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Boxer Maxim Dadashev Dies After Suffering Severe Brain Injury In Fight

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Maxim Dadashev celebrates after being declared the winner of a super lightweight bout in Las Vegas in October 2018.

Russian boxer Maxim Dadashev has died from injuries suffered in a grueling 11-round fight against Subriel Matias on Friday night.

Dadashev’s strength and conditioning coach Donatas Janusevicius and trainer Buddy McGirt confirmed the death to ESPN.

The 28-year-old had been in a medically induced coma at the University of Maryland Prince George’s Hospital Center, following an emergency two-hour surgery to relieve a subdural hematoma, or brain bleed.

After 11 rounds, McGirt had pleaded with the boxer to end the fight, believing he was taking too many hits. Dadashev, who by that point couldn’t speak, shook his head no multiple times, but McGirt made the decision to end the fight anyway, telling the referee, “That’s it.”

“God forbid, one punch as you know can change a whole guy’s life and I wasn’t going to let that happen,” McGirt told the media shortly after the fight at the MGM National Harbor Casino in Oxon Hill, Maryland. “I’d rather have them be mad at me for a day or two than to be mad at me for the rest of their life.”

Dadashev is survived by his 2-year-old son, Daniel, and wife, Elizaveta Apushkina, both of whom live in St. Petersburg, Russia.

“It is with great sadness that I confirm the passing of my husband, Maxim Dadashev,” Apushkina said in a statement provided to HuffPost. “He was a very kind person who fought until the very end. Our son will continue be raised to be a great man like his father.

“Lastly, I would like to thank everyone that cared for Maxim during his final days. I ask that everyone please respect our privacy during this very difficult time.”

The previously undefeated boxer was unable to leave the ring on his own power, The Guardian reported. He lost consciousness on the way to the hospital, where he was found to have sustained severe brain damage.

“I hope that Maxim is all right,” his opponent Matias said after the fight. “He is a great fighter and a warrior.”

This story has been updated with a statement from Elizaveta Apushkina.


Ilhan Omar Shuts Down Constant Calls For Muslims To Condemn Things

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WASHINGTON — Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and other Muslim politicians are constantly being asked to condemn groups and issues that her non-Muslim colleagues are not asked to answer for, and she’s tired of it.

Speaking on the opening panel at the Muslim Collective for Equitable Democracy conference on Tuesday, the congresswoman took a question from Ani Zonneveld, founder of the Los Angeles-based group Muslims for Progressive Values. Zonneveld asked if Omar and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) would come out and condemn female genital mutilation.

Omar, who has previously voted for numerous bills against FGM both on the state and federal levels, immediately called the question “appalling.”

“How often should I make a schedule like this? This needs to be on repeat every five minutes. Should I do that?” she asked Zonneveld.

“So today, I forgot to condemn al Qaeda, so here’s the al Qaeda one. I forgot to condemn FGM. Here that goes. I forgot to condemn Hamas. Here that goes.”

Last week, President Donald Trump falsely accused Omar of praising the terrorist group al Qaeda. Omar responded by saying she would not “dignify” the lie with a response, adding that “it is beyond time to ask Muslims to condemn terrorists. We are no longer going to allow the dignification of such a ridiculous statement.”

The room at Tuesday’s panel, filled with approximately 100 people attending this historic gathering of American Muslims in politics, applauded Omar’s response to Zonneveld.

But Omar, who sported a gray dress and a white hijab, was not finished.

“I am quite disgusted, really, to be honest, that as Muslim legislators we are constantly being asked to waste our time speaking to issues that other people are not asked to speak to,” she continued, noting the assumption that Muslims “somehow support” these issues.

“So I want to make sure that the next time someone is in an audience and is looking at me, and Rashida and Abdul and Sam, that they asked us the proper questions that they will probably ask any member of Congress.”

Tlaib, who was scheduled to speak, was not present. Abdul El-Sayed, who ran in Michigan’s 2018 Democratic gubernatorial primary, and Sam Rasoul, one of two Muslim members of the Virginia General Assembly, sat alongside Omar on the panel. Other panelists included Khizr Khan, the father of a Muslim American war hero killed in Iraq and the man who famously held up the Constitution at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, and Ken Martin, the chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

Omar’s comments came just an hour after Trump made his latest Twitter attack against Omar and three other freshmen congresswomen, calling the Minnesota lawmaker “an America hating anti-Semite.” Trump is scheduled to speak the same day at the Turning Point USA summit, a nationwide conservative organization of student Republicans riddled with bigotry and white supremacy, just a few miles away in D.C. Earlier Tuesday at the summit, Eric Thomas Bolling, a former Fox News host who was fired after a sexual harassment probe, bashed Omar.

“A Somali refugee coming over here and becoming a member of Congress, to complain about the system, that’s just hypocrisy to me,” Bolling told the crowd.

For the last few years, Muslim American candidates have reported a rise in smear campaigns and anti-Muslim bigotry used against them as they run for public office. The most common tactic was falsely accusing Muslim candidates of having ties to terrorism and extremism, according to research by the Information Disorder Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.

How Did A 2012 Rape Convict’s Photo End Up On A Punjab Voter Awareness Ad?

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Chandigarh: Punjab’s Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) is facing heat after news broke last week that the Hoshiarpur district administration used a photograph of Mukesh Kumar, one of the convicts in the 2012 gangrape and murder of a physiotherapy student in Delhi, in a voter awareness advertisement. 

HuffPost India has learnt that the advertisement was on a hoarding installed at the venue of a Republic Day function inside the district administration complex. 

That was more than six months ago, but the mistake was exposed just now because the printer whose payment was pending with the district administration approached a local journalist with the story, said people familiar with the matter.

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Punjab CEO Karuna Raju told HuffPost India that the error was made by a contractual employee who downloaded some photographs from the internet for the advertisement without recognising Kumar.

“The officials committed a blunder by downloading an unknown photograph from an unknown source and using it in Systematic Voters’ Education and Electoral Participation (SVEEP) activities. It has sent a wrong message,” said Raju, adding that it appeared that the advertisement was sent for printing by officials without checking the proof.

Kumar is currently lodged in Tihar Jail along with four others and is facing a death sentence. 

Asha Devi, the mother of the 23-year-old whose rape had led to unprecedented protests across the country, told HuffPost India that she was shocked at the way election officials in Punjab ‘glorified’ a rape convict.

“We are struggling for the last seven years to get justice,” she said, adding that the Election Commission has sent the “wrong message across the world”.

The Indian Express reported on Monday that the Election Commission had issued a notice to the Punjab CEO, and had asked for a report within a day. 

The Delhi Commission for Women (DCW) has also sought a reply from Raju after Asha Devi lodged a complaint with DCW along with a picture of the hoarding. The Commission has sought the names of the officials responsible and demanded strict action in the matter. 

After receiving flak, the Hoshiarpur district administration has now asked the concerned computer operator to reveal the source from where the picture was downloaded. 

CEO Raju said that as per rules, the officials should have used photographs of voters from the area. 

“As a common practice, we use three photographs including a common voter, a woman voter and the third from the LGBT community.  The officials should have chosen the actual voters from their own area,” said Raju, who has sought a detailed report from the Hoshiarpur Deputy Commissioner. 

Patanjali Denies US Banned Its Sorbet Over Quality Issues

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HARIDWAR — The growing popularity of Patanjali’s products has caused discomfort among the firm’s international rivals who are out to malign it by spreading lies, yoga guru Ramdev’s company said on Tuesday. 

Terming the news about US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) finding something wrong with Patanjali sorbets as part of a conspiracy by the company’s foreign rivals, it said, “Patanjali is India’s own brand and has created vast credibility among its people through the quality and minimal pricing of its wide range of products.” 

“This brand image of Patanjali, its acceptability, and quality has been a cause of discomfort for many foreign and anti-national companies, and they keep on maligning Patanjali without any basis or concrete evidences,” Patanjali Ayurveda said on Tuesday. 

Citing an instance which the company termed a “conspiracy by anti-national forces”, it said misleading news has been spread in print and social media recently which suggests the USFDA has found differential claims and qualities for Patanjali’s sorbet for India and USA markets. 

“This is a gross misrepresentation of facts with the only intention to defame Patanjali Ayurved’s image and to mislead its consumers at large. 

“We would like to clarify and put things in right perspective for our consumers. Patanjali follows the full compliance for packaging and labelling for its products, as per Ayurvedic norms in India, and as per US specific regulations in USA. These are in the complete compliance with prevailing laws of respective countries. 

 

“Since the USFDA audit in 2018 till date, Patanjali Ayurved has not received any notice pertaining to above different claims on Sorbet from the USFDA. Moreover, Patanjali Sorbet’s sale has not been banned in the US. 

“More than 100 products are still being sold in the US market. 

“We would like to re-emphasise that Patanjali conducts in-depth research and several testing in order to manufacture its world class products, with zero tolerance policy on quality issues. 

“When foreign multinational companies fail to compete with Patanjali in terms of quality and least pricing, they opt for the ill-practice of misleading conspiracy to deviate consumers. 

“Therefore, all of you are hereby requested not to get confused and beware of such rumours and mischief. 

“Patanjali is a unique type of organisation where consumers are not considered as mere customers, they are family. We humbly request for your constant support and exhibited co-operation. 

“With our combined energies, we would continue to propagate our nationwide mission and give a fitting reply to such misleading conspiracies,” Ramdev’s firm said.

Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood On 2019 Booker Prize Longlist

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LONDON — Booker Prize winners Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood are contenders again for the coveted fiction trophy.

Rushdie, who won in 1981 for Midnight’s Children, makes the 13-book longlist for his latest novel, Quichotte. Atwood won in 2000 for The Blind Assassin and is nominated for The Testaments, a follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale.

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The eight women and five men on the list announced Wednesday include Britain’s Max Porter for Lanny; Nigerian-British writer Oyinkan Braithwaite for My Sister, the Serial Killer; British-Turkish author Elif Shafak for 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World; and Lucy Ellmann, the only American finalist, for Ducks, Newburyport.

Founded in 1969, the 50,000-pound ($67,000) prize is open to English-language authors from around the world.

Six finalists will be announced September 3, with the winner revealed October 14..

Cole Sprouse And Lili Reinhart Split And 'Riverdale' Fans Are Freaking Out

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Riverdale” stars Cole Sprouse and Lili Reinhart have reportedly split after two years of dating, breaking Bughead hearts everywhere. 

The former couple, who play love interests Betty Cooper and Jughead Jones on the wildly popular CW teen soap based on Archie Comics, reportedly broke up over the summer during a hiatus from filming, multiple outlets reported. 

The two were “intentionally keeping their distance from the other” during the break, E! News reported, citing an unnamed source, and they will not be living together when the show films its upcoming fourth season. The co-stars are, however, on “much better terms” now, according to the outlet.

Before the breakup news broke, Sprouse, 26, and Reinhart, 22, were all-smiles at San Diego Comic-Con over the weekend. They sat next to each other on a panel, but were rarely seen in each other’s company at the after-party hosted by Entertainment Weekly on Saturday night. 

Cole Sprouse and Lili Reinhart attend a Comic-Con panel in San Diego over the weekend.

Coincidentally, the actors’ long-rumored romance was first confirmed at the same event two years earlier, when they were spotted “canoodling, holding hands and kissing,” according to a report.

But the two were tight-lipped about their relationship at the time, despite the increased fan attention.

“Sometimes people will approach me on the street and ask me very personal questions about my dating life. Fans talk to me like they know me, and it’s like, you don’t know me. You know my character, but you really don’t know me,” Reinhart told HuffPost in a 2017 interview. “I want to be relatable. I want people to know who I am, but that doesn’t mean you get to know everything about me and my life.”

Sprouse and Reinhart made their official debut as a couple just months later, when they walked hand-in-hand on the 2018 Met Gala red carpet. And the rest is history. 

They since traveled the world together, sang each other’s praises in the press, shared envy-inducing photos of each other online and posted loving tributes on social media.

In March, Reinhart celebrated Sprouse and his new film “Five Feet Apart,” writing she was in “awe” of his performance.

Naturally, fans of the couple on-screen, where the relationship between Betty and Jughead is known as “Bughead,” and IRL took to the internet to express their heartbreak. Some straight-up denied the breakup reports, while others moved right past the denial phase and onto anger. 

Janelle Monáe To Star In 'Homecoming' For The Series' Second Season

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Janelle Monáe will star in the second season of “Homecoming,” an Amazon original series, the singer, actress and activist confirmed on Tuesday. 

The “Dirty Computer” singer/songwriter will succeed Julia Roberts, who had the leading role in the first season of the series as social worker Heidi Bergman. Roberts will continue to serve as an executive producer for the new series via her production company Red Om Films, a press release stated.

The plot for the second season will involve Monáe, whose character, “a tenacious woman,” finds herself floating in a canoe with no memory of who she is or how she got there, according to the release.

Monáe celebrated her participation in the project on Twitter Tuesday. 

“Excited and ready for this wild ride,” she wrote. 

The first season of “Homecoming,” based on a Gimlet Media podcast of the same name, and created by executive producers Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg, premiered last year in November.

Other executive producers of the series include the show’s creator and director Sam Esmail via his Esmail Corp, Chad Hamilton of Anonymous Content and Gimlet Media’s Chris Giliberti, Alex Blumberg and Matt Lieber. The series is co-produced by Amazon Studios and Universal Content Productions. 

More detailed information about the second season will be announced at a later date, the release noted. 

Monáe, who acted in films “Moonlight” and “Hidden Figures,” will also appear in the forthcoming Harriet Tubman biopic, “Harriet.” Her most recent album, “Dirty Computer,” was nominated for the coveted Album of the Year for the Grammys last year. 

The Fall Of Mic Was A Warning

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Esther Bergdahl felt invigorated. How could she not? It was 2014, and she had just joined the millennial-centric news site PolicyMic, where something exciting always seemed to be happening. That January, Forbes included the company’s co-founders on its annual “30 Under 30” list. A few months later, the site announced it had secured $10 million in a funding round. That June, PolicyMicrebranded simply as Mic after buying the domain for $500,000, according to company sources. The company explained the switch at the time by saying the new name reflected its “expanded focus and bold vision.”

Sure, the money wasn’t great — Bergdahl estimated that her pay worked out to roughly $12 per hour. But by the time she joined, Mic had already established itself as an improbable upstart in the crowded digital media marketplace by hiring a cadre of bright, passionate young journalists and zeroing in on the types of stories millennials wanted to share: compact pieces with sharp headlines focused on undercoveredissues.  

“I was really proud to be a part of the mission and super excited about the work that we were doing and the people that we were able to reach and the voices we were able to uplift,” she said.

There were perks more reminiscent of a Silicon Valley startup than a traditional journalism shop. Bergdahl and others got Bose speakers in 2014. The next year, the company passed out custom-made Nikes with “Mic” and the employee’s initials on them. One of the co-founders hosted parties at the Manhattan apartment he shared with roommates, complete with a pool table — and sometimes a DJ and self-serve open bar, Bergdahl said. In an effort to promote transparency, the co-founders allowed employees to anonymously ask questions at meetings.

Backed by millions of dollars in venture capital, Mic developed into one of the more diverse newsrooms in media, shed light on important stories and served as a launching pad for several now-thriving journalists. The Observer, Forbes and Business Insider published glowing profiles of the new company and its leaders. 

“When it was good, it felt, like, too good to be true,” said one former employee. “We all felt like we were making a difference. We were all having so much fun. Everybody was so young. We were all laughing. People would stay late just to hang out.”

Due in part to its earnestness, Mic also became the target of ridicule. Some stories about the company painted it as the archetypal digital media shop — a playground packed with entitled 20-somethings. A 2016 New York Times piece called “What Happens When Millennials Run the Workplace?” described a collection of adult-sized children who rode around the office on hoverboards and inappropriately demanded apologies from their superiors. The story was catnip for millennial-bashers. Chris Altchek, Mic’s then-28-year-old co-founder and CEO, was “still working out how to manage many of the traits associated with his fellow millennials: a sense of entitlement, a tendency to overshare on social media, and frankness verging on insubordination,” the Times explained. The piece’s central anecdote involved a Mic employee who lied about a funeral to get a week off work, only to go home and build a treehouse. 

But ultimately, Mic’s problems were more economic than generational. The colorful anecdotes, custom Nikes and gorgeous office space on the 82nd floor of the One World Trade Center distracted from one critical fact: Mic never developed into a sustainable business. 

The Times had missed the forest for the treehouse. Mic was the archetypal millennial-packed digital media workplace ― not because it coddled its young employees, but because it left so many of them yearning for stability. Like its cousins BuzzFeed, HuffPost and Vice, Mic at times relied on its young and diverse staff to churn out content, respond nimbly to every change in the Facebook algorithm and sometimes even mine their personal pain for clicks in the pursuit of blistering traffic growth. 

Many of the more than three dozen former employeeswho spoke to HuffPost said they entered the company hungry and hopeful, only to feel twisted around by a publicly woke company that privately left them feeling exhausted, distrustful of leadership and desperate for financial security. 

When I think about things that grow that wildly and that successfully, I don’t think of a media company ― I think of cancer.Esther Bergdahl, former Mic employee

Last November, the company was forced to face the hard truth: Its Facebook-fueled bet on a millennial news site had failed. At an all-hands meeting, Altchek told his newsroom that Facebook had canceled a video deal that had served as the company’s final lifeline. Facebook’s decision, he said, left Mic’s founders with no other option but to lay off the editorial staff and sell the company to Bustle Digital Group for a fraction of what it had once been valued at.

Although its end was particularly abrupt, the problems Mic faced were far from unique. The capital that flooded the media industry in the first half of the decade caused unexpected problems at many companies when the market cooled. Facebook and Google’s grip on the digital ad market stifled the entire industry’s prospects. Too many outlets convinced themselves for too long in the power of Facebook-dependent growth. 

“Mic may ultimately be held up as a case study on this turbulent era in digital media,” said Ellie Krupnick, who worked as a lifestyle editorial director at the site. (Krupnick worked at HuffPost from 2011 to 2014 before leaving to join Mic.) “Hindsight is 20/20, but somehow all of the big forces we’ve seen impact digital newsrooms over the past five or so years, Mic seems to have found themselves swept up in just about all of them.”

If Mic’s downfall is a case study, the lesson is clear, Bergdahl argued.

“Journalistic institutions need to be institutions. They need to be able to grow in a healthy and steady way,” Bergdahl said. “When I think about things that grow that wildly and that successfully, I don’t think of a media company ― I think of cancer.”

When Altchek and Jake Horowitz launched a “beta version” of Mic in 2010, they were 23-year-olds with little work experience, let alone journalism know-how. 

What they did have was the kind of story investors could believe in. Altchek and Horowitz met at the elite private school Horace Mann in the Bronx. After high school, the right-leaning Altchek and more liberal Horowitz headed off to Harvard and Stanford, respectively, but continued to enjoy what they later called “extremely healthy” debates born out of their politically divergent views. These intellectual face-offs served as the inspiration for Mic, which they hoped would “help our generation talk about the issues that really matter,” Horowitz once told the Observer. In early 2011, they each raised $75,000 with the help offriends and family and decided to go all in. Altchek quit his gig at Goldman Sachs and contributed his bonus to the cause.

Through a spokesperson, Altchek and Horowitz declined an interview request, as well as a request to answer a detailed list of questions sent to them for this story. A person familiar with Mic fielded some fact-checking questions. During the reporting process, which took several months, Bustle Digital Group, through its lawyers, threatened to sue HuffPost’s parent company if we published this story.

Altchek and Horowitz’s decision to launch Mic could hardly have been better timed. After all, the digital media industry was sizzling. Early in 2011, AOL had purchased HuffPost for $315 million, a number that raised some eyebrows at the time but looked small by 2013, when Vice was valued at more than $1 billion. The financial optimism was propped up by a booming digital ad market and a growing appetite for mobile content that helped bring together two odd bedfellows: journalists and venture capitalists. At the end of 2014, Wired noted that “the media sector [was] overflowing with capital—as of September 2014 it was the second-largest VC-funded area of the year, after software.”

Horowitz, the former editor of his high school paper, became Mic’s editor-in-chief. Altchek became CEO. 

Like HuffPost and BuzzFeed before it, Mic’s earliest incarnation relied on unpaid “contributing bloggers” for much of its content. But the founders soon proved to have a knack for finding and empowering talented journalists who instinctively understood not only the issues young people cared about but also how to present those issues in easily digestible formats. 

“In a way, it was an incubator for young talent,” said Elizabeth Plank, an early employee at the site who rose from intern to senior correspondent and had a video series called “Flip The Script.” “They took in a lot of people like me who probably A, would have never been hired in media, or B, would have been interns somewhere and gotten some old white guy coffee.” 

Some Mic employees came to view Altchek and Horowitz as a pair of 20-somethings from privileged backgrounds who didn’t deserve to run a newsroom. Publicly, though, the co-founders played up their inexperience as an advantage: Where others may have been weighed down by old habits, Mic’s lack of established processes allowed the staff to adapt quickly and often. 

“We didn’t really know what we were doing,” Horowitz said in 2014. “So we took a startup, entrepreneurial approach, which was to try a bunch of different things and see what worked and what resonated.”

It didn’t take long before it became clear that what resonated at Mic was left-leaning “social justice clickbait,” a former senior editor said. In 2013, Mic launched an Identities vertical, which was “dedicated to examining the intersections of sexuality, gender, class and race in politics and culture for the millennial generation.” Just writing about a topic of interest to readers wasn’t enough, however. Mic posts had to be packaged in tight, engaging manners meant to maximize shares on Facebook. A listing for the Identities section in 2013 said Mic was looking for unpaid writers who would be open to “incorporating multimedia (video, GIFs, photos, memes, etc.)” in posts.

In meetings, Horowitz was known to ask “who’s sharing this?”; new employees received a 45-minute training focused on “Shareability.” When a headline construction shared well on Facebook, Mic relentlessly published stories that fit the blueprint. In 2015, the phrase “One Tweet” (i.e., “In One Tweet, This Man Took Down a Group of Incredibly Sexist Internet Trolls”) appeared in the headline of stories about “sexist internet trolls,” Ricky Gervais, “the racist hypocrisy of American police violence,” “Game of Thrones,” J.K. Rowling (more than once), Elizabeth Warren and “the racist double standard of the media’s shooting coverage.” The next year, the phrase “brutal truth” (i.e., “The Brutal Truth Every White Feminist Needs to Hear”) made its way into headlines about viral Instagram postsmasculinitywhite gay men, white allies and prom

In September 2014, Bergdahl was named copy chief and converted from freelance to full-time. By then, the company had more than 30 full-time employees and had moved to new offices on Hudson Street in Manhattan. The site had also firmly established itself as a millennial-first news destination. A chart shared with Recode that year showed 60% of its visitors that July were between the ages of 18 and 34 — more than Vice, BuzzFeed or Upworthy. 

The co-founders portrayed their decision to focus on people their age as a mission-driven choice. “We want to be the voice of our generation,” Horowitz told Forbes in 2014. But there was also a clear business incentive. Stephen Colvin, then the executive-in-residence at Lerer Ventures, told the Observer in 2014 that Mic provided the “perfect platform for marketers” to target millennials, the “most difficult to reach consumer group in the world.”

Altchek proved to be a talented fundraiser. “Chris is incredibly smart and an incredibly great salesman,” said a longtime member of the brand team. The company raised $60 million over its eight years as an independent company, and The Wall Street Journal once quoted someone saying it was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In 2014, Twitter reportedly offered to buy the company for approximately $90 million, but Altchek and Horowitz declined. By then, their aspirations had grown larger. 

“The next $10 billion media company will be the one that wins over millennials,” Altchek said soon afterward. “We understand them intuitively because we are them.”

One former executive at the company explained that the $60 million the company took in necessitated lofty goals and a substantial return. Ideally, venture capitalists search for a “10x return” on their investments. In the media business, however, “it’s hard to get there in the time horizon that a venture capital business wants,” the former executive said. 

But like many startups, Mic’s aspirations stood in contrast to its early finances. In 2014, the year Twitter offered to buy the company, Mic generated $1 million. The next year, it pulled in $3 million. A former employee familiar with the company’s sales deals described the business model as “unsustainable.” “We just never were making enough money,” the former employee said.

Mic had its offices on the 82nd floor of One World Trade Center in Manhattan. 

Absent a business model that would prove Mic a worthy gamble, the company focused on growth early on. 

“We had to show audience growth,” said a separate former executive at the company. “As a company that was venture-backed, that was important.”  

Altchek described “explosive audience growth” as “central” to Mic’s strategy in a 2016 company email. “That means aggressively pursuing new platforms and distribution opportunities. Almost always, that means doing so before business models have been fully developed. This is how we win,” he said.

But the goals Altchek set up could feel unattainable, according to the second former executive. “Even when it was very obvious that these goals were unreachable, Chris would not relent on those goals and the goals would keep growing,” the second former executive said. 

“Chris is an aggressive leader,” said an adviser who worked closely with the company. “There’s a leadership style which says it’s better to shoot for 15 and hit 12 than shoot for 10 and hit 10. And there’s pluses and minuses to that. But I would definitely say that’s Chris’ style.” (Another person familiar with the company disputed the idea that Altchek’s goals were unrealistic.)

Some employees saw gaming Facebook as a necessary part of pushing undercovered, important stories into the national conversation and said Mic still gave them room to grow and experiment. 

“Did I have to do silly things for clicks or quick hits and stuff like that? Yes,” said one former writer. “But anything that I wanted to do that I was passionate about ― if I could find a way to frame it as a story ― it was developed, encouraged. There was a path for it.”

But the degree to which analytics dominated the job made some of the young journalists uncomfortable. Bergdahl started to feel like “the rage was just a commodity,” she said. “Something that you engaged with to get clicks.”

Another former employee said it felt like “the analytics team ran the newsroom.” “A lot of us couldn’t write about things because it wouldn’t click well,” said a third, who added that it could feel like Mic cared “about these issues so long as we think other people will care about it or we can use a splashy headline on it.”

“I didn’t work for Facebook, and I didn’t want to work for Facebook,” said a fourth. 

A fifth former employee said it became difficult for editors to juggle the large number of stories coming across their desks, especially considering the sensitivity they required: “If you’re writing that many stories all the time, most of them are not going to be good and some of them are going to be insensitive.”

“You had a lot of incredibly talented, passionate people who were placed into systems that worked against their natural talent and hard work,” Bergdahl said. “There were writers who would have to churn out four or five or six pieces a day, and they could be great writers, but they could also just be completely in despair by an afternoon because who has that kind of stamina?”

The pressure highlighted a key difference between digital journalism outfits and platforms like Facebook and Twitter. “Those businesses have products that have infinite scale once they work,” said one of the former executives. “That’s not exactly how content works, right? ... You have to come in and write the news every day.”

Some employees were accused of taking shortcuts: In early 2015, Mic fired Jared Keller, then the site’s director of news, after Gawker published 20 examples of stories containing passages he had plagiarized. Media reporters soon sniffed out that Chris Miles, the former managing editor of news, had been forced out months earlier over similar charges.

Multiple employees argued that the journalistic transgressions — while inexcusable — had to be understood within the context of Mic. “That position had a ton of pressure to meet traffic goals,” said a former senior employee. “That Jared Keller and Chris Miles were fired for plagiarism wasn’t a coincidence,” said another. “I don’t want to justify plagiarism … [but] I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they both ended up making the same mistake because of the crazy level of pressure that was placed on both of them.”

Shortly after the scandals, Mic hired NPR veteran Madhulika Sikka as executive editor. Horowitz stepped down as editor-in-chief the same year. 

“Basically everybody banded together and said, ‘You need to hire someone who knows what the fuck they’re doing,’” said a former employee. Mic undertook an investigation and made a number of internal changes to avoid similar missteps in the future. Sikka left after less than a year at the company. 

Despite the plagiarism, Mic’s aggressive pursuit of clicks worked — for a while. In 2015, the company received an additional $17 million in funding. Some months, it hit 20 million unique U.S. visitors, per ComScore. 

“It was intoxicating to write wonky policy pieces about food stamps or taxes or backward drug policy and see them often get hundreds of thousands of views, sometimes millions,” Zeeshan Aleem, a former politics writer for the site, wrote later. (Aleem worked at HuffPost from 2013 to 2014 before leaving to join Mic.)

Mic came to stand out from much of its competition by not only hiring one of the more diverse editorial teams in digital media, but also elevating the voices and stories of people of color and members of the LGBTQ community.  

Some employees considered Altchek and Horowitz genuine allies. 

“Mic was one of the first companies to take a chance on me,” said one former writer of color. “Even though I cried at work many times and I had to get my ass out of there ... they took a chance on me as a writer and I’m always really grateful for that.”

“It was by far the most diverse place I’ve ever worked ― and probably ever will,” said Rameez Tase, a former vice president of audience development and insights at Mic. “As a person of color, I was treated more than fairly.”

The diverse collection of voices within the newsroom allowed Mic to cover stories that affected minority and LGBTQ communities “extensively and authentically,” said the person familiar with the company, reflecting the feelings of some of those who spoke to HuffPost.  

“[Horowitz] built one of the most diverse newsrooms in the city. And he empowered people to approach stories through an angle that was authentic to them. And never forced anybody to write in a way that would contradict their own values,” said a longtime Mic employee who worked closely with Horowitz.

Not everyone felt the same way. Bergdahl found herself uncomfortable with Mic’s reliance on employees of color during moments of national crisis, saying black writers were often expected to come up with a “soul-searching polemic.”

One employee of color backed up Bergdahl’s assertion. Another former employee of color said it was hard to avoid feeling as if Mic was “commodifying racial justice issues.” A third employee said people of color could feel “tokenized,” and a fourth said Mic’s commitment to social justice seemed “disingenuous” at times.

There were a couple of reasons some Mic employees were suspect of the sincerity of the company’s commitment to social justice. One was that the company’s editorial leadership was predominantly white. Another was that the right-leaning Altchek, who had been a White House intern during the George W. Bush administration, had somehow stumbled into creating “the wokest fucking new media site” on the internet, as one former employee put it. 

A BDG spokesperson contended that the “senior most management” at Mic was 40% nonwhite and 80% female. But occasionally, leadership’s racial blind spots manifested themselves in uncomfortable ways anyway. Two former employees of color said they were encouraged to traffic in stories they considered to play off racial “tropes.”

Horowitz once interrupted a pitch for a story about a woman creating community gardens in New Orleans and asked, “But is she black?,” as The Outline first reported. Altchek told some employees he wanted to create “the next Chappelle Show, except it’s hosted by a trans woman of color,” according to The Outline. 

Some employees pointed to a contrast in how leadership dealt with a series of national crises in 2015 as another example. 

When protests broke out in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray that April, the newsroom sprang into action, publishing stories like “The Side of Rioting the Media Never Talks About,” “11 Stunning Images Highlight the Double Standard of Reactions to Riots Like Baltimore,” “10 Images of the Baltimore Riots You Won’t See on TV” and “What Young People on the Ground Think of the Uprising in Baltimore.” The stories were quintessentially Mic — entertainingly packaged with an underlying messages that mattered to the people within the newsroom. Readers loved them. 

“The stuff that we were doing that week really, really, really broke through, especially with the generation and the audience that we were trying to reach,” said a former member of management. 

Some members of the newsroom felt great pride that they may have played some role in shifting the conversation on the biggest story in the country by painting a complex and nuanced portrait of a community of color that was in pain, the same former manager said. “They were celebrating the fact that we broke through,” the manager said. “Not for the first time ever at Mic, but for the first time for positive, real reasons.”

Horowitz was among those members of the newsroom. One former employee of color remembered Horowitz particularly celebrating the work of one Mic employee as “top notch.” 

But other former Mic staffers said the celebration of the site’s work on Gray’s death and its aftermath focused too much on the site’s traffic at a time when some of its employees were struggling. 

A few months later, when two white television journalists were shot dead on air, leadership bought pizzas for the newsroom and said people could take time off if they needed it. Some of the site’s employees of color responded by writing an email noting that people of color had not been offered the same level of support after covering numerous police shootings of black people that year. “Where was that understanding for us?” one employee of color remembered thinking. 

The email was well-received, and some colleagues said they were sorry the employees of color had been made to feel that way — evidence of a culture that at its best encouraged employees to raise their concerns openly and honestly, multiple employees said. Altchek and Horowitz also seemed to take the criticism to heart. 

“To have that horizontal structure in the company, where people could present this thoughtful letter and have him [Altchek] listen to it and say that he appreciated it, I think was actually an example of the potential Mic had for good,” said one former employee.

In August 2015, the month the journalists were shot dead on air, Mic snagged the highest-profile interview in its history: Horowitz sat down with then-President Barack Obama. The interview felt like a culmination of something. Later that month, Business Insider published a celebratory piece titled, “How two millennials built a $100 million startup in 4 years and landed an interview with the president.”

“I think we’re still in the very early stages of the digital media revolution,” one of Mic’s board members, former AOL CEO Jon Miller, told the publication.

But the month of the Obama interview, Mic reached only 18 million “readers” — the site’s second-lowest-performing month that year and 10 million readers shy of its goal, then-VP of Growth Adam Jaffe told staff in an email a few weeks later.

“While our interview with Obama was exciting, we got distracted and lost focus of what we need to do each day to hit our goals,” Jaffe wrote. “We can’t lose sight of what we need to do every day — sourcing compelling stories, executing on them for shares, and packaging them perfectly — to hit our goals.”

Soon, leadership came to realize that the August traffic dip was not the result of a distracted workforce, according to one of the former executives. Instead, they realized a tweak to the Facebook algorithm had dramatically limited the reach of media outlets’ posts. Many of the site’s competitors faced the same issue, but Mic got hit especially hard because of its particular dependence on Facebook, the former executive said. 

“It was like this all-hands-on-deck, holy-fucking-shit, what-are-we-going-to-do kind of thing,” said one employee who was there at the time. 

In the near-term, Mic reacted by dropping much of the work that didn’t promise easy traffic, Aleem, the politics writer, wrote later. “Mic decided to start throwing everything that wasn’t guaranteed to generate virality under the bus,” Aleem wrote. “I recall being told that an article with the words ‘health care’ in the headlines was too stuffy, and implicitly that covering the topic was more or less pointless.” 

Other employees spoke similarly of the switch. Nicolas DiDomizio, who worked as a staff writer at Mic in 2015 and 2016, later wrote that the “directive to spark outrage and/or foster empowerment at every turn intensified” while he was there. A third former employee originally tasked with writing features was told there would no longer be time for anything other than short “trending” stories, the former employee said. (The person familiar with the company denied this.)

I recall being told that an article with the words ‘health care’ in the headlines was too stuffy, and implicitly that covering the topic was more or less pointless.Zeeshan Aleem, former Mic writer

The constant content churn eventually got to many of Mic’s employees, especially when combined with the long hours and low pay.

“I was getting paid, like, $48,000, and they wanted me to treat this job like it was my life,” said one of them. 

In November 2015, Joel Pavelski, then Mic’s director of programming, published a piece on Medium in which he admitted that he had made up a funeral to get a week off work, then went home and built a treehouse. The blog surprised his co-workers and bosses, and Pavelski told HuffPost he had some regrets about what he did. But at the time, he was struggling with what he now describes as a “mental health crisis,” due in part to the upcoming anniversary of his brother’s death, a recent split with a long-term partner and other family problems. At Mic, however, he felt as if he couldn’t be honest about the effect all of that was having on him.

“I was working 16 hours a day, seven days a week, completely indoctrinated into the idea that success in a competitive startup culture required it,” Pavelski told me over email. “I was unable to admit that I was burned out at 27 on a strategy of pivoting to nowhere.” 

The daily crunch eventually got to Bergdahl, too. Even though she worked from 7:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. and sometimes on weekends, she felt it was “suspect” if she left too early or went to the doctor or on a vacation, she said.

“I once got told that I needed to have a founder’s attitude and put in founder’s hours,” Bergdahl said. “I was certainly not being paid a founder’s salary.”

Employees had other frustrations with the financial side of startup life. When Mic passed out the custom-made Nikes in 2015, the company had already raised more than $30 million but had yet to set up a 401(k) system, multiple employees said. 

“I was just like, ‘This is so dumb. I don’t need a pair of Nikes. I need a 401(k),’” said one of them. “They just seemed like they were wasting money left and right.” 

When the company eventually set up a 401(k) at the end of 2015, according to the person familiar with the company, it did not match contributions. The adviser who worked for the company said it was “fairly standard” in startups that a “401(k) match is not a high priority for employees.”

Salary ranges at Mic also felt inconsistent to some of the people who worked there. One former employee said she was told editors were capped at $70,000 before she started, only to discover soon after her hiring that a fellow editor was hired at $75,000. After a female employee discovered she was managing a man of the same age and experience level who was making $30,000 more than her, she approached a member of senior leadership, who told her it was simply a “red herring” and not to worry too much about it. (“In this one case, the female employee was managing someone who had a very specialized role, hence the salary disparity,” the person familiar with the company said.)

Sometime in late 2015 or early 2016, employees created an anonymous spreadsheet to figure out how much their colleagues were making. Three former employees said they deduced from it that men made more than women who had comparable experience. 

Management later did its own analysis, which showed women had made more than men in 2017, according to the person familiar with the company. When asked about earlier years, a Bustle Digital Group spokesperson said, “There is no reason to believe the trend would have reversed itself, but the HR records from those years at Mic are no longer available.”

More confounding was the lack of a dedicated human resources department, an issue employees brought up to the co-founders repeatedly, sources said. With such a young staff, Mic was “the perfect environment for a lot of inappropriate behavior,” said one former employee.

“There were no fucking rules,” said another. “It was just an HR mess.”

Bergdahl started to use companywide meetings to ask when Mic would be getting a proper human resources department. After one such gathering, she tried to fill the void. At a 2015 meeting, an Anglo-Pakistani employee asked why Mic had a more flexible time-off policy for Yom Kippur than the Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha. Bergdahl remembered Altchek responding by implying it was not the responsibility of the company to keep track of every holiday and that the employee should speak with her manager. (Altchek’s recollection of the conversation is different. “I told her, ‘Great point, being inclusive and respectful of all religious affiliations is incredibly important to Mic,’” he said later.)

Bergdahl was bothered enough by the interaction that she privately told Altchek his answer had come across as insensitive. She suggested he apologize.

Bergdahl heard that Altchek did end up apologizing. But he also talked to the Times about the incident.

“I was a little taken aback by the tone, but I told her I would address it and make sure the person who asked the question wasn’t offended by the answer,” Altchek told the publication, without naming Bergdahl.

Mic finally hired an HR director in March 2016, by which time Mic’s staff had grown to 160. That month, the Times story ran as well ― hoverboards, treehouses and all. Altchek told higher-ups that snarky anecdotes aside, the piece had served its purpose on the business side, a former high-level employee said.

By then, Bergdahl had been let go. She said she was told her position “no longer fit into the growth model.” 

Mic co-founders Chris Altchek and Jake Horowitz speak onstage at the inaugural Mic50 ceremony in New York City in 2015. 

But the growth model had stopped working. In the last month of 2016, the year the company moved into the One World Trade Center offices, Mic drew only 10.5 million unique visitors, down from 21.5 million the previous December. By December 2017, the number dropped to 6.1 million. 

The person familiar with the company argued that the traffic drop was part of a strategic decision to focus “on more reporting and video work and less around viral stories.” The adviser to the company backed this up, saying investors “very much supported” the decision “to go premium” and focus more on “quality” rather than “crank-it-out journalism.” 

Over the next few years, Mic published award-winning work on subjects including transgender rights and the opioid epidemic. Horowitz and Mic staffer Kendall Ciesemier’s aggressive reporting on Alice Johnson garnered the attention of Kim Kardashian, who successfully lobbied President Donald Trump to grant her clemency. Just this February, the American Society of Magazine Editors nominated the site’s ambitious “Black Monuments Project” for an Ellie award in the Digital Innovation category. 

But as it was winning those awards, Mic also began a series of twists and turns in the search for a new, more successful formula. As Facebook traffic waned, Mic embarked on an all-out war for SEO domination and tried to recreate the success BuzzFeed had with a watermelon and some rubber bands on Facebook Live. 

“That is what innovation looks like” in an early-stage startup, the adviser argued. “It’s a series of correcting mistakes. You make lots of little mistakes. But those companies that succeed are the ones that adapt and tweak in response to those early missteps.”

To employees, “it felt like whiplash all the time,” said one former employee. “Every three months there was a new strategy,” said another. “We chased everything because we liked the idea of the optics of it all,” said a third. “The reality was because you’re chasing seven different things, you never really get good at any of them.”

Mic’s internal workings were chaos by then, too. “Editorial guidelines changed constantly and incoherently; people were randomly fired and disappeared; the anonymous questions for management practice was scrapped,” Aleem wrote. 

The transparency in management that Mic had once preached also started to dissipate. “I was in the room in a lot of situations where they would say one thing within the leadership team and then they would go out and say a completely different thing to the staff,” a former high-level employee said.

“It was a game of adapt or die,” said another former employee. “There was a running joke that you would find out somebody was gone when their Slack handle was no longer active.”

I was just like, ‘This is so dumb. I don’t need a pair of Nikes. I need a 401(k).’ They just seemed like they were wasting money left and right.former Mic employee

In an email to staff in May 2016, Altchek noted that the “narrative on digital news companies has turned” and that it appeared to industry analysts that “digital media companies are doomed.”

“The competition is real and the stakes are high,” Altchek wrote to his staff. “And the market for raising money is not as strong as the past two years.”  

The industry had dramatically changed since Bergdahl’s first day at Mic just two years before. Once-optimistic investors had started to sour on the media industry as a place where they could earn a significant return. The number of venture capital deals in the “consumer-focused media space” dropped from an “all-time high” of 945 to 541 between 2014 and 2016, according to Pitchbook, a private and public equity data provider.

“It was noticeable that the market was softening at that time,” said the adviser who worked with the company. “Investors were not seeing a path to [digital media companies] continuing to scale at that rate. And so they were getting nervous about their valuations. And then separately, that’s also when the industry was really starting to realize that the Google-Facebook dynamic was sucking the oxygen out of the room for independent publishers and for journalism business models in general.”

But Altchek held on to the one thing Mic still had on its side. “We reach the the [sic] most coveted audience one [sic] on the entire internet – affluent millennials,” he wrote in the May email. 

Amid industry tumult and investor anxiety, Mic started to make more money, logging its three highest-revenue months in a row in the middle of 2016, according to a company email. Between 2016 to 2018, Mic pulled in more than $10 million in revenue each year. But costs rose, too, and the company was never able to turn an annual profit. The longtime member of the brand team said by that time, “there wasn’t really a clear way to drive the revenue that you needed to drive to have a sustainable business.”

“Mic was sort of always going uphill, and it just got harder. And the incline just got steeper and steeper,” the brand team member said. 

“The walls were starting to close in,” said the high-level employee familiar with the company’s finances.  

The Mic-branded Nikes employees received in 2015. 

The deteriorating conditions affected staff morale. A new banner reading “Are you meeting the mission?” rubbed some employees the wrong way. When asked about the issue at one all-hands meeting, then-publisher Cory Haik responded by saying low morale was normal in newsrooms, according to multiple sources. (Haik did not respond to an emailed request for comment.) In October, Altchek let everyone know that anything less than maximum effort would not be tolerated.

“Recently, I have noticed some team members working as if Mic were just another 9-6 job, not giving it their all everyday [sic],” Altchek wrote to his staff that month. “I’ve challenged every leader to fix any instances immediately. I’ve asked every leader at Mic to set really ambitious goals going into [Objectives and Key Results] and not accept anything less than total effort from their teams everyday.”

After years of promoting socially conscious viewpoints, the election of Donald Trump in November 2016 only further discouraged the newsroom. The night of Trump’s victory, Altchek and Horowitz addressed the team’s “collective pain” in an email.  

“We have spent every waking moment of the past five years working toward the mission of informing, inspiring and empowering our generation to change the world,” they wrote. “And in the moment when our generation became the biggest voting bloc in American history, our voices fell silent.” 

“That hurts,” they added. “We’ve asked so many friends to drop everything and join us. We’ve made promises to our community of millions of peers. We’ve obsessed over harnessing the power of ideas supercharged through our global networks. And yet tonight, in the face of the most damning threat to our future, we’ve hit rock bottom.”

On the first day of 2017, Altchek and Haik emailed the newsroom to lay out the stakes.

“Last year, the news industry was shaken at it’s [sic] core,” they wrote. “Winning in 2017 means growing fanatic audiences for our channels through great daily storytelling, sticky products, longform video and talented faces that speak truth to power.”

Mic secured more than $25 million in additional funding in 2017 after Altchek set up the ambitious goal of pulling in $20 million in revenue for the year, according to a well-placed company source. But morale continued to drop precipitously ― so much so that Altchek and Haik invited editors of color to a breakfast in Tribeca in July 2017 to ask why black employees in particular continued to leave, according to an employee who was there at the time. 

That August, Mic laid off 25 staffers in a pivot to video, which was internally referred to as a “pivot to quality,” one former employee said. Outside Mic, the move was widely ridiculed. But some at the top of the organization saw the switch as a necessity. People were watching more video on their phones, and advertisers seemed increasingly interested in paying for advertisements against videos, not words. 

“The non-pivot-to-video, the stay-the-course [strategy] would have probably been pretty stupid too,” said one of the former executives. 

Amid the bleak financial climate, Altchek continued to project confidence to his staff. 

“I have never been more optimistic about Mic’s future and potential. Having recently completed our Series C financing, Mic is in the strongest financial position in the company’s history,” he wrote in an August 2017 memo announcing the layoffs. 

But by November, Altchek was trying to offload a reservation he had made at Tribeca 360 in Manhattan to host Mic’s holiday party for more than 250 people, according to an email reviewed by HuffPost. After not reaching their financial goals for the year, Mic’s leadership “decided that hosting an expensive holiday party was not the right thing to do,” according to the person familiar with the company.

Mic hosted the party at the office instead, a source said. A senior-level staffer said the site ended up bringing in only around $14 million that year, far short of Altchek’s $20 million goal. It was becoming increasingly clear that Mic was not alone in its struggles either. That December, Ziff Davis purchased Mashable at a “fire sale” price of $50 million, one-fifth of what it had been valued one year before. 

As the fate of their jobs became increasingly uncertain, many employees fled. Those who stayed did what they could to protect themselves by announcing their intention to unionize in February 2018. (The company voluntarily recognized the union but a contract was never ratified.) 

Around the same time, executives created Mic Productions, a five-person unit focused on developing video projects for streaming services and television, and began developing “Mic Dispatch,” which it called a “correspondent-led, twice-weekly newsmagazine program” for Facebook Watch. 

It was the final pivot. That fall, Facebook decided to effectively cancel “Mic Dispatch,” forcing Mic to gut its staff and sell itself to Bustle for $5 million. Bryan Goldberg, Bustle Digital Group’s CEO, later said “Mic had a day of cash left in the bank” at the time. 

“Facebook caught us by surprise at a really bad time,” a choked-up Altchek told his staff in November. “The cancellation, combined with the headwinds our industry is facing, has made it no longer possible for us to operate as an independent media company.”

“It was horrible. It was devastating,” said one employee who was there until the end. “We were just a bunch of young, smart people who were probably always flexing a little bit above our weight class. And that was really exciting to be a part of. We were the underdogs for sure. I think we always felt that. I mean, I felt that.”

“But I don’t think I felt angry,” she added. “I mostly felt sad because I loved my job.”

The crisis facing digital media shows no signs of ending. Last year, well over 50% of every dollar spent on digital ads in the U.S. went to Google and Facebook, and one of the strongest gainers on the so-called “duopoly” is Amazon, according to research company eMarketer. That leaves media companies like BuzzFeed, HuffPost and Vice fighting for scraps. 

This winter, all three of those outlets laid off significant chunks of their staff — 9.5% at HuffPost, 10% at Vice and 15% at BuzzFeed. In April, a private equity group acquired Gizmodo Media Group, reportedly for less than half of what it had been valued at a few years before. Twenty-five employees were promptly let go. 

All told, at least 2,900 people have lost their jobs in media so far this year, making the sector an anomaly. The U.S. unemployment rate is currently at its lowest level since 1969. 

Searching for ways to survive, the CEO of BuzzFeed has floated the idea of merging with other internet publishers to better take on Facebook and Google. Two recently laid-off journalists, ex-HuffPoster Laura Bassett and ex-BuzzFeeder John Stanton, even launched an advocacy group to bring attention to the “existential threat” the tech giants present to the industry. 

Mic, to the extent it exists today, is a shell of its former self. Under Goldberg’s ownership, the site’s masthead now leads to an error page, and there’s a skeletal editorial staff. It is just one of many once-promising brands now owned by Goldberg ― a growing list that also includes Elite Daily, Gawker and The Outline, which itself published an extensive piece on Mic’s workplace culture in 2017. 

In an emailed statement to HuffPost, Goldberg emphasized that his plan to rebuild Mic is already underway. “BDG will make a big investment in the relaunch of Mic, and we are currently hiring a large editorial team to support the path forward,” he said. “BDG is focused on the future, and the future is bright for Mic and for our industry.”  

Goldberg’s optimistic view is not widely shared among the Mic staffers he laid off, many of whom have yet to find full-time jobs. It was always a stretch to argue that Mic coddled its employees. Now that they’re out of jobs — with their industry’s bubble burst and their 4-year-old custom Nikes tattered — it’s clear their story is less about the privileges of working in digital journalism and more about its precarity: a warning about believing the optimistic pronouncements and predictions of quick-talking executives bearing gifts.

Today, some former Mic employees have moved on from journalism altogether, to branded content and nonprofit work. Others have found new gigs in the shrinking industry. Krupnick is the managing editor of Eater; Pavelski is the director of audience development at GQ; Plank hosts a Facebook Watch show for Vox Media, and Tase is the vice president of growth at Axios. Bergdahl is now a freelance editor, fact-checker and reporter who lives in Brooklyn and is working on a novel.  

Mic’s former office space in One World Trade Center is now occupied by a company developing an online food-ordering platform. A few months ago, the 82nd floor served as the backdrop for “Fyre Fraud,” a documentary that Mic co-produced about Billy McFarland’s spectacularly failed and fraudulent millennial-focused music festival in the Bahamas. Speaking directly to the camera, Horowitz, who had done significant original reporting on the festival’s fallout, tried to explain how McFarland had been able to fool so many people for so long. 

“As it turns out,” Horowitz said, “it doesn’t take much to trick a New York City media reporter into writing a story about how great your company is.”

CORRECTION: This article previously reported that Mic’s old office on the 82nd floor of One World Trade was unoccupied. A spokesperson for the building says he misspoke when HuffPost contacted him earlier and that in fact the space is now occupied by a company with an online food-ordering platform. 


When Computers Create Code, Who Owns It Is a Question Worth Billions

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NEW YORK—Google’s DeepDream has generated artwork; the What-If Machine created the characters and story for a West End Musical; music composed by programs was performed in the London Symphony in 2012. We talk about jobs that may be lost to automation, but there is scant attention paid to who owns the intellectual property created by machines.

Artificial intelligence technology no longer allows us the luxury to vacillate. With the advent of AI, software and computers will be creating a number of programs and original works. 

But in many parts of the world, IP laws have not kept pace with the technology. US copyright and patent statutes for instance traditionally required humans as authors or inventors in order for works to be protected under copyright or patent law.

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Part of the problem may be historical—copyright laws for instance, were crafted to address printing press technology (that enabled human beings to copy at little to no cost) and not artificial intelligence and the ability for software programs to generate more programs.

The latter point has a real world impact—if the IP for programs generated from code belongs to the code, it could impact the Indian IT industry, and cost millions their jobs.

Other countries such as the UK and the European Union on the other hand have modified their laws, or are considering proposals to do so in order to address the advances, and breakthroughs in robotics technology. The UK for instance, has done away with the requirement of the human author and is conceivably open to awarding copyright protection to bots created by bots.

 

The UK, when introducing software programs into the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act in 1988 specifically did away with the requirement of “human author” (when recognizing which works would be eligible for copyright). 

In 2017, the Committee on Legal Affairs of the European Parliament released a study on AI and asked for the elaboration of criteria for “own intellectual” creation for copyrightable works produced by computers or robots; thus, paving the way for copyright protection for AI. 

Who owns the AI?

The problem of who will be the “owner” of the programs created by programs poses a thorny issue. Some folks point to programs such as Google’s DeepDream art, and argue that the program was a “tool” or paintbrush that enabled human authors’ vision to be manifested and so, the human author would own the IP. Others argue that the programmer who wrote the software or algorithm should be the author and copyright owner.

The law thus far has been silent on who owns the IP when the machine output cannot be predicted by the humans involved. There is a third group which includes technology savants like Elon Musk, who argue that AI created work should be in the public domain, owned by no one. 

Will contracts supersede the law?

While we wait for the laws in connection with IP ownership of AI to be developed or crafted, people may (by contract) have unwittingly given up that right. Right now, most employment contracts include a “work for hire” concept. As a result, most employers that use software programmers, writers etc. as employees or contractors include a wide provision that states all work produced during the term of employment or contract will be owned by the employer. The salary or fees paid to create the work is considered adequate compensation, including to transfer ownership in IP rights. 

On the face of it, the above may not seem worrisome or particularly important. However, it becomes significant because of the additional complication presented by the following contracting practice. 

Why should India’s technology industry worry

As a corollary to the above ‘work for hire’ employment contracts, large corporate customers particularly US clients have consistently insisted that all Indian technology corporations providing services to the US corporation transfer all the IP produced during the provision of, and in connection with the services. Indian technology corporations by and large have not objected to this.

Indeed for decades Indian technology corporations have transferred all IP to the client, believing the secret-sauce was the know-how or knowledge of how to implement the software programs. Hence, by inserting locks or restricting US clients from hiring their software programmers, Indian technology industry was content. 

This is about to change. Once copyright protection is recognized for AI code, no one else will be allowed to copy that code for a long time (the life of the author + 50 or 70 years depending upon the jurisdiction). Similarly, if a patent is granted for a code, no one else will be allowed to use that code for a long time (20+ years from the date of patent application).

Hence, if AI is granted formal IP protection, and the US clients own all the formal IP, they could take advantage of the protection offered by copyright and patent laws and be able to prevent Indian companies from performing the same services for other clients or corporations. In other words, if the Indian companies used the same code for other clients they could be sued for copyright or patent infringement. Especially so, because the U.S. has been comfortable recognizing patents for algorithms in connection with AI. 

Steps now needed

To continue to ride the technology wave in the AI era, Indian industry will have to adapt quickly and dramatically modify its contracting and negotiating practice. Companies must negotiate hard to retain the formal IP in order to be able to continue to operate their service lines in future. Hence, the risk presented by AI will not only be the loss of US and EU jobs as a result of computerization – estimated by Oxford University’s study as 47% and 54% of the US and EU workers’ jobs and the trickle-down effect on India but also from being able to write programs or perform work for other corporations as a result of AI IP they have written and handed over to their clients. 

It is an existential moment for the industry. At risk is not only half the 3.9 million Indians’ jobs  or 70% of the Indian IT workforce (as a result of automation) but the $155 billion industry that has been the engine for India’s economy and global image. It is not all dark – if Indian firms were to change strategy and to negotiate to own the IP they create, India may well succeed in riding the technology 2.0 or AI wave and epitomize the latter part of Hawking’s prediction:

“Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.” – Stephen Hawking

Aarthi Anand is a leading technology attorney, Vice President at J.P. Morgan, New York, and was a Rhodes Scholar. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect the opinion of the Bank. 

YouTube's Plan To Rein In Conspiracy Theories Is Failing

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YouTube’s change to its algorithm was meant to cut down on misinformation. That's not what's happening.

Six months ago, under tremendous public pressure, YouTube announced that it would tweak its algorithm to recommend fewer videos“that could misinform users in harmful ways.” It was a major step for a company that has spent years driving people toward increasinglysensationalistcontentincludingdangerousdisinformation — that would keep viewers glued to their screens for as long as possible to maximize advertising revenue.

The announcement in late January triggered panic within YouTube’s sprawling network of conspiracy theorists. The host of JustInformed Talk, a channel with nearly a quarter-million subscribers that spreads QAnon theories and baseless claims about Democratic politicians, warned in a February video that the new measure was sure to “instantly destroy” the ability of pages like his to get traffic.

He was wrong. The audience for YouTube’s top conspiracy theory channels is still growing, a HuffPost investigation has found.

Using web analytics tools such as Social Blade and in consultation with experts, we analyzed more than a dozen major YouTube channels that produce conspiracy theory videos to see how their subscriber counts, viewership and estimated earnings have changed. Some channels are growing at slower rates than before, others at around the same rates or a bit more rapidly. Changes to video production levels can affect growth, but as these YouTube channels’ enormous subscriber bases continue to consume and share their videos, all are still drawing in new viewers — and the creators behind them remain undeterred. 

The harm that’s been done in many cases can’t now be undone.Guillaume Chaslot, former algorithm engineer at Google

There are significant financial incentives for conspiracy theorists to keep churning out clickbait disinformation on YouTube: They can still promote their merchandise and third-party fundraising pages on their videos, and they can still take a cut of the earnings from ads on their content through YouTube’s monetization program. The payoff can be huge.

In addition to profiting from ad revenue on YouTube, JustInformed Talk uses the platform to promote its merchandise and fundraising pages.

Views from video recommendations, which can be especially vital for new YouTube pages trying to develop audiences, have been cut in half for content featuring harmful misinformation, a YouTube spokesperson told HuffPost. But for massive conspiracy theory channels like JustInformed Talk — channels that YouTube’s algorithm has already catapulted into notoriety, giving them large and loyal followings — the change has been largely ineffective in suppressing their influence.

Since uploading the video forecasting its own demise, JustInformed Talk has gained almost 50,000 new subscribers for a total of more than 222,000. It’s still verified on YouTube, and its average daily views per month nearly doubled between the end of January and the start of June (the most recent data available for that metric). The channel, which circulates falsehoods including the existence of a deep-state cabal of elite liberal and Hollywood pedophiles, has also seen its earnings increase, for an annual income of up to $138,600, Social Blade estimates.

Next News Network, a rightwing conspiracy theory channel designed to appear like a legitimate news source, has close to 1.2 million subscribers and uploads multiple videos per day, including a stream of fake news. Also verified on YouTube, it has posted videos falsely claiming that Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of disaster-torn San Juan, Puerto Rico, was arrested for corruption involving relief funds; that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) made a speech while drunk; that former president Bill Clinton raped a teenager; that the Clinton Foundation was linked to the murder of a Canadian couple; and that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged people against getting the flu shot.

The channel is run by prominent conspiracy theorist Gary Franchi, who regularly accuses YouTube of targeting him as part of a broader campaign of partisan censorship — a narrative often pushed by far-right extremists trying to paint themselves as victims of big tech.Franchi and other conspiracy theorists have actually capitalized on YouTube’s change to its algorithm by using it as fodder to rally their bases for increased grassroots promotion.

“Conservative censorship is on the rise, and we cannot let algorithms dictate your requests of news and opinion on this channel that we produce for you,” he said at the start of a recent video, as he always does before imploring viewers to share and subscribe. Now it’s up to you to help us reach new people. Please tell a friend about Next News. When you’re at the dinner table, bring up our reports, say how much you love Next News and Gary Franchi.”

In another video last week, Franchi, who did not respond to HuffPost’s request for an interview, described his audience as “the lifeblood of our channel,” and said that “because YouTube has removed our ability to reach new viewers, we now rely 100 percent on you to grow.”

Within an hour of being uploaded, the video had been viewed some 30,000 times.

Franchi’s videos still bring in an average of up to $2,185 daily for a rising annual income of as much as $885,600. And despite his repeated claim that YouTube has “removed our ability to reach new viewers,” his subscriber count is still steadily increasing.

TRUreporting, another YouTube-verified conspiracy theory channel, earns up to $76,000 annually from ad revenue on the platform, in addition to direct donations from users. (YouTube’s “Super Chat” feature allows people to pay to have their comments highlighted and pinned during livestream chats.)

TRUreporting often livestreams multiple times per week.

Donations come in during a TRUreporting livestream.

The channel’s total subscriber count is also still rising — meaning the QAnon theories and other partisan lies it broadcasts for monetized views are engaging more and more people on the platform.

YouTube acted “way too late,” said former Google engineer Guillaume Chaslot, who helped design YouTube’s algorithm. “The harm that’s been done in many cases can’t now be undone.”

It’s not just established conspiracy theory channels that have managed to thrive in spite of YouTube’s attempt to contain them.More than two months after the company said it would crack down on disinformation, the minuscule channel Evil Preston posted a single conspiracy theory video about the death of American rapper Nipsey Hussle that instantly went viral. It drew in 3.1 million views and launched the page’s subscriber numbers from less than 800 to more than 12,000 in just two days.Evil Preston has since leveled out at around 20,000 subscribers and continues to spread fake news about Hussleand others to its new base.

YouTube’s effort to rein in the spread of disinformation on its platform is a work in progress that comes as “part of our ongoing efforts to improve the user experience across our site,” the company spokesperson told HuffPost, stressing that this content represents a tiny fraction of all videos on YouTube. “We are continuing to apply this change gradually in the U.S. and as we improve our recommendation systems and increase their accuracy over time, we will be rolling it out to more countries.”

In March, amid ongoing calls to demonetize or ban conspiracy theory videos altogether, YouTube rolled out a measure aimed at debunking them instead: It started adding links to related Wikipedia pages next to YouTube videos spreading false information.

The links, which are intended to provide users with contextual information so they can draw their own conclusions, are “as helpful as putting warning labels on cigarettes,” said Chaslot. “It’s better than nothing, but I’m not sure that it’s actually effective.”

For videos contending that the earth is flat or the moon landing never happened, viewers may be directed to Wikipedia pages that explain the opposite is true. But for other, more dangerous videos, such as those promoting Frazzledrip theory, Wikipedia offers no solution.

There’s no page dedicated to explaining that former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her top aide Huma Abedin didnot, in fact, rape a little girl, cut off her face and wear it as their own, as the viral theory suggests. It’s absurd, but on YouTube’s many Frazzledrip videos, people have left comments demanding to know why the mainstream media has ignored the story and calling for Clinton and Abedin to be brutally killed. One such video has nearly 1 million views.

Letting conspiracy theories run wild online has led to offline violence in the past: In 2016, a man fired a rifle inside a Washington pizzeria after watching a YouTube video that falsely claimed the eatery was the headquarters for a child sex-trafficking ring. And just last year, another man who embraced anti-Semitic conspiracy theories killed 11 worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue.

The spread of disinformation on social media platforms can also cause “increased distrust in democratic institutions and a threat to productive democratic political processes,” said Becca Lewis, an affiliate researcher at Data & Society. YouTube serves as an increasingly popular alternative to traditional news sources, she noted, and in recent years, it has created an atmosphere where fringe content excels and is rewarded even without algorithmic support.

“If a creator has already started to grow an audience, that audience will seek out their content whether it’s going up in the algorithm or not,” Lewis said. “In many cases, this change [to YouTube’s algorithm] is too little, too late.”

K. Sophie Will contributed reporting.

Sourav Ganguly Is Surprised These 2 Players Are Missing From ODI Squad For West Indies Tour

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NEW DELHI — Former India captain Sourav Ganguly on Wednesday questioned the omission of veteran Ajinkya Rahane and young Shubman Gill from the ODI squad for the tour of West Indies, urging the selection committee to be consistent with their policies.

Ganguly took to Twitter to take a dig at the selectors stating the main agenda should be picking the best possible team and not making people happy.

“Time has come for Indian selectors to pick same players in all formats of the game for rhythm and confidence.. too few are playing in all formats ..great teams had consistent players ..it’s not about making all happy but picking the best for the country and be consistent @bcci,” Ganguly tweeted.

“Here are many in the squad who can play all formats ..surprised not to see Shubman Gill. Rahane in the one day squad,” he added.

Gill has already expressed his disappointment at not being picked in the squad for the limited overs series in the Caribbean.

The MSK Prasad-led selection committee picked India’s squads for the T20I, ODI and Test squads for the tour of West Indies on Sunday.

Barring left-arm spinner Ravindra Jadeja, Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma and KL Rahul, no other Indian player features in all 3 formats for the West Indies tour.

Two Independent Karnataka MLAs Seek Withdrawal Of Plea Seeking 'Forthwith' Floor Test From SC

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NEW DELHI — Two Karnataka Independent MLAs on Wednesday urged the Supreme Court to allow them to withdraw their plea seeking its direction to the state assembly Speaker KR Ramesh Kumar to conduct “forthwith” floor test on a trust motion moved by the HD Kumaraswamy government.

The Congress-JD(S) coalition government on Tuesday lost the trust motion on the floor of the House.

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A bench comprising Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justices Deepak Gupta and Aniruddha Bose was told by the counsel for the lawmakers R Shankar and and H Nagesh that they wanted to withdraw the petition in view of the recent development.

“Where is Mukul Rohatgi (counsel for the lawmakers)? Where is A M Singhvi (counsel for the Speaker)?” the bench said.

It said it will pass the order only in the presence of the senior counsel.

Lindsay Lohan Is Back With Another Brand-New Accent

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Lindsay Lohan seems to be loving her time Down Under so much, she’s starting to sound like an Australian herself.

The actress, who is currently a guest judge on “The Masked Singer Australia,” posted a video on Instagram this week in which she said hello to her “mates” in a very Aussie accent.

“G’day, mates,” she says in the clip, which makes heavy use of Instagram video filters. “I’m here in Australia.”

It appears the accent is just for the clip, as Lohan seemed back to her normal voice in subsequent Instagram stories on Tuesday.

But it’s hard to tell with the actress, who says she regularly picks up the dialect of wherever she’s traveling.

“Well, I think it’s because actresses even, I think when I’m around certain dialects it changes each time ...  and you just pick things up along the way,” Lohan said in an interview with ET Online earlier this year. 

In 2016, the actress caused a stir after debuting a new accent ― and speech pattern ― after living in London for four years.  

“It’s a mixture of most of the languages I can understand or am trying to learn,” she told the Daily Mail at the time after making headlines for her new way of speaking. 

“I’ve been learning different languages since I was a child. I’m fluent in English and French can understand Russian and am learning Turkish, Italian and Arabic,” she added. 

No Question Of Any Mediation On Kashmir Issue, Rajnath Singh Tells Lok Sabha

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NEW DELHI — There was no discussion on Kashmir in the meeting between US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Japan recently and there is no question of any mediation on the issue, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said on Wednesday.

Making a statement in Lok Sabha, Singh said mediation on the Kashmir issue is ruled out as it is a question of national pride for India.

“There was no discussion on Kashmir during the meeting between the Prime Minister and US President Trump in June. 

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There is no question of any mediation on Kashmir issue,” he said amid a walkout by the opposition which has been demanding a statement from Modi himself.

US President Donald Trump had on Monday claimed that Prime Minister Modi had asked him to play the role of a mediator on Kashmir.

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar had said in Parliament on Tuesday that Prime Minister Modi had made no such request to the US President.

Karnataka Crisis: Congress Insiders Reveal Why Its Govt With JD(S) Imploded

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UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi, BSP Chief Mayawati, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, Congress President Rahul Gandhi, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu with the new Chief Minister of Karnataka Kumarswamy during his swearing-in ceremony at the Grand Steps of Vidhana Soudha on May 23, 2018 in Bengaluru, India. 

NEW DELHI —After weeks of political drama in Karnataka, the Janata Dal (Secular)- Congress government in the southern state fell on Tuesday night, leaving the Congress with governments in four states and one Union Territory. 

In the wake of another body blow after the abysmal general election result, Congress leaders and workers in Delhi and Karnataka, speaking on the condition of anonymity, expressed despair and frustration. 

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To some, the JD(S)-Congress coalition, forged between two political rivals with the sole objective of  keeping the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from taking power in Karnataka, was doomed from the start. 

For those who accuse BJP of “horse trading,” there is little the Congress could have done to counter the “money and muscle power” of the ruling party. 

Almost all the insiders said that the internal working dynamic of the Congress and poor leadership was at least partially to blame for the debacle.

A Congress insider in Delhi said, “This is very bad. They snatched the government from right under our noses.”

A second Congress insider in Delhi said, “The day that the JD(S)-Congress coalition happened, the fall of the government was scripted on that day itself. In hindsight, it would have been better if we had sat in the Opposition and consolidated.”

The JDS-Congress alliance, which came about after Sonia Gandhi convinced HD Deve Gowda to have faith in the partnership, was never on firm footing. The Congress and the JD(S) — with 78 and 37 lawmakers respectively — together beat out BJP’s 104. Even as the Gandhi family agreed to Gowda’s son, HD Kumaraswamy, becoming chief minister, having to play second fiddle to the JD(S) never sat well with Congress leaders and workers on the ground. 

Rumblings about the fall of the JD(S) government started in the months leading up to the 2019 general election.

A commonly expressed sentiment was that if the BJP returned to power at the Centre, the JD(S)-Congress government in Karnataka would fall. 

And still, the Congress and its former president Rahul Gandhi were unable to stave off the looming crisis. 

This is very bad. They snatched the government from right under our noses.

Congress shares the blame 

In addition to the BJP’s political machinations to bring down the Karnataka government, its fall lies squarely on the Congress itself.

Congress insiders in Delhi and in Karnataka gave four reasons for the collapse of the government: the lack of leadership in the state and in Delhi, local officials failing to relay ground truths, a clueless central command, and infighting within the party. 

A Congress insider in Karnataka said that he was “happy” at the fall of his party’s government because it exposed the incompetence of its officials and the self-serving attitude of its leaders.  

“I am feeling bad, but I’m also happy,” this insider said. “People here have used Rahul Gandhi’s name to become heroes but they have done nothing but make a mess of things.”

“Karnataka is the most dynastic state. Those in power are second or third generation politicians from the same families. No one new can rise. That is also part of the problem,” this insider said.  

Karnataka is the most dynastic state.

Congress insiders in Karnataka said that there was never any real cohesion between the All India Congress Committee (AICC) officials working in the state and local party leaders. 

The biggest casualty in all this, Congress insiders said, is information. Ground realities were rarely conveyed to the Gandhi family. 

This was key to its poor performance in the Lok Sabha election, which saw the BJP take 25 of the 28 seats from Karnataka, while the Congress managed one. Despite this abysmal performance, there was no change in the party leadership in the state. 

Conspiracy theories 

For Congress workers, who have barely recovered from the general election result, losing power in the state is deeply frustrating. It is not surprising then that there is talk of internal sabotage. 

In one of the conspiracy theories doing the rounds, former chief minister of Karnataka Siddaramaiah, in a bid to weaken the government, encouraged the “rebel” Congress MLAs until Kumaraswamy was forced to step down, but then his own plan got away from him. 

The first insider in Delhi, said, “He did not anticipate the tenacity of the BJP.”

A third insider in Delhi said, “I don’t know whether he was working to weaken the government, but how Siddaramaiah worked weakened the government. He and his followers were always confrontational with Kumaraswamy.”

I don’t know whether he was working to weaken the government, but how Siddaramaiah worked weakened the government.

Union Minister for Chemicals and Fertilisers D V Sadananda Gowda, earlier this month, claimed that Siddaramaiah was responsible for resignation of MLAs. Two MLAs in Bengaluru North Lok Sabha segment, followers of Siddaramaiah, have resigned. Siddaramaiah can quell crisis in the coalition,” he said. 

Of the 14 MLAs who have resigned, 11 are from Congress and three from the JD(S). two independents have withdraw support. The one Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) MLA, who was missing, has been expelled by Mayawati. 

Of the rebel MLAs, four are from Siddaramaiah’s Kurubas (shepherd) community, two from Congress, one JD(S) and one independent. 

No high command 

Some within the Congress say that party high command in Delhi is not to blame for the Karnataka debacle because “there is no party high command.”

The third Congress insider said, “At this point, Delhi is defunct. No one comes to AICC. No one is giving orders. People are used to taking orders from just one family and the three family members have decided not to say anything.”

Rahul Gandhi tendered his resignation as Congress Party president, earlier this month. 

Warning that Madhya Pradesh could be facing a similar fate as Karnataka, this insider said, “There is no Delhi. The state units are grappling on their own. There is barely any Opposition left in the country. The BJP will only get stronger.  Perhaps, Rahul ji believes that something will rise from the ashes.” 

There is no party high command.

No strongman 

Congress insiders in Delhi and Karnataka said that the fall of the government boiled down to the party being able to do little in the wake of BJP’s “money and muscle” power. 

“With the kind of money that the BJP is throwing around, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) notices, no amount of coordination could have prevented this.  Look at the income tax returns of the ‘rebels.’ They have grown richer. They are not in this for loyalty to the Congress. It is all about the money. It is all about saving one self,” the second Congress insider in Delhi said. 

A second Congress insider in Karnataka said, “Yes, there have been problems within the Congress, but the BJP had decided that it wanted the government out, and there was nothing that we could do about it. The money, the ED notices, every government department is functioning like a wing of the BJP.”  

The Congress lacked a strongman who could safeguard the alliance and ward off the BJP. 

There was, however, one Congress leader who was widely credited for  safeguarding  the fledgling JD(S)-Congress alliance in 2018. 

DK Shivakumar, the immensely wealthy lawmaker from Kanakapura, was credited for prevented the newly elected Congress MLAs from getting poached, in the midst of alleged horse trading attempts after the Assembly election. 

Congress members are divided over Shivakumar, an accused in at least four cases of corruption, forgery and criminal conspiracy. His declared assets increased from ₹251 crores in 2013 to ₹840 crores in 2018. He is accused of destroying evidence in connection with multiple tax evasion cases. 

While some resent his larger than life persona and strong arm tactics, others believe that he is the only leader who is capable of counteracting the BJP as well as the infighting within the Congress. 

Some say that Gandhi has deliberately thwarted Shivakumar to curb his growing ambition. He went from holding the energy portfolio in the Siddaramaiah government from 2014 to 2018 to the minister in-charge of irrigation.

The Congress insider in Delhi said, “We need a strongman in the state.”

The third insider in Delhi said, “The only person who was fire fighting was DK Shivakumar.”

The Gandhi family, some insiders lament, similarly thwarted ambitious strongmen like Jagan Mohan Reddy in Andhra Pradesh and Himanta Biswa Sarma in Assam, and it came back to haunt them. 

Following the floor test on Tuesday, Shivakumar tweeted, “During the trust vote debate, I quoted Voltaire - “Oh God, give me strength and defend me from my friends, I can take care of my enemies. BJP is setting a bad precedent by forming Govt’s through Operation Kamala. This has strengthened our resolve to fight to uphold democracy.” 

 

Scarlett Johansson Unveils Massive Engagement Ring From Colin Jost

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Scarlett Johansson debuted a massive engagement ring from “Saturday Night Live” star Colin Jost over the weekend, and the sparkler did not disappoint.

The “Black Widow” star appeared at a Marvel Studios panel Saturday during San Diego Comic-Con 2019 rocking a jumpsuit and the huge rock. 

Scarlett Johansson is rocking a huge rock in her engagement ring from Colin Jost.

The ring appears to be designed by Taffin’s James de Givenchy, the nephew of fashion house Givenchy’s founder, Hubert de Givenchy.

Alicia Davis, Shane Co.’s vice president of merchandise, told Page Six Style that the “11-carat, light brown diamond” is estimated at “over $400,000.” 

Johansson and Jost revealed their engagement in May after two years of dating. They met when Johansson hosted “SNL” in May 2017, but didn’t tell the public about their status as a couple until May 2018, when Jost said during a “Weekend Update” segment that he had a girlfriend.

The “Avengers: Endgame” star was married previously to actor Ryan Reynolds, and to journalist Romain Dauriac, with whom she has a 5-year-old daughter, Rose. 

 

Mahua Moitra Hits Out At Modi Govt: 'Inke Saath Ho Toh Bhagwaan, Na Ho Toh Shaitaan'

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Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra once again lashed out at the Modi government saying that anyone who was not with the government was vilified and a “troll army” was unleashed on them. 

Moitra also said that it was possible for people to be anti-government and not be an ‘anti-national’. 

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Inske saath ho toh bhagwaan, na ho toh shaitaan. Yeh toh na insafi hai bhai (If you are with the government you are god, otherwise you’re the devil. This is unfair!)” Moitra said, adding that she had experienced first-hand how anyone who criticised the government was termed as an “anti-national”. 

Moitra made the remarks while debating against the amendment to the UAPA bill in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday. 

“Why are we in the Opposition at the risk of being called anti-national every time we disagree with the government on issues of national security, on issues of law and order and on issues of policing?” Moitra asked. 

Moitra alluded to the online trolling of anyone who comments against the Modi government saying, “Every time we disagree this government, its troll armies, its propaganda machineries work overtime to call us terrorist sympathisers, to calls us ‘sickulars’, to call us ‘anti-nationals’.”

Moitra asserted that the people of India still appreciated nuance. “It still has people who have not degenerated into the mindless world of black and white — we can either be pro-government or be anti-country. All of India does not believe this, even if members of this house may. It is still possible to be anti-government and pro-India and that is the space I choose to represent today.”

Moitra’s speech was interrupted by MPs of the ruling party. BJP MP from West Bengal SS Ahluwalia said that Members of Parliament could not make allegations against the government without substantiating it. The chair, Meenakshi Lekhi, also a member of the BJP, read out from the rule book of the house that allegations or defamatory statements could be made against a member only after giving notice. 

Moitra clarified that she was not making defamatory statements against any member of the House. 

“I have not made any single thing against any member. I spoke about the propaganda machineries and troll armies,” Moitra said and was interrupted again. “It is unfortunate that you need three ministers of the treasury benches to stand up and fight me. I am sure Mr Shah (Amit Shah) will have the grace to hear me out.”

She also quoted Mahatma Gandhi and George Orwell and said, “The truth is the truth, even if I am a minority of only one.”

Netflix's Rs 199 Mobile-Only Plan Targets Indians Consuming Content On The Go

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NEW DELHI — Premium video streaming company Netflix on Wednesday announced a Rs 199 mobile-only plan in India as it looks to woo viewers amid intense competition from Amazon Prime Videos and other local players.

 The video content platform, which had been testing the mobile-only plan for several months in India, has also restructured its three existing plans.

Indians spend 30% of their time on entertainment, they are consuming content on the go and in their homes. Members in India watch content on their mobile phones more than anywhere else in the world, Netflix Director Product Innovation Ajay Arora told reporters here.

He added that more people sign up for Netflix service on mobile phones in India more than any other country.

“The mobile plan for Rs 199 a month is made for India. Users will have access to the same unlimited standard definition (SD), ad-free content under this plan,” he said adding that this will help the company expand to smaller cities in the country.

The company has tested similar mobile-only plans in few other markets; but as of now, the offering is being announced in India only, Arora said.

In India, Netflix has partners like Hathway, Bharti Airtel and ACT Fibernet to take its services to customers through these networks.

Recently, during an investor call, Netflix had said it believes that growth in the Indian market is a marathon; and that the company is witnessing steady progress here.

With the Rs 199 plan, Netflix hopes to further expand its business in a market where Pay TV average revenue per user (ARPU) is low (below $5).

The company has over 148 million paid memberships in over 190 countries. It doesn’t disclose country-specific subscriber numbers.

Netflix, which is witnessing sluggish growth in its home market, is betting on markets like India to drive growth.

Online content consumption in India has seen massive growth with data plans becoming more affordable. Data rates in India are among the cheapest globally.

While there is a growing trend of consuming these on-demand content on television, a significant number of people watch content on smartphones.

While Netflix plays in the premium content streaming space, it competes with the likes of Amazon Prime Video, Hotstar and even YouTube, along with other local players in the Indian market.

Amazon Prime Videos, Hotstar and Zee5 offer services at Rs 999 annually.

The competition in the video-on-demand space has intensified, especially, after the launch of Reliance Jio’s services as data tariffs have come down drastically in the country.

Players like ALTBalaji as well as vernacular platforms like Hoichoi are actively expanding their library with original programming to tap into the Indian market.

Netflix’s global paid membership grew by 2.7 million in the second quarter, less than the 5.5 million in the year-ago period and its own forecast of five million for the June 2019 quarter.

In the third quarter, Netflix said it expects to grow by 7 million paid memberships (0.8 million in the US and 6.2 million internationally) compared to an addition of 6.1 million subscribers in the year-ago period. 

‘Jai Shri Ram’ Has Become 'Provocative War Cry': Activists, Filmmakers Write To Modi

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A group of filmmakers, activists and artists have written an open letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressing concerns over the increasing number of lynchings in the country. 

The letter is signed by 49 eminent personalities, including Anurag Kashyap, Aparna Sen, Binayak Sen, Konkana Sen Sharma, Mani Ratnam, Ramchandra Guha, Soumitro Chatterjee, and Shyam Benegal.

“The lynching of Muslims, Dalits and other minorities must be stopped immediately. We were shocked to learn from the NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau) reports that there have been no less than 840 instances of atrocities against Dalits in the year 2016, and a definite decline in the percentage of convictions,” the letter, which has been reproduced by NDTV, reads. 

It also notes that ‘Jai Shri Ram’ has become a “provocative war cry today that leads to law and order problem, and many lynchings take place in its name”.

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The letter says “it is shocking that so much violence should be perpetrated in the name of religion”. The name of Ram, the letter further states, is sacred to many in the majority community of India and calls on the prime minister to put a stop to the name of Ram being defiled in this manner.

It also underscored the significance of dissent in a democracy. “People should not be branded ‘anti-national’ or ‘urban Naxal’ and incarcerated because of dissent against the government.”

“Criticising the ruling party does not imply criticising the nation. No ruling party is synonymous with the country where it is in power.”

(With PTI inputs)

Prince Harry And Jane Goodall Share Dance And 'Chimpanzee Greeting'

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It’s a jungle in there.

Prince Harry and primatologist Jane Goodall shared an impromptu dance and a “chimpanzee greeting” during a Windsor Castle event for young conservationists on Tuesday, according to the royal’s Instagram. (See the video highlights below.)

As the two met in front of the Roots and Shoots Global Leadership Meeting, Goodall asked the Duke of Sussex if he recalled the “chimp greeting” from a previous occasion together, People reported. Harry acted like a chimp and patted her on the head as if she were a nervous female chimp. Then they hugged.

Cute stuff!

Goodall, 85, said the two had previously discussed Harry’s increased interest in conservation since he and the former Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, became parents to Archie. (Goodall visited the pair and their son in June.) “When you bring a child into the world, you have to worry about the future,” she said, per People.

The prince offered high praise for Goodall at the event.

“She is a woman of kindness, warmth, immense knowledge and a softness that’s needed by mankind just as much as it is chimpkind,” he said, per the Sun. “I’ve been admiring her work since I was a kid, and it was so wonderful to find that she was even more amazing in person.”

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