South China Morning Post

Like many urban Chinese consumers, Shenzhen civil servant Gao Jian has had a long-held belief that the quality of domestic smartphone brands paled in comparison with foreign brands, especially Apple.

But in December, Gao joined the growing number of mainland consumers who have made the switch from Apple’s iPhone to a premium Android smartphone from a major Chinese brand. He bought a Mate 20 Pro, the flagship model from the country’s largest smartphone supplier Wah-way Technologies.

“Its design and cameras are better than what I expected,” Gao said. “Also, iPhones have become increasingly unaffordable.”

His experience reflects the broader success of the Chinese mobile phone industry in smashing people’s perception that domestic suppliers are only good for inexpensive, low-quality products.

That stereotype has beset many Chinese brands in the home appliances, consumer electronics, personal computer, car and mobile phone markets, where products from more established brands in the US, Japan or Europe were preferred by mainland consumers for many years.

But brands like Haier Group Corp, Lenovo Group and, more recently, Wah-way, have expanded their operations, increased research and development, and made advanced products to change that impression around the world.

China is now home to some of the most successful smartphone brands, which rival the likes of Samsung Electronics, Apple and LG Electronics.

Shenzhen-based Wah-way, the top global supplier of telecommunications network equipment, was ranked the world’s second biggest smartphone vendor – behind Samsung and ahead of Apple – for the second consecutive quarter in the three months ended September 30, according to research firm IDC. Show-me Corp and Oppo took the No 4 and 5 spots in the same quarter.

“Clearly, not all [Chinese smartphone brands] have been equally successful,” said Kiranjeet Kaur, a senior research manager at IDC Asia-Pacific. “But most of those that are doing well in the domestic market have had good fortune in the global market, too.”

Kaur said other major Chinese smartphone players include Vivo, OnePlus, Alcatel brand licence-holder TCL Corp, ZTE Corp and Lenovo Group, which bought Motorola Mobility in 2014 and now sells a line of handsets under the Moto brand.

Demand for Chinese-brand mobile phones doubled each year between 2010 and 2012 during the period when 3G mobile services were being rolled out across the country, but gradually slowed down from 2013 ahead of the deployment of faster 4G services by the mainland’s three mobile network operators.

The emergence of Chinese smartphone brands on the global stage has mirrored the rising competitiveness of the country’s telecoms network equipment suppliers, which have won market share with value-for-money offerings as well as on heavy investments in research and development.

The gains have also sparked increasing push-back by the US, which is persuading its allies to boycott Chinese telecoms gear suppliers such as Wah-way on grounds of national security.

With the world’s biggest internet population and smartphone market, China had as many as 300 domestic mobile phone companies about three years ago. Cutthroat competition reduced that number to about 200 last year, as Chinese consumers bought fewer smartphones and the economy grew at a slower pace.

The larger, deep-pocketed Chinese smartphone suppliers have won a big chunk of the domestic market through aggressive promotions, advanced designs and features, and offering a wide array of models in a range of prices to entice both younger and affluent buyers. It also represents their standard operating procedure overseas, particularly in India and countries in Southeast Asia.

Unlike the smaller smartphone brands in China, Kaur said none of the major players competed in the very low-end of the market because they focused on building their brands and offered sophisticated features at affordable prices – a strategy that worked well against global brands like Apple and Samsung.

Show-me blazed a successful trail in China by exclusively selling online low-cost Android smartphones with design and technical specifications comparable to high-end models.

The Beijing-based company also expanded its product line to include mobile phone accessories, tablets, earphones, smart television sets and laptop computers.

Wah-way, with operations in about 170 countries and territories, achieved broad distribution on the back of its role as a telecoms gear supplier to many mobile network operators around the world.

In 2016, Wah-way collaborated with Germany’s Leica Camera to help it address the premium smartphone segment and further differentiate the firm from other Android device makers.

For privately held BBK Electronics Corp, headquartered in the southern coastal city of Dongguan in Guangdong province, a multiple brand strategy has allowed it to cover nearly all smartphone segments in China and overseas. The company is behind Oppo and Vivo as well as newer brands OnePlus and Realme.

OnePlus is already a global top five supplier of high-end Android handsets, according to Counterpoint Research. Realme, which started as an India-focused vendor of affordable smartphones, now plans to expand its operations across Southeast Asia, Africa and Europe.

Samsung has been hit hard by that competition. In December, the South Korean tech giant said it was shutting down its smartphone manufacturing plant in the northern city of Tianjin amid slumping sales in the country and rising labour costs. Samsung was No 1 in China with 20 per cent of the market in 2013, but fell to less than 1 per cent last year.

Wah-way, Vivo, Oppo and Show-me were the top-selling smartphone brands in China in the quarter ended September 30, according to Counterpoint. Apple ranked fifth in the same period.

Earlier this month, Apple chief executive Tim Cook blamed a weak Chinese economy for a downgrade in the company’s revenue guidance for the quarter ended December 31.

Market experts, however, said Cook may have glossed over strategic missteps made by Apple on the mainland, where its latest iPhones are the most expensive and compete against vastly improved Chinese handsets that cost less.

“The new iPhones are certainly not as popular as four years ago,” said Wang Dan, who runs a mobile phone store in the electronics marketplace in Shenzhen. “A lot of Chinese customers cannot afford them, and there are now more choices available.”

Wang said Apple typically reduced the price of new iPhones after a certain period in the market. Four smartphone wholesalers in the area estimated that iPhone prices there have been cut between 200 yuan (US$29) and 500 yuan in the past few days.

Zaker Li, a Shenzhen-based senior industry analyst with IHS Markit, credited better smartphone design and performance by Chinese brands for attracting users away from foreign brands.

Wah-way’s flagship Mate 20 Pro, for example, received an overall review score of 9 out of 10 on tech news site CNET. That matched well against Samsung’s Note 9, with a similar score, and the iPhone XS, with an 8.8 mark.

Major Chinese smartphone brands look to ratchet up the delivery of smartphones based on 5G technology in 2019, as mobile network operators around the world step up testing and development of next-generation wireless infrastructure. Wah-way, ZTE and OnePlus have joined Samsung among the first big brands to announce plans to release 5G handsets in 2019.

Still, a prolonged US-China trade dispute could spoil those initiatives, especially if Washington restricts the export of American-made software and hardware components.

That would threaten to slow down China’s expansion in everything from smartphones, wireless network equipment and self-driving cars to semiconductors, e-commerce and financial technology.

Lei Jun, Show-mi’s founder and chief executive, recently suggested a way to ride out that trade conflict. He said Show-mi will sharpen its focus on Europe, where main Chinese rival Wah-way is growing, and push high-end Android devices there.

“If we steadily improve our quality and design, consumers will be willing to pay more to buy our products,” Lei said.

Politico

Top Wall Street executives would love to be rid of President Donald Trump. But they are getting panicked about the prospect of an ultraliberal Democratic nominee bent on raising taxes and slapping regulations on their firms.

The result is a kind of nervous paralysis of executives pining for a centrist nominee like Michael Bloomberg while realizing such an outcome is unlikely from a party veering sharply to the left.

Early support from deep-pocketed financial executives could give Democrats seeking to break out of the pack an important fundraising boost. But any association with bankers also opens presidential hopefuls to sharp attacks from an ascendant left.

And it’s left senior executives on Wall Street flailing over what to do.

“I’m a socially liberal, fiscally conservative centrist who would love to vote for a rational Democrat and get Trump out of the White House,” said the CEO of one of the nation’s largest banks, who, like a dozen other executives interviewed for this story, declined to be identified by name for fear of angering a volatile president. “Personally, I’d love to see Bloomberg run and get the nomination. I’ve just never thought he could get the nomination the way the primary process works.”

Across Wall Street and more in executive suites across the nation, corporate titans are trying to figure out how to navigate the 2020 presidential election. While some executives remain supportive of Trump — especially in industries like energy given the president’s approach to climate change — many recoil at his chaotic approach to governance and harsh approach to trade and immigration.

On Wall Street, executives love Trump’s tax cuts and soft-touch regulatory posture. But as the nation comes off the longest shutdown in American history amid warnings of an impending economic slowdown, there is also a clear preference for a change to more predictable leadership.

While just one slice of a complex corporate world, Wall Street has often played a pivotal role in presidential elections.

The industry backed then-Sen. Barack Obama in 2008, viewing him as more savvy about the depths of the financial crisis than Sen. John McCain, the GOP nominee. Bankers swung back toward Republicans in 2012 when private-equity executive Mitt Romney became the standard-bearer. But the financial support could not overcome — and perhaps added to — Romney’s image as a plutocrat with fancy houses and a rotating garage.

In 2016, Wall Street campaign cash and paid speeches to big banks became a serious headache for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, helping open her to a brutal primary battle with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who made those banker ties a central issue. Now, several Democrats are trying to figure out if they can scoop up Wall Street money without significant blowback.

After mentioning Bloomberg, Wall Street executives who want Trump out list a consistent roster of appealing nominees that includes former Vice President Joe Biden and Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Kamala Harris of California. Others meriting mention: former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, former Maryland Rep. John Delaney and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, though few know his positions.

Bankers’ biggest fear: The nomination goes to an anti-Wall Street crusader like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) or Sanders. “It can’t be Warren and it can’t be Sanders,” said the CEO of another giant bank. “It has to be someone centrist and someone who can win.”

Robert Wolf, an investment banker, founder of 32 Advisors and former adviser and fundraiser for Obama, echoed that sentiment but suggested it was too soon to declare anyone unelectable.

“We just haven’t seen this many candidates running in our party. The Republicans went through that, but we haven’t,” he said. “There is a lot of excitement about where the party is going, and we will all have friends running, and it’s hard to decide who to support. Our party likes the aspirational, exciting candidate, but we also have to find someone who can do well in the swing states.”

For Democratic candidates, seeking Wall Street support in the 2020 race will be tricky. The allure of cash to report on initial fundraising filings remains strong. Booker, Harris and Gillibrand have all taken meetings or made calls to top Democrats on Wall Street gauging potential financial support.

But news reports of such meetings often draw swift social media backlash from progressives who don’t want the 2020 nominee to have anything to do with Wall Street “fat cats“ and view higher taxes on the wealthy and stronger banking regulations as sacrosanct positions for any potential nominee to hold.

After CNBC reported earlier this month on Gillibrand making calls to bankers to gauge potential support for a 2020 bid, the senator tweeted a list of her progressive credentials on the banking industry including support for a financial transactions tax, reinstating a wall between retail and investment banking and opposing the bank bailouts of 2008.

In several interviews, Wall Street executives cited these positions as reasons they were skeptical of Gillibrand as a candidate and unlikely to support her unless she catches fire and emerges from the field. “It will be an interesting test to see if people actually step up and support her,” one senior executive at a large bank said. “There is not a lot of trust there.”

But Gillibrand does have Wall Street backers who view her as pragmatic, a centrist and preferable to Warren or Sanders.

“She understands Wall Street, but she is not owned by Wall Street,” said Larry Rand, a Wall Street veteran and visiting professor of economics at Brown University. “Wall Street likes her because she is a pragmatist, not an ideologue, and of the announced candidates so far she is the most electable.”

A person close to Gillibrand noted the senator’s strong support for banking regulation and said any meetings with people at financial firms should not indicate a willingness to change positions on anything.

Overall in 2020, financial support from Wall Street and corporate America is likely to be somewhat less important. Democratic candidates are mostly swearing off any donations from corporate political action committees and are committed to raising small dollar amounts from grassroots donors, mostly online. Warren has urged all candidates to swear off support from any outside PACs and also criticized anyone who self-funds, a clear shot at Bloomberg.

Warren and Sanders both have formidable digital fundraising operations, as do Gillibrand and Harris. O’Rourke broke fundraising records last year in his unsuccessful Texas Senate run, drawing in $80 million.

But the allure of wealthy donors who can write the maximum $2,700 checks to candidates — and billionaires who can fund outside super PACs — will remain, especially given the competition for small dollar online donations and the pressure to put up solid fundraising numbers in early reporting periods to show momentum.

“People are still calling and showing up. They just don’t want to be seen doing it,” a senior Wall Street executive who has worked in Democratic politics said.

Pete Buttigieg, the Democratic mayor of South Bend, Ind., who just entered the presidential race running at least in part as a voice of fiscal prudence, said in an interview that he would not shy away from seeking Wall Street cash. “But I’m not sure they would be too wild about me anyway,” he said, noting that he too is focused on small dollar, grassroots donors.

While Bloomberg represents something of the platonic ideal on Wall Street — fiscally responsible while strong on climate change and gun policy and not in need of cash — Biden represents something of a wild card.

The former vice president does not have deep relationships across Wall Street, but he’s viewed favorably as a candidate who could win and would take a somewhat more moderate approach on taxes and regulation. But there are concerns about his age and his penchant for gaffes.

“Everybody likes him. I don’t know if you want him to be president at 78 in 2020, but it looks like he’s in great shape,” said one hedge fund manager and top Democratic donor. “If it’s Biden and Beto or Biden and Harris, that might make a difference. The good news for Biden is everyone likes him. The bad news is there is not a lot of passion.”

Among the most hardcore Democrats on Wall Street, the strong desire is to find a candidate — any candidate — who can beat Trump, even if that means getting behind someone like Warren who supports policies that bankers hate.

“Everybody just wants to win,” a second senior executive who has worked in Democratic politics at the presidential level said. “It’s as wide open as I’ve ever seen it. There is no gravitational force that everyone is sort of running towards. Everyone has their candidate. Frankly, if people believed Warren would win, they’d jump on board. And everyone in the top tier not named Bernie Sanders could probably win.”

The Atlantic

The house in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, that Denise Portner and her husband raised their two children in was the site of dozens of celebrations—from birthday parties to Passover seders and Rosh Hashanah dinners. It was where she beat cancer. It was where her children were potty trained and where they returned to during their breaks from college.

But after 15 years, it was time to go.

“It was a big house, an old house,” Portner, a 56-year-old marketing-communications professional, told me. “The taxes were really high.” So, they moved to nearby Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, cutting their tax bill to a third of what it once was. “We are able to save money that we can use for travel and for saving for our kids’ needs.”

Portner and her husband moved after her youngest child left for college and their large Tudor-style home was no longer the hangout hot spot it was when her kids were younger. Leaving the neighborhood was difficult, but ultimately, as is the case for many parents who have sold their home, as empty-nester syndrome set in, putting up the for-sale sign seemed like the natural next step. Though these moves can signal an important transition in life for both parents and children, selling the family home becomes an emotionally fraught manifestation of that change.

Karen Kennedy, a realtor with the Boston-based Hammond Residential Real Estate, says that a large percentage of her clients are empty nesters. Kennedy works primarily in Newton, an affluent suburb, and says that homeowners there tend to be looking to sell their houses to free themselves from the burden of maintaining large residences.

“It’s basically people that have had their last child leave the house and go into college, and they’re in a big house,” Kennedy says. “They feel that the house is too much for them to keep up—all of it, the property and the house.”

According to the Census Bureau, 7.1 percent of Americans between the ages of 55 and 74 moved last year, a rate that has remained virtually unchanged over the past decade, even as domestic migration rates have cratered in other age brackets. These movers, like Kennedy’s clients, tend to skew affluent, since wealthier people are more likely to be both homeowners and home sellers. And yet, despite the financial ties that may bind some empty nesters, the underlying reason for their moves isn’t always about money.

“The way a lot of people talk about moving in terms of jobs and taxes and things like that, that’s really not the immediate cause,” says Thomas Cooke, a demographer at the University of Connecticut. “The way demographers … look at it is in terms of a life course. The basic idea is that at different stages in the life course, different places have different values to you.”

For empty nesters who are approaching retirement, a leafy suburb with well-regarded public schools may have seemed like the perfect zip code for raising children, but it can be less appealing once a family’s youngest child collects a high-school diploma.

According to the Census Bureau, a majority of the 4.8 million 55- to 74-year-old movers in 2017 stayed within the same county, but about a fifth of them left for a different state. Where empty nesters decide to move depends on several factors, such as proximity to their workplace, where their adult children live, and—if they’re already retired—the weather and community amenities that can make aging as comfortable as possible. Portner and her husband, for instance, decided to move less than a mile away from their own parents.

“Our move reflects changing priorities and a shift in caretaking from our kids to our parents,” Portner says. “Whereas our lives were focused around our children, and our house in Elkins Park was just a few blocks away from our day school and our synagogue, now we are very close to our parents, who are getting older.”

For Patricia Lara Garza—a 63-year-old corporate-relations director who moved from Wilmette, Illinois, to Chicago in 2017—shedding the family home not only saves her roughly $1,000 a month, but it has also improved her quality of life. Since she works in Chicago and both of her children live there, too, she says there was nothing keeping her in the suburbs. She can now “be part of the city and do the cultural things” without the hassle of commuting back and forth. Garza wasn’t just looking to save—she was looking to get something fundamentally different from the community in which she lived.

Kennedy, the realtor, says that access to the heart of a city is also important to some of her suburban clients, who are thinking about mobility as they get older.

“Sometimes they want to be in downtown Boston, so they have walkability,” she says, “and sometimes they want to be in the same community but have a first-floor master [bedroom]. It’s not necessarily that they can’t do the stairs now, but they’re looking down the road to when they might not be able to.”

Regardless of where empty nesters move, selling a family home can be a weighty endeavor. When a family inhabits the same house for decades, its sale can conjure a flood of memories, separation anxiety, and grief; it’s not just that people mourn the sale of their home, but that they mourn their former selves who grew and evolved there.

It can be especially difficult for kids who are in college or just starting off their careers, when a sense of rootlessness is pervasive. The transition from high-school student to working adult can involve a lot of boxes and packing tape, whether it’s moving from the parents’ house to a dorm or from one apartment to another. Through it all, having the chance to return to a family home can provide a sense of stability, but if their parents move, visits “home” mean traveling to an unfamiliar place.

Alene Bouranova, a 24-year-old resident of Brookline, Massachusetts, who grew up in Kirkland, Washington, was sitting in a dining hall at Boston University during the fall of her junior year when she she found out that her parents had sold her childhood home. Bouranova had not even realized the house was on the market.

“I started crying in the dining hall, just crying all over my plate of pasta,” Bouranova says. “I was not pleased at all. That was my home.”

But, as Robin Gordon, a 57-year-old who moved from Maple Glen, Pennsylvania, to Pompano Beach, Florida, told me, when you live in a home for several decades, it becomes the backdrop for not just the climaxes of life, but also the mundane. It’s where the kids haphazardly tossed their soccer cleats, where the family ate leftovers, and where everyone battled over access to dial-up internet and landline phone service.

“It sounds so dark, but [I remember] all the bad things, the crazy things that happened,” Gordon says. “All the injuries that the kids had in the old house … the parties that went wrong when they were teenagers, the birthday parties that we had, and the family dinners.”

Although her three children understood why she was moving, Gordon says they were still upset that she was selling the house: They had assumed that it would remain a steady constant in their lives, and had looked forward to bringing their own kids there one day. In this way, not only can the sale of the family home serve as a life marker for empty nesters, but it can also bookend a stage for their adult children who haven’t actually lived there for years.

Bouranova told me that even though she was initially upset by the idea of leaving her home and neighborhood in Washington State behind, she was able to put the move in perspective and fly back from college to help pack up her things and give the house a final goodbye.

“It’s my parents, and as sad as I was originally, it’s their lives and they can do what they want,” Bouranova says. “I just want them to be happy.”

And that’s the rub, of course: At the end of the day, it’s not the banisters, cabinets, and backyards that give a house meaning and that make selling it so difficult. It’s the lives lived inside the walls.

“I never loved the house,” Gordon says. “I loved the home.”

Business Insider

Luxury fashion is having a moment.

According to a recent report from The NPD Group, dollar sales of luxury fashion in the United States have increased by 50% in recent years, with substantial growth in sales of expensive apparel and footwear.

"The luxury market is evolving, new brands are getting attention, and online retailer platforms are elevating the competitive landscape," Marshal Cohen, chief industry advisor for NPD, said in a statement accompanying the report.

He continued: "The younger, multi-ethnic demographic that is more attracted to purchasing designer products online — even more than the average online accessories, footwear, or apparel buyer — is a major contributor to this evolution."

High-end brands such as Gucci have exploded in popularity in recent years. In the first half of 2018, its sales almost doubled. And recent survey results show that millennial and teen shoppers can't get enough of it: It was ranked the second-hottest brand on a recent survey by Lyst and was the 10th most popular apparel brand.

Experts say that there is more significance behind the recent boom in luxury fashion than first meets the eye.

A recent report released by Deloitte titled "The Great Retail Bifurcation: Why the retail 'apocalypse' is really a renaissance" argued that consumers' shifting attitudes towards finances and social issues are driving a massive shift in retail.

"Households have diverged along economic lines and now people's respective income levels are steering their behaviors and dictating the success of retail segments," Robert Stephens, senior manager at DeloitteConsulting LLP and co-author of the study, wrote in March 2018.

He continued: "More affluent shoppers have fueled high-end retail as their income and net worth have grown, while lower-earning consumers, faced with growing expenses and dramatically less disposable income, have turned toward price-conscious stores."

Increasingly, this has meant that the most successful businesses in the retail sector have become more distinctly split into two sections: luxury and budget stores.

"The middle is disappearing — low- and middle-income customers increasingly shop at discounters and dollar stores, forcing retailers that once served these customers .. .to close shop," analysts from intelligence firm Gartner L2 wrote in a recent report on department stores.

BBC

As artificial intelligence becomes both more useful and more widespread, workers everywhere are becoming anxious about how a new age of automation might affect their career prospects.

A recent study by Pew Research found that in 10 advanced and emerging economies, most workers expect computers will do much of the work currently done by humans within 50 years. Workers are clearly anxious about the effects on the job market of artificial intelligence and automation.

Estimates about how much of the workforce could be automated vary from about 9% to 47%. The consultancy McKinsey estimates up to 800 million workers globally could be displaced by robotic automation by 2030. Some jobs will change dramatically, while others will disappear altogether.

So if automation makes the job market a little like a game of musical chairs, is there a way to make sure you’re still employed when the music stops? Can education help you robot-proof your career?

Future-proofing your career is less about picking a safe job and more about constantly updating your skills throughout your career, according to Northeastern University president Joseph Aoun, who wrote Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

He says education needs to change dramatically if workers are to adapt to this new environment. His solution, which he calls humanics, has three basic pillars:

Technical ability: understanding how machines function and how to interact with them. As both artificial intelligence and robotics become ever more capable, machines will step into roles once monopolised by humans. Some employees won't last, but others will find themselves working with machines, and probably being vastly more productive as a result. Workers with a grounding in coding and engineering principles will be better placed to thrive in this new kind of workplace.

Data discipline: navigating the sea of information that's generated by these machines. Workers will need data literacy to read, analyse and use the almost bottomless troves of information that are increasingly guiding everything from major business decisions to stock picks to purchasing decisions.

And the human discipline: "which is what we humans can do that machines for the foreseeable future, cannot emulate.” Aoun says this includes creativity, cultural agility, empathy and the ability to take information from one context and apply it to another. In educational terms, this means less emphasis on the classroom and a greater emphasis on experiential learning.

The World Economic Forum suggests many white-collar jobs, like accounting, will be at risk from future automation, while the OECD says low-skilled jobs will be most vulnerable and there’ll still be a strong correlation between education and income. Either way, skills are becoming outdated faster than ever before.

“A generation ago, the half-life of a skill was about 26 years, and that was the model for a career. Today, it’s four and half years and dropping,” says Indranil Roy, the head of the Future of Work Centre of Excellence, set up by global consultancy Deloitte.

Aoun says the rapid pace of change isn’t necessarily a negative, but it does mean you’ll probably never outgrow homework. It also means universities will need to shift their focus towards lifelong education and training mid-career workers.

“We’re constantly becoming obsolete. And in some ways that’s an enormous opportunity for us all to re-educate ourselves and update ourselves. Those that are able to do it will be able to flourish,” he says.

Aoun worries that the tertiary education system currently isn’t equipped for this new reality. He says many universities are far too focused on four-year undergraduate courses and academic research.

Equally important to helping students graduate, he says, is helping students master “the human discipline”. The solution is a much greater emphasis on real-world experience. That might mean taking a job or a long-term internship while studying. In addition to career experience, this gives students the life-skills to negotiate and interact with colleagues.

“It also allows you to see opportunities and see gaps, and this is where you can say ‘I’m going to start a company or a not-for-profit’,” he says.

Roy agrees that less-tangible life skills are becoming more important to many employers. He says some of Deloitte’s “more progressive” clients use artificial intelligence for skills like analytics, freelancers for deep technical skills and only fully employ people with “life skills” and values that align closely with the organisation. But he points out those are skills that mostly come from outside a university environment.

McKinsey suggests that by 2030, the workforce will spend 55% more time using technical skills than in 2016. The World Economic Forum, meanwhile, foresees a net gain in employment from automation, with some jobs killed off but more created.

Roy says that probably means a workplace in which robots work alongside humans – for example, he says some of Deloitte’s clients have AI systems that attend and participate in meetings.

Aoun agrees that it’s important to understand changing our relationship with machines in the workplace, and to adapt education accordingly.

“In the same way that once we have self-driving cars, clearly teaching driving will be transformed. So technology is going to make certain fields obsolete, but it’s not going to make humans obsolete,” he says.

Perhaps above all, Aoun says humans need to focus on skills that are harder for artificial intelligence to replicate. Specifically, that means taking knowledge from one context or discipline and applying it to another. Humanics itself is about combining three separate disciplines.

“We humans are creative, innovative, entrepreneurial. We are able to interact with other people, work with them, be empathetic. We are able to be culturally agile, work with people with different backgrounds. We are able to be global,” he said.

Roy says universities, particularly in the US, Canada and Australia, are increasingly focusing on interdisciplinary studies. However, tertiary institutions in other countries are still a little more traditional in their approach.

Technology is constantly upending our expectations, with change the only certainty. Roy says he is “surprised every day” at the barriers machines are breaking.

So perhaps it’s not enough to help workers survive a musical chairs-style job market. Maybe they also need to survive in one where all the chairs are constantly moving.

The most geopolitically significant technology spat in the world ratcheted up a few notches early this week.

The Department of Justice unsealed two separate court cases against Huawei, the world’s largest telecommunications company, which is headquartered in China. One indictment accused Huawei and the company’s CFO, Meng Wanzhou, with creating a “fraudulent financial scheme” that allowed the company to sell technology to Iran, breaking U.S. sanctions. The other newly unsealed indictment documents the 2012 theft of trade secrets from T-Mobile that took the form of designing and operating a phone-testing robot called Tappy.

The current Huawei saga has all the trappings of a Cold War espionage thriller, but reengineered for our current moment. Instead of Russia, it’s China. Instead of arms, it’s mobile technology. Instead of Iran, it’s … no, it’s still Iran, actually.

Americans are generally unfamiliar with Huawei because the U.S. government has tried to keep the company out of the market. Around the world, however, Huawei and a few Western companies are vying to become the preferred backbone of the world’s wireless infrastructure. It’s a huge business, and it’s core to every country’s national security. American officials have long argued that, if push came to shove, Huawei would bend to the needs and desires of the Chinese government, not its customers in other countries.

This particular moment is also significant because the new generation of mobile infrastructure—termed 5G—is due to be built out over the next few years. A relatively small group of companies can provide the technology to do 5G, and Huawei is globally competitive, especially given that many countries could see American companies as equally entangled with the nation’s national-security apparatus as Huawei is with China’s.

Even without American business, Huawei has grown tremendously in size and influence. American officials are working their hardest to keep Huawei out of the networks of its allies, but the company is “flourishing in Europe.”

The U.S. government has a long-expressed distaste for the Chinese telecom giant. In 2005, a congressional report averred that “industrial espionage is an active tool of China’s strategy for technological development.” In 2009, congressional opposition scuttled a proposed deal between Huawei and the American networking company 3Com. The year 2010 saw Sprint Nextel refuse bids from Huawei and ZTE, another Chinese tech company. And in 2012, a different congressional report recommended that American telecom companies refrain from buying equipment from Huawei because of national-security risks. Huawei, for its part, has denied being a tool of the Chinese government.

“Unfortunately, over the past 10 years, as we have been investing in the United States, we have encountered a number of misperceptions that some hold about Huawei,” the company wrote in a 2011 open letter. “These include unfounded and unproven claims of ‘close connections with the Chinese military,’ ‘disputes over intellectual property rights,’ ‘allegations of financial support from the Chinese government,’ and ‘threats to the national security of the United States.’”

At the same time, the ongoing trade war with China adds weight to every China-related action by the Donald Trump administration.

In early December 2018, Canadian officials detained the Huawei CFO, who is also the company founder’s daughter. The U.S. is pressing to extradite her on fraud charges related to misrepresentations she allegedly made about Skycom, a company that the U.S. says Huawei secretly operated in Iran as a subsidiary, to financial institutions. That’s created a three-way diplomatic incident with the Canadian and Chinese governments.

The indictment regarding Tappy is less complex. According to the legal document, the Huawei China engineers who are building a similar robot straightforwardly asked Huawei USA engineers working with T-Mobile to gather detailed information all the way down to the “shape, diameter, and hardness” of the little tip that Tappy used to simulate fingers touching phones. After many different entreaties, they eventually smuggled a robot arm out of T-Mobile facility, then returned it, and allegedly faked an investigation into the incident.

To announce the newly available indictments, a coterie of Trump administration officials each took turns slapping at Huawei in a press conference in Washington. “These cases make clear that, as a country, we have to carefully consider the risk that companies like Huawei pose if we’re going to allow them into our telecommunications infrastructure,” said Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker.

Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia immediately firmly endorsed the new tough line. “There is ample evidence to suggest that no major Chinese company is independent of the Chinese government and Communist Party – and Huawei, which China’s government and military tout as a ‘national champion,’ is no exception,” Warner said in a statement. “It has been clear for some time that Huawei poses a threat to our national security, and I applaud the Trump Administration for taking steps to finally hold the company accountable.”

In 2019, mobile technology cannot be disentangled from national security, and the ramifications of that will continue to reverberate through the world.

Vice

BROOKLYN, New York — After 35 days of testimony by 56 witnesses, the trial of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán is nearing a conclusion. Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn rested their case Monday, and the defense followed suit on Tuesday — after calling just one witness, who was on the stand for less than half an hour.

The lone defense witness was an FBI agent who was questioned about how he took notes during an interview with a Colombian drug lord who testified against El Chapo earlier in the trial. Despite some early indications that El Chapo himself might testify, he told Judge Brian Cogan on Monday that he would invoke his right to remain silent.

"Señor judge, me and my attorneys have spoken about this, and I will reserve," Chapo said in the only moment he was allowed to address the court over the course of the trial.

"Reserve?" Cogan asked. "Yes, I will not testify," Chapo replied.

Closing arguments are now scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, and the jury could begin deliberating as soon as Friday. A guilty verdict, which would carry a mandatory life sentence in Chapo’s case, seems certain. The government has methodically obliterated any semblance of reasonable doubt about his status as the ruthless leader of the “continuing criminal enterprise” known as the Sinaloa cartel.

Chapo may have passed on his chance to get the last word, but even without his testimony, the trial that already been a Shakespearean drama. Each day has brought fresh jaw-dropping tales of bribery, murder, and betrayal. There's been telenovela-level melodrama, like when Chapo and his wife donned matching red velvet blazers as a show of solidarity against his mistress, who sat on the witness stand while prosecutors read her steamy text messages to the drug kingpin aloud for the jury to hear.

And there has been comedy, like when the lights briefly went out in the courtroom, creating a tense few seconds in pitch black. When the lights flickered back on, a veteran New York court reporter cracked, “He’s gone!” loud enough for everyone to hear. Chapo, known for his daring escapes, remained seated at the defense table, prompting laughter from everyone except the courtroom guards, who glared and no doubt breathed sighs of relief.

The real spectacle, of course, has been the testimony, particularly from the 13 “cooperating witnesses” who used to be part of Chapo’s organization but flipped in exchange for leniency in their own cases. Here are the 10 wildest stories from the government’s case.

10) The Poisoned Arepa

Before he was one of El Chapo’s primary cocaine suppliers, drug lord Jorge Cifuentes was a young punk locked up in a Colombian prison. He wanted to move up the ranks in the Medellín cartel, so he agreed to murder a fellow inmate who had somehow run afoul of Pablo Escobar’s partner José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, aka El Mexicano.

According to Cifuentes, the cartel gave him a choice of three ways to commit the hit: a knife, a grenade, and cyanide. He opted to slip the poison into an arepa from the prison kitchen that made its way onto the target’s plate. The plot fell apart when the guy lost his appetite. Cifuentes later gave up after botching the grenade attack (he never attempted the blade). Despite his failures as a hitman, Cifuentes went on to ship hundreds of tons of cocaine to the U.S. through Mexico.

9) The Viagra Box

In an effort to corroborate testimony among cooperators, prosecutors have asked several witnesses to describe their first meeting with El Chapo. Most began the same way: The guest is flown in a rickety old Cessa from Culiacán, Sinaloa to a mountain hideout. They land on a clandestine airstrip, which is on a steep incline to slow the plane. It sounds like a harrowing experience, but for Pedro Flores, what happened next was even more frightening.

Flores and his twin brother, Margarito, who were from Chicago, were two of Chapo’s main U.S. distributors. On his way to the first business meeting with Chapo, Pedro said he passed by a man who was naked and chained to a pole, presumably as a torture for somehow crossing Chapo. Pedro was dressed like a gringo — in jean shorts — and he recalled Chapo greeting him with a burn, asking why “I couldn't afford the rest of my pants." On a return visit, Pedro brought a gag gift: "a pair of jean shorts in a big Viagra box." Flores got the last laugh again when he became a DEA informant and recorded Chapo discussing a heroin deal.

8) The Helicopter Crash at the Ostrich Ranch

Jorge Cifuentes was so rattled after his Cessna flight into the mountains that when he arrived, he told Chapo he would buy him a brand-new helicopter “so he would fly in a more civilized way." Cifuentes kept his word, gifting his partner a $1 million chopper specially designed to maneuver in tight spaces. Cifuentess brother Alex encouraged Chapo to take pilot lessons so that he could fly away at a moment’s notice in the event of a surprise raid.

Chapo never learned how to fly, but perhaps he should have: One of the cartel’s pilots crashed the helicopter by flying it inside a hanger located at an ostrich ranch on the outskirts of Culiacán (unclear whether any ostriches were harmed in the incident). Cifuentes and Chapo later conspired to push the helicopter off a cliff as part of an insurance fraud scam.

7) The Hacker Who Helped Chapo Spy on His Wife and Mistresses

Christian Rodriguez was just 21-years-old when he was hired to be the Sinaloa cartel’s IT guy. By that time, according to the defense, Rodriguez had already used his hacking prowess to “break into the U.S. energy system, the grid, for fun." He designed an encrypted phone network for the Sinaloa cartel, then became an informant for the FBI, allowing the feds to obtain recordings of hundreds of incriminating phone calls.

Rodriguez also introduced Chapo to spyware, which he had installed on the phones of his wives and mistresses. He used the technology to track their movements, read their text messages, and remotely activate the microphone on their phone to eavesdrop on their conversations. Rodriguez had his own relationship issues at the time, and the combined stress with his informant work caused him to have a nervous breakdown. He underwent “electroconvulsive therapy,” which caused short-term memory loss but didn’t impair his recollection enough to keep him from testifying during the trial.

6) The 20 Tons of Sunken Cocaine

Juan Carlos Ramírez Abadía — better known as Chupeta or Lollipop — was an unforgettable witness. A leader of Colombia’s Norte del Valle cartel, Chupeta had so much plastic surgery during his time as a fugitive that he now looks like a narco Nosferatu. Despite his ghoulish appearance, he was an incredible storyteller, particularly when it came to recounting what happened with 20 tons of cocaine that sank off the coast of Mexico.

Chupeta said a Mexican ship’s captain sampled too much of the cargo and “started to see ghosts” that resembled U.S. Coast Guard ships, leading him to scuttle the boat with all the drugs on board. He had enough sense to take down the coordinates of the shipwreck, but when Chupeta and one of El Chapo’s Sinaloa cartel partners did a flyover of the site they found "nothing other than sea — just the sea." Cartel divers found the sunken treasure after more than a year of searching, and Chupeta sent a Colombian chemist to salvage the waterlogged Coke. Chupeta never mentioned what happened to the captain, but presumably he ended up sleeping with the fishes.

The Fistful of Dirt

Miguel Angel Martinez was Chapo’s right-hand man from the late ‘80s through the mid-’90s, and he testified about the glory days when Chapo had a fleet of private jets, beach houses all over Mexico, and even his own private zoo with a train that took guests around on a tour to see the tigers, lions, panthers, and deer. But when Martinez — known as El Gordo — got locked up and Chapo suspected him of snitching, their friendship ended in dramatic fashion.

After three attempted stabbings, Martinez was in protective custody at a prison in Mexico City. Early one morning, he heard a brass band playing the song “Un Puño de Tierra” on repeat. The corrido basically tells the listener to enjoy life because you can’t take anything with you when you die, not even a fistful of dirt. Apparently it was one of Chapo’s favorites, and he used to to send a message. When the band stopped playing, an assassin threw a grenade into Martinez’s cell. He shielded himself from the blast by hiding behind the toilet. Chapo’s lawyer was later scolded by the judge for tweeting a link to the song on YouTube after Martinez was done testifying.

4) The $100 Million Bribe

Alex Cifuentes had no shortage of crazy stories after working as Chapo’s personal secretary and living with him in the mountains, like the plot to have the Hell’s Angels murder someone in Canada, or the time that Chapo told a movie producer that the Mexican military had dangled him upside down from a helicopter. But his real bombshell was the allegation that Chapo paid a $100 million bribe to former Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto in 2012.

Cifuentes testified about seeing photos of “suitcases full of cash” on a plane that belonged to a political consultant who worked on Peña Nieto’s 2012 campaign. He also claimed that the president initially asked for $250 million from Chapo. (A spokesman for the ex-president denied the allegations.) Cifuentes also accused former president Felipe Calderon of being on the payroll of a rival cartel, and current president Andrés Manuel López Obrador was implicated when court documents revealed the claim that an official on his failed 2006 campaign took a cartel payoff.

3) The Mile-Long Escape Tunnel with a Motorcycle Inside

Chapo’s escape from a maximum-security prison near Mexico City was the stuff of legend even before the trial, but witness Dámaso López offered some new details that made it even more spectacular. According to López, Chapo’s right-hand man throughout the 2000s, the tunnel was masterminded by Chapo’s sons — with some key assistance from his wife Emma Coronel. She allegedly passed messages from Chapo after visiting him behind bars, and may have smuggled in a GPS-enabled watch that López said was used to plot the 4,600-foot path of the tunnel from a shack outside the prison to the shower drain in Chapo’s cell.

When it came time for the escape, at around 9:30 p.m. on July 11, 2015, Chapo stepped into the hole and found his brother-in-law waiting on a motorcycle, which was mounted on rails. Chapo was then transported on an ATV to a nearby warehouse, where a pilot was waiting with a plane that took him into the mountains. He was back at his hometown throwing a party with his family and business partners within the week. López claimed that after Chapo was recaptured in 2016, he paid a $2 million bribe to the chief of Mexico’s prison system and was planning to tunnel out again until he was extradited to New York to stand trial.

2) The Naked Escape

One witness testified that El Chapo had a warning network in place at his hideouts in the mountains of Sinaloa, and he allegedly ordered his lookout to "call me five minutes before the army is close and even if I'm naked I'll run away, just like that.” Apparently he wasn’t kidding, though his au natural escape happened down in the city at one of his safe houses in Culiacán.

Chapo’s mistress, a former state lawmaker in Sinaloa named Lucero Sanchez, testified that a reinforced door bought him enough time during an early-morning raid by the DEA and Mexican marines that he was able to activate a hidden switch in his bathroom, triggering hydraulics that lifted up his bathtub and revealed a tunnel underneath. In the scramble to lave, Sanchez said, Chapo had no time to get dressed. He was completely nude as he fled through the tunnel, which connected to the sewer system. I’ve been inside that tunnel and it was pretty gross even with clothes on.

Chapo left behind a trove of evidence at his network of safe houses, including rocket-propelled grenades, a pistol with his initials encrusted in diamonds on the grip, more than 2,800 packages of meth, and a bunch of plastic bananas stuffed with cocaine. He was captured a few days later at a beachfront hotel with his wife. The DEA agent who orchestrated the raid didn’t specify whether they caught Chapo with his pants down the second time around.

1) The Torture

Most descriptions of murder during the first two and a half months of El Chapo’s trial were bloodless, but prosecutors saved the most gruesome details for the grand finale. Isaias Valdez Rios, a former army special forces member who became a hitman for Chapo, was the last cooperating witness called by the government. Valdez, known by the nickname Memín, described the routine day-in-the-life of a sicario, which included graphic details about how he saw Chapo personally torture and murder at least three people.

Memín recounted how one of the victims, a member of the rival Arellano-Felix cartel, had been burned all over his body with a clothing iron even before falling into Chapo’s hands. Chapo allegedly kept his captive locked in a henhouse-type structure until the smell of his scorched flesh became unbearable, at which point he ordered his men to dig a hole in a nearby graveyard. Memín said Chapo began to interrogate the man, then shot him with a .25 caliber pistol and had him buried while he was still “gasping for air.”

In a separate incident, Memín said Chapo spent two or three hours beating two captured members of the rival Los Zetas cartel with a large tree branch until they “were pretty much like ragdolls.” Memín said Chapo then ordered his men to dig a large hole and start a bonfire. Chapo and another hitman strapped the Zetas onto the back of ATVs, then transported them to the fire pit. Memín recalled that Chapo “didn't say much,” he just chambered a round in his assault rifle and said “ Chinga tu madre” before shooting the Zetas in the head. According to Memín, the bodies were then dumped in the fire and burned to ash.

Greensville.com

In South Carolina, civil forfeiture targets black people’s money most of all, exclusive investigative data shows

When a man barged into Isiah Kinloch’s apartment and broke a bottle over his head, the North Charleston resident called 911. After cops arrived on that day in 2015, they searched the injured man’s home and found an ounce of marijuana.

So they took $1,800 in cash from his apartment and kept it.

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When Eamon Cools-Lartigue was driving on Interstate 85 in Spartanburg County, deputies stopped him for speeding. The Atlanta businessman wasn’t criminally charged in the April 2016 incident. Deputies discovered $29,000 in his car, though, and decided to take it.

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When Brandy Cooke dropped her friend off at a Myrtle Beach sports bar as a favor, drug enforcement agents swarmed her in the parking lot and found $4,670 in the car.

Her friend was wanted in a drug distribution case, but Cooke wasn’t involved. She had no drugs and was never charged in the 2014 bust. Agents seized her money anyway.

She worked as a waitress and carried cash because she didn’t have a checking account. She spent more than a year trying to get her money back.

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The Greenville News and Anderson Independent Mail examined these cases and every other court case involving civil asset forfeiture in South Carolina from 2014-2016.

Our examination was aimed at understanding this little-discussed, potentially life-changing power that state law holds over citizens — the ability of officers to seize property from people, even if they aren't charged with a crime.

The resulting investigation became TAKEN, a statewide journalism project with an exclusive database and in-depth reporting. It’s the first time a comprehensive forfeiture investigation like this has been done for an entire U.S. state, according to experts.

The TAKEN team scoured more than 3,200 forfeiture cases and spoke to dozens of targeted citizens plus more than 50 experts and officials. Additionally, the team contacted every law enforcement agency in the state.

This yielded a clear picture of what is happening: Police are systematically seizing cash and property — many times from people who aren’t guilty of a crime — netting millions of dollars each year. South Carolina law enforcement profits from this policing tactic: the bulk of the money ends up in its possession.

The intent is to give law enforcement a tool to use against nefarious organizations by grabbing the fruits of their illegal deeds and using the proceeds to fight more crime.

Officers gather in places like Spartanburg County for contests with trophies to see who can make the largest or most seizures during highway blitzes. They earn hats, mementos and free dinners, and agencies that participate take home a cut of the forfeiture proceeds.

That money adds up. Over three years, law enforcement agencies seized more than $17 million, our investigation shows.

“We’ve heard so many awful stories,” said Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP’s Washington bureau. “Having cash makes you vulnerable to an illicit practice by a police organization.

“It’s a dirty little secret. It’s so consistent with the issue of how law enforcement functions. They say, ‘Oh yeah, we want to make sure that resources used for the trafficking of drugs are stopped’ … but many of the people they are taking money from are not drug traffickers or even users.”

These seizures leave thousands of citizens without their cash and belongings or reliable means to get them back. They target black men most, our investigation found — with crushing consequences when life savings or a small business payroll is taken.

Many people never get their money back. Or they have to fight to have their property returned and incur high attorney fees.

Police officials respond by saying forfeiture allows them to hamstring crime rings and take money from drug dealers, a move they say hurts trafficking more than taking their drugs.

In 2016, when a Myrtle Beach police unit broke up a sophisticated drug ring called the 24/7 Boyz that offered a dispatch system to order drugs and have them delivered on demand, the police used seizure powers. They took cars, firearms, a four-bedroom house and $80,000. They also arrested 12 people.

Fifteenth Circuit Solicitor Jimmy Richardson initially prosecuted the case before turning it over to the federal government. In January, 10 of the 12 defendants pleaded guilty to drug conspiracy charges.

Richardson said taking a drug ring’s operating cash strikes a critical blow against traffickers in a way that criminal charges don’t. “A drug enterprise is an onion, it’s a multitude of layers,” he said. “Some tools hurt the traffickers, some hurt the enterprise itself. I feel this hurts the enterprise.”

Agencies also said funding for their work would be imperiled without the profit from this tool. Clemson Police Chief Jimmy Dixon said losing those profits could shut down his agency’s K-9 unit entirely. Undercover narcotics operations overall would suffer, Dixon said, citing limits on the department’s operating budget.

The TAKEN investigation key findings:

• Black men pay the price for this program. They represent 13 percent of the state's population. Yet 65 percent of all citizens targeted for civil forfeiture in the state are black males.

“These types of civil asset forfeiture practices are going to put a heavier burden on lower-income people,” said Ngozi Ndulue, recently a national NAACP senior director, now working at the Death Penalty Information Center. “And when you add in racial disparities around policing and traffic stops and arrest and prosecution, we know this is going to have a disproportionate effect on black communities.”

• If you are white, you are twice as likely to get your money back than if you are black.

• Nearly one-fifth of people who had their assets seized weren't charged with a related crime. Out of more than 4,000 people hit with civil forfeiture over three years, 19 percent were never arrested. They may have left a police encounter without so much as a traffic ticket. But they also left without their cash.

Roughly the same number — nearly 800 people — were charged with a crime but not convicted.

Greenville attorney Jake Erwin said the overarching idea is that the money being seized is earnings from past drug sales, so it's fair game. “In theory, that makes a little bit of sense," he said. "The problem is that they don’t really have to prove that.”

In some states, the suspicions behind a civil forfeiture must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in court, but there is no requirement of proof in South Carolina. When a forfeiture is contested, prosecutors only have to show a preponderance of evidence to keep seized goods.

Police don’t just seize cash.

Practically anything can be confiscated and sold at auction: jewelry, electronics, firearms, boats, RVs. In South Carolina, 95 percent of forfeiture revenue goes back to law enforcement. The rest is deposited into the state’s general fund.

Most of the money isn’t coming from kingpins or money laundering operations. It’s coming from hundreds of encounters where police take smaller amounts of cash, often when they find regular people with drugs for personal use. Customers, not dealers. More than 55 percent of the time when police seized cash, they took less than $1,000.

• Your cash or property can disappear in minutes but take years to get back. The average time between when property is seized and when a prosecutor files for forfeiture is 304 days, with the items in custody the whole time. Often, it’s far longer, well beyond the two-year period state law allows for a civil case to be filed. But only rarely are prosecutors called out for missing the filing window and forced to return property to owners.

• The entire burden of recovering property is on the citizens, who must prove the goods belong to them and were obtained legally. Since it’s not a criminal case, an attorney isn’t provided. Citizens are left to figure out a complex court process on their own. Once cases are filed, they have 30 days to respond. Most of the time, they give up.

The bulk of forfeited money finances law enforcement, but there’s little oversight of what is seized or how it’s spent. Police use it to pay for new guns and gear, for training and meals and for food for their police dogs. In one case, the Spartanburg County sheriff kept a top-of-the-line pick-up truck as his official vehicle and sold countless other items at auctions.

In many other places, changes are being made: 29 states have taken steps to reform their forfeiture process. Fifteen states now require a criminal conviction before property can be forfeited, according to the Institute for Justice, a non-profit libertarian law firm.

South Carolina lawmakers have crafted reform bills in recent General Assembly sessions, but none of the efforts made it out of committee.

To critics, South Carolina is the poster child for the injustice inherent in the for-profit civil forfeiture system, said Louis Rulli, a law expert at the University of Pennsylvania.

Forfeiture doesn’t square with the rest of the justice system, Rulli said. “How could it be possible that my property could be taken when I am not even charged with any criminal offense? It seems un-American," he said.

Those who pay the biggest price are black men. Men like Kinloch. While he was hospitalized for a head injury from a home intruder, North Charleston police removed money from the tattoo artist’s apartment.

That department earns 12 percent of their annual operating budget from cash and property seized under civil law, our investigation shows.

“The robber didn’t get anything, but the police got everything,” said the 28-year-old Kinloch.

Police charged him with possession with intent to distribute after finding the marijuana in his apartment, but the charge was dismissed.

Kinloch never got his cash back.

Rent was due.

Without his $1,800, he couldn’t pay the landlord and was forced out of his home.

South Carolina’s legal legacy

The state has a long history of racial discrimination related to property.

Civil forfeiture is a vestige of that history, some critics say. It links to an established trend of targeted law enforcement that puts more police in contact with non-whites, an exposure that can lead to civil forfeiture, experts say.

Some departments have built a money-making machine on the backs of this type of targeting.

It starts with where police use forfeiture. It's happening in every urban environment in South Carolina. There are only six cities in the state with a population over 50,000. All of them frequently use forfeiture.

In smaller towns, only about half the police forces use the tool at all, and most agencies don’t pursue many cases.

The system is designed to be applied at scale. The more forfeiture is used, the more money police have at their disposal for equipment, training and for undercover drug purchases.

Though the racial disparities in the data exist broadly across the state, the decisions that lead to civil forfeiture are situational. It’s a traffic stop, or a drug investigation that leads to a residence, or increased patrols in low-income or historically black neighborhoods.

The TAKEN team used census data to analyze the widest disparities between the number of forfeiture cases with black subjects compared with the number of black residents in an agency’s jurisdiction.

The largest racial gaps? The highest disproportionate targeting of black people came from the Myrtle Beach Police Department, followed by the Lexington County Sheriff’s Office and the Charleston Police Department.

During 2014-2016, there was one black person targeted for forfeiture by Myrtle Beach police for every 50 black residents who live there. If you roughly extrapolated that rate over a generation, one in five black people would have money or goods taken by police in Myrtle Beach at some point over three decades, despite the fact that the city is mostly white.

The city is 69 percent white and just 14 percent black, according to 2014 U.S. Census data.

In Greenville County, black people were targeted for forfeiture at a rate of one per every 587 black residents during our three-year study period.

In comparison, forfeiture affected one white person per every 4,139 white residents in the county. Greenville County is 69 percent white and 19 percent black, according to U.S. Census data.

“It just sort of reinforces an understanding we already knew — that black residents disproportionately come in contact with law enforcement given the way criminal justice policy is oriented in this country,” said Nicole Porter, spokeswoman at The Sentencing Project, a reform advocacy group.

For more than six years, former Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones led an investigation into the CIA’s detention and interrogation programs after 9/11, sifting through thousands of pages documenting torture, abuses of power, and the lack of accountability during the Bush administration. But when Jones talks about his experience, he doesn’t come off as a cynic about the U.S. “Over the years, you travel a lot, you talk to a lot of foreign governments, you talk to a lot of citizens,” he said Monday at the Sundance Film Festival, reflecting on a career that also included a stint as an international FBI agent. “[The United States] are a beacon, whether you want us to be or not … the building of post–World War II institutions, we’re responsible for that. In the War on Terror, we slipped.”

Jones is the subject of a new film written and directed by Scott Z. Burns called The Report, which debuted at Sundance on January 26 and has already been acquired by Amazon for a reported $14 million. A frequent collaborator of Steven Soderbergh, Burns is best known for his meticulous, fact-based screenplays for films including The Informant! and Contagion. In his new movie, Burns takes Jones’s 6,700-page report and somehow boils it down to a comprehensible narrative. Adam Driver stars as Jones, while Annette Bening plays his boss, Senator Dianne Feinstein. Burns and Jones spoke with The Atlantic’s editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg in Park City, Utah, on Monday about the making of the film, the delicate political lines it crosses, and the Obama administration’s role in trying to suppress the report.

What Jones uncovered was that the CIA had long misrepresented the success of its “enhanced-interrogation procedures,” which some 119 prisoners were subjected to during the Bush era. The protocols—which included waterboarding, placing people in stress positions, sleep deprivation, and simulated burials—were devised by Air Force psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, neither of whom had any prior experience with real interrogation. The psychologists said they had reverse-engineered highly specific military training designed to prepare soldiers for being questioned as prisoners of war, and claimed the process was scientific. In reality, as Jones found, enhanced interrogation never secured any crucial information in the War on Terror and more often than not would produce false answers or cause prisoners to totally shut down. Because the prisoners “looked a little different, spoke a different language, it made it easier” for CIA agents to torture them, Jones said.

The desperation for information post–9/11, along with the CIA’s tradition of secrecy, even within the agency, helped keep the program alive without much scrutiny—Jones alleges that President George W. Bush himself was not briefed about it until 2006. “Bureaucracies get such a bad name, but they prevent bad ideas from [being carried out],” Jones said. “In the CIA, you lack bureaucracy.”

Burns weaves a sense of compartmentalization into every part of the film. The scenes of torture themselves take place in secret black sites, blank environments where accountability is the last thing on anyone’s mind. CIA discussions, led by a composite character played by Maura Tierney (largely modeled on the now-CIA director Gina Haspel), are clinical and remote. Polite boardroom conversations with figures like John Yoo (Pun Bandhu), who wrote the notorious “torture memos,” help justify waterboarding and abuse by quietly manipulating legal language. And Jones’s own quest to investigate takes place in a series of oppressive, often windowless office spaces, anonymous concrete buildings near the nation’s capital that resemble torture chambers.

The Report is just as tough on the Obama administration, presenting Obama’s chief of staff Denis McDonough (Jon Hamm) and CIA head John Brennan (Ted Levine) as infuriating roadblocks to Jones’s pursuit of the truth. McDonough, and by extension Obama, seeks mostly to leave the past in the past, acknowledging the CIA’s failures while redacting the most demoralizing parts of the report. Brennan, meanwhile, sticks to the company line that torture was effective at points, while admitting the agency’s overreach. “The allegiance that these people have to that organization supersedes a lot of things,” Burns said. “It's not even clear to us ... how widely known the enhanced-interrogation program was within the CIA. It was not something everybody knew [about]. But they tend to protect their own.”

Brennan has since become an icon among some for his voracious criticism of Donald Trump, who last year revoked the CIA lifer’s security clearance. “I love the fact that John Brennan and a lot of these people are leading the charge against what’s going on in our government right now,” Burns said. But the filmmaker still wanted The Report to be brutally honest, even if that meant taking aim at more beloved figures. “Most of [Brennan’s] dialogue in the movie I took from the CIA’s official response, from speeches he’s made, from his comments at the Council on Foreign Relations. I didn’t make that up,” Burns added.

In another pointed moment, The Report negatively references Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar-winning 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty, which suggests that torture played a role in providing information that eventually led to the killing of Osama Bin Laden. When asked about the movie, a slightly chagrined-looking Burns said he was a friend and admirer of Bigelow and the film’s screenwriter Mark Boal, but that he felt the movie was rooted in a false CIA narrative. “Hollywood people don't always fact-check stories,” he said. “I don’t think the narrative is accurate. … But [Bigelow and Boal] were fed a narrative by very credible people. … I think they made an amazing film about the story they were given.”

The pop-culture heroism of Zero Dark Thirty is at the root of what the real-life Jones is still looking to dispel (the movie’s version of Jones derides the TV show 24 for its frequent endorsement of ends-justify-the-means thinking). The Report is a film whose champion is not a brawny soldier or a secret agent, but a thorough, committed, pencil-pushing investigator, someone searching for moral clarity in a decade suffused with confusion and dread. “As [Jones is] trying to [compile] this report, this story [about the usefulness of torture] springs up in popular culture, and everybody embraces it. We all embraced it,” Burns said ruefully. His film aims to undo that narrative—thoughtfully, methodically, and quite powerfully.

The Guardian

In the spring of 2018, New York was gripped by a sudden, very particular and, for some, calamitous food shortage. Gaps appeared on grocery shelves. Coffee shops put out signs, turning customers away. Twitter and Instagram brimmed with outrage. The truly desperate searched from Williamsburg to Harlem, but it seemed undeniable: New York was out of oat milk.

It wasn’t just New York, in fact. The entire US was suffering from a shortage of Oatly, a Swedish plant milk whose rapid rise from obscure digestive health brand to the dairy alternative of choice had caught even Oatly by surprise. Since its US launch in 2016, Oatly had gone from supplying a handful of upscale New York coffee shops to more than 3,000 cafes and grocery stores nationwide. The company had ramped up production by 1,250%, but when I spoke to CEO Toni Petersson in late summer, they were still struggling to meet demand. “How do we supply when the growth is this crazy?” Petersson said.

Fortunately, when it comes to milk, in 2019 there is no shortage of alternative alternatives. Visit your local supermarket and you will find a refrigerated aisle overflowing with choice: almond milk, hazelnut milk, peanut, tiger nut, walnut, cashew – and that’s just the nuts. Coconut, hemp, spelt, quinoa, pea – you name it, somewhere a health-food startup is milking it. London tube stations are filled with ads for new plant milks – or rather, “mylks” (EU law prevents dairy alternatives from using the word milk if it isn’t produced by a lactating mammal). Cookbooks dedicate entire chapters to blending and straining your own. Sainsbury’s now stocks around 70 different options. There are the wellness punks (Rebel Kitchen, Rude Health), the dairy puns (Malk, Milkadamia, Mooala) and the nourishers (LoveRaw, Good Karma, Plenish). “People are just looking at every nut that exists and seeing if they can squash it into a milk,” said Glynis Murray, one of the owners of Good, which squashes hemp seeds into oil and milk.

It seems unthinkable now, but as recently as 2008, alternatives to cow’s milk largely meant soya (invariably Alpro in the UK, Silk in the US). For anything else, you’d need to scour health-food shops for drab, clinical-looking, long-life cartons of rice milk buried in the back with the other digestive aids. “It was the deathly aisle,” said John Schoolcraft, Oatly’s global creative director. “It was just for people who were lactose intolerant [or] had an allergy to milk; vegans, vegetarians – people who, at that time, were on the fringe of society.”

Plant milks are no longer fringe. Just over one in 10 of Pret a Manger’s hot drinks in the UK are ordered with dairy alternative milks (organic soya milk or organic rice-coconut milk). According to research firm Mintel, UK plant milk sales have grown by 30% since 2015, buoyed by a surge in vegan and vegetarian diets. In the US, nearly half of all shoppers now add a plant milk to their baskets. Globally, the industry is estimated to be worth $16bn.

Meanwhile, reduced demand for cow’s milk and falling prices led to the closure of 1,000 dairy farms in the UK between 2013 and 2016. Milk’s reputation as a healthy food is under threat from anxieties about bovine antibiotics, animal cruelty and the industry’s environmental impact, as well as increased diagnosis of lactose intolerance. Teenagers now consider cow’s milk less healthy than plant milk alternatives, a development the former chairman of Dairy UK, David Dobbin, called “a demographic time bomb”.

“Consumers are really not sure about the dairy industry,” Caroline Roux, a dairy analyst at Mintel, told me. “They’re not convinced these products are good for them any more.”

But the plant milk boom is, as one entrepreneur told me, “way bigger than just switching your milk”. To converts, almond and oat milk are the next wave in a fundamental shift towards a more conscious, sustainable way of living. To critics, they’re little more than cleverly marketed nut juice with additives – a symptom of everything that’s wrong with modern food culture. And so a strange battle has emerged, between an industry trying to replace something it says we don’t need in the first place, and dairy, a business that for a century sold itself as the foundation of a healthy diet, while ignoring the fact that most of the world does just fine without it.

e are all born milk drinkers. Babies’ guts produce the enzyme lactase, which breaks down lactose, the sugar in breastmilk (and cow’s milk), into the simpler sugars glucose and galactose. But for the majority of humans, production of the enzyme lactase plummets after weaning. “From a human perspective – no, to go further than that, from a mammalian perspective – the norm is to be able to tolerate your mother’s breast milk, and then as you get past infancy, to stop producing lactase and become lactose intolerant,” said Adam Fox, a consultant paediatric allergist at Guy’s and St Thomas’s hospitals, and one of the UK’s leading food allergy experts. “Then you’ve got a small group of humans that have a mutation which means they maintain production of lactase into adulthood. Northern Europeans, the Masai [in east Africa], some Arab groups as well. But that’s the exception, not the rule.”

That schism between milk-drinkers and the rest – actually a series of independent genetic mutations – appears to have occurred about 10,000 years ago, around the time humans were domesticating farm animals. It is the reason that in countries such as the UK, Sweden and Ireland, more than 90% of adults can drink milk without suffering any ill effects, but worldwide, more than two-thirds of all adults are considered lactose intolerant. For lactose-intolerant people, a glass of milk can induce bloating, stomach pains and diarrhoea. (Lactose intolerance should not be – though often is – confused with cow’s milk allergy, an immune response to the proteins in cow’s milk that affects around 1% of UK adults.)

Even in northern Europe, milk as we know it is a recent phenomenon. Fresh milk, left unrefrigerated, spoils quickly and can harbour a variety of deadly pathogens, including E Coli and tuberculosis. For most of history it was either consumed within moments of milking, or processed as cheese or yoghurt. Few drunk milk in its liquid form. “The Romans considered it a sign of barbarism,” said Mark Kurlansky, author of Milk! A 10,000-Year Food Fracas. “The only people who drank milk were people on farms, because they were the only ones who could get it fresh enough.” (Even then, cow’s milk was considered inferior to alternatives such as goat or donkey.) In the 19th century, “swill milk” – so called because cows were fed the filthy runoff from inner-city breweries, turning their milk blue – was linked with thousands of infant deaths. Only in the early 20th century, with the introduction of mandatory pasteurisation – in which milk is heated to kill off any bacteria before bottling – did milk become safe enough for most people to drink regularly.

It was the first world war that ultimately aligned political forces behind the dairy business. In Britain, rationing meant food was limited, and child malnutrition was rife. The emerging field of nutritional science identified milk – with its high protein content and newly discovered “vital amines”, or vitamins – as a potential solution. Thanks to government price controls, milk was one thing not in short supply. Soon, “consumers everywhere witnessed a snowfall of propaganda documenting the miracles worked by milk”, writes Deborah Valenze in Milk: A Local and Global History. Milk became the original superfood: a boundless source of calcium, protein and vitamins. In 1946, Clement Attlee and Harry S Truman’s governments both passed measures to ensure milk was available free with school meals. Industry alliances like the UK’s Milk Marketing Board embarked on campaigns to enhance milk’s image. More recently, in the US, the Got Milk? campaign showed celebrities from Beyoncé to Kermit the Frog with milk moustaches. The message was clear: if you wanted your children to grow up big and strong, they needed to be drinking milk.

Today, dairy is a vast and highly regulated behemoth, worth more than $400bn, produced by a global herd of more than 274 million cows. Politicians mess with milk at their peril (when Margaret Thatcher, as education secretary, in 1971 took the draconian step of cutting free school milk for the over-sevens, she was branded “milk snatcher”). And yet, for many consumers, the allure of milk is on the wane. In 1975, the average American consumed 247 pounds (around 130 litres) of milk per year; in 2017, it was just 149 pounds (66 litres). In the US, milk sales have fallen 15% since 2012.

Milk’s “share of throat” – an industry term for the proportion of total liquid we consume in a day – has been eroded by a steady flow of soft drinks, juices and smoothies, even bottled water. But none of these presented an existential threat. Blanket marketing established the connection between milk and wholesomeness and good nutrition. Now new forms of persuasion, more targeted and pervasive, have stripped away that healthy sheen from dairy.

The internet has given animal rights activists new reach. Search for “dairy” on YouTube and you will be assaulted by videos with titles like Dairy Is Scary (5m views), which depicts in graphic detail the suffering of dairy cows. Netflix, too, has provided previously untapped audiences for documentaries like Cowspiracy and What the Health. Besides the ill-treatment of animals, evidence has mounted that the dairy industry is catastrophic for the environment. Animal agriculture contributes more greenhouse gases than aviation, shipping and road vehicles combined. One recent study led by Oxford University claimed that observing a vegetarian or vegan diet is the single most effective way to reduce your own environmental footprint.

Plant milks received a boost from their association with clean eating, a craze that has also had the effect of linking dairy with negative health issues. Clean eating, advocated by a fresh-skinned, glossy crop of wellness bloggers and Instagram celebrities, argued for the elimination of any foods deemed overly processed, allergenic, or otherwise “unnatural”: gluten, caffeine, meat and dairy. Its proponents blamed lactose intolerance as the cause of a range of ailments, including acne, eczema, lethargy, joint pain and a variety of digestive issues. And, as the clean eaters warned their readers off dairy, they sent them into the willing arms of plant milk startups. A steady supply of attractive millennial influencers filled their Instagram feeds with appetising shots of peanut-milk Thai curries and gluten-free beetroot bread. (According to industry analysts, one of the keys to the plant-based trend is that it looks appetising on Instagram.) The clean eaters did what years of vegan campaigning never could. Suddenly, giving up milk wasn’t just a health issue. It was part of living your best and most beautiful life.

he notion of milking plants is not new. In China, soya milk has been made since at least the 14th century, most commonly as a step in making tofu. The earliest written mention of almond milk appears in a Baghdadi cookbook from 1226, the Kitab al-Tabikh. “If you look at Medieval recipes, they will often give you a choice between milk or almond milk,” said Mark Kurlansky (whose best-seller Cod: A Biography, launched an entire genre of food microhistories).

In the west, until recently, almond and soya milk remained relatively unknown, except by vegetarians and the odd eccentric (Henry Ford, of the car company, was an early soya evangelist). In 1956, the Plantmilk Society was established in London by Leslie Cross, then vice-president of the British Vegan Society, a nascent group of animal rights activists. Cross, who particularly objected to the cruelty of the dairy industry, set about trying to find a dairy replacement using crops that could be grown in Britain.

“The big issue originally was: how do you get a protein in a liquid that can emulate dairy milk?” said Adrian Ling, whose father, Arthur, was chair of the new organisation. Photos from the time show the smiling pioneers in white lab coats examining many glasses of questionable opaque liquids. “They did a lot of work on cabbage,” Ling said. Eventually, they settled on the soya bean. “It was a very small market – a few hundred people,” said Ling. “They lost a lot of money.”

In 1981, a young Belgian food tech named Philippe Vandemoortele decided to use a new packing technology, the sterile Tetra Brik, to sell soya milk. “I started in a garage with pots and pans, a grinder. I was young, and very naive,” Vandemoortele, now 73, told me. He called his soya milk Alpro. Reviews were mixed. The local supermarket refused to stock it. “The buyer tasted my product, and he said: ‘Whoa. It’s awful!’” But Vandemoortele persisted. Today Alpro is owned by Danone, and in 2017 had a turnover in excess of £183m.

Soya’s real break came in the late 90s, when a Colorado soya company called WhiteWave made what seems like a confoundingly obvious discovery: if they moved the product to the refrigerated aisle alongside the dairy milk, more people bought it. WhiteWave’s new refrigerated soya drink, which it called Silk, was a sensation. At the same time, Silk, Alpro and others jumped on emerging evidence about the link between high cholesterol and heart disease to market themselves as a healthy alternative. All of a sudden, soya was for everyone.

Soya’s rapid growth was short-lived, in large part due to the fact that it doesn’t taste very good. Even modern soya milks, which add sugar, thickeners and other additives to imitate dairy milk, have a beany taste and odour. In the early 2000s, soya had its own health scare. Soya contains phytoestrogens, oestrogen-like compounds that can mimic the hormone’s effects in humans, a discovery that led to fears about it disrupting hormones and “feminising” men. Clinical studies have consistently shown those fears are overstated. Even so, neo-Nazis continue to push the theory that soya milk is a liberal conspiracy to emasculate men, and drink cow’s milk at rallies to demonstrate “digestive superiority”.

In 2008, the Blue Diamond Growers, a large cooperative of almond farmers in California, sensed an opportunity. Its milk, Almond Breeze, had long lagged behind Silk, by then America’s leading soya brand. “We knew if we were wanting to compete with them, we would need to be in the refrigerated case,” Al Greenlee, Blue Diamond’s director of marketing, told me. Supermarkets maintain a tight grip on shelf space, charging high fees to stock a new product. Lucrative, high-traffic displays like the refrigerated case are fiercely competitive. The owners of Silk at that time – the dairy giant Dean Foods – had leveraged its industry clout to get Silk positioned alongside milk. “So we followed a similar p...