A Chinese law firm has filed a complaint against Apple Inc on behalf of 28 local developers alleging the firm breached antitrust regulations.

The complaint, lodged by Beijing-based Dare & Sure Law Firm, accuses Apple of charging excessive fees and removing apps from its local store without proper explanation, Lin Wei, an attorney at the firm told Reuters on Thursday.

“During its localization process Apple has run into several antitrust issues … after an initial investigation we consulted a number of enterprises and got a very strong response,” said Lin.

The law firm invited developers to join the complaint in April and on Tuesday filed it to China’s State Administration for Industry and Commerce and the National Development and Reform Commission, which oversees antitrust matters in the country.

An Apple spokeswoman told Reuters that guidelines for publishing apps on the App Store were consistent across all countries, and that it was in the process of expanding its local developer relations team.

The law firm did not provide details of the developers involved in the complaint.

Apple’s China App Store is its most profitable store globally, despite being subject to strict censorship controls that have pressured the firm to recently remove dozens of apps.
…

your ad here

While the northern and southern U.S. states were engaged the civil war of the 1860s, a smaller war was playing out in the American southwest between the U.S. Army and the Mescalero Apache and Navajo peoples.

Between 1864 and 1866, soldiers forced tens of thousands of men, women and children along the so-called “Long Walk,” nearly 500 kilometers from their homeland in Arizona to the Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico. Today, a memorial marks the site, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has announced a $150,000 grant to help New Mexico and the Navajo and Mescalero Apache Nations develop a permanent exhibit and educational programs at the memorial.

“This grant will provide matched funds for site programming for the next four years,” said Patrick Moore, director of New Mexico Historic Sites. In an emailed statement, he listed a variety of planned events, including lectures, tribal youth and elder gatherings, film showings, and a 150th anniversary commemorative “run/walk/horseback ride/motorcycle rally,” honoring the 1868 treaty between the U.S. and the Navajo Nation.

“The broad array of partners and the vast geography across which the proposed activities are planned provide an opportunity to reach a multitude of audiences,” Moore said. “For example, the organization of a horseback ride from Bosque Redondo to Window Rock is an activity that could link local Anglo ranchers and Navajo participants–parties with shared horse culture bonds that would never have otherwise interacted.”

Hopefully, he said, these programs can help shift perspectives on both sides.

Funding cultural preservation

That grant is one of a dozen NEH announced last week which will fund efforts to preserve Native American culture and history across the country.

Maryland’s St. Mary’s College will receive one of the larger grants, $240,000, to support its research into the Rappahannock people, who flourished in Virginia before the arrival of British explorers in the 15th century.

The college was earlier contracted to reconstruct the “indigenous cultural landscape” of Virginia’s Rappahannock River valley. Using the U.S. Geological Survey’s Geographic Information Systems Data, anthropologists dispelled previously-held notions about the Rappahannock people.

“It was commonly accepted that the Rappahannock moved to this area to distance themselves from the more powerful Powhatan people,” said Julia King, a professor of anthropology at St. Mary’s. “As we came to the end of the study, it became clear that this was the area where tribal groups who wanted to get away from the Europeans in the 17th century went.”

The NEH grant will allow the team to continue its research, develop a detailed cultural history of Rappahannock River groups, identify Rappahannock villages and connect them to contemporary locations, excavate sites and work with the modern Rappahannock tribe to create an oral history.

Saving language

NEH also announced a three-year partnership with First Nations Development Institute (FNDI) to help revitalize Native American languages through language-immersion education programs in a dozen tribal communities. Language loss, a global phenomenon, is particularly acute in North America. Prior to contact with Europeans, hundreds of languages were spoken north of present-day Mexico. Today, only around 150 languages are still spoken, in some cases, only by the elderly, and are in danger of being lost.

“Language is highly important to Indian culture and identity,” said FNDI president Michael Roberts. “When you’re talking about indigenous languages, you’re talking about languages that have been around for thousands of years, and so in the sense of indigenous knowledge and history and even things as seemingly unrelated as changing climate and the knowledge of how to survive those climatic changes, all of these things are embedded in language.”

Proposed shutdown

The National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent federal agency created in 1965 to fund research, educational and humanities programs across the country. The grants announced August 2 are the last it will give out for fiscal year 2017, and, if the White House proposed 2018 budget passes, its last ever.

The Trump Administration has called for eliminating the NEH and other cultural agencies entirely. Its FY 2018 budget, released in May, requests about $42 million to cover administrative expenses and salaries associated with shutting the agency down by October 1, when the new fiscal year begins—which, in Julia King’s opinion, would be a tragedy.

“The NEH contributes enormously to what we might call quality of life issues–who are we, as Americans, where we came from,” she said. But she is optimistic the agency will survive. “This is not the first time the NEH has been targeted. Sometimes they emerge bruised, but they always emerge intact.”

For his part, FNDI’s Roberts stressed the importance of continued government funding for Native American cultural projects.

“The U.S. spent a lot of money on the destruction of Native culture and languages,” he pointed out, “so to put a little bit put back into the restoration is a start.”
…

your ad here

Turkish authorities have detained a suspected Islamic State militant of Russian origin after he allegedly planned to use a drone to bring down a U.S. plane at the Incirlik air base, Dogan News Agency said on Thursday.

Dogan, citing security officials, said Russian national Renat Bakiev was detained after police surveillance showed him scouting the southern city of Adana, where the base is located, with the aim of carrying out his attack.

Bakiev told authorities that he was a member of Islamic State and planned to use a drone to bring down a U.S. plane and carry out an attack against U.S. nationals, Dogan said.

Authorities said he had also scouted an association of the Alevi religious minority in Adana. He described Alevis as “enemies of Allah”, and criticized President Tayyip Erdogan, while being interrogated, Dogan said.

Turkey has been a partner in the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State forces, providing the coalition with access to Incirlik air base to wage strikes against the militants.

Ankara has detained more than 5,000 Islamic State suspects and deported some 3,290 foreign militants from 95 different countries in recent years, according to Turkish officials. It has also refused entry to at least 38,269 individuals.

 
…

your ad here

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Wednesday distanced herself from her comment earlier this year about the nation’s historically black colleges and universities being pioneers of school choice, saying that in the past “there were no choices” for African-Americans in higher education.

 

“When I talked about it being a pioneer in choice it was because I acknowledge that racism was rampant and there were no choices,” DeVos said in an interview with The Associated Press in her office at the Education Department. “These HBCUs provided choices for black students that they didn’t have.”

 

DeVos, who marks six months in office this week, alienated many African-Americans in February when she described historically black colleges as “real pioneers when it comes to school choice.” In May, she was booed while attending the commencement ceremony at a historically black college in Florida.

 

“My intention was to say they were pioneering on behalf of students that didn’t have another choice. This was their only choice,” DeVos said. “At the same time I should have decried much more forcefully the ravages of racism in this country.”

Civil rights critics

 

The Trump administration and DeVos have come under criticism from civil rights advocates for undoing some civil rights protections, including rescinding Obama-era federal guidance that instructed schools to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms of their choice and President Donald Trump calling for banning transgender individuals from serving in the military.

 

DeVos, a billionaire Republican donor and long-standing school choice activist from Michigan, said that she has spent her career campaigning on behalf of minority children.

 

“That’s where my heart has been for three decades is to really empower and allow all families the same kind of opportunities I’ve had for my kids,” she said.

 

At the same time, DeVos acknowledged that she could have done more to reach out to African-American communities around the country to make her position more clear.

 

“I’ve had these conversations with some of the African-American organizations that represent higher education, but probably not as explicitly as I am right now,” DeVos said.

 

The NAACP and the National Association For Equal Opportunity in Higher Education did not return requests for comment about DeVos’ remarks.

 

“It was a mistake and it sounds like she’s acknowledged it,” said Johnny Taylor, president of Thurgood Marshall College Fund, an organization representing HBCUs. “The reality is that people who decided that one statement, an error, is a statement about her commitment and knowledge about HBCUs — it’s not realistic, it’s not fair.”

 

Marybeth Gasman, a professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania who studies minority-serving institutions, wasn’t convinced.

 

“At the time she made the comments about school choice, I am certain she was trying to promote her school choice agenda,” Gasman said in an e-mail. “I am glad she realizes the comments were offensive. That’s important.”

Affirmative Action

 

The issue of minorities’ access to higher education remains controversial today. The Justice Department said last week it would conduct an inquiry into how race influences admissions at Harvard University after a coalition of more than 60 Asian-American groups brought a complaint alleging the school uses race as a factor in admissions and discriminates against Asian-Americans by holding them to a higher standard.

 

DeVos said her department was not involved in that process and added that this “has been a question for the courts and the courts have opined.”

 

The Supreme Court last year upheld a University of Texas program that considers race, among other factors, in admissions, offering a narrow victory for affirmative action. A white Texan who was denied admission to the university sued, but the high court said the Texas plan complied with earlier court rulings that allow colleges to consider race in an effort to bolster diversity.

 

At America’s elite private colleges, many of which have drawn criticism over race-conscious admission policies, incoming classes have become increasingly diverse in recent years.

 

Asked whether race should play a role in college admissions, DeVos said it is being considered in the selection process.

 

“Well, they are looking at that, that is a factor today,” DeVos said referring to college admissions officers. “I am not going to debate that, I am not going to discuss that.”

Equality starts earlier

 

But DeVos said the key to giving students equal access to higher education lies in elementary and secondary school.

 

“It is not fair to think that when students transit through a K-12 system that is not preparing them for beyond, that somehow we are going to wave a magic wand and things are going to be perfect for them at the higher-ed level,” DeVos said.

 

“So I’ve always said: What we should really be talking about is what are we doing to ensure that every single child — no matter their family income, no matter their racial background, no matter their ZIP code — has equal opportunities to access a quality education.”
…

your ad here

Five transgender members of the U.S. military, including Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, sued President Donald Trump on Wednesday, challenging his ban on transgender people serving in the armed forces.

Trump said on Twitter on July 26 that the U.S. government “will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity” in the military, a reversal of Pentagon policy that the lawsuit said was made without consulting senior military commanders.

The surprise announcement, citing health care costs and unit disruption, appealed to some in Trump’s conservative political base but created uncertainty for thousands of transgender service members, many of whom came out after the Pentagon said in 2016 it would allow transgender people to serve openly.

Trump’s tweets appeared to dismiss findings from a RAND Corporation study commissioned by the Pentagon that found allowing transgender people to serve would “cost little and have no significant impact on unit readiness.”

The White House did not immediately respond to the lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Washington.

The service members suing the president are three U.S. Army soldiers, one U.S. Air Force airman and one member of the U.S. Coast Guard who are active duty. All have come out as transgender to their commanding officers but are anonymous in the lawsuit, named only as Jane Doe, for fear of retribution, said Jennifer Levi, a lawyer from GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders.

Violation of rights

The group filed the lawsuit along with the National Center for Lesbian Rights. The American Civil Liberties Union said it was preparing its own lawsuit.

The lawsuit said Trump’s tweets violated the rights of the service members to due process and equal protection under the law. It asks the court to declare Trump’s directive as unconstitutional and to issue injunctions to stop it.

The defendants are listed as Trump, Defense Secretary James Mattis and other military leaders including Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Dunford said in a memo a day after Trump’s tweets that there would be no change in policy until Mattis received an official order from the president. That order has yet to be issued.

“In the meantime, we will continue to treat all of our personnel with respect,” Dunford said.

Lawyer Levi said the plaintiffs, some of whom are near retirement, need not wait for an official policy because the tweets alone created uncertainty about their futures.
…

your ad here

They have come from all over the United States, piling out of taxis, pushing strollers and pulling luggage, to the end of a country road in the north woods.

 

Where the pavement stops, they pick up small children and lead older ones wearing Mickey Mouse backpacks around a “road closed” sign, threading bushes, crossing a ditch, and filing past another sign in French and English that says “No pedestrians.” Then they are arrested.

 

Seven days a week, 24 hours a day, migrants who came to the U.S. from across the globe – Syria, Congo, Haiti, elsewhere – arrive here where Roxham Road dead-ends so they can walk into Canada, hoping its policies will give them the security they believe the political climate in the United States does not.

 

“In Trump’s country, they want to put us back to our country,” said Lena Gunja, a 10-year-old from Congo, who until this week had been living in Portland, Maine. She was traveling with her mother, father and younger sister. “So we don’t want that to happen to us, so we want a good life for us. My mother, she wants a good life for us.”

 

The passage has become so crowded this summer that Canadian police set up a reception center on their side of the border in the Quebec community of Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) south of Montreal, or almost 480 kilometers (300 miles) north of New York City.

 

It includes tents that have popped up in the past few weeks, where migrants are processed before they are turned over to the Canada Border Services Agency, which handles their applications for refuge.

 

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are adding electricity and portable toilets. A Canadian flag stands just inside the first tent, where the Mounties search the immigrants they’ve just arrested and check their travel documents. They are also offered food. Then shuttle buses take the processed migrants to their next destination. Trucks carry their luggage separately.

 

How this spot, not even an official border crossing, became the favored place to cross into Canada is anyone’s guess. But once migrants started going there, word spread on social media.

 

Slipping by the law

Under the 2002 Safe Country Agreement between the United States and Canada, migrants seeking asylum must apply to the first country they arrive in. If they were to go to a legal port of entry, they would be returned to the United States and told to apply there.

 

But, in a quirk in the application of the law, if migrants arrive in Canada at a location other than a port of entry, such as Roxham Road, they are allowed to request refugee status there.

 

Many take buses to Plattsburgh, New York, about 32 kilometers (20 miles) south. Some fly there, and others take Amtrak. Sometimes taxis carry people right up to the border. Others are let off up the road and have to walk, pulling their luggage behind them.

 

Used bus tickets litter the pavement, their points of origin mostly blurred by rain that fell on nights previous. One read “Jacksonville.”

 

One Syrian family said they flew into New York City on tourist visas and then went to Plattsburgh, where they took a taxi to the border.

 

The migrants say they are driven by the perception that the age of Republican President Donald Trump, with his ban on travelers from certain majority-Muslim countries, means the United States is no longer the destination of the world’s dispossessed. Taking its place in their minds is the Canada of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a member of his country’s Liberal Party.

 

Most of the people making the crossing now are originally from Haiti. The Trump administration said this year it planned to end in January a special humanitarian program enacted after the 2010 earthquake that gave about 58,000 Haitians permission to stay temporarily in the U.S.

 

Walking toward the border in a group on Monday, Medyne Milord, 47, originally of Haiti, said she needs work to support her family.

“If I return to Haiti, the problem will double,” she said. “What I hope is to have a better life in Canada.”

​

‘Better than America’

Jean Rigaud Liberal, 38, said he had been in the United States for seven months and lived in Florida after he left Haiti. He learned about Roxham Road from Facebook and said he thinks “Canada will be better than America.”

 

“We are not comfortable in America,” said Liberal. “We are seeking a better life; we don’t want to go back to Haiti.”

 

On the New York side, U.S. Border Patrol agents sometimes check to be sure the migrants are in the United States legally, but they said they don’t have the resources to do it all the time.

 

Besides, said Brad Brant, a special operations supervisor for the U.S. Border Patrol, “our mission isn’t to prevent people from leaving.”

 

Small numbers continue to cross into Canada elsewhere, but the vast majority take Roxham Road. U.S. officials said they began to notice last fall, around the time of the U.S. presidential election, that more people were crossing there.

 

Francine Dupuis, the head of a Quebec government-funded program that helps asylum seekers, said her organization estimates 1,174 people overall crossed into Quebec last month, compared with 180 in July 2016. U.S. and Canadian officials estimated that on Sunday alone, about 400 people crossed the border at Roxham Road.

 

“All they have to do is cross the border,” Dupuis said. “We can’t control it. They come in by the hundreds, and it seems to be increasing every day.”

 

Canada said last week it planned to house some migrants in Montreal’s Olympic Stadium. It could hold thousands, but current plans call for only 450.

 

In once most cases, the migrants are in Canada they are released and can live freely while their claims for refugee status are processed, which can take years. Meanwhile, they are eligible for public assistance.

 

‘Not a free ticket’

Brenda Shanahan, the Liberal Party member of Parliament who represents the area, visited the site Monday. She is proud of her country for being willing to take in the dispossessed, she said, but there is no guarantee they will be able to stay in Canada.

 

“It’s not a free ticket for refugee status, not at all,” Shanahan said.

 

Opposition Conservative lawmaker Michelle Rempel said the Trudeau government lacks a plan to deal with the illegal crossings, even though a summer spike had been anticipated.

 

“All that we have heard is that we are monitoring the situation,” she said. “The government needs to come up with a plan right away to deal with this.”

 

It will further backlog a system in which some refugees are already waiting 11 years for hearings, Rempel said. Canadians will question the integrity of the immigration system if the “dangerous trend” of illegal crossings continues, she said.

 

Trudeau himself recently said his country has border checkpoints and controls that need to be respected.

 

“We have an open compassionate country, but we have a strong system that we follow,” he said. “Protecting Canadian confidence in the integrity of our system allows us to continue to be open, and that’s exactly what we need to continue to do.”

 

Inancieu Merilien, originally of Haiti, moved to the United States in 2000 but crossed into Canada late last month. U.S. authorities, he said, are trying to scare Haitians by refusing to guarantee they’ll be able to stay.

 

“There’s a big difference here. They welcomed us very well,” he said after leaving the Olympic Stadium to begin looking for a home in Montreal’s large Haitian community. “They’re going to give us housing in apartments. I hope everything goes well.”
…

your ad here

A British company hired to train Afghan intelligence officers billed the U.S. government for high-end cars, including Porsches and an Aston Martin, and paid the “significant others” of the firm’s top executives six-figure salaries even though there’s no proof they did any work, according to a Pentagon audit made public Wednesday.

Sen. Clarie McCaskill, D-Mo., said New Century Consulting also spent $42,000 on automatic weapons, using cash to get around a prohibition in the contract on purchasing the firearms, and showered other personnel with hefty pay and bonuses they hadn’t earned. Overall, the military contractor “left taxpayers on the hook for over $50 million in questionable costs,” McCaskill said in a statement.

McCaskill, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, summarized the audit’s major findings in a letter to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. She demanded to know which Defense Department office was responsible for overseeing the contractor, what steps are being taken to recover the disputed payments, and whether New Century Consulting will face disciplinary action.

Michael Grunberg, chief executive officer of New Century Consulting, said the company is being portrayed unfairly and that it strives to follow federal acquisition rules. Grunberg said it “is most unfair and is significantly inaccurate” that the executive assistants received excessive salaries.

He said the audit “questioned solely the use and depreciation treatment of vehicles” and that New Century Consulting “accounted for no more than three vehicles across the entire business at any one time.” The purchase of the weapons was done properly and at the direction of the U.S.-led command overseeing the training and equipping of the Afghan security forces, according to Grunberg.

McCaskill’s disclosure of the audit’s key findings is a rare glimpse into the opaque world of battlefield contracting. Contractors are indispensable in Afghanistan, handling security, transportation, construction and more. Yet the Defense Department has faced widespread criticism that it often fails to perform rigorous oversight of the companies and how exactly U.S. taxpayer dollars are spent.

The report also comes amid the tense debate inside the Trump administration over the way ahead in Afghanistan. Two of President Donald Trump’s most senior advisers — chief strategist Steve Bannon and son-in-law Jared Kushner — have been advocating for military contractors to fight the war there instead of American forces.

The United States has about 8,400 troops in Afghanistan, and so far Trump has resisted the Pentagon’s recommendations to send as many as 4,000 more. The Associated Press reported last week that Blackwater Worldwide founder Erik Prince, the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, was approached by Trump’s top advisers to develop proposals to gradually swap out U.S. troops and put contractors in their place.

The Defense Contract Audit Agency examined New Century Consulting’s invoices between fiscal years 2008 and 2013, when it was a subcontractor to another company, Imperatis Corporation. Among the costs charged to the U.S. were expenditures for seven high-end cars — Porsches, Alfa Romeos, a Bentley, an Aston Martin and a Land Rover, according to McCaskill’s letter to Mattis. The actual cost of the vehicles isn’t specified.

“NCC claimed that the vehicles were available to all employees but the vehicles actually were used exclusively by the chief executive officer, chief operating officer, chief financial officer and the significant others of the CEO and CFO,” McCaskill told Mattis. Her letter doesn’t identify who the significant others are.

These “significant others” also were employed by New Century Consulting as executive assistants and had an average salary in 2012 of close to $420,000 each even though McCaskill said the company was unable to provide evidence they actually performed any work.

The audit also challenged millions of dollars in compensation for other employees, including the consultants whom the company sent to Afghanistan to train the forces there. McCaskill said the consultants were supposed to be paid at a 100 percent rate when deployed overseas, but only at 60 percent when on leave. But New Century Consulting gave its consultants the full rate regardless of where they were.

“These excessive payments cost taxpayers over $15 million,” she wrote.

New Century Consulting also gave its consultants more than $3.3 million in bonuses that they either didn’t earn or that weren’t required by their contracts, according to the senator.

McCaskill said the audit, completed last year, was conducted partly in response to concerns she and Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, had raised after the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction identified a litany of problems with Imperatis’ billing and record-keeping practices. The Defense Contract Audit Agency doesn’t publicly release its audits.

Imperatis had a contract dating to 2007 for intelligence training in Iraq. The work shifted to Afghanistan in 2010. Three years later the Army Contracting Command awarded New Century Consulting a contract all its own to professionalize the intelligence units within the Afghan ministries of defense and interior. Imperatis went out of business last year.

The two companies were paid $522.4 million overall, according to contract data compiled by the special inspector general.

Army Contracting Command didn’t respond to a request for comment.

McCaskill said the Defense Contract Audit Agency is currently auditing New Century Consulting’s billings through early 2016 on the contract it received as its arrangement with Imperatis was ending.
…

your ad here