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Virat Kohli Responds To Rumours Of Rift With Rohit Sharma

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MUMBAI — Indian captain Virat Kohli dismissed speculations of a rift with Rohit Sharma calling the reports ridiculous and baffling lies and insisting that he has no issues with his deputy.

After India’s ouster from the World Cup, there were rumours of fissures in the Indian camp with claims that Rohit and Kohli are not seeing eye to eye.

On the eve of his team’s departure for the tour of West Indies, Kohli sought to clear the air.

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“In my opinion it’s baffling, ridiculous to read such stuff, we’re feeding lies,” Kohli said with coach Ravi Shastri by his side, who also termed the rumours as “nonsense”.

Kohli insisted that his relationship with Rohit is fine.

“We’ve had no issues. If I don’t like somebody, it shows on my face. I have also heard a lot in past few days but if team atmosphere wasn’t good, we couldn’t have played well,” Kohli said.


Should Ravi Shastri Continue As Head Coach? Virat Kohli Responds

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MUMBAI — Captain Virat Kohli on Monday said he is in favour of Ravi Shastri continuing as the head coach of the Indian cricket team despite the criticism following the semi-final ouster from the World Cup.

The current support staff comprising incumbent head coach Ravi Shastri, bowling coach Bharat Arun, batting coach Sanjay Bangar and fielding coach R Sridhar were given a 45-day extension following the World Cup, covering the West Indies tour from August 3 to September 3.

“Well, the CAC (Cricket Advisory Committee headed by Kapil Dev) has not contacted me on this. But all of us share a great camaraderie with Ravi bhai and would definitely be very happy (to have him around),” Kohli told reporters when asked for his opinion on the appointment of chief coach.

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“But as I had said, it’s on the CAC to decide (how to go about it).”

They may have failed to win the T20 World Cup in 2016 and the ODI World Cup in 2015 and 2019, but the Shastri-Kohli duo helped India climb the top of the Test rankings with a historic series triumph in Australia.

Shastri was the team director till June 2016 until India lost in the World T20 semi-finals before being reappointed as head coach in 2017 after Anil Kumble was removed following his differences with Kohli.

The interviews of applicants for India’s head coach are likely to take place on August 13 and/or August 14. The deadline for filing the applications for the head coach and support staff is July 30.

The Committee of Administrators (COA) running Indian cricket has tasked the Kapil Dev-led ad-hoc committee to pick the next national coach. 

The ad-hoc body comprising former India captain Kapil Dev, Anshuman Gaekwad and former women’s captain Shantha Rangaswamy had earlier appointed WV Raman as the women’s team coach in December.

Back then, the COA was a two-member panel comprising chairman Vinod Rai and former India women’s captain Diana Edulji, who had called the women’s coach selection process unconstitutional.

She had asserted that only the Cricket Advisory Committee (CAC) was empowered to do so. But with serious doubts over the future of CAC comprising Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly and VVS Laxman, the CoA thought it was prudent to hand the responsibility to the ad-hoc panel.

This Woman Was Hit With 4 FIRs, Rape Threats For Writing Poetry In Her Mother Tongue

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A woman who has been left out of the NRC in Assam.

‘Mother’, Rehana Sultana wrote, ‘you hate me, because even though
I was born in your lap, I am that ‘cursed Miya’.’

Sultana was 18 when she first heard the word ‘miya’ being used as an insult. She had just moved to Guwahati from her village in lower Assam, and had stepped out with a group of girls from her hostel when they spotted a scrawny, dishevelled rickshaw-puller coming their way. As the man stopped near them, the teenage girls shook their heads vehemently, motioning him to move ahead even though they needed a ride. Then one of them rolled her eyes and said, “I knew he was a miya when I saw him coming.” The others laughed.

“I still remember the sound of the word, the laughter and my silence,” said Sultana, now a 28-year-old doctoral student in Gauhati University.

When, in 2016, she wrote her first poem in the dialect she spoke at home, she felt shaken and raw, like she had just had a painful conversation she had been putting off for way too long.

After she uploaded ‘I’m Miya’, written in the Miya dialect, people wrote to her on Facebook expressing how necessary and important her writing was. Someone even said, “May your pen never rest.”

But three years later, with the publication of the final draft of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) looming over Assam, Sultana’s poems have been dug up on social media and her inbox flooded with threats and insults. She has also had four police complaints lodged against her.

Sultana is not alone. Over the past month, four FIRs have been lodged against Assamese poets who identify themselves as ‘Miya’ poets—‘Miya’ being a colloquial expression used in Assam, almost as a pejorative, to refer to Bengal or Bangladesh-origin migrant Muslims in the state. The accusations against them range from promoting disharmony in Assam to painting a discordant picture of Assamese society outside the state, ironic, given the negative press that the NRC process itself has attracted even internationally.

 

Three of these FIRs were based on complaints filed by indigenous Assamese Muslim organisations who have traditionally wanted to distance themselves from those Muslims whose forefathers migrated from Bangladesh. Speaking to HuffPost India, the president of one of the organisations repeatedly said that their organisation represented Muslims whose forefathers were from Assam and “are Assamese first and Muslims later”.

The attack on the poets is an extension of a larger cultural and political conflict that has intensified as the deadline for the NRC—August 31—approaches. As lakhs of people in Assam live in fear of losing their citizenship and being declared illegal immigrants through the error-prone process, people like Sultana, whose work is perceived as a threat to the Assamese subnationalist project, are also paying a heavy price.

Reclaiming identity through poetry

Sultana grew up speaking both Assamese and the Miya dialect at home, but she had never thought there could be anything ‘literary’ about the latter. The dialect, written in the Assamese script—and easy to read if one knows Bengali—is spoken by a majority of migrant Muslims, especially those living along the Brahmaputra river in Assam.

The dialect, which is influenced by Assamese and Bengali, represents the cultural trajectory of Muslims who migrated from Bangladesh to Assam over many decades, beginning from the 19th century.

Rehana Sultana

In 2016, poet Hafeez Ahmed was the first to write a poem in the Miya dialect—a loose translation of the title would be “Right Now, I Am A Miya”—and upload it on Facebook. And the first time Sultana read poetry in the Miya dialect, she felt like the words were painting pictures in front of her.

“I could see the tears in the eyes of the men the words spoke about, I could see them struggling to cope with the oppression and poverty they face,” she said.

It took her some time to realise that while she spoke many languages — English, Hindi, Assamese — Miya was the language she felt in.

And hence was born Miya poetry, a genre which helped writers from the community appropriate a word that had only been bandied about as abuse until then.

Kazi Sharowar Hussain, a 23-year-old poet and a student at Tezpur University, said that Miya poetry was born from the need to articulate the oppression faced by poor Muslims living in the fringes of Assam, in a language they spoke.

“The hatred they face for being a ‘miya’, the discrimination against them when they go to work as migrant labourers, there was a need to document their lives without villainising them,” Hussein, who goes by the name Kazi Neel, told HuffPost India. With Ahmed’s poem, young people like Neel and Sultana realised that the language they spoke it could also be the language they wrote literature in — a political assertion that came at a time the Bengali Muslim identity in Assam was facing threats of state persecution and organised political oppression.

While the dominant narrative about immigrant Muslims in Assam — whose forefathers migrated from Bangladesh — seeks to paint them as encroachers and troublemakers, this genre of poetry sought to speak about the systemic oppression they allegedly face. In 2016, the emergence of the trend was covered by Al Jazeera—this report is now being used by detractors to claim that Miya poets are ‘insulting’ Assam in front of the world.

Hussein, for instance, has been accused of creating a false narrative of sexual violence against poor Muslim women in the state. In one of the poems, about the discrimation faced by economically backward minorities in the country, Hussein wrote the lines:

The land that makes my father an alien, that kills my brother with a bullet, and gangrapes my sister…

“It is a metaphor for all Muslims and women irrespective of their religions. Haven’t women, especially poor women, been gangraped in India? Haven’t men been killed for belonging to a certain religion? Isn’t there an attempt to call many poor Muslims ‘illegal immigrants’ in Assam? There have been cases where 7-year-old children have been left out of the NRC,” explained Hussein.

Critics, however, have read the lines literally to contest the poet’s argument and file police complaints.

“They said, my father was not shot, my sister was not gangraped, I was lying,” he said.

The deliberate misreading doesn’t end there.

One of the police complaints refers to a line in Hussein’s poem—‘your torture has burnt my body black’—and demands to know: “Did you file FIR or complaint before the appropriate authority? What is the case number? Where is the medical report? Can you show?”

It picks out another line that says ‘my mother is a D-voter’ and declares that it is her duty to prove her citizenship before an ‘appropriate forum’.

“Writing poetry is not the solution,” says the complaint.

‘You’re the one I love’

To Sultana, the Miya language is a ‘khichdi’, but also the one she feels closest to. One in which she can speak about that time her college went for a day trip and the girls giggled and rolled their eyes at a group of young women wearing bright, red and yellow sarees. “Look, look, miyas,” they laughed, making faces at the ‘shiny’ clothes.

Or the time a friend told her about a ‘miya’ sewer cleaner whom her family threatened to turn over to the police because he asked for the amount they had agreed upon earlier.

You are my mother,
I was born in your lap,
My father and brother were born in your lap,
Mother,
Even then, you say I am not yours
I am nothing to you…”

Quoting the opening lines of her first ‘Miya poem’, Sultana said that accusations that she was trying to ‘malign’ Assam especially rankled.

“I have studied in Assamese medium in school. I did my graduation in Assamese literature and then my Masters in it. Later, when I began writing my doctoral thesis, that too was in Assamese. In fact, I did not think that Miya language was something that I could write in till very recently,” she said. In fact, some of her poems on the miya community, have been written in Assamese. “That is still the language I am most comfortable writing in,” she said.

Her poems mostly speak about the experiences of poor Muslim families she has worked with since her student days. Sultana’s doctoral thesis is on the folk traditions of Muslims who live in ‘chars’ — temporary river islands on the Brahmaputra — a community known to be the poorest, least educated and most oppressed among even the minorities in Assam.

During the course of her doctoral research, she frequently made trips to the chars and heard stories of hungry children waiting all day for their fathers to return home from selling odds and ends in the villages for food. But the men couldn’t return, because they would be spending the night in police lock-ups on suspicion of being thieves or ‘Bangladeshis’.

Sultana’s first poems, therefore, was about an average poor migrant Muslim’s desperation in to be counted as an Assamese. “They have given up their mother tongue, they gave up their culture to try to fit in. ‘Mother, you don’t trust me, because I have a beard, I wear a lungi, I am distraught from trying to prove my identity to you, yet, despite tolerating thousands of insults, pain and deprivation, I will stay say that you’re the one I love’ — I wrote this to capture their cries of desperation, to be accepted even after being born here like any other Assamese,” Sultana said.

And the poems don’t deal with just one angle. Because they have been denied education and are cut off from most amenities, these societies are also deeply superstitious. Sultana’s poems do not just talk about discrimination but also protests the doubly oppressive lives of women in that society. “Child marriage is rampant, so is domestic violence. I wrote extensively on those issues as well,” she said.

And then, the abuse

After Sultana’s first poem was published in 2016, she didn’t receive a single critical or abusive message. So she was taken by surprise in June this year when she saw the toxic language being unleashed on the comments section of a friend’s status update on Miya poetry.

“Don’t let this affect you and don’t stop, keep writing,” she commented.

On 17 June, a message landed on her inbox, calling her a prostitute and asking how much it would cost to ‘have a night with her’. The man, called Manash, did not try to hide his identity and messaged Sultana from a profile which he seemed to be using to post regular content and interact with friends and family. When Sultana did not respond, he followed up with more messages, asking her to go to Pakistan and taking a dig at ‘beef-eating Muslims’.

While most of the miya poets were getting trolled, being the only woman miya poet of the group meant Sultana received a special kind of abuse.

She was sent graphic descriptions of how ‘miya’ men must be masturbating at women like her, long messages about the alleged sexual excesses of her community, accusations that she probably wants ‘40 children’, and assertions that miyas are rapists who should be cut up in public. And, unsurprisingly, multiple rape threats. Once Sultana changed the privacy settings of her Facebook profile and the men couldn’t comment on her posts, she received messages saying that they wanted to write things about “her vagina, nipples” on the posts. They dared her to change the privacy settings.

One man wrote, “We are so disgusted by you that we won’t come near miya girls even if they stood naked in front of us.”

“I thought of reporting them but how many will I report? I am one person,” she said.

In some of the screenshots Sultana shared with HuffPost India, women also participated in degrading conversations about her and when the men wondered who she was, some of them posted links to her Facebook profile in the comments threads.

One of Sultana’s friends, a Hindu Assamese woman, who defended miya poets on Facebook, had to deal with torrents of men commenting on the nature of her relationship with the male miya poets, each conversation sexually coloured and obscene. Sultana’s WhatsApp inbox also started getting flooded with threatening messages.

“I work and study in Guwahati University. Many people have my number, it’s not difficult to get it,” she said.

The messages were so graphic and disturbing that Sultana was forced to switch off her phone. When this correspondent tried to get in touch with her two weeks ago, her brother informed HuffPost India that she had stopped using the phone because it was flooded with threatening, abusive messages. Even her family could only get in touch with her by calling people around her—friends when she was at university, relatives when she was visiting their homes. 

One of Sultana’s friends, a Hindu Assamese woman, who defended miya poets on Facebook, had to deal with torrents of men commenting on the nature of her relationship with the male miya poets

“It became unbearable and honestly, the slew of obscene messages made me feel deep shame. Every time my phone buzzed, I froze, thinking someone will message me asking for sex or threatening to rape me,” she said.

Initially, Sultana thought she would file police complaints against these men and women. But she decided against it because in her village where her parents live, getting embroiled in ‘police cases’ was always made out to be a statement on a woman’s character, not the perpetrator’s.

“They will not understand any Miya poetry, or Facebook or protest. They will think I must have done something terrible to have gotten the police involved. It’s a matter of deep shame there,” she said.

And the police were not far behind, either. Over the next few weeks, as Sultana wondered how to deal with this onslaught of verbal violence, four FIRs were lodged against her in quick succession.

The NRC connection

Sultana and her friends did not know most of the people who had filed the FIRs, but they weren’t surprised.

“Almost the whole of Assam were talking about our poetry and from the hatred I was getting, it was clear that people had been tracking us for a while and were waiting for the right opportunity to pounce on us,” she said.

While Miya poetry is a literary expression of the social challenges of the Muslims in Assam, Sultana and some others writers had gone beyond that to help poor people make sense of the many layers of the hard-to-understand NRC process, including foreigner tribunals, biometric databases and court summons.

She has often participated in camps organised by activists across Assam’s poorest minority belts to help people understand the nitty gritties of the complex process they have unwillingly been thrown into.

“There are times these men and women who live on chars go to villages to sell the fruits and vegetables they have grown. A Border Police person will pick them up, take them to the police station and take their names and addresses down. They are so poor and scared that they do not question the authorities. Days, months and at times years later, they will get a notice asking them to prove their citizenship before a foreigner tribunal or go to jail,” she said.

While working on her doctoral thesis, Sultana realised that many villagers often land in detention camps because they could not read a summons, did not understand what documents were needed from them and where to get them and when asked to produce papers, showed something else, angering the government officials.

“A large part of their fate depends on the babus not getting angry or irritated with them when they mistakenly mess up documents. So we organise camps to look at their documents and direct them to the right authorities to get documents,” Sultana said.

Her work includes getting the right forms, filling them out, writing appeals to government offices for copies of documents to help prove citizenship and then patiently explaining this to the men and women and marking out the documents they needed to furnish.

Though she has been doing her research for some years now, Sultana says that it is the advent of the BJP government in Assam and the rise of majoritarian chauvinism that has especially targeted people like her and those she has been helping.

“It is clear that the multiple FIRs against us are meant to scare us and thwart the work we are doing to help these people get their paperwork sorted, so that they can’t be declared foreigners or kept out of the NRC,” she said.

Us versus them

So why did Muslim organisations themselves file police complaints against the Miya poets?

“These Bengali-speaking immigrant Muslims… the Assamese people cooperated with him, let they stay with love, let them cultivate land and rear animals, taught them Assamese and now they are saying they were tortured?” Hafijul Ahmed, president of Sadou Assam Godia Moria Deshi Jatiya Parishad (An Indigenous Assamese Muslims Body) told HuffPost India.

According to him, Sultana and her fellow poets were disturbing communal harmony before the publication of the NRC. It was the reach they had through social media that seemed especially worrying to him.

“It was okay if it was in a book. But they are writing on social media, making videos and spreading them. So we appealed that the people responsible for law and order in the state look into them and stop them,” he said, emphasising that his organisation did not represent migrant Muslims.

Ahmed’s organisation is a subsidiary of the powerful student’s organisation All Assam Students’ Union (AASU), which has been at the forefront of leading the stir against “illegal immigrants”.

Jyotirmoy Talukdar, a professor at Ashoka University, said that Miyas face deep persecution in the state, and that no indigenous Muslim will want to do anything with them and be targeted themselves.
“Indigenous Muslims have always sided with Assamese subnationalism and Assamese subnationalism is staunchly linguistic,” he said.

Last week, Sultana finally got bail in all the three FIRs filed against her, and decided that she would give her parents some idea of what was happening to her.
“I stay in Guwahati and both my parents are old and suffer from high blood pressure. If my mother heard about a FIR, she would die,” she said.

Pakistan: 17 Killed As Military Plane Crashes Into Buildings In Rawalpindi

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Pakistan army officials examine the site of a plane crash in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, July 30, 2019

A Pakistani military aircraft on a training flight crashed in a built-up area in the garrison city of Rawalpindi early on Tuesday, killing all five crew members and 12 civilians, an army statement said.

Farooq Butt, an official at the state-run emergency service called 1122, said authorities had declared an emergency in hospitals. He said about 20 people were injured in the plane crash, Associated Press reported.

Rawalpindi is close to the capital, Islamabad, and is where the headquarters of the Pakistan army is based.

Butt said a rescue operation was still ongoing. An AP reporter at the scene of the crash saw a burning house and some makeshift homes.

Rescue officials say the plane suddenly lost control with the tower and reason for the incident was not known.

The website of newspaper The News carried footage showing a building engulfed in flames. There was no immediate word on the cause of the crash or the type of aircraft involved, Reuters reported.

Military and civilian rescue teams were at the scene and extinguished the fire and took the injured to hospital, the statement from the army’s communications wing said.

Unnao Case: UP Govt Formally Requests Centre For CBI Probe Into Rape Survivor's Accident

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People use their mobile phones as torches while gathered for a silent protest in solidarity with the Unnao rape case victim, at India Gate on July 29, 2019 in New Delhi. 

LUCKNOW/RAEBARELI — The Uttar Pradesh government on Monday night recommended a CBI probe into a road accident in which the Unnao rape survivor and her lawyer were critically injured and her two aunts killed.

Principal Secretary (Home) Arvind Kumar said in a statement that a formal request for it has been sent to Government of India.

“The government has decided to refer the investigation of case crime number 305/2019 u/s 302/307/506/120 B IPC PS Gurbuxganj Distt Raebareli to the CBI. A formal request has been sent to Government of India in this regard,” he said.

Earlier in the day, UP DGP OP Singh had said the state government was ready for a CBI probe into the accident if a request is made.

“The truck was over-speeding and it was raining also. Prima facie, it appears to be an accident, but a detailed unbiased probe is on in the matter,” he told reporters.

“The state government is ready to recommend a CBI probe into the Sunday’s mishap in Rae Bareli if the victim’s mother or a relative makes any request in this regard,” Singh said.

On Sunday, the rape survivor, her family and lawyer were travelling was hit by an overspeeding truck in Rae Bareli, killing two members and leaving her and the advocate critically injured.

The Uttar Pradesh police on Monday filed a murder case against BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar and nine others after the rape survivor’s family filed a complaint, alleging “conspiracy” behind the accident. 

Sengar, a four-time MLA from UP’s Bangermau, is accused of raping the woman, and he was arrested last year in April. 

Raebareli District Magistrate Neha Sharma told reporters, “I visited the Raebareli jail with the SP and met Mahesh Singh. He had give application for parole application and as he is resident of Unnao it has been forwarded to the Unnao district magistrate.” 

Mahesh Singh is the uncle of the 19-year-old woman and he is lodged in the Raebareli jail. 

“He also gave two other applications. One for registration of an FIR which it has already been filed and the other for a CBI probe into the matter. This application has been forwarded to the principal secretary (home),” she added.

Meghan Markle's British Vogue Guest Editor Letter: 'We Are Even Stronger Together'

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Meghan Markle has revealed she approached British Vogue’s Edward Enninful about editing the magazine’s coveted September issue – and hopes it will reflect “the power of the collective”.

In her guest editor’s letter, the Duchess of Sussex says she met the magazine’s editor-in-chief over a “steaming cup of mint tea”, where the pair “teased through how one can shine light in a world filled with seemingly daily darkness”

Coming away from that meeting, Markle had a vision – and it wasn’t being a cover girl. “So I asked the question,” she writes in her letter. “Actually, I typed and deleted the question several times until I built up the courage to ask the question in question: ‘Edward... instead of doing the cover, would you be open to me guest editing your September issue?’” 

[Read More: Who Are The 15 Women On Meghan Markle’s Vogue Cover?]

The Duchess celebrated him “yes” quietly, she says, sitting on the sofa at home with her two dogs. Months of planning followed, leading to a September cover that celebrates 15 women who are “forces for change” in the world.

These include Adwoa Aboah, Jacinda Ardern, Laverne Cox, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Greta Thunberg. “More than anything, this issue is about the power of the collective,” the Duchess’s letter reads. “In identifying our personal strengths, it is anchored in the knowledge that we are even stronger together.”

Announcing their collaboration on Instagram, Enninful echoed the Duchess’s sentiments: “From the very beginning, we talked about the cover—whether [the duchess] would be on it or not,” he explained. “In the end, she felt that it would be in some ways a ‘boastful’ thing to do for this particular project. She wanted, instead, to focus on the women she admires.” 

Some of those featured on the cover are people Markle has met personally, while others she said she admired from afar for “their commitment to a cause, their fearlessness in breaking barriers, or what they represent simply by being”.

“These are our forces for change,” she writes in her letter. “And among all of these strong women on the cover, a mirror – a space for you, the reader, to see yourself. Because you, too, are part of this collective.”

The issue will include a piece with Dr Jane Goodall, interviewed by Prince Harry; a conversation between the Duchess and former first Lady, Michelle Obama; and a section that focuses on “internal beauty”.

[Read More: Michelle Obama Tells Meghan Markle Motherhood Is ‘A Masterclass In Letting Go’]

Markle notes that she was around five months pregnant when the guest editing process first began – and will be holding three-month-old baby Archie by the time readers are holding the magazine. 

“It’s a very special time for me personally, on so many levels,” she writes. “Working with Edward and his team, both during my pregnancy and my maternity leave, has played no small part in that joy. It has been a privilege to be welcomed and supported by this amazing team.”

British Vogue’s September issue is the magazine’s biggest publication of the year, jam-packed with high fashion – and pages of adverts to match. Markle says she saw the challenge as “an opportunity to further diversify what that typically represents”, but that she has not had total control over the edition. 

“There is one caveat for you to remember: this is a magazine. It’s still a business, after all,” she writes. “I share that to manage expectations for you: there will be advertising sections that are requisite for every issue, so while I feel confident that you’ll feel my thumbprint on most pages, please know that there are elements that just come with the territory.”

The Duchess of Sussex guest edits the September issue of British Vogue. 

Cafe Coffee Day Founder VG Siddhartha Missing, Karnataka Police Launches Search Operation

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Cafe Coffee Day founder VG Siddhartha has gone missing on his way to Managaluru and not been seen since Monday evening, news reports said.

His family informed of the police of his disappearance after Siddhartha’s driver told them he was missing, News18 said.

Police told the Hindustan Times that they have launched a statewide search for the businessman at his family’s request.

Siddhartha, 58, is married to the daughter of BJP leader and former Karnataka CM SM Krishna.

Siddhartha’s driver told the police that they had left for Mangaluru from Bengaluru on Monday night. “They were crossing National Highway 66 and the driver was asked to stop the car at the bridge over Netravati River in Ullal. He was talking on his mobile phone when he asked his driver to stop the car and is said to have walked away from the car. He told his driver he would be back soon and that was the last time his driver saw him,” Mangaluru Commissioner Sandeep Patil told The NewsMinute

Patil told ANI that the police are checking with all the people Siddhartha spoke to last.

Siddhartha started the first Cafe Coffee Day in 1996 on Bengaluru’s Briagade Road. According to IB Times, it is India’s biggest cafe chain with 1,750 outlets across the country. 

According to Economic Times, the entrepreneur was in talks with Coca Cola to sell them a stake in his enterprise. 

Hasan Minhaj And Lilly Singh Hope South Asians Can Be More Open About Mental Health

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Comedian, YouTube star and soon-to-be NBC late night host Lilly Singh, who this fall will become the first South Asian woman to host a late night show, has long been candid about her mental health and the stigma in the South Asian community against talking about it.

“It’s a culture full of secrets. It’s a culture full of ‘What will people think?’” she told fellow comedian Hasan Minhaj, host of Netflix’s “Patriot Act,” in a clip from the show posted Monday. 

“The alternative choice is, if we share this, there’s a potential to help people,” Singh said. “I’m a big believer that when you share stories — and storytelling brings people together — that’s magic, and that’s medicine, and that’s what our culture needs.”

In the clip, Minhaj took Singh on a tour of the “Patriot Act” offices and writers room, in order to help her get ideas about her new show, “A Little Late with Lilly Singh,” premiering Sept. 16.

He praised Singh for talking openly about “sexuality, mental health and dogs” on her popular YouTube channel, “three things that aren’t not discussed in the South Asian community.”

“You are every uncle’s worst nightmare,” he joked.

In September, Singh will become the only woman to host a current late night show on one of the four major broadcast networks. Her show is also making strides in the comedy world because of its gender-equal writing staff — three women and three men — a rarity on late night TV shows, where many writing teams still consist primarily of men.

While she is still working out exactly what she wants the show to look like, Singh told Minhaj that she’ll definitely include “lots of social commentary,” and wants to “switch up the monologue game.”

But she will keep at least one staple of late night TV: the host’s desk.

“I hate sitting pretty. I only want to look good from, like, here,” she said, gesturing toward the upper half of her body.

She also joked that her dog, Scarbro, could become her sidekick on the show.

“I think he’s going to review tech or something,” she joked.

Minhaj advised Singh that the most important part of hosting a show is determining “what it is that you want to say, because everything trickles down from that,” he said.

He later cited some guidance from his former boss Jon Stewart.

Minhaj joked that he had hoped the then-host of “The Daily Show” would be like a “Jewish Yoda.” But it turned out that what he learned most from Stewart wasn’t “specific advice,” but simply how to be himself.

“He would give me no notes — none! He would just be like, ‘That’s great.’ He would basically just ask me questions, like ‘What are you interested in?’ or ‘Why does that bug you?’ But he would never give me specific advice,” Minhaj said of Stewart. “And the note of having no note was the best note. You’re going to be you, Stephen [Colbert] is going to be Stephen, [John] Oliver is going to be Oliver. Everyone is going to do their own version of who they are.”


Trump's 9/11 Boast Sparks Hilarious 'Lost Trump History' Meme

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President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claim on Monday that he “spent a lot of time” with 9/11 first responders at Ground Zero has inspired a side-splitting Twitter series featuring totally fabricated moments of “Lost Trump History.” 

Trump’s best-known action after the 2001 terror attacks was to brag in a radio interview that his building at 40 Wall Street was suddenly the tallest building in Manhattan. The boast was not only callous but untrue.

Trump also applied for and received $150,000 in federal recovery grants intended for small businesses affected by the Sept. 11 attacks, a New York Daily News investigation discovered, even though his properties were not damaged.

To ridicule the president’s most recent 9/11 claim, people on Twitter decided to come up with their own examples of all the amazing things in history Trump has (not) accomplished.

Lawyer George Conway, who is married to White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, was one of the first Twitter users to jump on the #Lost Trump History trend, retweeting his favorite digs at the president to his 620,000 followers.

Disturbing Report Shows How Many Environmental Activists Are Killed Each Week

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Standing up for the Earth is a dangerous pursuit. A devastating tally released Monday counts 164 environmentalists killed for their efforts in 2018. And that number is probably an underestimation.

The annual report from international NGO Global Witness tracked the murders and “enforced disappearances” of activists around the world working to protect ecosystems, preserve natural resources being depleted by mining, agriculture and other huge and destructive industries, and defend the rights of indigenous people to their native lands. 

In addition to gathering data on murders, attacks on and intimidation of what it calls land and environmental defenders, the 2019 Global Witness report highlighted the insidious ways large corporations and governments — including our own — are complicit in the rampant violence and harassment. 

Three Dead Every Week

In 2018, the report found, 164 environmental activists around the world were murdered, and “countless more were silenced through violent attacks, arrests, death threats or lawsuits.” The number — which averages out to three deaths per week — was a drop from last year’s count of 207, but Global Witness senior campaigner Alice Harrison doesn’t take much comfort in that.

Harrison told HuffPost, “Deaths were down last year, but violence and widespread criminalization of people defending their land and our environment were still rife around the world.”

“The drop in killings masks another gruesome reality,” said Harrison. “Our partners in Brazil and many other countries have noted a spike in other forms of non-lethal attacks against defenders — often attacks so brutal they’re just shy of murder.”

Brazil has topped the list for the number of killings since Global Witness, which focuses on natural resource conflicts and human rights, released its first report in 2012, but fell this year. Its 20-person death count put it at No. 4, behind the Philippines (where there were 30) and Columbia (24). Third on the list was India, with 23 deaths, 13 of which came from a single incident, when police shot into crowds of people protesting a copper mine in the state of Tamil Nadu. Dozens more were injured. 

The report identified mining as the industry associated with the most activist deaths: 43 activists around the world were killed for their resistance to the damaging effects of mineral extraction on the environment, as well as native people’s lands and livelihoods. 

“The Philippines has consistently ranked as one of the deadliest countries in the world for people protecting their land or the environment. ... Under the current regime of President Rodrigo Duterte the situation certainly isn’t improving,” according to the report, which notes that his administration has announced plans to allocate 1.6 million hectares of land for plantations in an area that is a “hotspot for murders of land and environmental defenders.”

Even if Brazil has seen a small reduction in environmentalists killed, activists there are still extremely vulnerable. Brazil’s new president, Jair Bolsonaro, is rolling back enforcement of crucial policies protecting the Amazon rainforest from illegal logging, mining and clearing for agriculture. More than 1,330 square miles of the Amazon forest in Brazil has been lost since Bolsonaro took office in January, The New York Times reports. Besides the ecological threat of handing large swaths of the Amazon over to corporations (tree cover there plays an important role in mitigating greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere), it represents a real mortal threat to people trying to protect that land.

How The Government Turns Activists Into “Terrorists”

In addition to having measurable ecological impacts, Bolsonaro’s antagonism toward environmental preservation is just one example of how governments are creating an increasingly unsafe climate for climate activists. Last year, he referred to the actions of the activist group MST, which campaigns on behalf of rural workers and families for land use reform, as terrorism. In December, two MST members were shot dead

Similar rhetoric and its fallout is being seen around the world. 

Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous people, was called a terrorist by the government in her home country of the Philippines.

“In March 2018, the Philippines government declared me a terrorist,” wrote Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous people, in Global Witness’ report. “This was in retaliation for me speaking out against indigenous rights violations in my home country.”

One of 600 people the government petitioned to label as terrorists, Tauli-Corpuz told Reuters at the time she worried for her safety and the safety of others on the list.

“This is a phenomenon being seen around the world,” she continued in the report. “Land and environmental protectors, a significant number of whom are indigenous peoples, are declared terrorists, thugs, or criminals for defending their rights, or simply for living on lands coveted by others. … What begins with smear campaigns labeling defenders ‘anti-development’ leads to legal prosecution and arrests, and then often violence.”

Joel Raymundo, who is part of the Guatemalan Peaceful Resistance of Ixquisis movement against the building of hydroelectric dams in indigenous lands, told Global Witness, “We are afraid of going to the police to report the threats we are receiving because we know that there are arrest warrants against us and the police can capture us if they want.” 

In the U.S. and the U.K., government antipathy toward environmentalists is typically accompanied by cozy relationships with energy and agricultural industry leaders. Labeling them as terrorists justifies the criminalization of activist activity.

Global Witness highlighted “draconian” jail sentences issued in September against anti-fracking protesters in the U.K., which were later overturned by an appeals court for being “manifestly excessive.” This month, a former U.K. counterterrorism official called the climate change movement Rebellion Extinction an example of extremism and warned their tactics of civil disobedience would lead to “the breakdown of democracy and the state.” 

Joel Raymundo Domingo, 55, photographed in April, holds smoke bombs, tear gas canisters and other projectiles used by Guatemalan state forces to disperse a peaceful blockade against the San Mateo Hydroelectric Project, in October 2018. 

Stateside, attitudes in the White House are dramatically less green and more threatening to environmental activists than in administrations past.

“President Donald Trump’s ‘energy dominance’ agenda has changed the political and legislative landscape in the U.S. in ways that bode incredibly badly for land grabbing, environmental destruction and climate change,” said Harrison. She also noted, “Since the Dakota Pipeline protests took off, we’ve seen a resurgence of references to ‘eco-terrorism,’” which stokes fear, retaliation and legal repression

Lawmakers in Washington state and North Carolina have proposed labeling protesters “economic terrorists.” In 2017, 84 members of Congress suggested that the Department of Justice should be able to prosecute pipeline saboteurs as domestic terrorists according to definitions in the federal criminal code.

“If bias like this infiltrates countries’ legal systems,” the Global Witness report reads, “land and environmental defenders might be unfairly dragged through the courts, struggle to get a fair trial, and be punished for crimes that shouldn’t really be crimes at all.”

Anthony Swift, director of National Resources Defense Council in Canada, said the U.S. federal government has a “two-pronged approach” to quashing resistance movements.

On the one hand, he said, the Trump administration is attempting to get projects like the Keystone XL pipeline project out of the environmental review process, which is often the public’s only opportunity to have a voice in how and whether such development projects should be done, thereby “preventing the public from having an official means of lodging their concerns.” Meanwhile, “we’re seeing the oil industry working at the state level to dramatically increase criminal penalties for protesting these projects and the impact they’ll have on communities,” which effectively stifles the First Amendment right to protest.  

“It is striking,” he added, “and it’s coming at a time when it is clear that the public has never had more to lose with these projects. We’ve seen that with not just what you would expect, like pipeline spills and accidents, but we’re also seeing that Americans are facing daily the consequences of a warming climate.”

A Dole banana plantation in the Filipino village of San Jose, Impasugong town in Bukidnon province Mindanao. Global Witness investigators allege the land was illegally seized from the people living on it and leased to the food production giant.

Blood On Corporate Hands

Corporations often play a large part in silencing dissent by bringing aggressive civil lawsuits against protesters. In November 2018, a subsidiary of TransCanada (the company behind Keystone XL) filed a lawsuit against members of the Canadian Unist’ot’en tribe for creating a blockade to halt construction of a natural gas pipeline on their land. The British Columbia supreme court ordered the tribe to allow the company to access the site.

Global Witness is putting the onus on companies to ensure that their, and their subsidiaries’, land use practices respect the rights of the people living in production areas. The nonprofit conducted an investigation that uncovered that a large plot of indigenous land in the Philippines was illegally subleased by a powerful local business man to Dole Philippines for growing bananas. The land grab involved demolishing around 200 homes, according to the report. “Members of the community have also faced death threats and been shot at by armed security guards for refusing to leave their land, yet no one has been brought to justice,” said Harrison.

“Global Witness is calling on Dole to freeze operations on the land it leases until an agreement with affected indigenous communities has been properly and fairly negotiated,” the report states. “And Dole’s foreign investors should conduct rigorous checks along their supply chains to ensure that their operations aren’t linked to attacks against defenders and abuses of land rights.”

HuffPost requested comment from Dole, which has a corporate responsibility website touting its efforts to provide services to communities in its production areas and ensure environmentally sustainable practices are observed. (Dole had not responded at press time.) 

While the Global Witness Report is hopeful about the growing global awareness of “the connections between our food, manufacturing, and environmental systems,” and the mainstreaming of climate activism, it is highly critical of the lack of progressive support or outright pushback from governments and industry.

“So far,” the report reads, “governments have largely failed to listen or react, while big businesses are generally holding to the model that created the problem in the first place.”

“Growing awareness of environmental issues must now be translated into concrete actions to protect the planet and the people who defend it,” Harrison said.

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HuffPost’s ‘This New World’ series is funded by Partners for a New Economy and the Kendeda Fund. All content is editorially independent, with no influence or input from the foundations. If you have an idea or tip for the editorial series, send an email to thisnewworld@huffpost.com

Elton John Is 'Eternally Grateful' As He Marks His 29th Year Of Sobriety

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With the success of “Rocketman,” the musical biopic based on his life, Elton John is a hot commodity once again. Still, the Oscar, Grammy and Tony award-winner chose to mark a deeply personal milestone this week: the 29th anniversary of his sobriety.

John acknowledged the occasion Monday on Instagram with a photo of his Alcoholics Anonymous sobriety coin. Underneath he wrote, “29 years ago today, I was a broken man.”

“I finally summoned up the courage to say 3 words that would change my life: ‘I need help,’” he continued, adding that he was “eternally grateful” to those who had helped him on his recovery journey. 

John has been upfront about his struggles with addiction throughout the years. His Monday post felt particularly appropriate in the wake of “Rocketman,” which depicted the pop icon’s substance abuse and decision to enter rehab after reaching the zenith of fame in the 1970s and ’80s. 

“I am a survivor,” he told Variety in May. “I’ve survived a lot of things. Life is full of pitfalls, even when you’re sober. I can deal with them now because I don’t have to run away and hide.”

John has repeatedly cited his friendship with Ryan White, an Indiana boy who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1990 at age 18, as having been an impetus in his decision to get clean that same year. 

“It was one of the greatest things in my life to meet Ryan’s family, to be there the last week to try and help, and then for that wonderful message that he gave me to change my life around,” he told the Associated Press in 2010. 

Artistically, John is just as prolific today as ever. In addition to “Rocketman,” this summer saw the release of Disney’s photorealistic “Lion King” reboot, for which he wrote the music. 

He’s also at work on a Broadway musical adaptation of “The Devil Wears Prada” and will return to the concert stage in September for the third leg of his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour. 

Rajya Sabha To Take Up Triple Talaq Bill Today

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NNEW DELHI — The government has listed the contentious triple talaq bill for consideration and passage in the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday.

The bill has already been passed by the Lok Sabha by a voice vote amidst a walkout by Congress, Samajwadi Party, Trinamool Congress, DMK and others. The bill was passed by the 16th Lok Sabha but could not pass the Rajya Sabha hurdle.

The ruling BJP has issued a whip to its MPs, asking them to ensure their presence in the House.

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The bill, which criminalises instant divorce by Muslim men and seeks jail term for the guilty, was the first draft legislation tabled by the Narendra Modi government in this first session after it took oath of office for a second term in May.

Several opposition parties have bitterly opposed it but the government has asserted that the bill is a step towards gender equality and justice. Parties like the Congress, the Trinamool Congress and the DMK have demanded that it be sent to a parliamentary committee for scrutiny.

Unlike lower house, where the BJP-led NDA enjoys strong majority, the ruling alliance will face an uphill task in Rajya Sabha where opposition parties have numerical advantage over the treasury benches.

Some of the BJP’s allies, including the JD(U), have also expressed their reservation about the bill.

Kanwarias Get Flower Showers In UP Again, This Time From Cops

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GHAZIABAD — In keeping with the novel practice started last year by the Uttar Pradesh government, Lord Shiva devotees ’kanwarias” were on Monday showered with flower petals from helicopter in Ghaziabad by top administrative officials.

District Magistrate Ajay Shankar Pandey and Senior Superintendent of Police Sudhir Kumar Singh took a chopper to hover all over the district and showered flower petals on ‘kanwarias’, said officials.

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The chopper provided by the state government took off from the Harsaon police lines ground with the two officials on board and they “rained” flower petals on ‘kanwarias’ clogging various arterial roads of the city on their way back from Rishikesh with pitchers of the Ganga water from there.

“Besides showering rose petals, security was also monitored thoroughly by us,” said District magistrate Pandey.

“We both were connected with the police control room and we instructed officials of concerned areas to manage traffic and security there,” he said.

“Today being the last day of kanwar yatra, the maximum pilgrims, carrying the holy Ganga water passed through the district to reach their destinations to offer the water to Lord Shiva on the occasion of Mahashivraatri tomorrow, the district magistrate added.

Stringent security were provided to the ‘kanwarias’,” said Pandey, adding in communally sensitive areas, para military forces too were deployed.

“Officers were patrolling on foot, so that no unpleasant situation may arise,” the DM said.

BJP’s Baghpat MP Satyapal Singh along with Loni MLA Nand Kishore Gurjjar also showered rose petals in Ghaziabad district on Sunday.

'I Have Failed': Missing Cafe Coffee Day Founder's Letter To Employees

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Cafe Coffee Day founder VG Siddhartha was reported to have gone missing after he left from Bengaluru on Monday night, police said.

More than 200 policemen and divers on about 25 boats were carrying out searches for him.

On Saturday, Siddhartha had written a letter to the company’s Board of Directors and his “Coffee Day family”. 

Coffee Day Enterprises’s shares tanked 20% and hit a 52-week low of Rs 154.05 apiece on BSE on Tuesday.

Here’s the full text of his letter:

To our Board of directors and Coffee Day family, 

After 37 years, with strong commitment to hard work, having directly created 30,000 jobs in technology company where I have been a large shareholder since its founding. I have failed to create the right profitable business model despite my best efforts. 

I would like to say I have given it my all. I am very sorry to let down all the people that put their trust in me. I fought for a long time but today I have given up as I could not take any more pressure from one of the private equity partners forcing me to buy back shares. A transaction I had partially completed six months ago by borrowing a large sum of money from a friend. Tremendous pressure from other lenders lead to me succumbing to the situation. There was a lot of harassment from the previous DG income tax in the form of attaching our shares on two separate occasions to block our Mindtree deal and then taken possession of our Coffee Day shares, although the revised returns have been filed by us. This was very unfair and has led to a serious liquidity crunch.

I sincerely request each of you to be strong and to continue running these businesses with a new management. I am solely responsible for all mistakes. Every financial transaction is my responsibility. My team, auditors and senior management and totally unaware of all my transactions. The law should hold me and only me accountable, as I have withheld this information from everybody including my family.

My intention was never to cheat or mislead anybody. I have failed as an entrepreneur. This is my sincere submission. I hope someday you will understand, forgive and pardon me.

I have enclosed a list of our assets and tentative value of each asset. As seen below our assets outweigh our liabilities and can help repay everybody. 

Here’s Android Running on a Nintendo Switch

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Since the Nintendo Switch’s release back in 2017, hackers have been trying to find exploits in the House of Mario’s latest console. After some major breakthroughs last year, it has now surfaced that Android can run on the Nintendo Switch. It doesn’t even have to be installed on the system itself, but works via SD card. You can try it for yourself with this handy guide. Keep in mind that this port of Android to the Nintendo Switch is of course, unofficial and the usual caveats about loss of warranty when trying this out apply. A report stated that thanks to a flaw in the Tegra X1 SoC custom development is possible on most Nintendo Switch units available now.

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Interestingly, this Android port for the Nintendo Switch is based on LineageOS 15.1 (Android 8.1 Oreo) for the Nvidia Shield Android TV. Despite being in early stages of development, Joy-Cons work smoothly and even Android apps like Netflix operate just like official Nintendo Switch games do — allowing you to resume instantly when moving from docked to handheld mode and vice versa. That said, there are some issues such as certain apps not working and screen rotation not being as polished as it could be. Considering it just released however, it bodes well for those interested in the homebrew scene on the Nintendo Switch. You can see how it works right here:

After already announcing a Nintendo Switch Lite, it looks like fans who wanted a better standard Switch model will be getting something soon. An upgrade to the standard Switch model arrives next month in USA with other regions in Europe to follow. The Japanese market gets the upgraded model in August as well. This new model will offer nearly double the battery life and have new packaging.

The currently available Nintendo Switch offers 2.5 to 6.5 hours of battery life with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild lasting for 3 hours in specific conditions. The New Nintendo Switch model (that is still called the Nintendo Switch) will offer 4.5 to 9 hours of battery life with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild lasting for 5.5 hours—a huge upgrade. Though we won’t be surprised to see these exploits blocked in revisions using newer Tegra X1 variants like the Nintendo Switch Lite and this Nintendo Switch revision with improved battery life. 

The Mako Reactor is your one-stop destination for everything Japanese gaming in India. 


Not Just Sexual Harassment, Now Amit Shah To Head Panel To Combat Mob Lynching

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Union home minister Amit Shah will head a panel of ministers to combat mob lynchings in the country, a senior government official told The Hindu

The official said Shah would lead an empowered Group of Ministers, constituted last year, to suggest measures to combat lynchings. External affairs minister S Jaishankar, transport minister Nitin Gadkari, law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and social justice and empowerment minister Thawar Chand Gehlot are the other members of the group.

The news comes just days after Shah was appointed as chair of a government panel to prevent workplace sexual harassment, a move that sparked outcry on Twitter and among journalists who pointed that he had been accused of using state machinery to keep a young woman in Gujarat under illegal surveillance in 2013. 

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The need for government’s response to lynchings once again made headlines last week after 49 intellectuals and artists, including Aparna Sen, Anurag Kashyap, Ramachandra Guha and Adoor Gopalakrishnan, wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressing concern that ‘Jai Shri Ram’ has become a war cry for lynchings.

Signatories to the letter said they had received threats and backlash for signing the letter.

On Friday, the Supreme Court had directed the Centre to respond to the allegation that it had not implemented a slew of directions issued last year to curb lynching and mob violence.

The directions were passed on the PIL by Congress activist Tehsin Poonavall, who had brought the issue of rising incidents of mob lynching and cow vigilantism.

The apex court had asked Parliament to consider enacting a new law to sternly deal with mob lynching and cow vigilantism, warning that such incidents may rise like a “Typhoon-like monster” across the country, PTI reported.

The court said there was need to enact a special law as it would instill a sense of fear for law amongst those who involve themselves in mob lynching.

The top court also said that it was the duty of the states to strive and promote fraternity amongst all citizens, as such mob violence was being instigated by intolerance and misinformed by circulation of fake news and false stories.

(With PTI inputs)

Fire Emblem: Three Houses DLC Episodes Are Spin-Offs With New Characters

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Fire Emblem: Three Houses from Nintendo Koei Tecmo, and Intelligent Systems finally released last week on Nintendo Switch bringing the series to the big screen in a mainline entry after a long time.

As with the last few Fire Emblem games, an Expansion Pass released alongside the game with lots of content planned.

This includes new story content and the developers spoke to Famitsu (translated by Nintendo Everything) about what to expect in the new DLC content. Nintendo’s Genki Yokota commented on the DLC story content saying it wouldn’t affect the main story.

“These will be spin-offs that won’t affect the main story or the post-game either. We’re also thinking about introducing some new characters. We’re talking something fairly big here, so I think fans might have to wait a while,” he said.

“Also, aside from the expansion pass there will be a free update post-launch to add a new ‘Lunatic’ difficulty. Again, there might be a bit of a wait for this, but I think skilled players can definitely look forward to it.”

Fire Emblem: Three Houses Expansion Pass contents

Additional Story Content +
Additional Auxiliary Battles +
Additional Items +
Additional Quests +
New Attire +

Officers Academy Outfits for female and Male Byleth are available now for Expansion Pass owners. It is worth noting that content is planned until the end of April 2020 for Fire Emblem: Three Houses in terms of updates and DLC including Lunatic Difficulty that will arrive later.

Nintendo also confirmed to USGamer that it will change Byleth’s (Male) voice after abuse allegations.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses Expansion Pass price and bundle details

The Expansion Pass is priced at $24.99 and is also available in a bundle with the base game for $84.98.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses is now available on Nintendo Switch. If you haven’t bought it yet, read this.

TMR is etc end text — I’ll try and get this automated by the end of the week.

Is Truecaller Linking To Your Bank Account Without Permission?

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Caller ID app Truecaller, which has a massive user base in India, may be responsible for a security risk by linking the bank accounts of users with its Unified Payments Interface (UPI) offering without seeking consent or requiring any user action. According to several users, many of whom have complained through Twitter, Truecaller has automatically been sending out UPI-linking requests after an update to the app that came out recently.

Truecaller told HuffPost India that this is being caused by a bug that affects the payments feature. The full statement is here:

“We have discovered a bug in the latest update of Truecaller that affected the payments feature, which automatically triggered a registration post updating to the version. This was a bug and we have discontinued this version of the app so no other users will be affected. We’re sorry about this version not passing our quality standards. We’ve taken quick steps to fix the issue, and already rolled out a fix in a new version. For the users already affected, the new version with the fix will be available shortly, however, in the meanwhile they can choose to manually deregister through the overflow menu in the app.”

Although Truecaller has taken note of the matter, it took several days of tweets from users to make this happen, which is not too big a deal for other tech apps, but a big concern when it starts to affect your bank account.

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Responding to Truecaller CEO Alan Mamedi on Twitter, user Nikhil Dhariwal shared screenshots of an SMS from ICICI about UPI registration without asking for any permission. Another user tweeted a screenshot showing that the process of adding their Axis Bank account to UPI had begun. There are several such examples, such as this one about Truecaller automatically linking UPI, or this one where another user flagged the issue, which seems to have come up when upgrading to Truecaller version 10.41.6.

Replying to a tweet from Truecaller, another user posted that Truecaller was trying to verify their UPI ID without adequate confirmation. This thread by user Dheeraj Kumar contains the most details about this issue, with screenshots. Several other accounts confirmed that updating to the latest version of the app tries to automatically link the Truecaller UPI with your bank accounts.

Millions could be affected

Spam calls are a huge problem in India and so it’s not surprising that an app like TrueCaller, which can identify who is calling you even if you don’t have their number saved, has taken off so well. Earlier this year, Truecaller CEO Mamedi tweeted that Truecaller has crossed 100 million (10 crore) daily active users in India, and added that every tenth active user in India has linked their bank account to Truecaller Pay. This means that around one crore people could be affected by this latest update from Truecaller, whether or not it was intentional.

Truecaller has also been criticized for the way in which it builds its database of numbers—users of the app upload their contacts to Truecaller, which can then collect numbers from multiple sources and build a fairly universal database. However, this also means that your number can be uploaded even if you are not using Truecaller, simply because someone who has your number uses the app.

Truecaller’s Help account has said that it does not use this kind of dark pattern, and requires users to explicitly take action to connect their UPI. Once Truecaller UPI is connected to your bank account, it can be used to send and receive money or pay businesses offline and online. All you require is the other person’s phone number (if they’re also using UPI on Truecaller) or their UPI ID, and you can start sending or receiving money. That’s not all, though: UPI also lets you check your bank balance, which is a feature offered through the Truecaller app.

This has raised serious questions about the security and privacy of people’s financial data, and although Truecaller denied that there has been a breach, there have been reports that user data from the app is on sale on the Dark Web.

What can you do?

Check the Truecaller app to make sure that your account hasn’t been linked, and also check your SMS app to see if any messages were sent or received for UPI. Disable SMS permissions for Truecaller, and if you’re not on the latest version of the app, turn off automatic updates for Truecaller. Until the company issues an update that fixes this issue, it’s best to exercise caution.

Meghan Markle's New Vogue Cover Is Already Sparking 'Controversy'

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Meghan Markle’s new British Vogue cover is making headlines for its similarities to a book the former “Suits” actress contributed an essay to three years ago. 

The book, called “The Game Changers,” and the Vogue cover, which reads “Forces for Change,” look alike in both the language and the black-and-white photos of the women on the front of both publications (the book also comes in a pink cover, in addition to a black-and-white version). Each cover has exactly 15 women on the front as well. 

Both of the publications highlight specific women who are working to change the world.

One of the authors of the book, bestselling writer and art director Steph Adams, told HuffPost on Monday that she and co-author Samantha Brett were “honestly just very flattered” when they saw Meghan’s new Vogue UK cover, saying they “have great admiration for British Vogue and the Duchess of Sussex.” 

“When we first put together ‘The Game Changers,’ we had carefully selected different women who we thought were inspirational and that were about making changes in the world, including Meghan Markle,” Adams said in an emailed statement.

“If the Duchess of Sussex now wants to do the same and with British Vogue and she is making a difference in the world by inspiring readers then that’s great. Imitation is the ultimate form of flattery.”

Brett is a journalist at Australia’s 7 News. She spoke to 7 News on Monday about the “controversy,” as she put it, over the look-alike appearance of the cover and the book. 

Brett said she was “very, very, surprised” about the similarities, saying that people were writing to her all day to tell her about Meghan’s new Vogue cover and asking her if she’d collaborated on the September issue with her. 

“At first I thought, ‘OK, this is a coincidence.’ I know that she has multiple copies of the book ― I’ve sent them to her myself,” Brett said. “But then, I came across ― someone actually sent me the press release for this latest project ― and there were words that were used: ‘trail-blazing,’ ‘change makers’ and ‘fearless women.’” 

“Now, if you look at the back of our book, it says ‘trail-blazing,’ ‘game changers,’ ‘fearless women,’” Brett added. “There are too many similarities here.”

Buckingham Palace has not commented on the similarities between the two publications.

“I’m flattered, it was a great book so I always thought someone’s going to copy it and do their own,” she added. “She has amazing women, she’s supporting women, she’s trying to empower other women ― the cause is good.” 

But Brett said she and her co-author have thought about contacting the palace and Meghan before the issue comes out on Friday. 

“I’ve just seen tonight that it’s now on the front page of every paper in the U.K. so, it’s not us saying this, it’s other people ― it’s readers of this book and readers of these papers that have come out and commented and said, ‘Wow there are so many similarities here, you guys should look into it,’” she said. 

When asked what she would say to the duchess if given the chance, Brett said that the former actress should support their book first and then challenged her to give any proceeds to charity.

Meghan has done so in the past with the launch of the cookbook “Together: Our Community Kitchen,” which she worked on with the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire. All proceeds from that book benefit the Hubb Community Kitchen. 

In an introduction to the issue published Monday, the duchess reminded readers that Vogue is “still a business, after all,” noting that the issue she guest-edited will include the usual advertising sections.

Meghan spoke about creating the issue with Vogue UK’s editor-in-chief, Edward Enninful, in the same article.

“This issue is about the power of the collective. In identifying our personal strengths, it is anchored in the knowledge that we are even stronger together,” the duchess wrote. “You will find that spirit of inclusivity on the cover: diverse portraiture of women of varying age, colour, creed, nationality and life experience, and of unquestionable inspiration.” 

This article has been updated with comment from Steph Adams.

Michelle Obama Reflects On Motherhood In Interview With Meghan Markle

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Former US first lady Michelle Obama recently gave new mom Meghan Markle some heartfelt advice about motherhood while praising the “resiliency” of her own two daughters, Malia, 21, and Sasha, 18.

“Being a mother has been a masterclass in letting go,” Obama told the Duchess of Sussex in an interview for British Vogue released by the magazine on Monday. “Motherhood has taught me that, most of the time, my job is to give them the space to explore and develop into the people they want to be. Not who I want them to be or who I wish I was at that age, but who they are, deep inside.”

She also said that raising the two young women “has also taught me that my job is not to bulldoze a path for them in an effort to eliminate all possible adversity. But instead, I need to be a safe and consistent place for them to land when they inevitably fail; and to show them, again and again, how to get up on their own.”

Meghan served as a guest editor for British Vogue’s September issue, selecting a group of trailblazing women spotlighted as “forces for change.” The magazine hits newsstands on Aug. 2.

Obama, in her interview, also told Meghan that she has advised her daughters to focus less on adhering to a path and more on “trying on new experiences until they find what feels right,” a process she wrote about in her best-selling memoir, “Becoming.”

“Don’t just check the boxes you think you’re supposed to check, like I did when I was their age,” she said. “As a younger woman, I spent too much time worrying that I wasn’t achieving enough, or I was straying too far from what I thought was the prescribed path. What I hope my daughters will realize a little earlier is that there is no prescribed path, that it’s OK to swerve, and that the confidence they need to recognize that will come with time.”

Obama said that if she had sons, her advice “would be exactly the same.”

In her introduction, the duchess praised Obama for her “authenticity,” saying she had not expected the detailed and candid answers to her questions.

“A few ‘simple questions’ (which she could have answered with a sentence or two) were returned to me as a thoughtful, reflective and beautifully curated narrative ― a gentle reminder not of how but of why she has become such a globally respected public figure,” wrote Meghan, who gave birth to a son in May.

“Had I known Michelle would be so generous in making this a comprehensive interview my questions would have been lengthier, more probing, more engaging. I would have called her and included the banter on these pages ― the laughs and sighs and ping-pong of dialogue as I chimed in. But to re-engineer that now would rob Michelle’s words of their authenticity, which, for me, is at the crux of what makes this piece special.”

Read the full interview here.

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