A notorious guru self-helped himself to a bevy of sex slaves, subjecting them to "shame and humiliation," a federal prosecutor said Tuesday.

Keith Raniere - the sex svengali of the NXIVM cult - held sway over the vulnerable women by threatening to expose their "deepest, darkest secrets."

The women either agreed to have sex with him or they would be exposed.

Prosecutor Tanya Hajjar presented opening statements at the sex-trafficking trial of Raniere in New York City.

"The defendant pretended to be a guru," Hajjar said, "but he was a criminal."

The prosecution laid out a sordid indictment against Raniere who ensnared Smallville star Allison Mack, a Bronfman heiresses and a bevy of other starlets.

Nusrat Jahan Rafi was a young woman who attended a madrassa in the rural town of Feni in Bangladesh. In late March of this year, she attended the local police station to report a crime. Nusrat alleged that the headmaster at her madrassa had called her into his office several days before and sexually assaulted her. After the assault, Nusrat told her family what had happened and decided to make a report to the police, no doubt trusting that they would treat her with some decency. The officer who took her statement did no such thing. He videotaped it on his camera phone and can be heard on the footage telling her that the assault was "not a big deal." The headmaster was arrested, but someone within the police leaked the fact that Nusrat had made allegations against him and the footage of her statement ended up on social media. She was soon receiving threats from students at the madrassa as well as other people in the community. Influential local politicians expressed their support for the headmaster and crowds gathered in the streets of Feni demanding his release. Defiant, Nusrat insisted on going into the madrassa to sit her exams, but while there she was tricked into going up onto the roof of the building with a fellow female student. She was then set upon by a group of people who tried to persuade her to withdraw her allegations. When she refused, they doused her with kerosene and set her alight. Some of the men arrested have since told police that the attack had been planned and ordered by the headmaster from prison. Nusrat survived long enough to describe what had happened, but died in hospital on 10th April. She was 19.

It's difficult to imagine a more tragic example of the terrible dangers that women can face in speaking out about sexual violence, nor the lengths that some people will go to in order to protect perpetrators from exposure. In Bangladesh there has been a huge response to Nusrat's murder. Tens of thousands of people attended her funeral prayers, and there have been protests in the capital Dhaka. Bangladeshi feminists have used the case to draw attention to the high rates of sexual abuse in the country and the mistreatment of victims by police.


The news has recently started filtering through to the Western media, but thus far prominent feminists have been noticeably silent. At the time of writing, there has been no mention of Nusrat's murder in the major third wave feminist websites Jezebel, Feministing, and Everyday Feminism. Notably, the radical feminist platform Feminist Current has reported on the case-this is the site edited by Canadian journalist Meghan Murphy, considered so reprehensible by Twitter that she has been banned. Although there have been reports on the murder in the international sections of most newspapers, Nusrat's name has not appeared on the comment pages of any of the major Left-leaning anglophone newspapers: the New York Times, the Guardian, the Huffington Post, the Independent, or the Sydney Morning Herald.

A Biman Airlines' Bombardier Dash-8 aircraft has skidded off the runway at Myanmar's Yangon International Airport, losing its wings and breaking into three parts. Pilots were attempting to land as the accident occurred.

Although conflicting reports exist, a Biman Airlines spokesman told Bangladeshi news site BDnews that four of the 33 people on board were injured, including the pilot.

Photos shared on social media show the extent of the wreck.

Cecilie Fjellhoy thought she had met her prince charming when she matched on Tinder with Simon Leviev.

Fjellhoy, a 29-year-old Norwegian masters student living in London, said she was swept off her feet on their first date, which included a private plane ride to Bulgaria. Fjellhoy said Leviev told her he was an Israeli millionaire who called himself the "Prince of Diamonds."

"I was texting my friends at the same time like in a group chat just like, 'I don't know what's going on,'" she said.

But what began as a storybook romance turned into a real-life nightmare, Fjellhoy said - one that sent her into debt and fearing for her safety. It's a cautionary tale in the dangers of online dating.

"I hate him, he's so horrible," she said. "I am just tired of crying about this you know? It's just so painful. I just hate myself that I did this."

International media freedom watchdogs said they were "appalled" by the recent brutal attack on Ukrainian journalist Vadym Komarov and urged the country's authorities to do their utmost to ensure that it does not go unpunished.

In a statement on May 7, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said that Ukrainian authorities "should leave no stone unturned" in identifying the motive of the attack on Komarov and bringing the assailants to justice.

Gulnoza Said, CPJ Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, said that her organization was "appalled by the brutal assault," which she said comes amid "a range of threats faced by investigative reporters in Ukraine."

Canada's federal government is likely to announce in mid-June that it would be proceeding with the controversial expansion of the Trans Mountain oil pipeline designed to double the pipeline flow out of Alberta to the west coast in British Columbia, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday, citing officials familiar with the issue.

Justin Trudeau's federal cabinet will meet to discuss the Trans Mountain expansion on June 18 and is expected to take the decision on that day, officials tell Bloomberg, noting that "it's possible but unlikely" that the government extends again the decision deadline in order to allow more time for consultations with stakeholders.

While Alberta and its leaders have been advocating for the pipeline expansion, British Columbia has been strongly opposing the project, which is now owned by the federal government of Canada. The fierce opposition in British Columbia has forced Kinder Morgan to reconsider its commitment to expand the Trans Mountain pipeline, and to sell the project to the Canadian government in August 2018.

According to a recent study conducted by the University of California Riverside, California's minimum wage hikes have slowed job growth among restaurant workers.

The golden state instituted a series of minimum wage hikes - set to reach $15 by 2022, or 50% over 2012 levels, according to Forbes.
"Data analysis suggests that while the restaurant industry in California has grown significantly as the minimum wage has increased, employment in the industry has grown more slowly than it would have without minimum wage hikes," according to the study. "The slower employment is nevertheless real for those workers who may have found a career in the industry."

Azmi Doghmush, a building owner in Gaza, says that he received a taunting phone call from an Israeli intelligence officer on Sunday: "Sheikh Doghmush! How are you doing?... Count down five minutes and watch my proficiency and accuracy in toppling your building, but keep 50 meters away."

The seven-story al-Qamar residential building in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood in the Gaza City was then leveled by six Israeli missiles.

"He was honest, while my lifetime dream was turned into fallen dominoes," Doghmush, 50, said.

Would you let a stranger eavesdrop in your home and keep the recordings? For most people, the answer is, "Are you crazy?"

Yet that's essentially what Amazon has been doing to millions of us with its assistant Alexa in microphone-equipped Echo speakers. And it's hardly alone: Bugging our homes is Silicon Valley's next frontier.

Many smart-speaker owners don't realize it, but Amazon keeps a copy of everything Alexa records after it hears its name. Apple's Siri, and until recently Google's Assistant, by default also keep recordings to help train their artificial intelligences.

So come with me on an unwelcome walk down memory lane. I listened to four years of my Alexa archive and found thousands of fragments of my life: spaghetti-timer requests, joking houseguests and random snippets of "Downton Abbey." There were even sensitive conversations that somehow triggered Alexa's "wake word" to start recording, including my family discussing medication and a friend conducting a business deal.

Former chief executive officer of opioid manufacturer Purdue Pharma Richard Sackler wrote an email to a friend in 2001 calling opioid abusers "victimizers" and "criminals" and complained that "calling drug addicts 'scum of the earth' will guarantee that I become the poster child for liberals who want to distribute the blame to someone else," according to previously-undisclosed documents attached to a lawsuit against Purdue from the state of Connecticut.

The email exchanges have been added in un-redacted form to court documents filed this week in the state of Connecticut's lawsuit against Purdue Pharma.

A top Connecticut state official said that the email exchanges "encapsulate the depraved indifference to human suffering that infected Purdue's entire business model."

An attorney for Sackler confirmed through a spokeswoman the authenticity of the email exchanges but said they were written long ago and taken out of context.

Sackler "has apologized for using insensitive language that doesn't reflect what he actually did," attorney David Bernick said. "These emails were written two decades ago following news reports about criminal activity involving prescription opioids, such as drug store robberies. Dr. Sackler was expressing his worry that this news coverage would stigmatize an essential FDA-approved medication that doctors feel is critical for treating their patients in pain. The same concern from twenty years ago exists today."