliver the garments and raw materials to the worker and come back later to pick up the finished orders.Still, brands tend to know these conditions exist. “You name any brand and they are doing stuff,” Sanjay Kumar, the director of SEWA Bharat, part of a national trade union representing informal workers, including some homeworkers, told Quartz in 2015. The union had set up a unique company that contracts directly between brands and homeworkers to create a mutually beneficial arrangement.The new report doesn’t call out any brands explicitly. Kara explains that the goal wasn’t to name and shame these companies, which he says are “household names that you and I would recognize.” He doesn’t want the public scrutiny to scare them into cutting off suppliers that have been subcontracting to homeworkers, potentially depriving those workers of wages vital to their survival.Instead, the goal is to get brands to start paying attention, and to take steps to make sure homeworkers are being properly paid and protected. Most home-based garment workers aren’t in a union, for instance. None in the new report were, nor did any of them have a written contract, leaving them particularly susceptible to exploitation. Beyond being severely underpaid, they could be harmed further by subcontractors who might pay them late, or threaten them in other ways.The report recommends that home-based workers get their own garment-specific union, that they start to receive written contracts, that they be properly monitored to ensure they’re earning proper wages, and that the extraordinarily vulnerable women and girls who comprise most of these workers receive education and skills training to empower them. It’s the brands, because of their size and leverage with suppliers, that “are best positioned to address the findings of this report on a meaningful scale and thereby substantially improve conditions for home-based garment workers in India,” the report states.

(Reuters) - Wall Street rallied for a fourth session on Wednesday, propelled by Apple, chipmakers and other trade-sensitive stocks after signs of progress in trade talks between the United States and China. The benchmark S&P 500 .SPX, now in its longest daily winning streak in nearly four months, is up about 10 percent from a 20-month low it touched around Christmas, lifted by hopes for a deal between the world's two largest economies, which eased some worries over the impact of the trade spat on global growth. Market participants were also encouraged by strong U.S. jobs data and recent indications the U.S. Federal Reserve is in no rush to raise interest rates. The Fed released minutes showing a range of policymakers said in December they could be patient about future interest rate increases and that a few did not support the central bank’s rate increase that month. China pledged to purchase “a substantial amount” of agricultural, energy and manufactured goods and services from the United States, the U.S. Trade Representative’s office said, as talks wrapped up in Beijing. The S&P technology index .SPLRCT rose 1.50 percent, with Apple Inc (AAPL.O) up 1.70 percent despite a Nikkei report that the company had reduced planned production for its three new iPhone models for the January-March quarter. The company’s shares tumbled about 10 percent last week after it warned on holiday quarter sales. Its suppliers, which largely include chipmakers, took another beating on Tuesday after Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) flagged weak chip demand. The Philadelphia Semiconductor index .SOX gained 2.52 percent. Chipmakers are among the U.S. multinationals with the highest revenue exposure to China. “If you want to gauge how investors are viewing the trade talks, just watch tech, and semiconductors in particular,” said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Cresset Wealth Advisors in Chicago. Shares of Boeing Co (BA.N), which also has a large exposure to China, climbed 0.97 percent, with the S&P industrial index .SPLRCI gaining 0.63 percent. The energy index .SPNY led other sectors with a 1.50 percent jump, helped by oil prices at their highest levels in nearly a month. The CBOE Volatility index .VIX, often referred to as an investor fear gauge, dropped half-a-point to a one-month low of 19.85. The Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI rose 0.39 percent to finish at 23,879.12 points, while the S&P 500 .SPX gained 0.41 percent to 2,584.96. The Nasdaq Composite .IXIC added 0.87 percent to 6,957.08. Financial stocks .SPSY rose 0.52 percent, with Citigroup (C.N) climbing 2 percent. Echoing the Fed minutes released on Wednesday, many policymakers said they could wait on any further interest rate hikes until they had a better handle on whether growing risks will undercut an otherwise solid U.S. economic outlook. “A more stable Fed is going to lead to more stable markets over time,” said Mark Heppenstall, chief investment officer at Penn Mutual Asset Management in Horsham, Pennsylvania. “Some of the sharp moves in the market were driven by the fact that Fed tightening is starting to have an impact on economic growth and financial conditions.” For the S&P, Wednesday’s advance marked the benchmark index’s longest streak of gains since mid-September, just before it started retreating from its record high. Shares in Constellation Brands Inc (STZ.N) sank 12.42 percent, dragging down the consumer staples index .SPLRCS, after the Corona brewer cut its fiscal 2019 profit outlook. FILE PHOTO: Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S., January 8, 2019. REUTERS/Brendan McDermidAdvancing issues outnumbered declining ones on the NYSE by a 2.28-to-1 ratio; on Nasdaq, a 1.91-to-1 ratio favored advancers. The S&P 500 posted no new 52-week highs and one new low; the Nasdaq Composite recorded 27 new highs and 5 new lows. Volume on U.S. exchanges was 8.0 billion shares, compared with the 9.0 billion-share average over the last 20 trading days. Additional reporting by Sruthi Shankar in Bengaluru; editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Jonathan OatisOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

By many measures, Castro might seem modest. The company that makes the freemium podcast-listening app doesn’t disclose usage numbers, stating only that it’s among the top 10 podcast apps for iOS—a market segment dominated by Apple’s bundled Podcasts, which overshadows everything else. Castro might have as many as the low hundreds of thousands of users, the vast majority paying nothing.But Castro has ambitions. While the podcast industry raked in over $300 million in ads in 2017, that number is estimated at $400 million for 2018, and is expected to cross $600 million by 2020, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. That’s a tiny sum relative to newspaper and radio ad sales, which are around $17 billion each. Still, it’s up from nearly nothing in just a few years.[Image: courtesy of Castro]Counting advertising alone misses an important and growing part of podcast revenue, however. Other forms of income come from paid content that’s either charged as a premium or included as part of a subscription. This money is collected by companies as varied as Audible, Spotify, and Stitcher. They don’t disclose details about the income they receive that is solely attributable to selling podcast content, but some observers believe it could reach billions in a few years, based on rapidly growing demand.Castro would like a piece of that future, and the two-man band that developed the app— Pádraig Ó Cinnéide and Oisín Prendiville—recently sold their creation to Tiny, a Victoria, B.C., venture-capital firm that specializes in boosting the fortunes of generally profitable middle-stage startup firms and app makers. Castro’s developers will remain at work on their creation. Tiny’s cofounder Andrew Wilkinson also founded MetaLab, a user-interface shop that’s designed products and handled launches for firms like Slack, Coinbase, Amazon, and Google.Castro’s revenue currently comes entirely from users who opt to pay for Castro Plus at $3 a quarter or $9 a year. That in-app upgrade brings a number of minor improvements, including an option to recognize and trim silences in podcasts—offering a minor speedup of listening time—and per-podcast customization of settings, such as how many episodes to retain.Tiny believes in Castro as a product and thinks it’s positioned to take advantage of burgeoning revenue in a rapidly growing space. “We think Castro is the best [app] we’ve used,” says Wilkinson via email. “So it was a no-brainer to team up with Pádraig and Oisín to help them keep going to be able to capture that opportunity versus continuing the brutal indie app-store grind with limited resources.”[Images: courtesy of Castro]The potential listening market is huge. In 2006, in podcasting’s relative infancy, just 11% of Americans 12 or older had ever listened to even one episode. But by 2018, according to Edison Research, that number had climbed to 44%, or about 124 million people. The firm said 17% of Americans who are 12 and older currently listen to podcasts at least once a week. There’s more growth potential yet to come in other countries. The U.K.’s telecom and broadcast regulator, Ofcom, noted in September 2018 that weekly podcast listeners there had doubled from 7% of people aged 15 and over in 2013 to 11% in 2018–nearly 6 million people–but they still have a long way to go to match the U.S.Wilkinson notes that Tiny is happy to invest in listeners without obsessing about short-term profits for now, but will seek “revenue over the long term.” The goal is to become one of the “top 10 players.” The landscape of podcast apps, advertising, and consumer-paid content doesn’t make that a boast or implausible. Castro is just the latest in a series of moves on the app side of things, as more companies enter the fray.Here’s a map of the current rocky terrain.Apple-to-apples comparisonsYou can’t talk about the podcast ecosystem without starting with Apple. It’s the 100,000-watt gorilla radio station, if that radio gorilla were benign and shared its bananas by broadcasting any tape sent in.The Apple Podcasts app ships as part of iOS, and thus is in the hands of a billion or more iPhone and iPad users. By many reports, listeners who use this app form 70% or more of podcast consumers. All other apps, no matter how popular, have just a few percentage points of listeners, at least for podcasts that aren’t behind a walled garden.Over the years, Apple’s interest in podcasts has ranged from indifferent to supportive. Currently, it’s in a supportive arc. The company doesn’t offer any way for podcasters to charge for content, but it puts them in its directory without charge, and offers a streamlined way for listeners to subscribe to new episodes and select from back catalogs.Apple shows podcasts in its audio search results with the same level of visibility as music, spoken word, and audiobooks. The Podcasts app is not great, but it’s good enough, and it fits neatly into this ecosystem. The Podcasts app’s existence is certainly a reason podcast listening has grown steadily over several years from a niche audience. (Google released its own Google Podcasts app for Android in June 2018, but it has to be downloaded. Google has no plans for an iOS version, nor is Apple likely to offer anything for Android–although given that it just announced plans to bring formerly proprietary services to LG, Samsung, Sony, and Vizio TV sets, who knows what the future might bring?)[Image: courtesy of Stitcher]For all the benefits of Apple’s support of podcasts, its dominance has led to an advertising monoculture. Podcasters couldn’t charge directly for episodes or shows, and couldn’t assemble rigorous information about listenership or, critically, how long into a podcast people listened before dropping off or whether they skipped over ads. Advertisers on terrestrial and satellite radio rely in part in listening data collected by Nielsen’s tracking systems.In this monoculture, “host-read ads” leapt to the fore. A throwback to old-time radio, they involve the podcast’s host reading ad copy–often improvising a bit or speaking from personal experience–in the same natural cadence of the rest of the show.That sort of read “will not necessarily scale to billions of dollars, we don’t think,” says Erik Diehn, the CEO of Stitcher, an E.W. Scripps company that offers its own subscription-based app, sells ads for podcast creators, and produces its own shows for free and premium distribution. “If you’re Starbucks and want to reach people in five cities for a seven-day holiday promotion,” he said, a host-read ad doesn’t meet the bill. That’s despite the success of Midroll, a pioneering podcast ad-sales firm acquired by Scripps before it bought Stitcher.These ads also typically benefit advertisers who can measure direct response from codes or URLs read by the hosts. There’s a reason why it seems like direct-to-consumer businesses such as Audible, Casper, Harry’s, MeUndies, and Squarespace are the only companies paying for podcast ads. For programs that don’t have many regular listeners or aren’t focused around a host, these sorts of ads are a poor fit. (Some podcasts rely on voluntary support or a patronage model, but this largely works best for those with low production costs or vast listenership.)In the last few years, there’s been some shift. A number of companies offer software that can insert audio ads dynamically for each download of an episode. Some podcasts use host-read ads for an initial release, and then mark those sections to deliver dynamic ads when an episode becomes part of the back catalog. Some popular podcasts may have as many cumulative downloads from a back catalog in a month or so as any new episode.[Images: courtesy of Stitcher]And Apple opened its kimono at least partly. In mid-2017, it began to offer podcast creators access to analytics for their shows, aggregating information from iOS users who opted in at a system-wide level to sending diagnostic and usage information to Apple. Charts and lists reveal overall and per-episode data, such as unique devices and time listened.But most importantly, Apple displays listenership across the duration of a podcast episode, providing a graphical and quantitative insight into when people stop listening. That lets podcasters know (and prove to advertisers) that listeners keep listening rather than abandoning an episode after a few minutes.With Apple’s new features, podcasts fed out through a feed, rather than through custom apps, could get unfiltered and direct insight for the first time. There were fears that this knowledge would poison the podcast pool. What if it turned out listeners tune out before the first ad? Those concerns were misplaced. However, people generally listen through episodes at a declining rate that largely matched expectations.But dynamic advertising and partial metrics don’t offer enough options for every podcast that’s after revenue to thrive and expand. That’s led to a proliferation of podcast apps with specialized features—some aimed at listeners and some for show producer and podcast networks—designed to create listener loyalty, accept payments, and gather metrics outside of Apple’s constraints.Hungry for dataA few dozen apps, like Apple Podcasts, have no monetization or network affiliation built in. In iOS, that includes Castro, Overcast, Downcast, Pocket Casts, and others. These can use public or private podcast feeds. (A consortium of public-radio groups, including NPR and This American Life, bought Pocket Casts in May 2018.) These apps typically have an in-app purchase, likely a recurring but modest subscription, to unlock certain features, or request a voluntary contribution. But none offer premium content or pass-along payments to podcast creators.Dozens of other podcast apps and streaming-audio apps that include podcast support have a huge diversity of models. Some, like Spotify, embed ads in third-party podcasts unless someone is a premium Spotify subscriber. Others, like Stitcher, allow subscriptions to a significant percentage of free podcasts, but also offer access to premium programming through a monthly subscription. And NPR One, created by that public-radio network, is a combination of public-radio-only podcasts and streaming audio. iHeartRadio has a similar app that centers around streaming radio from its stations, but also allows podcast subscriptions of programs it produces and others it lists in a directory.Still others, like the podcast-hosting platform Libsyn, create custom or template-based apps for programs or networks that can optionally collect subscription fees or other revenue.Many of these apps gather the kind of listening data that advertisers and media-company executives love seeing: granular and comprehensive. It’s used for selling ads, but also analyzing the popularity of programs, especially for subscription-based services.This tendency to track listeners and their behavior will take a strong tick upwards with NPR’s release of a a podcast measurement standard called Remote Audio Data (RAD). RAD will allow podcast producers to tag their content, dropping markers in audio files at specific time stamps using an existing metadata format. The standard comes with wide support among other app developers, podcast platforms, and both public and commercial radio and podcast networks.When a listener uses any of these apps with RAD support and the app encounters a marker, it shoots back an anonymized bit of data to an analytics URL that’s part of the marker. RAD will let podcasters, advertisers, and other members of the ecosystem aggregate listening data across a variety of apps into a single dashboard. (Apps will have to work through how they disclose or allow opt-in or opt-out of RAD data collection in a way that conforms with Apple’s and Google’s privacy policies, too.)That will overcome some of the fragmented podcast app landscape. But Apple hasn’t signed on, and some podcast app developers are opposed to the idea. Marco Arment, whose Overcast app typically has more listeners than any other independent podcast app, has long taken a strong privacy stance. On Deccember 11, he tweeted about his objections to RAD. Yes. I understand why huge podcast companies want more listener data, but there are zero advantages for listeners or app-makers. I won’t be supporting any listener-behavior tracking specs in Overcast. Podcasters get enough data from your IP address when you download episodes. https://t.co/mplhnrmCsc — Marco Arment (@marcoarment) December 11, 2018The Stitcher exampleThe focus on listener metrics and ad delivery means that most podcasting companies haven’t delved deeply into other possible forms of revenue. This is partly because the firms generating the most revenue with subscription-only podcast series and premium content for shows that are otherwise freely available share almost no information about revenue attributable to podcasts.Stitcher is a rare exception, as its parent company, E.W. Scripps, breaks out the business’s revenue, which was $13 million in the most recent quarter, or a 90% year-over-year increase. That combines ad commissions and subscription/premium content. (E.W. Scripps put its podcast ad sales, original series development, apps, and premium services under the Stitcher brand earlier this year, folding in Midroll.)Stitcher combines a bit of nearly every existing revenue model in one place. It pioneered the “Netflix for podcasts” model, which has gradually become a value-added extra in a number of audio-subscription services, including Audible, Spotify, and Pandora. Listeners to those networks can subscribe to podcasts available for free on the larger internet, but just as Netflix supercharged its subscription growth by producing programming in-house in ever-larger quantities, it seems like that’s the direction for audio-subscription services with podcasts as well.According to Stitcher CEO Diehn, “There will an increasing volume of content that will not be available via RSS,” the venerable technology used to push out free podcast feeds. Partnering with Marvel, Stitcher just coproduced the first season of a Wolverine series, available initially only to paid subscribers. The cast had fairly well-known TV and movie actors, including Richard Armitage in the lead role. (Stitcher also launched a Conan O’Brien podcast with his production company, but it’s broadly available and free.)Despite the scope of listenership, none of these models have fully shaken out yet. At some point, people may own enough mattresses and razors, and stop responding to ads. Locked in by premium content, listeners subscribing to one network may not want to subscribe or buy audio from others.Even with Apple’s domination of mass listenership, the fragmentation of the rest of the market makes it unlikely that podcasts turn into what’s happened in streaming media, with original, subscription-only programs available uniquely at Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, and TV and movie company apps such as CBS All Access and Disney’s Disney+. Netflix and Hulu have scored some remarkable subscription increases, but at some point–as with cable TV bills–people look at what they’re paying each month and make hard decisions.This gives Castro and a host of other apps with existing user bases a toehold to help explore the future. Tiny’s principals didn’t want to discuss the details of Castro’s future on the record, but they’re eager to be part of riding the podcast wave and shaping its direction. And as Stitcher’s Diehn says, “I don’t think it’s all shaken out yet.”Listeners currently reside in the catbird seat. Everybody wants to cater to their listening interests, nobody knows what to charge or fully how to collect money from them, and their listening habits remain only partly tracked. Whatever model or models emerge will have to contend with a lifetime’s worth of already-released podcast episodes that hundreds of millions of people have yet to listen to.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California power company PG&E Corp, which expects to soon file for bankruptcy, said on Wednesday it would cost between $75 billion and $150 billion to fully comply with a judge’s order to inspect its power grid and remove or trim trees that could fall into power lines and trigger wildfires. FILE PHOTO - PG&E crew work on power lines to repair damage caused by the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, U.S. November 21, 2018. REUTERS/Elijah NouvelagePG&E said in a filing in U.S. District Court in San Francisco that it could not on its own afford the work proposed in a Jan. 9 order by U.S. District Judge William Alsup, who is overseeing conditions of the company’s probation following a 2010 gas pipeline explosion. To pay for the proposed work, PG&E said it would have to pass the bill to ratepayers who get their power from the utility company’s nearly 100,000 miles (161,000 km) of overhead lines in northern California. “PG&E would inevitably need to turn to California ratepayers for funding, resulting in a substantial increase - an estimated one-year increase of more than five times current rates in typical utility bills,” the company said. PG&E, which provides electricity and natural gas to 16 million customers in northern and central California, is facing widespread litigation, government investigations and liabilities that could top $30 billion following fatal wildfires in 2017 and 2018. On Tuesday, PG&E said it had secured $5.5 billion in financing from four banks as it prepares to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on or about Jan. 29. The utility on Wednesday estimated it would have to remove 100 million trees or more to safeguard power lines, a campaign that would face “myriad legal obstacles to reconfiguring the California landscape,” as it would require contending with state and federal agencies as well as private property owners. A proposal to restrict using power lines deemed unsafe during high winds is not feasible because lines traverse rural areas to service urban zones, while “de-energization” of lines could also affect the power grid in other states, PG&E said. State Senator Bill Dodd questioned PG&E’s filing, underscoring the frustration of many California policymakers after they approved legislation last year to let utilities recover some of the costs related to wildfires in 2017 and others starting in 2019. The legislation, which critics called a bailout, did not make provisions for fires last year and it was approved before November’s Camp Fire, the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California’s history. “PG&E’s mismanagement and lack of credibility casts doubt over anything they put forward,” Dodd told Reuters in an email. “The company can and must do more to ensure safety, and I expect the court and regulators will make that happen.” In separate court papers citing concerns about the complexity of regulations around PG&E’s power transmission, the U.S. government recommended a court-assigned monitor review Alsup’s proposals and consult with relevant agencies to reach “workable” terms for the company. The government said the monitor is “in the best position to determine whether wildfires can be prevented by fixing gaps in the currently regulatory scheme, or by improving PG&E’s compliance with current regulations.” While PG&E questioned the judge’s proposals, the company said it has no issue with the monitor checking its efforts to mitigate wildfire risks. Alsup’s order would modify terms of PG&E’s probation. He will hold a hearing on the new terms on Jan. 30. Reporting by Jim Christie; editing by Richard PullinOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.