World
Apple’s app store goes on trial in threat to ‘walled garden’
On Monday, Apple faces one of its most serious legal threats in recent years: A trial that threatens to upend its iron control over its app store, which brings in billions of dollars each year while feeding more than 1.6 billion iPhones, iPads, and other devices.
The federal court case is being brought by Epic Games, maker of the popular video game Fortnite. Epic wants to topple the so-called “walled garden” of the app store, which Apple started building 13 years ago as part of a strategy masterminded by co-founder Steve Jobs.
Read Also: Apple's iPhone privacy clampdown arrives after 7-month delay
Epic charges that Apple has transformed a once-tiny digital storefront into an illegal monopoly that squeezes mobile apps for a significant slice of their earnings. Apple takes a commission of 15% to 30% on purchases made within apps, including everything from digital items in games to subscriptions. Apple denies Epic’s claims.
Apple’s highly successful formula has helped turn the iPhone maker into one of the world’s most profitable companies, one with a market value that now tops $2.2 trillion.
Privately held Epic is puny by comparison, with an estimated market value of $30 billion. Its aspirations to get bigger hinge in part on its plan to offer an alternative app store on the iPhone. The North Carolina company also wants to break free of Apple’s commissions. Epic says it forked over hundreds of millions of dollars to Apple before it expelled Fortnite from its app store last August, after Epic added a payment system that bypassed Apple.
Epic then sued Apple, prompting a courtroom drama that could shed new light on Apple’s management of its app store. Both Apple CEO Tim Cook and Epic CEO Tim Sweeney will testify in a Oakland, California federal courtroom that will be set up to allow for social distancing and will require masks at all times.
Neither side wanted a jury trial, leaving the decision to U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who already seems to know her ruling will probably be appealed, given the stakes in the case.
Much of the evidence will revolve around arcane but crucial arguments about market definitions.
Read Also: Apple signals return of right-wing free speech app Parler
Epic contends the iPhone has become so ingrained in society that the device and its ecosystem have turned into a monopoly Apple can exploit to unfairly enrich itself and thwart competition.
Apple claims it faces significant competition from various alternatives to video games on iPhones. For instance, it points out that about 2 billion other smartphones don’t run iPhone software or work with its app store — primarily those relying on Google’s Android system. Epic has filed a separate case against Google, accusing it of illegally gouging apps through its own app store for Android devices.
Apple will also depict Epic as a desperate company hungry for sources of revenue beyond the aging Fortnite. It claims Epic merely wants to freeload off an iPhone ecosystem in which Apple has invested more than $100 billion over the past 15 years.
Estimates of Apple’s app store revenue range from $15 billion to $18 billion annually. Apple disputes those estimates, although it hasn’t publicly disclosed its own figures. Instead, it has emphasized that it doesn’t collect a cent from 85% of the apps in its store.
The commissions it pockets, Apple says, are a reasonable way for the company to recoup its investment while financing an app review process it calls essential to preserving the security of apps and their users. About 40% of the roughly 100,000 apps submitted for review each week are rejected for some sort of problem, according to Kyle Andeer, Apple’s chief compliance officer.
Epic will try to prove that Apple uses the security issue to disguise its true motivation — maintaining a monopoly that wrings more profits from app makers who can’t afford not to be available on the iPhone.
Read Also: Epic Games complains about Apple to UK competition watchdog
But the smaller company may face an uphill battle. Last fall, the judge expressed some skepticism in court before denying Epic’s request to reinstate Fortnite on Apple’s app store pending the outcome of the trial. At that time, Gonzalez Rogers asserted that Epic’s claims were “at the frontier edges of antitrust law.”
The trial is expected to last most of May, with a decision to come in the ensuing weeks.
US denies Iran claims of prisoner deal; UK plays it down
The United States and Iran are in active talks over the release of prisoners, a person familiar with the discussions said Sunday as Washington denied a report by Iranian state-run television that deals had been struck.
Prisoner swaps between the U.S. and Iran are not uncommon and both countries in recent years have routinely sought the release of detainees. But any movement between the two countries is particularly sensitive as the Biden administration looks to restart nuclear talks. A 2015 atomic accord between the nations included prisoner exchanges.
Read Also: Progress noted at diplomats' talks on Iran nuclear deal
The issue burst into public view with a report in Iran of a deal for the Islamic Republic to release U.S. and British prisoners in exchange for Tehran receiving billions of dollars. U.S. officials immediately denied the report, though a person with knowledge of the discussions who was not authorized to discuss them publicly said talks are active, with messages passed between intermediaries.
It wasn’t immediately clear if the report represented a move by the hard-liners running the Iranian broadcaster to disrupt negotiations with the West amid talks in Vienna on Tehran’s tattered nuclear deal.
Even after an initial American denial, an anchorwoman on Iranian state TV still repeated the announcement.
“Some sources say four Iranian prisoners are to be released and $7 billion are to be received by Iran in exchange for releasing four American spies,” the anchorwoman said. She described the claimed deal as coming due to congressional pressure on President Joe Biden and “his urgent need to show progress made in the Iran case.”
But Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Majid Takht-e Ravanchi, later denied the report of the prisoner swap, saying that it’s “not confirmed,” according to the Telegram channel of state-run IRNA news agency.
“Iran has always emphasized the comprehensive exchange of prisoners between the two countries,” he said, without elaborating.
State TV did not identify the Iranians that Tehran sought to be freed.
State Department spokesman Ned Price immediately denied the Iranian state TV report.
“Reports that a prisoner swap deal has been reached are not true,” Price said. “As we have said, we always raise the cases of Americans detained or missing in Iran. We will not stop until we are able to reunite them with their families.”
Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain told CBS’ “Face the Nation” that “unfortunately, that report is untrue. There is no agreement to release these four Americans.”
“We’re working very hard to get them released,” Klain said. “We raise this with Iran and our interlocutors all the time, but so far there’s no agreement.”
Tehran holds four known Americans now in prison: Baquer and Siamak Namazi, environmentalist Morad Tahbaz and Iranian-American businessman Emad Shargi. Iran long has been accused of holding those with Western ties prisoners to be later used as bargaining chips in negotiations.
Despite the American denials, there have been signs that a deal on prisoners may be in the works based on Iranian officials’ remarks in recent weeks.
Although no formal proposal for a swap has yet been presented to officials in Washington, let alone been signed off on by the White House, the specificity of the reports from Iran suggested that working-level consideration of a deal is at least underway.
Read Also: US NAVY fires warning shots in new tense encounter with Iran
State TV also quoted sources as saying a deal had been reached for the United Kingdom to pay 400 million pounds ($552 million) to see the release of British-Iranian woman Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.
British officials played down the report. The Foreign Office said the country continues “to explore options to resolve this 40-year-old case and we will not comment further as legal discussions are ongoing.”
Aside from Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s case, the U.K. and Iran also are negotiating a British debt to Tehran from before the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Last week, Zaghari-Ratcliffe was sentenced to an additional year in prison, her lawyer said, on charges of spreading “propaganda against the system” for participating in a protest in front of the Iranian Embassy in London in 2009.
That came after she completed a five-year prison sentence in the Islamic Republic after being convicted of plotting the overthrow of Iran’s government, a charge that she, her supporters and rights groups deny.
While employed at the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of the news agency, she was taken into custody at the Tehran airport in April 2016 as she was returning home to Britain after visiting family.
Richard Ratcliffe, the husband of Zaghari-Ratcliffe, told The Associated Press he was not aware of any swap in the works.
“We haven’t heard anything,” he said. “Of course, we probably wouldn’t, but my instinct is to be skeptical at present.”
Earlier Sunday, U.K. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab told the BBC that he believed Zaghari-Ratcliffe was being held “unlawfully” by Iran.
“I think she’s been treated in the most abusive, tortuous way,” Raab said. “I think it amounts to torture the way she’s been treated and there is a very clear, unequivocal obligation on the Iranians to release her and all of those who are being held as leverage immediately and without condition.”
The announcement by state TV comes amid a wider power struggle between hard-liners and the relatively moderate government of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. That conflict only has grown sharper as Iran approaches its June 18 presidential election.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who pushed for the 2015 nuclear deal under Rouhani, has seen himself embroiled in a scandal over frank comments he made in a leaked recording. Zarif’s name has been floated as a possible candidate in the election, something that now seems unlikely as even Iran’s supreme leader has apparently criticized him.
Tehran is now negotiating with world powers over both it and the U.S. returning to the nuclear deal, which saw it limit its uranium enrichment in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. Iran has not held direct negotiations with the U.S. during the talks, however.
Read Also: Iran, US warships in first tense Mideast encounter in a year
As the negotiations continue, Iranian diplomats there have offered encouraging comments, while state TV quoted anonymous sources striking maximalist positions contradicting them. That even saw Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian deputy foreign minister leading the talks, offer a rebuke on Twitter last week to Iranian state television’s English-language arm, Press TV.
“I don’t know who the ‘informed source’ of Press TV in Vienna is, but s/he is certainly not ‘informed,’” Araghchi wrote.
US general: Afghan forces could face ‘bad possible outcomes’
Afghan government forces face an uncertain future and, in a worst-case scenario, some “bad possible outcomes” against Taliban insurgents as the withdrawal of American and coalition troops accelerates in the coming weeks, the top U.S. military officer said Sunday.
Gen. Mark Milley described the Afghan military and police as “reasonably well equipped, reasonably well trained, reasonably well led.” He cited Afghan troops’ years of experience against a resilient insurgency, but he declined to say they are fully ready to stand up to the Taliban without direct international backing during a potential Taliban offensive.
Read Also: Formal start of final phase of Afghan pullout by US, NATO
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, spoke in an interview with Associated Press and CNN reporters flying with him from Hawaii to Washington just hours after the formal kickoff of the withdrawal.
Asked whether he believes the Afghan forces can hold up under increased strain, Milley was noncommittal.
“Your question: The Afghan army, do they stay together and remain a cohesive fighting force or do they fall apart? I think there’s a range of scenarios here, a range of outcomes, a range of possibilities,” he said. “On the one hand you get some really dramatic, bad possible outcomes. On the other hand, you get a military that stays together and a government that stays together.”
“Which one of these options obtains and becomes reality at the end of the day? We frankly don’t know yet. We have to wait and see how things develop over the summer.”
He said there is “at least still the possibility” of a negotiated political settlement between the government in Kabul and the Taliban. This, he said, would avoid the “massive civil war” that some fear could happen.
Read Also: Counting the costs of Americas 20-year war in Afghanistan
Within about two months of the U.S.-led invasion in October 2001, the country’s Taliban rulers were removed from power and militarily defeated. But within several years, they had regrouped, rearmed and reasserted themselves, taking advantage of sanctuary in neighboring Pakistan. In recent years the Taliban achieved a battlefield stalemate with U.S.-supported Afghan government forces.
Milley noted that the Afghan military has operated in recent years with less reliance on U.S. and coalition advisers. Among the key exceptions are special operations commandos and the defense ministry.
“But for the most part, there’s no advisers out there anyway,” he said in one of his few interviews since President Joe Biden announced April 14 that all U.S. military personnel will withdraw this summer. Milley said the commonly cited total of 2,500 troops rises to 3,300 if special operations forces are counted. “We’re taking it down to zero,” he said.
After the withdrawal is over, the United States will provide unspecified “capabilities” to the Afghan military from other locations, Milley said. He did not elaborate on this, but other officials have said those “over-the-horizon” arrangements for supporting the Afghan military have yet to be solidified.
Read Also: Islamic State degraded in Afghanistan but still poses threat
Milley said it is possible that the withdrawal will be finished before the Sept. 11 target date announced by the White House. He said that date reflects the estimated maximum amount of time needed to move all U.S. and coalition troops, as well as large amounts of equipment, out of the country.
“I don’t want to put precise dates on it,” he said.
3 killed, 27 hospitalized after boat capsizes off San Diego
Three people were killed and more than two dozen others were hospitalized Sunday after a boat capsized and broke apart in rough water just off the San Diego coast during a suspected human smuggling operation, authorities said.
Lifeguards, the U.S. Coast Guard and other agencies responded around 10 a.m. following reports of an overturned vessel in the waves near the rugged peninsula of Point Loma, according to the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department.
The original call was for a handful of people overboard but as rescuers arrived in boats and jet skis they quickly realized “it was going to be a bigger situation with more people,” said San Diego Lifeguard Services Lt. Rick Romero.
Read Also: Search for 9 missing from capsized boat in Gulf on 6th day
“There are people in the water, drowning, getting sucked out the rip current there,” he said.
Seven people were pulled from the waves, including three who drowned, said Romero. One person was rescued from a cliff and 22 others managed to make it to shore on their own, he said.
“Once we arrived on scene, the boat had basically been broken apart,” Romero said. “Conditions were pretty rough: 5 to 6 feet of surf, windy, cold.”
A total of 27 people were transported to hospitals with “a wide variety of injuries” including hypothermia, Romero said. Most of the victims were able to walk themselves to ambulances, he said.
Officials said the group was overcrowded on a 40-foot (12-meter) cabin cruiser that is larger than the typical open-top wooden panga-style boats often used by smugglers to bring people illegally into the U.S. from Mexico.
“Every indication from our perspective was this was a smuggling vessel. We haven’t confirmed their nationality,” said Jeff Stephenson, a supervising agent with U.S. Border Patrol.
Agents were at hospitals preparing to interview survivors, including the boat’s captain who Stephenson described as a “suspected smuggler.” Smugglers typically face federal charges and those being smuggled are usually deported.
Officials said smugglers sometimes use larger more conventional boats to try and blend in with regular maritime traffic.
Read Also: Why are so many babies dying of Covid-19 in Brazil?
San Diego Fire-Rescue Department spokesman Jose Ysea said when he arrived on scene near the Cabrillo National Monument there was a “large debris field” of splintered wood and other items in the choppy waters.
“In that area of Point Loma it’s very rocky. It’s likely the waves just kept pounding the boat, breaking it apart,” he said.
There were life preservers on board, but it wasn’t known how many or whether any passengers were wearing them, officials said.
Among the rescuers was an unnamed Navy sailor who was in the area with his family and jumped in the water to assist someone in an effort described by Romero as a “huge help.”
Officials believed everyone on board was accounted for right away, but crews in boats and aircraft continued to search the area for several hours for other possible survivors, Ysea said.
On Thursday, border officials intercepted a panga-type vessel traveling without navigation lights 11 miles (18 kilometers) off the coast of Point Loma with 21 people on board. The crew took all 15 men and six women into custody. Agents determined all were Mexican citizens with no legal status to enter the U.S., according to a statement released by Customs and Border Protection. Two of the people on the boat, the suspected smugglers, will face charges, it said.
Read Also: Charter bus rollover kills 3, injures 18 outside San Diego
Border Patrol on Friday said law enforcement officials would be ramping up operations to disrupt maritime smuggling off the coast of San Diego this weekend.
As warmer weather comes to San Diego, there is a misperception that it will make illegal crossings safer or easier, the agency said in a statement.
In early March, an SUV packed with migrants collided with a tractor-trailer in the farming community of Holtville, California, about 125 miles (200 kilometers) east of San Diego. The crash killed 13 of 25 people inside 1997 Ford Expedition, including the driver, in one of the deadliest border-related crashes in U.S. history.
BJP Office set on fire in India’s West Bengal, party blames Trinamool
The BJP party office in Kolkata’s Arambagh was set ablaze on Sunday evening as the Trinamool Congress inched towards a huge victory in the assembly elections reported NDTV.
The incident has reopened allegations of violence by the ruling party of the country.
The BJP leaders and workers tweeted the video, alleging that Trinamool, the opposition party, has unleashed violence on their workers elsewhere as well.
Chief Minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, however, said it was the BJP workers who chased her party's Arambagh candidate Sujata Mondal and hit her on the head near polling booth.
Cellphone recorded videos from Arambag -- a town in Hooghly district 80-odd kilometres from Kolkata -- showed a fire raging through a temporary structure.
Also read: Bucking anti-incumbency, Mamata scores a hat-trick in Bengal
"After results for West Bengal assembly came in, TMC goons burnt down BJP's party office in Arambagh... Is this what Bengal will have to suffer for the next 5 years?" tweeted the BJP's IT cell chief Amit Malviya.
"TMC cadres didn't stop at burning BJP's party offices, they set our booth agent's house in Bishnupur also on fire..." read a second tweet.
The Trinamool is leading in more than 210 seats in the recently concluded assembly election. The BJP, which was targeting 200 seats is leading in 70-plus seats.
The BJP has been vocal about violence in the state over the last two years. The Election Commission said they factored in the security angle while charting the schedule for the elections.
Violence in the run-up to the polls has been followed by the two parties blaming each other.
Asian Americans see generational split on confronting racism
The fatal shootings of eight people — six of them women of Asian descent — at Georgia massage businesses in March propelled Claire Xu into action.
Within days, she helped organize a rally condemning violence against Asian Americans that drew support from a broad group of activists, elected officials and community members. But her parents objected.
“‘We don’t want you to do this,’” Xu, 31, recalled their telling her afterward. ”‘You can write about stuff, but don’t get your face out there.’”
The shootings and other recent attacks on Asian Americans have exposed a generational divide in the community. Many young activists say their parents and other elders are saddened by the violence but question the value of protests or worry about their consequences. They’ve also found the older generations tend to identify more closely with their ethnic groups — Chinese or Vietnamese, for example — and appear reluctant to acknowledge racism.
That divide makes it harder to forge a collective Asian American constituency that can wield political power and draw attention to the wave of assaults against people of Asian descent in the U.S. since the coronavirus pandemic began, community leaders say.
“In our original countries, where our ancestors came from, they wouldn’t even imagine that someone from Bangladesh would be lumped in the same group as someone from Laos,” said Angela Hsu, president of the Georgia Asian Pacific American Bar Association.
But those differences obscure a shared experience of “feeling like we’re constantly thought of as being foreign in our own country,” said U.S. Rep. Andy Kim, of New Jersey.
Much of the recent violence against Asian Americans has targeted the elderly, and some seniors have attended rallies to condemn it. But Cora McDonnell, 79, said she did not want to speak out, though she is now scared to walk to the church blocks from her Seattle home.
She emigrated to the U.S. from the Philippines in 1985 and said her culture was “more respectful.”
“You talk maybe in your family, but not really publicly,” she said. “You don’t really blurt out things.”
Lani Wong, 73, said she understood that feeling, though she does not adhere to it.
“Just don’t stir the pot, don’t get involved,” said Wong, chairwoman of the National Association of Chinese Americans. “I think that was the mentality of the older generation.”
Some young Asian Americans said they were frustrated by family members’ reactions to the shootings.
E. Lim said it was “infuriating and really sad” to hear her parents cast aspersions on the massage work done by some of the Georgia shooting victims.
“It’s almost like this desperation for denial so that they don’t have to recognize that there is a world that hates them,” said Lim, organizing and civic engagement director for Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta.
A pastor in the Atlanta area, Tae Chin, said his Korean mother-in-law also questioned the victims’ line of work while urging him not to focus on race. Four of the slain women were of Korean descent.
“‘Just work hard. Just live. Just be a good person, and they’ll see someday,’” Chin, 41, recalled her saying on a phone call after the March 16 attack. “I’m like, ‘That’s why we have this problem to begin with, because that’s exactly what we do.’”
Allison Wang’s parents were similarly inclined and thought she was wasting her time protesting the shootings.
“I think they believe that it’s more important to focus on your career and family and don’t really feel like we can make a difference,” said Wang, who helped Xu put together the rally in downtown Atlanta.
For Raymond Tran’s family, the political history of one of their home countries played a role in opposing his involvement in any organizations. The attorney raised in Los Angeles said that when he was growing up, his parents told him about an uncle imprisoned and tortured by Vietnamese communists after joining a student group.
Racist polices in the U.S. strictly limited immigrants from Asia until the 1960s, so many Asian families have been in the country for only a generation or two. It’s not unusual for new immigrants to focus on providing for their families, avoiding attention in favor of assimilation.
Asian immigrants face the added burden of the “model minority” stereotype that portrays them as industrious, law-abiding and uncomplaining, and ascribes their achievements to those traits, historians and advocates say.
“It divides generations,” said Maki Hsieh, CEO of the Asian Hall of Fame, a program that honors Asian leaders. “It divides Asians from each other, and ultimately it divides them from other groups.”
Xu said her parents worried about her safety, but she thinks their objections to her activism also stemmed in part from a desire to avoid trouble. They understood the need to speak out against anti-Asian violence but didn’t want her to do it, she said.
“I wholeheartedly believe if this is the way everybody thinks, then there won’t be any progress,” she said.
The younger generation is also coming of age during a period of renewed racial awareness — reflected in last year’s Black Lives Matter protests — that makes it impossible for Asians in the U.S. to “fly under the racial radar anymore,” said Nitasha Tamar Sharma, director of the Asian American Studies program at Northwestern University.
In addition to holding rallies and vigils across the country in the wake of the Georgia shootings, young organizers have shared stories of racist encounters and used the hashtag #StopAsianHate to raise awareness about the dangers Asian Americans face.
“In America, we are all one,” said Hsu, the bar association president. “We are viewed in a similar way.”
Bucking anti-incumbency, Mamata scores a hat-trick in Bengal
Indian state of West Bengal's firebrand Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, affectionately called 'Didi', scripted history on Sunday by single handedly pulling off a landslide victory in the assembly election, bucking anti-incumbency and staving off a massive challenge from Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
Though the Trinamool Congress swept back to power with a resounding majority of well over 210 seats in the 292-member assembly and Mamata secured a third five-year term in office, the 66-year-old lost her own seat in Nandigram to her former protege-turned-BJP's star campaigner Suvendu Adhikari by a thin margin of around 2,000 votes.
The BJP though has made major gains in Bengal, winning some 80 seats. In 2016, the saffron outfit had just three legislators in the state. In fact, it is now the main opposition party in the state as the Left Front, a coalition of Communist parties, has been decimated by the Trinamool Congress. The Left Front ruled Bengal for 34 years -- from 1977 to 2011.
Addressing the media in state capital Kolkata in the evening, Mamata hailed her party's astounding success at the assembly polls as a "victory for Bengal".
"Khela hobe (game) did happen, and we did win. The BJP kept going on and on about double-engine sarkar (government), while I assured you all that I will score a double century. This is Bangla's win... this is Bengal's win... this is your win. This win has saved Bengal, it has saved the culture and tradition of Bengal," she said.
Though Mamata conceded defeat to Adhikari in Nandigram -- the potboiler of the assembly election in Bengal -- the Trinamool supremo said she would challenge the result in a court of law. "Don't worry for Nandigram, for struggle you have to sacrifice something. Let the people of Nandigram give whatever verdict they want, I accept that," she said.
Just an hour before her press meet, Mamata addressed her party workers outside her residence in south Kolkata and urged them not to indulge in any victory celebrations. "Covid is going on. Please follow all Covid protocols and don't put your lives at risk," she said.
Political leaders cutting across party lines, including Prime Minister Modi, took to social media to congratulate the three-time Bengal Chief Minister on her "historic win".
"Congratulations to Mamata Didi for @AITCofficial's win in West Bengal. The Centre (federal government) will continue to extend all possible support to the West Bengal Government to fulfil people’s aspirations and also to overcome the Covid-19 pandemic," Modi tweeted.
Top BJP leader and Indian Defence Minister Rajnath Singh also congratulated Mamata."Congratulations to the Chief Minister of West Bengal, @MamataOfficial Didi on her party’s victory in West Bengal assembly elections. My best wishes to her for her next tenure."
Former Chief Minister of the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and head of regional Samajwadi Party, Akhilesh Yadav also hailed Mamata's win. "Hearty congratulations to the conscious public, the combative Ms Mamta Banerjee ji and the dedicated leaders and activists of TMC, who defeated the politics of hate of BJP in Bengal!" he tweeted.
In fact, West Bengal witnessed the most high-profile contest in India's recently held state elections. While Mamata harped on being Bengal’s daughter, the BJP asked people to vote for "change and socio-economic development" after nearly 50 years of Communist and Trinamool Congress rule.
"It was BJP's star power versus Trinamool's one-woman army. From Modi to Indian Home Minister Amit Shah, the entire top leadership of BJP campaigned in Bengal. But none failed to unseat Didi. She came back again, this time with a bigger mandate," Prof Suneeta Roy, a political pundit, told UNB over the phone from Kolkata.
Though it was a huge setback for the BJP, particularly the Modi-Shah juggernaut, the country's ruling party managed to retain power in the neighbouring northeastern state of Assam -- defying all odds and defeating the country's main opposition Congress party, which tried its best to reclaim its erstwhile citadel.
"People have blessed us. We can say for sure that the BJP will form government in Assam. We are coming back to power with our partners," Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal said.
The BJP also won the assembly election in the Union Territory of Puducherry in southern India, but failed to retain power in the neighbouring state of Tamil Nadu, along with its bigger coalition partner AIADMK. In Tamil Nadu, the DMK swept to power in the 243-member assembly after being in the opposition for a decade.
It was also a big disappointment for the BJP as well as the Congress in the southern state of Kerala, where the Left Democratic Front (LDF) government, led by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, won a historic second term for the first time in 40 years. Kerala is known to vote out incumbents every five years.
Elections to the four states and one Union Territory took place in March and April, just as India started witnessing a ferocious second wave of Covid-19. On Sunday too, India registered close to four lakh cases and nearly 3,700 deaths in a span of 24 hours. The country has been reporting over three lakh daily infections for the last 10 days.
Why India’s pandemic data is vastly undercounted
Even after more than a year of devastating coronavirus surges across the world, the intensity and scale of India’s current crisis stands out, with patients desperate for short supplies of oxygen, pleas for help from overwhelmed hospitals, and images of body bags and funeral pyres.
As daily case counts soar far beyond what other countries have reported, experts caution the official COVID-19 numbers from the world’s second most populous country are likely a massive undercount. But why is India’s data considered inaccurate? Is the data any less accurate than what other nations report? And which numbers give a good indication of the crisis?
IS INDIA COUNTING EVERY CASE?
India is not counting every coronavirus case, but no nation can. Around the world, official tallies generally report only confirmed cases, not actual infections. Cases are missed because testing is so haphazard and because some people infected by the coronavirus experience mild or even no symptoms.
The more limited the testing, the more cases are being missed. The World Health Organization says countries should be doing 10 to 30 tests per confirmed case.
India is doing about five tests for every confirmed case, according to Our World in Data, an online research site. The U.S. is doing 17 tests per confirmed case. Finland is doing 57 tests per confirmed case.
“There are still lots of people who are not getting tested,” said Dr. Prabhat Jha of the University of Toronto. “Entire houses are infected. If one person gets tested in the house and reports they’re positive and everyone else in the house starts having symptoms, it’s obvious they have COVID, so why get tested?”
Jha estimates, based on modeling from a previous surge in India, that the true infection numbers could be 10 times higher than the official reports.
WHAT ABOUT DEATHS?
Deaths are a better indicator of the shape of the pandemic curve, Jha said, but there are problems with the data here too.
“The biggest gap is what’s going on in rural India,” Jha said. In the countryside, people often die at home without medical attention, and these deaths are vastly underreported. Families bury or cremate their loved ones themselves without any official record. Seventy percent of the nation’s deaths from all causes occur in rural India in any given year.
Counting rural deaths can be done, as Jha’s work with the Million Death Study has shown. The pre-pandemic project used in-person surveys to count deaths in rural India, capturing details of symptoms and circumstances with results of the “ verbal autopsies ” reviewed and recorded by doctors.
Many low- and middle-income countries have similar undercounts of death data, Jha said, but India could do better.
“It’s a country that’s got a space program. Just counting the dead is a basic function,” he said. “India should be doing much, much better.”
DOES IT MATTER?
Knowing the size and scope of the outbreak and how it is changing helps governments and health officials plan their responses.
Even with the known problems with the data, the trajectory of COVID-19 cases and deaths in India is an alarming reminder of how the virus can rocket through a largely unvaccinated population when precautions are lifted.
“What happens in India matters to the entire world,” said Dr. Amita Gupta, chair of the Johns Hopkins India Institute in a Facebook conversation Thursday. “We care from a humanitarian perspective, a public health perspective, and a health security perspective.”
Bangladeshi man stabbed to death in Malaysia
A Bangladeshi man died while two others were injured after being stabbed with a screwdriver in a brawl with fellow countrymen at a workers' dormitory in Mahkota Industrial Park, Banting last Friday.
Kuala Langat district police chief Superimendant Azizan Tukiman said the victim identified as Babu, 44, died at the scene after he was stabbed in the chest believed to have hit his heart, while his two friends sustained injuries in their stomach, in an incident at about 9 pm.
'The fight involved five Bangladeshi men. The two suspects Red the scene after stabbing the victims: he said in a statement today.
He said a police investigation found that the deceased and the suspects were among 30 foreign workers of a paper mill who tested positive for COVID-19 and were undergoing quarantine at a location not far from the dormitory.
Azizan said the investigation also found that the brawl had started after the suspects had removed the victim's belonging from the dormitory without his consent
'Following the brawl, the suspect who had lost control took a screwdriver and stabbed the victin before stabbing his friends using the same weapon,' he said.
Azizan said both suspects, aged 42 and 4t who were hiding at the Taman Mans Jaya junction, were arrested at 3.30 am yesterday.
'Both of them admitted to having a fight with the victim and nabbed him with a screwdriver; he said.
SpaceX capsule departs station with 4 astronauts, heads home
A SpaceX capsule carrying four astronauts departed the International Space Station late Saturday, aiming for a rare nighttime splashdown to end the company’s second crew flight.
It would be the first U.S. splashdown in darkness since Apollo 8′s crew returned from the moon in 1968.
NASA’s Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, and Japan’s Soichi Noguchi, headed home in the same Dragon capsule that delivered them to the space station last November. The ride back was expected to take just 6 1/2 hours.
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“Thanks for your hospitality,” Hopkins radioed as the capsule undocked 260 miles (420 kilometers) above Mali.
SpaceX targeted a splashdown around 3 a.m. Sunday in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Panama City, Florida. Despite the early hour, the Coast Guard deployed extra patrols — and spotlights — to keep any night-owl sightseers away. The capsule of the first SpaceX crew was surrounded by pleasure boaters last summer, posing a safety risk.
Hopkins, the spacecraft commander, rocketed into orbit with his crew on Nov. 15 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Their replacements arrived a week ago aboard their own Dragon capsule — the same one that launched SpaceX’s first crew last spring.
The four should have been back by now, but high offshore wind kept them at the space station a few extra days. SpaceX and NASA determined the best weather would be before dawn.
The delays allowed Glover to celebrate his 45th birthday in space Friday.
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“Gratitude, wonder, connection. I’m full of and motivated by these feelings on my birthday, as my first mission to space comes to an end,” Glover tweeted.
Saturday night’s undocking left seven astronauts at the space station: three Americans, two Russians, one Japanese and one French.
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