The mug shot of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, imprisoned leader of the ruthless Sinaloa Cartel, is not just for police blotters anymore.

Sun, 19 Jan 2020 13:23:33 -0500

Adolfo Cardenas smiles faintly at the memory of traveling with his 14-year-old son from Honduras to the U.S.-Mexico border in only nine days, riding buses and paying a smuggler $6,000 to ensure passage through highway checkpoints. Father and son walked about 10 minutes in Arizona's stifling June heat before surrendering to border agents. Instead of being released with paperwork to appear in immigration court in Dallas, where Cardenas hopes to live with a cousin, they were bused more than an hour to wait in the Mexican border city of Mexicali.

Sun, 19 Jan 2020 12:24:36 -0500

NEW DELHI -- Under a highway bridge in New Delhi, where a large protest had shut down several lanes of traffic, a coterie of veteran dissidents took turns speaking: men with shaggy beards, singers strumming guitars, social activists so impassioned that spit flew from their wet lips.But a jolt of electricity passed through the crowd when a slight woman -- younger, smaller and more vulnerable looking than anyone else -- stepped up to the mic.She carried no notes. She wore a bandage on her forehead. Her arm was in a cast."Many people ask me whether I'm scared," she began. "And I tell them: How can I be scared?"People nodded their heads, seeming to follow her words carefully.She wasn't frightened of Amit Shah, the home minister, she said, or Narendra Modi, the domineering prime minister who has sent India down a Hindu nationalist path."Even if you beat us, we won't step back," she thundered. "Long live the revolution!"The crowd roared.The biggest and most energized protests India has witnessed in a generation are sweeping the country, and one young woman has been thrust to the fore: Aishe Ghosh.Earlier this month, while leading a peaceful demonstration on her university campus, Ghosh was attacked by Hindu nationalist goons. After they cracked her in the head with an iron bar and thrashed her body, images of her blood-smeared face were instantly beamed nationwide.But it was the photograph made two days later that etched her into the Indian psyche: It showed Ghosh, 25, staring straight into the camera, her head wrapped in a doughnut of white medical tape, her hair wild and her eyes radiating a resolve that seemed indestructible."Every protest has a face," said Vidit Panchal, a young doctor who traveled across India this week to meet her.Ghosh is that face.The product of politically active parents from West Bengal, Ghosh was a talented painting student before entering university to study politics. Last fall she was elected president of the student body at one of India's liveliest and most prestigious schools, Jawaharlal Nehru University, a bastion of anti-Modi dissent.Even in the weeks before she was attacked by the gang of Modi's supporters, Ghosh was marching in protests, coordinating strikes and recruiting followers -- in essence, galvanizing the resistance. Now, she is being invited everywhere to speak.To be a student leader in India, it's a thrilling time."Professors have been writing mails to us saying that you should be going to the protests, because protests teach you more than I can teach you in the four walls of the classroom," Ghosh said, clearly excited by all this. "We have politicized so many people. It gives me so much pride."Ever since modern India was envisioned, a fundamental question has been how Hindu-oriented should it be, given that the population, about 80% Hindu, has long hosted a dizzying array of different cultures, including a Muslim minority that today, at 200 million people, would on its own be one of the largest Muslim nations in the world. Modi has taken a clear position, pushing a slate of divisive Hindu nationalist policies that play quite well with a large segment of society but have deeply worried minorities and progressives."A Germany in the making," Ghosh calls it.Since Modi's reelection in May, his government has plowed ahead with a contentious citizenship review in northeastern India widely seen as a test run for a nationwide attempt to identify and marginalize Muslim families. In August he summarily deleted the statehood of Kashmir, which had been India's only Muslim-majority state.These moves raised some eyebrows, especially in rival Pakistan, which also claims Kashmir.But the issue that sent millions of Indians over the edge was Modi's new citizenship law, which creates a special path to Indian citizenship for migrants from all major South Asian religions bar one: Islam.Modi has insisted that the law is intended to protect persecuted migrants from neighboring countries, but many Indians see it as blatantly anti-Muslim and discriminatory. As soon at it passed in December, universities across the country exploded in protest.Jawaharlal Nehru University, in central New Delhi, where Ghosh is working on a master's degree on climate change, has been one of India's most reliable incubators of dissent. It's a big leafy campus, known for its liberal arts programs, and on a recent day professors and students mingled in a sun-dappled courtyard between hulking brick buildings painted with images of Mandela, Gandhi and Guevara.These days, Ghosh has trouble making it across campus because she is stopped so often."Are you OK?" one young woman asked."You have amazing energy and stamina," said another."Please don't get beaten up again!" a friend laughed.It was a chilly day under a thick gray sky, and Ghosh, in bare sleeves with an anaconda-size scarf cinched around her neck and a permanent smile on her face, was hard to miss.She seems to have natural political skills. She lets people finish before she starts talking; she speaks well in public; and she constantly absorbs digs, like body shaming."Some people are like: You don't look like a president, because you are so thin," she said. "So I ask them: How much do I need to weigh to look like a president?"For a long time, Hindu extremists have hated this school, and Jan. 5, the shock troops arrived.That evening, Ghosh was speaking at a protest against a fee increase at her university.Witnesses said the attackers were a mix of students and outsiders from pro-Modi groups that targeted liberal leaders at the university and those who had been vocal about their opposition to Modi's Hindu nationalist policies. A Hindu extremist group later admitted to participating in the melee, saying it had armed followers in self-defense.The attackers carried iron bars, pipes and sledgehammers, and they knocked Ghosh to the ground and kept hitting her and hitting her."I thought I was going to die," she said.There's a grim, new joke in India: There may be freedom of speech, but there's no freedom after speech.After speaking out about her beating, Ghosh became the victim of a vicious disinformation campaign. Hindu extremists spread fake pictures of her, showing her cast on the other arm and saying she was lying. They even said that she had smashed her own head with an iron bar.Police officials then accused her and other leftist students of instigating the violence, which she denies."I don't care if they name me in 70 cases," she said. "I'm not quitting."Ghosh grew up in Durgapur, near Kolkata, a hotbed for India's communists. Her father works as an operations manager at a thermal plant and has joined many labor strikes. Her mother is a housewife.She has one younger sister, and during teatime, the Ghosh family sat in their two bedroom apartment and dissected politics.An old college friend, Yashvi Pandit, laughed about when she first met Ghosh, seven years ago. "She would be going on and on about this joint secretary appointment or that," she recalled, "and we were all like: Why do you care?""And now look: She's gotten a blue tick!"(Ghosh recently received a coveted blue check, or tick, on Twitter next to her name, signifying that she is a person of interest who has been verified as genuine.)Ghosh has not seen her parents since she was attacked, even though they wanted to visit. She has barely spent time with her boyfriend (another student activist) either. She is in the middle of a moment -- and she seems well aware of it."With all that's going on," she said as she hurried off to another protest, "I'm busy."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

Sun, 19 Jan 2020 12:15:43 -0500

A religious sect whose members professed to be “anointed by God” forced a pregnant woman and five of her children to walk through fire as part of a cult ritual, according to local residents.Police reported seven villagers had been killed by the cult earlier this week, while 14 more were found by authorities the next day, bound and beaten in a temple.

Sun, 19 Jan 2020 12:10:24 -0500

(Bloomberg) -- Congress is being stonewalled by intelligence agency officials who refuse to testify in public for fear of drawing President Donald Trump’s ire, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said.“Part of their job is to speak truth to power,” Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, said Sunday on “This Week” on ABC. “The intelligence community is reluctant to have an open hearing,” Schiff said, “because they’re worried about angering the president.”Schiff’s committee has in the past held annual public hearings to discuss global security threats, with leaders at the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency among those testifying. A hearing hasn’t been set for this year.Document disclosure is another problem area, he said.“The intelligence community is beginning to withhold documents from Congress on the issue of Ukraine. They appear to be succumbing to pressure from the administration,” he said. The Senate Intelligence Committee a year ago heard from the heads of key agencies, including the CIA and NSA, who said North Korea and Islamic State remained critical security threats. In response, Trump called the agency heads “extremely passive and naive” in a tweet to his millions of followers. Schiff said the NSA is refusing to provide “potentially relevant documents” on Ukraine, and also withholding documents that may be relevant for senators in Trump’s upcoming impeachment trial. “That is deeply concerning,” he said.The lawmaker said the CIA may be on the same course, but didn’t elaborate.“We are counting on the intelligence community not only to speak truth to power, but to resist pressure from the administration to withhold information from Congress because the administration fears that they incriminate them,” he said.To contact the reporter on this story: Steve Geimann in Washington at sgeimann@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Matthew G. Miller at mmiller144@bloomberg.net, Ros KrasnyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Sun, 19 Jan 2020 10:26:55 -0500

As companies have begun to experiment with security robots, the robots have repeatedly hit obstacles — or, in some cases, fallen into them.

Sun, 19 Jan 2020 09:07:00 -0500

Workers for cruise lines like Carnival and Norwegian might be away from home for over six months, so they need to be thoughtful about what they pack.

Sun, 19 Jan 2020 09:04:00 -0500

Sun, 19 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0500

Women could've fought for the ERA long before now, but too many chose political ideology over enshrining protections in the U.S. Constitution.

Sun, 19 Jan 2020 06:00:11 -0500

The Philippine military on Sunday said it has launched search and rescue operations for five Indonesian fishermen kidnapped by militants belonging to the Islamic State-linked Abu Sayyaf group in Malaysian waters last week. Three were released, while the remaining five were probably brought by their captors to the southern Philippine province of Sulu, said Lieutenant General Cirilito Sobejana, chief of the military's Western Mindanao Command. Sulu is Abu Sayyaf's stronghold.

Sun, 19 Jan 2020 05:55:51 -0500