NEWS AROUND THE WORLD

Does the Delhi gang rape sentence bring closure?

Did the fatal gang rape of a student last December eventually turn out to be a moment of dramatic change for India? And does the court's decision on Friday to hand out the death penalty to the four guilty men mark some kind of a closure?

The answer to the first question is possibly yes. The answer to the second is arguably, no.

The horrific crime triggered a firestorm of protest in the country like no other incident in the recent past. It touched a chord largely because India's restless and increasingly assertive youth - a fifth of India's 725 million eligible voters next year will be between 18 and 23 years old - identified with the victim: a struggling aspirant whose life came to a brutal end on the way back home after watching a film with her friend at a multiplex cinema in one of Delhi's ritzy shopping malls. A strident and purposeful media helped deepen this rage.Over time the rage led to what many say is a deeper engagement with issues relating to violence against and discrimination of women.The young have taken the lead: schools, colleges and youth communities are agog with informed debate. As novelist Nilanjana Roy eloquently puts it: "The rapes might not stop; but this conversation isn't stopping either."The Delhi rape also shone a light on poor, deracinated migrants who flock to the cities to escape the grinding poverty of their villages. As Jason Burke explains in this brilliant piece of reportage, the four men who raped the student represented a bulk of today's Indians - semi-skilled, poorly educated, unmarried and high on cheap alcohol in a city which has an awful sex ratio and record of protecting women and "high levels of alcohol abuse."Also, the government, initially slow to respond to the chorus of outrage, was pushed to implement tougher anti-rape laws, which in itself was a positive development.After the self-flagellation and scathing international condemnation - many said India had become the world's rape capital - there is an increasing realisation that rape is a deeply complex problem and blights all countries. Especially in India where the the majority of perpetrators are family members, relatives and friends of the victims. This useful infographic offers some clues: five cities in Madhya Pradesh, one of India's most undeveloped states which fares poorly in feeding, educating and protecting its women, have the highest rates of rape, but so do the prosperous cities of Delhi and Mumbai.But India is not alone. Last week I read of college students in the US being disciplined after they were seen apparently "extolling the joys of sexual assault" on an Instagram video. And a recent piece in the New Yorker revisited an incident in Steubenville, Ohio where high school football players were accused of repeatedly raping an unconscious 16-year-old girl after she was ferried from one party to another, that had earlier provoked a comment in New York Times titled Is Delhi So Different From Steubenville?Nevertheless, there were nearly 25,000 reported cases in 2012 in India. In Delhi alone, over 1,000 cases of rape were reported until mid-August this year, against 433 cases reported over the same period last year. In dirt-poor Jharkhand, over 800 cases have been reported in the past seven months, up from 460 in the whole of 2012. The increase in numbers could be because of increased reporting by the victims, which in itself is a good thing. But the fact is that the violence continues unabated.Clearly, patriarchy, misogyny and blaming women for "provoking" men are only part of the problem. India's criminal justice system remains broke: too few judges and policemen, shoddy investigations, questionable trials, low conviction rates.More importantly, India, many say, needs to consider why in a society which, justly, prides itself on strong family values, continues to tolerate what many say is widespread abuse of and violence against women at home. There is simply not enough debate on this. "We are argumentative about everything except our own selves," writes sociologist Sanjay Srivastava in this excellent piece. Why are people talking without listening?India also needs to become a more equitable society where fewer people will be left angry, frustrated and marooned in poverty amid shiny islands of wealth. Poverty, inequality and violence are inextricably linked.

The Payday at Twitter Many Were Waiting For

SAN FRANCISCO — In June 2007, Evan Williams was looking for investors for a quirky Internet communications service called Twitter that he had co-founded.

He had already signed up a number of well-known Silicon Valley financiers, but he also dashed off a note to his old friend Dick Costolo, who had just sold his company to Google, asking if he would like to put in $25,000 or $100,000.
“I’m on the $25k bus,” Mr. Costolo replied three minutes after receiving the e-mail. “Thanks Ev, this will be a lot of fun.”
Mr. Costolo, who is now the chief executive of Twitter, is one of a handful of individual investors who stand to reap the rewards of a potential initial public offering of stock in the social network. The company said on Thursday that it had filed early paperwork with regulators to conduct such a sale, which will probably occur late this year or early next year.
Although many details are still unclear — most of all the offering price of Twitter’s stock — Mr. Costolo’s initial investment is probably worth more than $10 million, with additional shares he has received as an executive worth many millions more, according to people knowledgeable about the company’s finances.
Twitter declined to comment on its finances, citing the confidential nature of its I.P.O. filings at this stage in the process.
Mr. Williams, who provided crucial early financing forTwitter and remains its largest shareholder, will almost certainly become a billionaire. The venture investor Chris Sacca and at least two venture capital firms, Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital, will also most likely end up with stakes exceeding $1 billion each, according to an analysis of financial documents and interviews with people who know about Twitter’s finances. Others could make tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars.
Not everyone will be so lucky.
Twitter struggled in its early days, even laying off employees as it tried to conserve its cash. Just two years ago, there were questions about its viability as it tried to figure out how to wring revenue from the endless stream of 140-character messages generated by its users. Many early investors and employees sold hundreds of millions of dollars of stock in 2011 to a Russian investment firm, DST Global, that was eager to buy in.
“To see it come to life and have it taken away, I was devastated,” said Dom Sagolla, an early employee of Twitter who was laid off in May 2006 and never received stock. While Mr. Sagolla has made some money by proxy from Twitter — he wrote a book that tells newcomers how to use the service and is doing some paid public speaking — he does not stand to benefit as Twitter heads to Wall Street.
Twitter’s I.P.O. will not be nearly as large as Facebook’s $16 billion offering last year, but it will still create a multimillionaires club of dozens of early believers.
“For me personally, this is a once-in-a-decade or once-in-a-career kind of investment,” said Bijan Sabet, a partner at Spark Capital, one of the earliest investors in Twitter.
If history is a guide, the money generated by the Twitter offering will also provide the seed money for the next generation of scrappy tech companies that could grow to compete with Twitter.
“When you have a successful I.P.O., it gives people confidence both in the public and private markets and they are directly correlated,” said James A. Moore, a senior executive at Columbia Business School’s entrepreneurship program and founder of J. Moore Partners, a technology mergers and acquisitions consulting firm.
Indeed, Mr. Williams and his other two co-founders, Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone, are no longer involved with daily operations at the company and have moved on to new ventures. Dozens of other very early employees have also left, although many still hold stock worth millions.
How many millions will depend on the final valuation placed on the company for the stock offering. Investment bankers will gauge investors’ interest in the stock and work with the company to set a price.
In March, Twitter set off a frenzy of interest after it said it was valuing the stock it was offering to employees at $17 a share, according to VC Experts, a private company data provider. That price implied that the company was worth more than the $8 billion valuation it had when it raised money in 2011.
Since then, interested parties have been willing to pay as much as $30 a share for a piece of the company in private transactions, according to Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities.
On the public stock exchanges, Internet companies have been surging. This week, investors have plowed money into companies like Facebook, Netflix and Pandora, sending their stock prices to record highs.
“Internet valuations are crazy right now and investors are willing to pay a lot for equity in Internet stocks,” Mr. Pachter said. “Twitter is taking advantage of this.”
In hindsight, some Twitter shareholders who cashed out early have expressed regrets. But “in our case, we are early-stage people, and we had had a remarkable run,” said one early investor who sold millions of dollars of stock in 2011, when the Russian investment firm was buying.
And then there were those who never got any stock at all, like Florian Weber, one of the earliest programmers at the company. He worked on the project before it was even fully separate from Odeo, the now-defunct company where it was hatched.
Mr. Weber, a German citizen, said he was hired as a contractor, not an employee, so he never received any stock options.
“Coming from Germany, it’s not something that I pushed terribly hard for,” said Mr. Weber, who often worked remotely from Hamburg and eventually tired of telecommuting.
“As far as I know, I’m the only one who does not have stock options,” he said. But he has no regrets. He eventually started his own company, Amen, in Germany, which was just sold to a bigger firm, Tape.tv. “I’m very happy with my life.”