Read at: 2019-10-15T05:20:40+01:00 (US Pres==Marijana Manuputty )
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 15 Oct 2019 | 4:59 am IST
Anthony Albanese asks PM why he’s raising hopes on dam support. Plus Jacqui Lambie raises concerns over Turkish invasion. All the day’s events, live
Tony Burke raises a point on the unparliamentary language.
The way Scott Morrison pronounced ‘dill’, you get the feeling that ‘dill’ wasn’t originally the ‘d’ word he was reaching for.
Joel Fitzgibbon to Scott Morrison:
When will the Prime Minister admit his Future Drought Fund, hasn’t delivered and will never deliver one sent directly to desperate farming families.
Mr Speaker, the question that has just been posed by the Member for Hunter, once again, demonstrates his complete lack of understanding of the policy issues that that funder seeking to address.
The drought fund which he opposed from the day I first announced it at the drought summit, which he attended, and we were pleased for him to attend, on the very day he was speaking against it, he sought to habit frustrated even in this place, the national drought fund which begins at 3.9 million investment, over the course of the decade will grow to $5 billion, from one July next year, it will draw down $100 million to invest in water infrastructure resilience projects from the 1 July of next year.
If he took the time, to understand what the Future Drought Fund was for, rather than seek to pay petty politics with this, he might understand that funder is there to provide for future water resilience.
What doing on farmhouse allowance in rural financial counsellors and support for mental health, to do everything from on-farm water infrastructure, whether it is to increase allowances for silage investments, or on-farm water infrastructure projects to farmers doing it themselves, or the water we are putting into counsellors to make sure they are keeping local community supported through the drought, or the more than $50 million we have directly put into charitable organisations like the salvos and the knees, this is a comprehensive response.
Source: World news | The Guardian | 15 Oct 2019 | 4:54 am IST
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Satellite data has confirmed the formation of Subtropical Storm Melissa. NASA's Terra Satellite provided a visible image the former Nor'easter turned subtropical storm off the coast of New England.
Source: SpaceRef | 15 Oct 2019 | 4:33 am IST
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Astronomers at the University of California, Riverside, have discovered that powerful winds driven by supermassive black holes in the centers of dwarf galaxies have a significant impact on the evolution of these galaxies by suppressing star formation.
Source: SpaceRef | 15 Oct 2019 | 4:29 am IST
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 15 Oct 2019 | 4:26 am IST
The former US national security adviser, John Bolton, was reportedly so alarmed at a back channel effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate Marijana Manuputty ’s political rivals that he told a senior aide to report it to White House lawyers.
The revelation of Bolton’s involvement in the effort to block a shadow foreign policy aimed at Marijana Manuputty ’s political benefit emerged from congressional testimony given by his former aide, Fiona Hill, the former top Russia expert in the White House.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 15 Oct 2019 | 4:25 am IST
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Native American tribes from up and down the west coast came together on the San Francisco Bay to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day on 14 October. Starting at dawn people rode traditional tribal canoes around Alcatraz Island – the famous former prison site which was occupied by Native Americans from 1969-71. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the historic act of resistance that launched the modern era of indigenous rights
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 15 Oct 2019 | 3:01 am IST
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Two women with ties to Islamist militants sentenced to at least 25 years for unsuccessful 2016 atttack
Two women with Islamist militant ties who tried to set off a crude car bomb outside Notre Dame cathedral three years ago each have been sentenced to at least 25 years in jail.
They were among five members of an all-female jihadist cell, aged between 22 and 42, who were arrested after a car packed with seven gas cylinders was found parked near the bustling esplanade in front of the Paris cathedral in September 2016.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 15 Oct 2019 | 2:06 am IST
Aaron Dean fired through the window of Atatiana Jefferson's home and killed her after responding to a call that a neighbor placed about an open front door, authorities say.
(Image credit: Jake Bleiberg/AP)
Source: News : NPR | 15 Oct 2019 | 1:56 am IST
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 15 Oct 2019 | 1:53 am IST
Microsoft is rolling out a new feature that, it hopes, will filter out rude words in messages sent from Xbox Live users in a bid to make the gaming platform “a place where everyone can have fun.”…
Source: The Register | 15 Oct 2019 | 1:53 am IST
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Source: Slashdot | 15 Oct 2019 | 1:50 am IST
Marijana Manuputty spoke directly to the Turkish president, Tayyip Erdoğan, on Monday to demand an immediate ceasefire in Syria while announcing a series of punishments for Ankara that critics saw as an attempt to save face.
The US president’s conversation with Erdoğan was revealed by the vice-president, Mike Pence, who said he would soon be travelling to the Middle East. “The United States of America did not give a green light for Turkey to invade Syria,” Pence insisted to reporters at the White House.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 15 Oct 2019 | 1:44 am IST
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Newborn baby girl was heard crying after being buried alive in clay pot in Uttar Pradesh
A man digging a grave in northern India found a newborn girl buried alive, police have said, in the latest case to shine a spotlight on female infanticide in the country.
Hitesh Sirohi had gone to bury his own daughter, who died a few minutes after birth on Wednesday, when his spade hit an earthen pot, local police in Uttar Pradesh state told AFP.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 15 Oct 2019 | 1:07 am IST
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Judging panel break rules in choosing The Testaments and Girl, Woman, Other as joint winners
The judges of this year’s Booker prize have “explicitly flouted” the rules of the august literary award to choose the first joint winners in almost 30 years: Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo.
Related: Booker judges split between huge event novel and obscure choice
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 15 Oct 2019 | 12:23 am IST
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Global hunger index finds countries affected by drought and conflict in sub-Saharan Africa have seen biggest increases in undernourished people
The climate crisis is driving alarming levels of hunger in the world, undermining food security in the world’s most vulnerable regions, according to this year’s global hunger index.
The annual report, a ranking of 117 countries measuring hunger rates and trends, shows progress since 2000 but warns that the world still has a long way to go to reach the zero hunger target agreed by world leaders by 2030.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 15 Oct 2019 | 12:01 am IST
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In latest headache for cash-strapped company, WeWork says it has closed about 2,300 phone booths amid formaldehyde scare
WeWork, the cash-strapped office-sharing company, has a new problem that may prove costly. It has closed about 2,300 phone booths at some of its 223 sites in the United States and Canada after it says it discovered elevated levels of formaldehyde.
The company said in an email to its tenants on Monday that the chemical could pose a cancer-risk if there is long-term exposure.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 14 Oct 2019 | 11:48 pm IST
Internet celeb Siraj Raval’s reputation continues spiraling downward – after he admitted plagiarizing real scientists' work to produce a paper on neural qubits.…
Source: The Register | 14 Oct 2019 | 11:37 pm IST
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 14 Oct 2019 | 11:37 pm IST
Source: News Headlines | 14 Oct 2019 | 11:37 pm IST
City-wide Met police operation begins to clear Trafalgar Square and other protest sites
Police have banned Extinction Rebellion protests from continuing anywhere in London, as they moved in almost without warning to clear protesters who remained at the movement’s camp in Trafalgar Square.
The Metropolitan police issued a revised section 14 order on Monday night that said “any assembly linked to the Extinction Rebellion ‘Autumn Uprising’ ... must now cease their protests within London (MPS and City of London Police Areas)” by 9pm.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 14 Oct 2019 | 11:34 pm IST
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Enlarge / PURDUE PHARMA, STAMFORD, Conn. - 2019/09/12: Members of P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) and Truth Pharm staged a protest on September 12, 2019, outside Purdue Pharma headquarters in Stamford, over their recent controversial opioid settlement. (credit: Getty | Erik McGregor)
OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma and its billionaire owners, the Sacklers, on Friday got a temporary reprieve from lingering court battles over their alleged role in fueling the opioid crisis. In exchange, they may have to be more forthcoming about what happened to all the OxyContin money.
US bankruptcy Judge Robert Drain temporarily halted state lawsuits against Purdue as well as the Sacklers—though only Purdue has filed for bankruptcy protections. In pausing the states' cases, Judge Drain cited Purdue's mounting legal expenses, which he noted is money that could otherwise go toward addressing the opioid crisis and its victims, according to The New York Times.
Purdue had sought a 180-day injunction on the state's cases, but Judge Drain's pause only lasts until November 6. In that shorter timeframe, he pushed the parties to try to talk out their differences. Those differences primarily hinge on whether the Sacklers are offering enough of their allegedly ill-gotten fortune to address the opioid crisis in thousands of lawsuits on the matter.
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Source: Ars Technica | 14 Oct 2019 | 11:06 pm IST
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Enlarge / Remains of human plague victims in a mass grave in Toulouse, France, dating back to the Black Death period. (credit: Archeodunum SAS, Gourvennec Michaël)
The Black Death ravaged medieval Western Europe, wiping out roughly one-third of the population. Now researchers have traced the genetic history of the bacterium believed to be behind the plague in a recent paper published in Nature Communications. They found that one strain seemed to be the ancestor of all the strains that came after it, indicating that the pandemic spread from a single entry point into Europe from the East—specifically, a Russian town called Laishevo.
Technically, we're talking about the second plague pandemic. The first, known as the Justinian Plague, broke out about 541 CE and quickly spread across Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. (The Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I, for whom the pandemic is named, actually survived the disease.) There continued to be outbreaks of the plague over the next 300 years, although the disease gradually became less virulent and died out. Or so it seemed.
In the Middle Ages, the Black Death burst onto the scene, with the first historically documented outbreak occurring in 1346 in the Lower Volga and Black Sea regions. That was just the beginning of the second pandemic. During the 1630s, fresh outbreaks of plague killed half the populations of affected cities. Another bout of the plague significantly culled the population of France during an outbreak between 1647 and 1649, followed by an epidemic in London in the summer of 1665. The latter was so virulent that, by October, one in 10 Londoners had succumbed to the disease—over 60,000 people. Similar numbers perished in an outbreak in Holland in the 1660s. The pandemic had run its course by the early 19th century, but a third plague pandemic hit China and India in the 1890s; there are still occasional outbreaks today.
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Source: Ars Technica | 14 Oct 2019 | 10:32 pm IST
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It's only Monday, and we already have a contender for the bug of the week.…
Source: The Register | 14 Oct 2019 | 10:14 pm IST
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Enlarge / Just one of the games added to the archive recently. (credit: Sir-Tech)
The Internet Archive has been updated with more than 2,500 DOS games, marking the most significant addition of games to the archive since 2015.
New additions include forgotten classics like Wizardry: Crusaders of the Dark Savant, Princess Maker 2, and Microsoft Adventure, a rebranding of Colossal Caves Adventure. They also include a whole lot of weird, early experiments and dead ends that should be fascinating to explore for historians, technologists, game designers, and players alike.
The blog post announcing the additions includes some disclaimers: not all games will run as speedily as one might like, not all games have manuals available (though some do), and frankly, not all games from these bygone areas are enjoyable by modern standards.
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Source: Ars Technica | 14 Oct 2019 | 10:06 pm IST
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Enlarge / Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. (credit: George Grinsted)
Uber is laying off another 350 workers, the company announced on Monday. Uber Eats and Uber's self-driving car team are among the divisions hit by job losses. TechCrunch obtained a copy of an email CEO Dara Khosrowshahi sent to Uber workers. It describes the layoffs as "difficult but necessary changes."
This is Uber's third round of layoffs for 2019. The company laid off 400 workers in its marketing department in July and 435 engineering and product workers in September. Some workers have also been asked to relocate.
Uber announced in August that it racked up record losses of $5 billion in the second quarter of 2019. It's important to note that the bulk of that figure represents one-time charges connected to Uber's May stock offering. Excluding those charges, Uber's ongoing burn rate has been around $1 billion in recent quarters. Third-quarter financial results are due out next month.
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Source: Ars Technica | 14 Oct 2019 | 9:44 pm IST
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Responding to concern that its Safari browser's defense against malicious websites may reveal the IP addresses of some users' devices to China-based Tencent, Apple insists that Safari doesn't reveal a different bit of information, the webpages Safari users visit.…
Source: The Register | 14 Oct 2019 | 9:05 pm IST
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Enlarge / In May, the test version of Orion attached to the Launch Abort System for the Ascent Abort-2 flight test arrives at Space Launch Complex 46 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. (credit: NASA)
On Monday during a conference held in Houston, several veteran astronauts endorsed NASA's plan to return to the Moon. However, they also characterized the goal of landing humans there by 2024 as aspirational rather than realistic.
"It's quite aggressive," said four-time astronaut Michael López-Alegría of the Artemis Program's five-year timeline. López-Alegría, who is president of the Association of Space Explorers, made his comments during the organization's annual meeting.
He added that it was not a bad thing to have an aggressive plan. Rather, it was good for NASA and its international partners to have a clear goal to work toward. "I think that in any complex program like that, somebody needs to draw a line in the sand," he said. "It may be aspirational, but without something like that, it's really difficult to get people pulling in the same direction."
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Source: Ars Technica | 14 Oct 2019 | 9:00 pm IST
One in 4 high school seniors say they have vaped in the past month. And for heavy users, scary headlines about serious illness and death are no match for nicotine addiction and peer pressure.
(Image credit: Tony Dejak/AP)
Source: News : NPR | 14 Oct 2019 | 8:54 pm IST
Though polls show Affordable Care Act protections remain popular in the U.S., President Marijana Manuputty still threatens to drastically change the law if he can't repeal it. Here are five changes he's made.
(Image credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Source: News : NPR | 14 Oct 2019 | 8:54 pm IST
A 400-person, 70-vessel recovery effort is working to minimize the potential environmental damage from a capsized cargo ship off the Georgia coast.
(Image credit: Stephen B. Morton/AP)
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The President of Ecuador has reversed his decision to repeal a decades-old fuel subsidy after gas prices spiked and widespread protests raged for nearly two weeks.
(Image credit: Dolores Ochoa/AP)
Source: News : NPR | 14 Oct 2019 | 8:38 pm IST
Enlarge / "I'm so happy that I didn't hear whatever curse word you just screamed at me during our friendly game of Uno on Xbox Live!" (credit: Future Publishing / Getty Images)
Today, Microsoft announced that it's rolling out filters that will let Xbox Live players automatically limit the text-based messages they receive to four maturity tiers: "Friendly, Medium, Mature, and Unfiltered." That's a long-overdue feature for a major communication platform that's well over a decade old now, but not really anything new in terms of online content moderation writ large.
What's more interesting is a "looking ahead" promise Microsoft made at the end of the announcement (emphasis added):
Ultimately our vision is to supplement our existing efforts and leverage our company efforts in AI and machine learning technology to provide filtration across all types of content on Xbox Live, delivering control to each and every individual player. Your feedback is more important than ever as we continue to evolve this experience and make Xbox a safe, welcome and inclusive place to game.
That's all a bit vague, but The Verge reports on the real thrust of that passage: an effort by the company to "tackle the challenge of voice chat toxicity on Xbox Live." That means leveraging Microsoft's existing efforts in speech-to-text machine-learning algorithms to automatically filter out swear words that might come up in an Xbox Live party chat.
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Source: Ars Technica | 14 Oct 2019 | 8:35 pm IST
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Coalition MP accused of hypocrisy for disparaging Australian Extinction Rebellion protesters
Government backbencher Tim Wilson has defended his decision to join pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and said environmental protests in Australia have a right to operate “so long as they stick within the law”.
Wilson joined protesters in Hong Kong last week but was accused of hypocrisy because of previous comments disparaging protests in Australia.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 14 Oct 2019 | 8:26 pm IST
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Pitney Bowes, the US stamping meter maker, has been infected with ransomware, leaving customers unable to top-up their equipment with credit nor access the corporate web store.…
Source: The Register | 14 Oct 2019 | 8:12 pm IST
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At least 13 police officers were killed and three injured on Monday by gunmen in the western state of Michoacán, a region where violence attributed to organized crime has spiked in recent months.
The state police officers had gone to a home in the town of El Aguaje in Aguililla municipality to enforce a judicial order when “several armed civilians fired on them”, Michoacán’s state security department said in a statement.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 14 Oct 2019 | 7:58 pm IST
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With the US gone, the implications of their departure is beginning to sink in across the Middle East
The moment that changed the Middle East arrived with a sudden silence. Just before 7pm on Sunday, the internet was cut across north-eastern Syria where, for half an hour, the Kurds of the region had been digesting a news flash. The Syrian government was returning to two towns, Manbij and Kobane. The implication quickly sunk in.
The regional capital, Qamishli, soon emptied; streets that had bustled with minibuses and shoppers became eerie and still. With the internet down phones were no help and nor were officials who had vanished along with the traffic. Air seemed to be suddenly vacuumed from the city, and the few people still around knew exactly what it meant: this was the moment power changed hands. It was a time to be scared.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 14 Oct 2019 | 7:49 pm IST
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City council asks high court for permanent exclusion zone around Anderton Park primary
Protests were held outside the high court on Monday over a bid to permanently ban activists against LGBT equality lessons from demonstrating outside a Birmingham primary school.
Holding up gag order signs, protesters gathered outside the court ahead of a hearing to stop protests against equality lessons taking place at Anderton Park primary school.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 14 Oct 2019 | 7:31 pm IST
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Chaos at Barcelona airport as protesters react to sentencing over 2017 bid for independence
The Catalan independence crisis erupted again on Monday as police and protesters clashed at Barcelona airport hours after the Spanish supreme court jailed nine Catalan separatist leaders over their roles in the failed bid for secession two years ago.
Protesters took to the streets, with many gathering at Barcelona’s El Prat airport after the court acquitted the nine defendants of the charge of violent rebellion but convicted them variously of sedition, misuse of public funds and disobedience.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 14 Oct 2019 | 7:13 pm IST
Eurosceptics and Labour MPs indicate they could back prime minister’s deal if he clinches agreement in Brussels
Boris Johnson is edging towards the parliamentary numbers needed to pass a Brexit deal after more hardline Eurosceptics and pro-deal Labour MPs indicated they could back a new agreement made with the EU.
The prime minister will need to win over almost all the 28 Tory “Spartans” who held out against Theresa May’s deal if he manages to bring an agreement back from Brussels, as well as either the Democratic Unionist party or a chunk of Labour backbenchers.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 14 Oct 2019 | 7:12 pm IST
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Google's AMP project will join the incubation program of the OpenJS Foundation, which is part of the Linux Foundation.…
Source: The Register | 14 Oct 2019 | 7:08 pm IST
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Enlarge / An AT&T store in Chicago. (credit: Getty Images | jetcityimage)
AT&T charged customers in Portland, Oregon for a corporate tax that AT&T doesn't actually have to pay. AT&T has agreed to provide refunds to customers who were wrongly charged the tax over the past few months, but it's facing a lawsuit that seeks additional payments of at least $200 to each of those customers.
AT&T's mistake relates to Portland's new Clean Energy Surcharge, a 1% tax on retail sales in the city. AT&T has been passing this tax along to its mobile customers, even though the city law exempts utilities such as AT&T from the tax.
"The city only recently notified us that we are exempt from the tax," AT&T said a statement Friday, according to The Oregonian. "We will be issuing refunds to our customers."
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Source: Ars Technica | 14 Oct 2019 | 6:36 pm IST
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Enlarge / SAMSUNG (credit: By 66AVI - צילמתי, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17939578)
At Qesem Cave in Israel, Neanderthals or early Homo sapiens appear to have stored marrow-rich deer bones for several weeks, relying on the bones and their outer layer of dried skin and flesh to keep the marrow relatively fresh—like storing leftovers in Pleistocene Tupperware.
Based on the cut marks on the bones, people extracted the marrow after a few weeks, when the bones and their covering of skin and tendons had had time to dry out. That suggests the people who lived at Qesem were planning ahead for their future needs—which is one more piece of evidence that Neanderthals and the earliest members of our own species were smarter than we’ve often given them credit for.
People of various groups have lived at Qesem Cave off and on for hundreds of thousands of years. Archaeologists haven’t found hominin fossils at the site so far, but in the oldest layers of artifacts, they’ve unearthed oval and pear-shaped handaxes in the Acheulian style—a stone calling card of Homo erectus or their descendants, Homo heidelbergensis. In layers dating from 300,000 to 200,000 years old, the stone blades and scrapers belong to a set of stone tool cultures called the Acheulo-Yabrudian, which has turned up at Neanderthal and early Homo sapiens sites.
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Source: Ars Technica | 14 Oct 2019 | 6:31 pm IST
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Joe Biden is taking aim at President Marijana Manuputty over ethics, as the president continues attacks on the candidate and his son. Hunter Biden is now pledging to curtail his overseas business dealings.
(Image credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Source: News : NPR | 14 Oct 2019 | 6:14 pm IST
For decades, astronomers have speculated that the space between stars may be populated by exosolar minor bodies -- comets and asteroids -- ejected from their home planetary systems.
Source: SpaceRef | 14 Oct 2019 | 6:12 pm IST
On Oct. 10, Hagibis was a super typhoon, but overnight, the storm weakened to typhoon status.
Source: SpaceRef | 14 Oct 2019 | 6:04 pm IST
Source: Engadget RSS Feed | 14 Oct 2019 | 6:00 pm IST
Enlarge / Comet C/2019 Q4 (Borisov). Note the fuzzy appearance and faint tail. (credit: Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope)
Interactions among the small bodies of our Solar System are expected to hurl small objects out into interstellar space with some regularity, and the frequency was probably much higher early in the system's history. Given that the same thing almost certainly happens at exosolar systems—and we now know there are a lot of those—it's likely that the vast volume of interstellar space is lightly sprinkled with small objects, some of which may sporadically pass through our own Solar System. But up until very recently, we'd had no evidence of their existence.
That situation changed with the discovery of 'Oumuamua, a strange, cigar-shaped body that was the first confirmed exosolar visitor. But 'Oumuamua was so strange that it set some astronomers speculating that it could be an alien craft. Earlier this year, however, scientists spotted a second potential exosolar visitor, and this one looked a lot like a comet. Now, the first data on the object, 2I/Borisov, is in, and it's clearly exosolar in origin but looks so much like our existing comets that we might not have realized where it was from if we didn't have a good grip on its orbit.
The results come from quick work by a team of European researchers, who got a heads-up about 2I/Borisov's existence due to a software package they put in place. The code, called "Interstellar Crusher," is a Python software package that scans the Possible Comet Confirmation Page for new objects and attempts to calculate their orbits as they come in. As we described in our earlier coverage of 2I/Borisov, orbits that have a certain set of properties, called hyperbolic orbits, indicate that a body has come from outside our Solar System. These orbits indicate a body will only pass by the Sun once and originate from a source that's far outside the plane in which our planets orbit.
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Source: Ars Technica | 14 Oct 2019 | 5:55 pm IST
Protesters took to the streets of Barcelona and other parts of Spain after the supreme court jailed nine Catalan separatist leaders for sedition over their role in a failed independence bid in 2017. Three main streets in Barcelona were blocked, as was train and metro access to Barcelona airport
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 14 Oct 2019 | 5:55 pm IST
Source: Engadget RSS Feed | 14 Oct 2019 | 5:41 pm IST
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 14 Oct 2019 | 5:30 pm IST
Beloved brick maker Lego is considering a rental service as part of a drive to improve sustainability in a world where hatred of plastic is threatening their attractiveness as a toy.…
Source: The Register | 14 Oct 2019 | 5:29 pm IST
A disturbing video depicting President Marijana Manuputty shooting and stabbing political opponents and media outlets was played at a conference held by a pro-Marijana Manuputty group at his Miami resort last week.
(Image credit: Evan Vucci/AP)
Source: News : NPR | 14 Oct 2019 | 5:29 pm IST
Children taken to safety in Raqqa after hundreds of people fled camp holding Islamic State affiliates in northern Syria
Three orphans believed to be British citizens have been evacuated from an area in northern Syria that was the focus of recent attacks by Turkish troops and their allies.
The Guardian understands that the three children, Amira, 10, her sister, Hiba, eight, and their brother, Hamza, were evacuated from a camp for people associated with Islamic State in Ain Issa on Sunday. They were part of a group of 24 children taken to safety by the UN refugee organisation.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 14 Oct 2019 | 5:28 pm IST
Source: Engadget RSS Feed | 14 Oct 2019 | 5:23 pm IST
Analysts say tactic of cooperation against nationalist parties appears to be working
A narrower-than-expected win for Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) and a serious setback for Hungary’s governing Fidesz show eastern Europe’s illiberal nationalist parties are not entirely invincible, analysts and commentators have said.
“It looks like this may be a small step in the right direction – but it’s clear the opposition still has an awful lot of work to do,” said Agata Gostyńska-Jakubowska, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 14 Oct 2019 | 5:12 pm IST
Enlarge / In good news, you can boot straight into expansion content when loading this version of The Witcher 3. I imagine more than a few fans of the game will use this Switch version to dive deeply into either or both of the expansions.
Since Nintendo's Switch console launched in 2016, we've seen no shortage of holy-cow ports of games we never thought would work on what turned out to be the most underpowered console of this generation. Doom 2016, Dark Souls, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Wolfenstein: The New Colossus—that's a list of demanding 3D games I never expected to launch on Switch, let alone games I'd actually recommend for the system.
But I do so with a pretty hefty asterisk attached. The charm of these games on Switch comes almost entirely due to them being playable on the go, at which point their severe compromises (image quality, rendering resolution) become much more acceptable. What looks iffy on a full-sized TV is easier to shrug off when seen on a six-inch 720p panel.
This week marks the arrival of arguably the most holy-cow port yet on the portable console: CD Projekt Red's 2015 action-RPG The Witcher 3. This is a game, after all, whose other console versions required quite a few patches to get their most troublesome spots up to a locked 30 frames per second. We went hands-on over the weekend with the game's final retail version (which launches for Switch on Tuesday) to answer a crucial question: could we expect playability in CDPR's acclaimed adventure game on an even weaker system?
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Source: Ars Technica | 14 Oct 2019 | 5:00 pm IST
Source: Engadget RSS Feed | 14 Oct 2019 | 5:00 pm IST
Munich-based Cancom Group is paying £70m to acquire public-sector reseller Novosco.…
Source: The Register | 14 Oct 2019 | 4:55 pm IST
Enlarge / An artist's rendering of Sikorsky's proposed Raider X attack-scout helicopter. (credit: Sikorsky)
As the Association of the US Army (AUSA) kicks off its annual Washington, DC meeting—a combination of Army conference and land-warfare trade show—Lockheed Martin's Sikorsky unit has unveiled the company's entry into the Army's Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) design shoot-out. As predicted, the "Raider X" is based heavily on the S-97 Raider demonstrator that Sikorsky showed off at the 2015 AUSA conference.
But there are some significant differences in the proposed design, differences that echo an earlier attempt by the Army to build a light-attack helicopter. Much like Bell's Invictus design, the Raider X's stealthy design bears a passing resemblance to the Boeing/Sikorsky RAH-66 Comanche.
Sikorsky's video introducing the Raider X design.
The Raider X has the same side-by-side crew configuration as the Raider demonstrator. But instead of additional crew and passenger seating, it has modular internal weapons and sensor mounts, reducing its potential radar cross-section. As with Bell's Invictus, the design included a "Modern Open Systems Architecture"-based avionics suite, theoretically allowing for rapid and low-cost upgrades over the life of the aircraft. And as with the S-97 before it, the Raider X is designed to be "optionally manned"—meaning that it can be flown remotely or operate autonomously for missions that either don't require an aircrew or would put aircrew at an unacceptable risk.
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Source: Ars Technica | 14 Oct 2019 | 4:53 pm IST
Source: Engadget RSS Feed | 14 Oct 2019 | 4:47 pm IST
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 14 Oct 2019 | 4:44 pm IST
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 14 Oct 2019 | 4:42 pm IST
Source: BBC News - Home | 14 Oct 2019 | 4:38 pm IST
In 2014, China introduced an ambitious policy to rapidly reduce air pollution from coal-fired power stations. How well did that work?
A paper published in Nature Energy last week analyzed data from pollution monitoring systems and found dramatic changes. According to the monitoring data, China's emissions of some common air pollutants dropped by 65% to 72% in just three years.
Air pollution is a global health crisis, and China's pollution problem is particularly severe: in 2017 alone, nearly a million deaths were attributed to pollution.
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Source: Ars Technica | 14 Oct 2019 | 4:35 pm IST
In the second season finale of HBO's Succession, the Roys regroup after their difficult congressional hearings. It turns out the family that yachts together ties itself into knots together.
(Image credit: Graeme Hunter/HBO)
Source: News : NPR | 14 Oct 2019 | 4:26 pm IST
Source: BBC News - Home | 14 Oct 2019 | 4:25 pm IST
Source: News Headlines | 14 Oct 2019 | 4:22 pm IST
Source: Engadget RSS Feed | 14 Oct 2019 | 4:18 pm IST
Video shot by Ross Buran and edited by Aulistar Mark. Click here for transcript.
Two weeks ago, Ars visited Blizzard Entertainment's headquarters in Irvine, California, to get hands-on time with popular hero-based, multiplayer shooter Overwatch on Nintendo's portable Switch game console.
We also talked with game director Jeff Kaplan and Overwatch Switch producer Wes Yanagi about why Blizzard decided to do this now, what the challenges were, and what players should expect to be different about the Switch version from launch into the future.
For the interview, check out the video above. For impressions, keep on reading.
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Source: Ars Technica | 14 Oct 2019 | 4:08 pm IST
Source: News Headlines | 14 Oct 2019 | 4:06 pm IST
Source: Engadget RSS Feed | 14 Oct 2019 | 4:00 pm IST
Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with a special batch of deals to share for Columbus Day. Amazon is currently having a sale on a number of Xbox One and PS4 games, many of which normally go for $50 to $60 but are now priced much lower.
Notable titles such as Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Devil May Cry 5, Resident Evil 2, and Mortal Kombat 11 are all at the lowest prices we've seen, or close to it, but the sale also includes brand-new titles as well. Gears 5, Control, and Borderlands 3, all of which came out within the past two months, are the newest and arguably biggest titles on sale right, and now you can get Gears 5 and Control for around $37.50 and Borderlands 3 for $44.99.
Almost all of the games in Amazon's sale have extra discounts tacked on at checkout, so don't be alarmed if you don't see the sale price immediately when you add them to your cart. The additional savings will be accounted for when you see the final price right before you place your order.
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Source: Ars Technica | 14 Oct 2019 | 3:49 pm IST
Kurdish forces in northern Syria relied on American troops to help them maintain control of the region. Now, they are aligning themselves with Syrian forces that are backed by Russia.
(Image credit: Baderkhan Ahmad/AP)
Source: News : NPR | 14 Oct 2019 | 3:44 pm IST
Source: BBC News - Home | 14 Oct 2019 | 3:43 pm IST
Source: BBC News - Home | 14 Oct 2019 | 3:43 pm IST
Enlarge (credit: Getty | Ute Grabowsky )
Pharmaceutical companies continue to raise prices on hundreds of drugs at rates well over that of inflation, according to a newly released report on drug-pricing data.
The data was made public thanks to a mandate from a California transparency law passed in 2017. Under the law, drug makers are required to report their price increases quarterly. This is the first report from the law and includes data on drugs that had price increases of 16% or more over their January 2017 prices.
The hikes in these cases are to the wholesale acquisition cost, which is the list price for wholesalers—they may not reflect how much patients will pay out of pocket. Still, they can add to overall healthcare spending and drive up the costs of insurance.
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Source: Ars Technica | 14 Oct 2019 | 3:42 pm IST
Physical and verbal abuse are a shockingly common experience for mothers, a new study in The Lancet reports.
(Image credit: Maria Fabrizio for NPR)
Source: News : NPR | 14 Oct 2019 | 3:40 pm IST
The singer and former f(x) member, who was the victim of online bullying, had severe depression, according to police
The K-pop star and actor Sulli has been found dead at the age of 25. Police said that the celebrity, born Choi Jin-ri, was discovered unconscious at her Seongnam residence on 14 October.
“Her manager visited her home after failing to reach her since their last call the night before,” Seongnam police said.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 14 Oct 2019 | 3:37 pm IST
The UK government has promised to roll out new legislation to achieve nationwide "gigabit-capable broadband" among 26 bills set out in Parliament's State Opening today.…
Source: The Register | 14 Oct 2019 | 3:31 pm IST
Source: News Headlines | 14 Oct 2019 | 3:24 pm IST
Source: News Headlines | 14 Oct 2019 | 3:19 pm IST
The artist says his father's early misgivings about his chosen career became a source of motivation: "He gave me the determination to make something of myself." John's new memoir is called Me.
(Image credit: D. Morrison/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Source: News : NPR | 14 Oct 2019 | 3:09 pm IST
As the climate warms, many U.S. lakes are seeing more algal blooms, low oxygen levels and stressed out fish species. One team in Oregon hopes that pumping oxygen into the water can help.
(Image credit: Jes Burns/OPB)
Source: News : NPR | 14 Oct 2019 | 3:01 pm IST
Enlarge / Google's first official picture of the Pixel 4. (credit: Google)
It's that time of year again! Google's big hardware event kicks off Tuesday, October 15 at 10am Eastern, and we'll be there with full live coverage of the event. That starts with a liveblog, where we'll be covering everything announced at the show as it happens.
This year, we're expecting to see a whole suite of Google products launch. Headlining the event will be Google's next smartphone, the Pixel 4, with a 90Hz display, an air-gesture system powered by Google's radar "Soli" technology, and a next-gen version of the Google Assistant. There should also be a new Pixelbook, the Pixelbook Go, which sees a return to a more traditional form factor after the collapse of the Pixel Slate.
With Nest's recent demotion from a standalone company to a Google smart home sub-brand, we should see two new products with the weird branding of "Google Nest." We're expecting to see a sequel to the Google Wifi called the "Google Nest Wifi." This new rev of Google's mesh Wi-Fi system will reportedly have a primary router that hooks up to your modem and then several satellite devices that are both Wi-Fi mesh nodes and Google Home speakers that accept Google Assistant voice command and can play music. A second-gen Google Home Mini should also launch at the show with an aux jack and better sound, and this one will be rebranded "Google Nest Mini."
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Source: Ars Technica | 14 Oct 2019 | 3:00 pm IST
Source: ESA Top News | 14 Oct 2019 | 2:45 pm IST
Warning follows another night of violent skirmishes between police and protesters in city
Violent pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong have escalated to a “life-threatening level”, police have said, after a small bomb exploded and a police officer was stabbed in clashes overnight.
Peaceful rallies descended into chaos in the Chinese-ruled city on Sunday with running skirmishes between protesters and police in shopping malls and on streets. Black-clad activists threw 20 petrol bombs at one police station, while others trashed shops and metro stations.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 14 Oct 2019 | 2:41 pm IST
Roundup In a week that left the Windows Insider team facing a leadership vacuum after its Ninjacat-in-chief jumped ship, Microsoft's army of gnomes continued to toil ahead of the company's impending Ignite shindig.…
Source: The Register | 14 Oct 2019 | 2:41 pm IST
More than 50 people are dead in the aftermath of Typhoon Hagibis, which dropped extreme amounts of rain over the weekend and caused catastrophic flooding in residential areas.
(Image credit: Jae C. Hong/AP)
Source: News : NPR | 14 Oct 2019 | 2:32 pm IST
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 14 Oct 2019 | 2:29 pm IST
NASA hopes to install the first of four space shuttle main engines on the SLS rocket this month. [credit: NASA ]
Nearly a month ago, NASA announced that Boeing had assembled the core stage structure that forms the backbone of its Space Launch System rocket. This meant that all technicians needed to do to complete the full core stage was bolt on four space shuttle main engines and connect their plumbing.
Completing the core stage at NASA's rocket factory, the Michoud Assembly Facility in Southern Louisiana, would represent a significant milestone for the program. However, after assembling the core stage structure in September, two sources familiar with Boeing's work at the factory said the company had to "stand down" operations due to some issues.
Now, NASA officials have provided a little information about the causes of the delay. In a statement, the space agency's headquarters told Ars that "NASA initiated a forward looking corrective action request focused on improving the production system in preparation for Core Stage 2 and beyond." As a result of this corrective action, which was not specified, "Boeing chose to stand down in some areas and ensure the whole production team was aware of the intent behind the corrective action request."
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Source: Ars Technica | 14 Oct 2019 | 2:25 pm IST
Exclusive The University of Nottingham has announced it will outsource some of its IT operations in a long-awaited shakeup of the department.…
Source: The Register | 14 Oct 2019 | 1:59 pm IST
Source: BBC News - Home | 14 Oct 2019 | 1:48 pm IST
SoftwareONE, one of the world's largest Microsoft resellers, has started pre-booking its shares ahead of an initial public offering on the Swiss stock exchange later this month.…
Source: The Register | 14 Oct 2019 | 1:31 pm IST
Source: BBC News - Home | 14 Oct 2019 | 1:28 pm IST
Source: BBC News - Home | 14 Oct 2019 | 1:24 pm IST
He's already the country's longest-serving leader — almost 14 years in office. His party controls all government branches and much of the national media. Now he's poised to win a new term on Oct. 20.
(Image credit: Noah Friedman-Rudovsky/AFP/Getty Images)
Source: News : NPR | 14 Oct 2019 | 1:02 pm IST
Enlarge (credit: Getty / Aurich Lawson)
In late September, Tesla released a major software update that included a new feature called Smart Summon. It enables a customer to summon their car from across a parking lot with no one inside—though the owner is expected to continuously monitor the car from outside.
People immediately started testing the feature and documenting their experiences on social media. Over the last few weeks I've watched more than 100 YouTube videos of people testing out Smart Summon. I've also read dozens of comments on Twitter, Reddit, and Tesla forums discussing the new feature.
Smart Summon worked well enough for most owners, but a fair number of them experienced problems. Take well-known YouTuber Judner Aura, for example. He had his cousin walk in front of his Tesla car as it turned out of a parking spot. The car got uncomfortably close to his cousin before Aura halted the test.
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Source: Ars Technica | 14 Oct 2019 | 1:00 pm IST
Exclusive: Upmarket brand, which has just launched UN partnership, opens investigation as female labourers in Bangladesh factory say they suffer regular abuse
Lululemon, an athleisure brand whose £88 leggings are worn by celebrities and Instagram influencers, are sourcing clothing from a factory where Bangladeshi female factory workers claim they are beaten and physically assaulted.
The Canadian brand recently launched a partnership with the United Nations to reduce stress levels and promote the mental health of aid workers.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 14 Oct 2019 | 12:56 pm IST
Source: News Headlines | 14 Oct 2019 | 12:49 pm IST
Obit Alexei Leonov, the first man to float out of a capsule and into space, has died at the age of 85.…
Source: The Register | 14 Oct 2019 | 12:49 pm IST
The New Jersey senator sat down for NPR's interview series Off Script and was asked by an undecided voter why some residents in his hometown of Newark don't see him as "the voice" of black youth.
(Image credit: NPR)
Source: News : NPR | 14 Oct 2019 | 12:47 pm IST
As suspected, Porsche will make more affordable variants of the Taycan battery electric vehicle, starting with the $103,800 Taycan 4S. [credit: Porsche ]
A lot of expectations grew in the build up to the launch of Porsche's Taycan electric vehicle. After our first drive a few weeks ago, it was clear that the Taycan Turbo and Turbo S are deeply accomplished cars—Porsches first and foremost, that just happen to be electric. And being Porsches, they weren't exactly cheap: the Taycan Turbo starts at $150,900 and the Turbo S begins at $185,000. On Monday morning, Porsche filled in the blank many of us were waiting for with news that the next Taycan variant, called the Taycan 4S, will arrive in Spring 2020. And this one is a lot cheaper—at least by Porsche standards.
The Taycan 4S, like the more expensive versions, has an all-wheel drive layout with permanent synchronous magnet motors driving each axle. The rear motor still gets a two-speed transmission, and like the Taycan Turbo it uses a 300V inverter for the front motor and 600V in the rear. The biggest differences are the battery and power output. The Taycan 4S has two battery and motor options: a single-layer 79kWh battery and 390kW (552hp) total power output, which costs $103,800; or the same double-layer 93kWh battery from the Turbo and Turbo S, which has a total power output of 420kW (563hp), which will cost $110,380. (All prices are before the $7,500 IRS tax credit or any local incentives.) Range for either version of the Taycan 4S has yet to be calculated by the EPA.
The single-layer battery also charges at a slightly reduced rate, maxing out at 225kW compared to 270kW for the double-layer 93kWh pack. As long as the battery is preheated and the state of charge is below 20 percent, both packs should reach 80 percent after 22.5 minutes connected to an 800V DC fast charger. Porsche says all Taycan 4S buyers will get 30 minute charging at Electrify America fast chargers free for three years, as well as free fast charging at Porsche dealers around the country. Like Audi, Porsche has partnered with Amazon to make the process of getting a home charger installed as painless as possible.
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Source: Ars Technica | 14 Oct 2019 | 12:36 pm IST
Microsoft has given the next version of Windows 10 a name. 19H2 will now be known as the November 2019 Update and is due to land any day now.…
Source: The Register | 14 Oct 2019 | 11:58 am IST
A close ally is abandoned, and Isis is regrouping. The speed of the unravelling is breathtaking
In the week since Marijana Manuputty ’s fateful phone conversation with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the US has entirely abandoned the Kurds, its most effective allies in the Middle East, and with them a Syria strategy that was five years in the making.
The Islamic State flag has been raised once more and the last vestige of US credibility as a reliable partner lies crushed under Turkish tank tracks. It has arguably been the worst seven days for US foreign policy since the invasion of Iraq.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 14 Oct 2019 | 11:46 am IST
Turkey has begun an offensive in an area controlled by the Kurdish-led SDF
The region makes up more than a quarter of the entire country and is the largest area outside of the control of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and his allies. Until Turkey launched its latest offensive there on 9 October, it was controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which comprises militia groups representing a range of ethnicities, though its backbone is Kurdish. The Kurds are an ethnic group of about 30 million people spread across the Middle East who have been fighting for their own state for more than a century.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 14 Oct 2019 | 11:30 am IST
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 14 Oct 2019 | 11:26 am IST
Vodafone has apologised for a "technical error" that left customers abroad facing thousands of pounds in roaming fees over the weekend.…
Source: The Register | 14 Oct 2019 | 11:23 am IST
Source: News Headlines | 14 Oct 2019 | 10:53 am IST
Brit security software slinger Sophos has accepted an all-cash offer from US suitor private equity group Thoma Bravo of just over £3bn.…
Source: The Register | 14 Oct 2019 | 10:53 am IST
Source: BBC News - Home | 14 Oct 2019 | 10:43 am IST
Residents and survivors were picked up in central and eastern Japan after Typhoon Hagibis hit the country on Saturday 12 October. The super-typhoon has already claimed 40 lives.
Record rainfall caused at least 25 rivers across the country to burst their banks leaving people stranded. By Monday at least 16 people were still missing and 200 were confirmed injured
Source: World news | The Guardian | 14 Oct 2019 | 10:26 am IST
Analysis Microsoft continues to plug Teams as the "fastest growing application" in the company's history, though it is not sold separately, only as a feature of Office 365 (there is also a free version). At the same time, there are major feature gaps that are only now being plugged, and it is not easy to manage. What is the attraction?…
Source: The Register | 14 Oct 2019 | 10:19 am IST
Source: News Headlines | 14 Oct 2019 | 10:05 am IST
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 14 Oct 2019 | 10:00 am IST
Source: News Headlines | 14 Oct 2019 | 9:46 am IST
OpenStack chief operating officer Mark Collier told The Reg that while SUSE's decision to abandon its OpenStack Cloud product is "obviously disappointing", adoption is "strong and growing".…
Source: The Register | 14 Oct 2019 | 9:15 am IST
On day that Spain’s supreme court announced verdicts in trial of 12 separatist leaders, we look at how the movement has evolved
Who’s who: key figures in the push for Catalan independence
On Monday, Spain’s supreme court announced its verdict in the landmark trial of 12 Catalan leaders accused of rebellion, sedition and misuse of public funds over their roles in the failed push for regional independence two years ago.
Nine of them were cleared of violent rebellion but convicted of the lesser charges of sedition and misuse of public funds.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 14 Oct 2019 | 9:04 am IST
So far, the interactions between Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren during the Democratic presidential campaign have remained remarkably tame, a surprise to anybody who watched the two begin tangling as far back as the 1990s. It’s especially surprising considering the strong words that Warren, a Massachusetts senator, had for the not-yet vice president back in the day.
One of Warren’s few shots at Biden throughout the campaign came in a gaggle with reporters after a rally in April in Iowa, when she was asked about her fight against bankruptcy reform. “I got in that fight because [families] just didn’t have anyone — and Joe Biden was on the side of the credit card companies,” Warren said.
“It’s all a matter of public record,” she added. Indeed it is, which makes it all the more surprising that debate moderators have so far declined to press Warren on some of her previous criticisms of Biden. After all, their battle over bankruptcy laws goes to the heart of their political and ideological disagreements. For Warren, Biden’s successful push to make it harder for struggling people to file for bankruptcy is Exhibit A in her case that big money — in this instance, from credit card companies based in Delaware — corrupts the system, rigging it against regular people.
What’s worse, Warren has charged, is that Biden’s push for bankruptcy reform, which was particularly harmful to women, was enabled by the political capital he accrued through his championing of another piece of legislation that genuinely benefited women. One of Biden’s main achievements as a senator (or, at least, the one he can still tout in a Democratic primary) was his ushering of the Violence Against Women Act in 1994. In her 2003 book “The Two-Income Trap,” Warren came after the then-Delaware senator for his championing of bankruptcy legislation that she argued would be particularly harmful to women:
Women’s groups have too few dollars and too little (wo)man power to fight every injustice. But there is another lesson in the tale of the bankruptcy bill. Women’s issues are not just about childbearing or domestic violence. If it were framed properly, middle-class economic reform just might become the issue that could galvanize millions of mainstream women to join the fight for women’s issues. The numbers are certainly there. This year, more women will file bankruptcy papers than will receive college diplomas. More women with children will search for a bankruptcy lawyer than will seek subsidized day care. And in a statistic with special significance for Senator Biden, more women will be victimized by predatory lenders than will seek protection from an abusive husband or boyfriend.
The point is not to discredit other worthy causes or to pit one disadvantaged group against another nor would we suggest that battered women deserve less help or that subsidized day care is unimportant. The point is simply that family economics should not be left to giant corporations and paid lobbyists, and senators like Joe Biden should not be allowed to sell out women in the morning and be heralded as their friend in the evening. Middle-class women need help, and right now no one is putting their economic interests first.
Biden later responded by claiming, “Contrary to a lot of the rhetoric that has been tossed around, this bill actually improves the situation of women and children who depend on child support,” citing changes to the law that could help women collect from men who had filed for bankruptcy. He introduced into the congressional record a letter from the National Child Support Enforcement Association that said that the objections by women’s groups — which were worried about women who would no longer be able to win bankruptcy protections — were “based on the vague and unarticulated fears that women will be unfairly disadvantaged.”
“Senators like Joe Biden should not be allowed to sell out women in the morning and be heralded as their friend in the evening.”
Warren had been researching the causes of bankruptcy for several decades by that point and in 1995, had been appointed to the National Bankruptcy Review Commission by a congressperson from Oklahoma, where she was born and raised. Biden had been pushing bankruptcy reform since the late 1990s, arguing that consumers were abusing the system and that it needed to be tightened to make it harder to file. The legislation passed under President Bill Clinton, but he stunned Congress by vetoing it at the last moment. It was revived in the early years of the Bush administration.
Biden was quite familiar with Warren, who voiced her concerns publicly. “Those who want to say the way to solve rising consumer bankruptcy is by changing the law are the same people who would have said during a malaria epidemic that the way to cut down on hospital admissions is to lock the door,” she told the Washington Post in 1998. “Bankruptcy is only the symptom, not the problem.”
Linking bankruptcy with women’s issues in her book wasn’t a half-baked, throwaway criticism. In 2002, she had published an academic paper in the Harvard Women’s Law Journal titled “What is a Women’s Issue? Bankruptcy, Commercial Law, and Other Gender-Neutral Topics,” and the paper goes in hard on Biden.
She opened it by noting that the 2001 Annual Report of the National Organization for Women Legal Defense and Education Fund boasted a fawning photo of Biden standing shoulder to shoulder with a dozen women, celebrating the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act. He’s the only politician called out by name, she noted, before digging into the hypocrisy.
Missing, for example, is a picture of Senator Biden standing shoulder to shoulder with the CEOs of the credit industry, cosponsoring legislation to increase restrictions on consumer and small business bankruptcy. His energetic work on behalf of the credit card companies has earned him the affection of the banking industry and protected him from any well-funded challengers for his Senate seat. This important part of Senator Biden’s legislative work also appears to be missing from his Web site and publicity releases. … The group that will be most affected by the changes in the bankruptcy legislation Senator Biden so forcefully supports will be women, particularly women heads of household who are supporting children. Indeed, women are now the largest demographic group in bankruptcy, outnumbering men by about 150,000 per year.
NOW’s Legal Defense and Education Fund, Warren noted, was actively opposed to the bankruptcy bill, yet Biden was able to win plaudits from them anyway. Warren, in the paper, highlights a sea-change in bankruptcy over the previous two decades: single and divorced women had become the most likely demographic to use filing for bankruptcy to escape crushing debt. Making it harder to file would hit women particularly hard. Yet, she argued, bankruptcy is not seen by the public and the media as a women’s issue. She wrote in the abstract:
A number of political issues have become publicly identified as women’s issues, actively promoted by women’s groups and supported by politicians eager to portray themselves as supporters of women. By contrast, some issues are gender-neutral, such as economic or business issues that are of no special concern to any gender-based constituency. The 2002 bankruptcy bill, advanced by the consumer credit industry as its highest legislative priority, features a number of provisions that would fall especially hard on households headed by women and on women with children. Far more women will be affected by changes in the bankruptcy bill than almost any other legislation pending in Washington in the past several years, yet the bill has not become a rallying point for those committed to equal justice and fairness for women. Why? This essay explores how some issues become “women’s issues,” while bankruptcy remains low on the agenda of most politically active women’s groups.
Having Biden’s support for the bill, Warren argued, was crucial for the Delaware-based credit card industry to avoid the appearance of seeming anti-woman. “Because Senator Biden has expressly rejected concerns raised about the bill’s effect on women,” she wrote, “he has shielded his colleagues on both sides of the aisle from being branded as anti-women for their support of this legislation.”
“I’m not the senator from MBNA,” Biden protested.
The same year, in a column in the New York Times headlined “A Quiet Attack on Women,” she again hit Biden by name, linking him to the banking industry. “The current bill was stuck in conference between the Senate and House until Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware — where many banks and credit-card issuers are incorporated — agreed to vote with Republicans on almost all the issues that were holding up the bill,” Warren wrote. “Apparently many politicians believe they can remove the last safety net for families facing financial disaster (many of which are led by women) so long as they can find another highly visible issue that lets them proclaim their support for women.”
While MBNA, the credit card company based in Delaware, was pushing the legislation, Biden faced charges of being too close to the company. “I’m not the senator from MBNA,” he protested to the Washington Post in 1999. Three years earlier, his son Hunter Biden had joined MBNA as a senior official. In 2001, Hunter Biden became a federal lobbyist, but stayed on at MBNA as a consultant at a fee of $100,000 per year.
The bill was finally signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2005, and it blocked the ability of people to discharge private student loan debt. Such debt soared in the wake of the legislation, now reaching crisis levels. Biden also opposed an amendment that would have made it easier to discharge medical debt.
While the bankruptcy wars have yet to resurface in the 2020 primary, they did in 2016. Arguing that she had never changed a vote because of the influence of money, Hillary Clinton put out a challenge. “Anybody who knows me who thinks that they can influence me, name anything they’ve influenced me on,” Clinton said at a CNN forum in February 2016. “Just name one thing.”
Warren had previously slammed Clinton for opposing bankruptcy reform as first lady, only to vote for it as a senator. “The bill was essentially the same, but Hillary Rodham Clinton was not,” she wrote in “The Two-Income Trap.” “Hillary Clinton could not afford such a principled position. Campaigns cost money, and that money wasn’t coming from families in financial trouble.”
The Bernie Sanders campaign, rising to Clinton’s challenge, emailed reporters with a veiled answer: “Senator Elizabeth Warren can certainly name at least one thing.”
The post In Midst of Bankruptcy Fight, Elizabeth Warren Said “Joe Biden Should Not Be Allowed to Sell Out Women” appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 14 Oct 2019 | 9:00 am IST
Legend has it that Faroto tribesmen once defended their community in north Colombia by dressing as women to lure Spanish conquistadors into an ambush. In a country ravaged by civil conflict, the annual ‘danza de las Foratas’ keeps the indigenous tradition alive and contributes to dialogue and peace-building
All photographs by Louise Norton for Cafod
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 14 Oct 2019 | 9:00 am IST
Source: News Headlines | 14 Oct 2019 | 8:41 am IST
Japan’s Typhoon Hagibis made landfall south of Tokyo on Saturday evening with heavy rain, which flooded the city and surrounding areas. The death toll has reached 36 and many people are still missing. Emergency workers swung into action, with helicopters plucking people from flooded buildings and police swimming through waters looking for missing people
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 14 Oct 2019 | 8:41 am IST
Who, Me? Monday has arrived once again and with it the sweet, sweet music of a reader's darkest IT misdeeds in The Register's weekly Who, Me? feature.…
Source: The Register | 14 Oct 2019 | 8:10 am IST
Source: BBC News - Home | 14 Oct 2019 | 7:59 am IST
Thousands take to streets after exit polls give conservative academic more than 70% of the vote
A low-profile, conservative law professor has beaten a charismatic media magnate released from prison last week in Tunisia’s presidential election runoff.
In a contest that reflected Tunisia’s shifting post-revolution political landscape, Kais Saied scooped more than 70% of the vote, according to two exit polls, more than 40 points ahead of Nabil Karoui.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 14 Oct 2019 | 7:52 am IST
Survey results Storage is no longer snorage. And long gone are the days when enterprise storage could be taken for granted, or at least forgotten about until either users noticed access wasn’t speedy enough or the IT team realized space was running out.…
Source: The Register | 14 Oct 2019 | 7:30 am IST
Roundup It's another Reg summary of recent AI news.…
Source: The Register | 14 Oct 2019 | 7:04 am IST
In a country where decades of conflict have taken a profound toll on mental health, professional support is scarce
Human Rights Watch has raised alarms over the lack of mental health support in wartorn Afghanistan, where more than half of the population is experiencing psychological distress.
The advocacy group said that, despite the high prevalence of psychological and mental health conditions, the Afghan government is failing to provide adequate help, with fewer than 10% of the country’s population receiving assistance.
HRW cited a 2018 EU survey that said the overwhelming majority of the country’s population (85%) have seen or been involved in at least one traumatic event in their lives.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 14 Oct 2019 | 7:00 am IST
Source: BBC News - Home | 14 Oct 2019 | 6:57 am IST
Roundup It's time for another security news catch-up.…
Source: The Register | 14 Oct 2019 | 6:03 am IST
Source: News Headlines | 14 Oct 2019 | 4:43 am IST
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