Most Recent Posts

The original 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign logo. Hillary Clinton campaign hide caption

itoggle caption Hillary Clinton campaign

Hillary Clinton's campaign logo was changed Tuesday to show support for same-sex marriage on the day of oral arguments at the Supreme Court. Hillary Clinton campaign hide caption

itoggle caption Hillary Clinton campaign

The Clinton campaign's Iowa logo. Hillary Clinton campaign hide caption

itoggle caption Hillary Clinton campaign

The Clinton campaign's New Hampshire logo. Hillary Clinton campaign hide caption

itoggle caption Hillary Clinton campaign

Hillary Clinton's new logo has been much maligned. A simple, rightward-pointing "H" with a red arrow through it that looks like it could have been made in "Paint."

Red, the color of the other team. How could she? some Democrats wondered. It seemed so amateurish, some design experts lamented.

"I think the Hillary logo is really saying nothing," Scott Thomas told Politico. Thomas was design director for Obama's 2008 campaign and worked on the White House website's redesign.

Clinton's simple logo, though, is certainly saying something now. On Tuesday, the day of the Supreme Court oral arguments on gay marriage, her logo on both Facebook and Twitter were changed to a rainbow-colored "H."

And it's not the only example of how the campaign has tried to adapt the logo. For Iowa, the background is an open field with corn in the foreground. For New Hampshire, mountains.

It's kind of becoming the Empire State Building of presidential campaign logos — changing colors to celebrate any variety of milestones and holidays, from pink for breast cancer awareness to red, white and blue for Memorial Day to "pastel fades" for Easter. (The Empire State Building has a whole calendar of scheduled colors.)

Among perhaps the smartest analyses of the logo was from Sol Sender, who designed Obama's 2008 logo. He told the Huffington Post that the point of campaign logo design is to first address one of the candidates biggest weaknesses. For Obama, because of his unusual name, the campaign knew it had to play up patriotism. For Clinton, it's the criticism that she represents the past.

"If you boil it down it's really a symbol of forward motion," Sender said of Clinton's logo. "On the Obama work we were really conscious from the start about where he was vulnerable — we knew Obama critics said things like 'he's not American.' So we thought going strong with a patriotic theme was quite important. Hence the red, white and blue colors in the Obama logo. In terms of vulnerabilities, Hillary always seems to get dragged into the past by her critics. Therefore, you might argue that a symbol like this which is so aggressively pushing forward could help counter-balance any negative energy that is directed at her past."

2016 Presidential Race

Democrats

Hillary Clinton

The families of convicted drug smugglers held farewell meetings in an Indonesian prison Tuesday, after the government rejected last-ditch pleas for mercy. The condemned include two Australians who led the "Bali Nine" smuggling group.

Australians Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan were the ringleaders of a group that was caught trying to smuggle heroin out of Bali in 2005. Their seven couriers have received either lengthy or life prison sentences.

In addition to the Australians, three convicts from Nigeria and one each from the Philippines, Brazil, Ghana, and Indonesia are to be tied to posts and killed by a firing squad tonight. The case of Sukumaran and Chan has attracted wide attention, in part because the pair have reportedly reformed themselves in the nearly 10 years since their arrest.

The case has also shown the limits of the influence wielded by Australia, which has abolished capital punishment, on Indonesia, one of its closest neighbors and a popular tourism destination. Indonesia and President Joko Widodo have rejected several nations' requests for clemency in the cases.

Prisoner Mary Jane Veloso of the Philippines has also been the subject of a last-minute push to save her life, over allegations that the mother of two had been forced into being a drug courier by a human trafficker. Pleas from Philippine President Benigno Aquino and boxer Manny Pacquiao were rebuffed this week.

The exact timing of the executions hasn't been announced, but a three-day warning period expires at midnight tonight, and it's widely believed that in the early hours of Wednesday (local time), the punishment will be carried out. Indonesia is 12 hours ahead of U.S. Eastern Time.

"I won't see my son again and they are going to take him tonight and shoot him and he is healthy and he is beautiful and he has a lot of compassion for other people," Raji Sukumaran said, according to Australia's ABC news agency. "I am asking the government not to kill him, please president, please don't kill him today."

The case has drawn international protests. This week, Australian celebrities including actor Geoffrey Rush put out a YouTube video calling for Prime Minister Tony Abbott to intervene.

From Sydney, Stuart Cohen reports for our Newscast unit:

"Australia's attorney general today became the latest official to appeal to Indonesian authorities, saying there are still serious questions about the legitimacy of their original trial that need to be resolved.

"But most people trying to save the two Australians say it's unlikely at this late hour that the executions won't go ahead."

Some of those questions about the case include allegations of bribery, as the Sydney Morning Herald reports.

Bali Nine

capital punishment

Australia

Selection Criteria: 'A Hundred Hours Of Hell'

They were whittled down to about 55 or 60 women from more than 200 at the very start, and they faced a selection process that was called "a hundred hours of hell." So that was a combination of mental agility tests and physical tests — climbing a 30-foot wall, or putting 35 or 40 pounds on your back and marching for what is called an unknown distance, so that could be 2 miles or it could be 12 — tests about cultural awareness. And they went through this in a five-day period which had little sleep and a lot of testing of who they were as people, and they were judged as a team.

Why White Didn't Tell Her Parents About Her Deployment

She really did not want them to worry. ... There wasn't a lot of a roadmap to point to in terms of what she would be doing [with the special operations teams]. Not many women had done that before her ... and she realized pretty quickly that this is real combat, right? We are going on some of the most dangerous, most critical missions to the war in Afghanistan that America is pursuing. ... There is a real moment where she talks to her husband and she talks to her brother and just says "I really want to keep this between us, I don't want people to worry."

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, author of Ashley's War. Courtesy of Harper hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Harper

What Female Soldiers Were Able To Discover

One young soldier found a woman who was sitting on a weapon that they had been looking for. Another soldier found something they were looking for in a baby's soiled diaper. Yet others were keeping young women that they had met calm during operations so that the Rangers could do their work. So very quickly they proved that there was this whole world, this whole community of Afghan women that you could access if you had American women soldiers out there talking to them.

A Foundation For Integration

We will know the answer in January of 2016 as to which jobs will open to women and whether all jobs will open to women. Right now what we know is that, in the summer of 2013, one of the special operations commanders actually cited Ashley and all of the women in these pages and said "those soldiers may well have laid the foundation for ultimate integration" — that they had done a fabulous job on the battlefield, and that they did prove that women could bring value to those kinds of mission. Those women were the softer side of the harder side of war.

women in combat

Afghanistan

The feeling that tech giants such as Facebook and Google know exactly where we are and what we're doing can be uncomfortable. Targeted advertisements or suggestions based on our location can feel like an invasion of privacy.

But the collection of our digital data has an upside in certain circumstances, and the aftermath of the massive earthquake in Nepal provides a good example.

As the nation struggles to deal with the devastation of a magnitude-7.8 earthquake that has left an more than 4,000 people dead, information about survivors, those still in danger and what resources are needed is in high demand. Tech and telecom companies are stepping up to offer much-needed services. From Apple to Viber, each has something a little bit different to offer.

The Two-Way

More Than 4,000 Dead In Nepal As Earthquake Toll Rises

The Two-Way

LOOK: Historic Nepal Sites Before And After The Quake

All Tech Considered

When Disaster Strikes, Facebook Lets Friends Know You're OK

Here's an overview of the ways in which tech companies are leveraging their power, and some of the challenges they are facing.

Apple: Apple has activated an iTunes store feature that allows visitors to donate to the American Red Cross using the credit card information Apple has on file. Apple has enabled one-click donation following other natural disasters such as the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the 2011 tsunami in Japan and the 2013 typhoon in the Philippines.

we poop on Facebook a lot here but this is super useful pic.twitter.com/5VSbPgo4uV

— nathanjurgenson (@nathanjurgenson) April 26, 2015

Of course, there are other ways to help those in need. You can find a list of some of the charities doing relief work in Nepal here.

Facebook: In October, after noticing how users organically turn to Facebook in times of crisis, the company launched "Safety Check." The site uses the city listed in your profile and data on where you've accessed the Internet from to determine whether you may be affected by a natural disaster. If so, Facebook sends a push notification asking if you're safe. When you confirm your safety, your friends receive a notification as well.

In the case of the Nepal earthquake Facebook activated Safety Check for Nepal and surrounding areas on Saturday. Mark Zuckerberg announced the service on his Facebook page. "It's moments like this that being able to connect really matters," the Facebook founder said in his post.

The feature has garnered praise, but it faces challenges associated with the availability (or lack thereof) of Internet access. The World Bank says that just 13 percent of Nepal's population accesses the Internet regularly, and the Los Angeles Times has reported that current connectivity in Kathmandu is tenuous.

MT-@GoogleCR: Person Finder launced to help track missing persons for #Nepal earthquake http://t.co/MovGHXXoAb pic.twitter.com/8NNz4BKXIp

— Google (@google) April 25, 2015

Google: Google also has a service designed to help you know whether friends and family are OK — it's called "Person Finder." According to Google's Asia Pacific blog, Person Finder "gives people a way to post and search for family or friends affected by the disaster." In a sense it crowdsources information about people in affected areas and in doing so collects an amazing amount of data. Through Person Finder you can create a listing for a person you're looking to get in touch with, or provide information about someone you've heard is safe. Search is available via the Web, or via SMS in Nepal, India or the United States.

Reduced cost of calls to #Nepal to 1/min (from 19/min) to help loved ones connect http://t.co/RjfHY8bCri @GoogleCR pic.twitter.com/fWEb70Pp8P

— Google (@google) April 27, 2015

And Google has reduced prices for Google Voice calls into Nepal from 19 cents per minute to 1 cent per minute, and Google.org, the company's charitable arm, pledged $1 million toward disaster relief and response.

Again, both of these services depend on infrastructure that is struggling to cope with demand. NPR's Kirk Siegler, who is in Kathmandu, noted that the local phone network "has been sporadic at best."

Microsoft: On Monday afternoon Microsoft announced free Skype calls to landlines and mobiles in Nepal. Microsoft has also pledged a minimum of $1 million to recovery efforts.

In light of the tragic events in Nepal, all Skype calls to landlines & mobiles in & out of Nepal are free. More: [http://t.co/pz8PwVcCq6

— Skype (@Skype) April 27, 2015

Sprint/T-Mobile: Both telecom firms have waived fees for calls and text messages sent by users in Nepal. The offer lasts through May 16, and is retroactive to April 25. On the question of whether users will have the capability to call or text Sprint notes that "it has been shown that text messages may go through when calling capabilities aren't available."

Viber: Chief Operating Officer Michael Shmilov told The Wall Street Journal that the voice and messaging app has approximately 3 million users in the Himalayan region. The company announced it would make calls for users in Nepal free to any destination.

In response to the earthquake in Nepal we have switched off Viber Out billing so Nepal users can call any destination for free

— Viber (@Viber) April 26, 2015

Tajha Chappellet-Lanier is the social media intern at NPR.

Nepal

Earthquake