A balance of payments crisis has been silently brewing in Pakistan for the past year. With dwindling foreign exchange reserves and growing imports, the country has been struggling to meet its external financing needs.

The country is in the grip of twin deficits, making it difficult to balance both its fiscal and external accounts. This is hardly a new challenge for Pakistan, since its macroeconomic vulnerabilities resurface every few years, forcing it to seek an external bailout. In 2008, Pakistan had to seek emergency assistance from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) soon after a political transition took effect from Pervez Musharraf’s military rule to a civilian government.

Six years later, in the midst of declining global oil prices, the next elected government under Nawaz Sharif also signed up to an IMF programme. And once again, three months after assuming power, Pakistan’s newly elected government is desperately trying to shore up its foreign reserves and stave off a potential economic collapse.

While Pakistan’s recurring economic crisis has multiple origins, including an undiversified export structure and the near stagnation of its large-scale manufacturing, the country’s economic dilemma is best illustrated by its fiscal disorder.

The fiscal deficit ballooned to 6.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) this year. This fiscal crisis emanates from limited constraints on spending, fuelled by politically motivated development spending and subsidies for loss-making public enterprises, and a failure to institute genuine tax reform.

Successive governments have tried to balance their books by resorting to domestic and international borrowing rather than directly taxing the rich. The country’s elites have effectively been running a fiscal Ponzi scheme that exudes an illusion of sustainability but is predicated on borrowed existence and remains perpetually vulnerable to a sudden collapse.

The elites don’t want to tax themselves

The costs of sustaining this fiscal arrangement are passed on to the poor, the future generations and productive sectors of the economy. While less than one percent of people in a country of 220 million pay direct income taxes, the burden of taxation is imposed on the poor through a raft of indirect taxes.

Financing the deficit through unrestrained borrowing means that the economic burden is also being shifted to future generations. And the prevailing arrangement systematically disincentivises productive activity in the real economy.

Continued recourse to domestic borrowing means that private banks are content with lending money to the government rather than providing much-needed credit for the private sector. The imperative of revenue generation also distorts the tariff policy and undermines private sector competitiveness.  

This fiscal arrangement is sustainable only to the extent that the country is able to access concessionary international finance. Foreign assistance tends to alleviate the resource constraint in the short-run but distorts political incentives for reform.

In this context, the recent announcement of a $6bn aid package from Saudi Arabia poses a moral hazard. Once again, it will insure the ruling elite against any genuine economic reform that could potentially redistribute economic power away from them.

If past experience is any guide, an IMF programme will also adversely affect any incentives for the elite to implement reform. Pakistan’s strategic decision-makers recognise that an IMF package is readily available as long as they have negotiated a geopolitical concession with the United States behind the scenes.

The IMF team can then step in and do all the necessary accounting exercises. And, as on previous occasions, when crunch time arrives, the IMF will stand ready to provide waivers and exemptions on the politically sensitive elements of reform. In this context, both the Saudi support and a potential IMF engagement will serve to bail out the elites.

Pakistan has a persistently low tax-to-GDP ratio (currently at 10 percent of GDP) – lower than its neighbours, India and Bangladesh, and countries with comparable income levels. The taxation structure is complex, inefficient, regressive, overly reliant on indirect taxes and defined by multiple exemptions.

Pakistan’s Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), for example, regularly issues exemptions on duties and tariffs. By one estimate, in 2011 more than half of the total number of tariff lines were subjected to such tax exemptions.

Agricultural incomes have also practically evaded direct taxation even though the agricultural sector still contributes more than 20 percent of national GDP and remains an important employer. The principal beneficiaries of such exemptions are the politically influential landed classes. 

Over the past two decades, the booming urban real estate sector has emerged as another untouchable for tax collectors. Although real estate is associated with capital flight from Pakistan (their profits are often invested properties in Dubai, London and Toronto), urban property is only lightly taxed and the capital gains made through real estate transactions remain hugely undertaxed.

Similarly, an expansion of the services sector has been accompanied by growing incomes for professionals, such as doctors and lawyers, but has generated fewer dividends for tax authorities. And the country’s retail traders have long resisted the introduction of value-added tax (VAT), deemed as a more efficient form of indirect tax and an important step towards documenting the economy.

It has long been recognised at the highest level of policymaking that the country needs to broaden its tax base. Last year, the army chief, considered the most powerful man in the country, alluded to the woefully inadequate tax effort. And, upon assuming elected office, Prime Minister Imran Khan promised wide-ranging tax reform in his maiden speech. Despite this, both khakis and civilians are poorly incentivised to institute genuine tax reform. The reason is simple: a widening of the tax base would essentially require the country’s elites to tax themselves and to tax politically sensitive constituencies.

For any political dispensation, including Imran Khan’s party, this is a dangerous prospect. Hanging on a thin electoral majority, the newly elected government will face immense resistance from treasury benches, many of whom belong to the same tax-exempt classes. Even the government’s core urban constituency, the newly empowered middle classes, are more enthused by an anti-corruption drive than a broad-based tax reform. 

For this reason, the new government has resorted to the same policy tools as the last one: imposing regulatory duties, revising tariffs, jacking up energy prices and slashing development expenditures. Far-reaching tax reform still appears to be a distant prospect. But this policy dilemma is not unique to Imran Khan’s government. All political incumbents face the same commitment problem when it comes to instituting economic reform. While on the election trail it is politically optimal to promise economic reform, once in office, they are poorly incentivised to undertake these reforms. How can this adverse political equilibrium be broken?

The solution

In my opinion, the solution to this commitment problem lies in the hands of Pakistan’s powerful military establishment. If Imran Khan – or any other leader for that matter – is to take on tax dodgers, he needs a commitment from the military that it will lend its support.  

While Pakistan suffers from weak bureaucratic capacity, the military is still the locus of whatever limited state capacity exists in the country. It is the most well-organised institution with a capacity for long-term strategic thinking.

When the military throws its weight behind any reform proposition, it is more likely to happen (the integration of Federally Administered Tribal Areas, known as FATA, in the national mainstream is one recent example). Importantly, among all the political and institutional actors, the military faces the strongest incentive to build a sound tax base. After all, it will be the direct beneficiary of a strong extractive capacity, since a lack of fiscal sustainability poses a long-term danger to its financing needs.

This is a central political economy dilemma – one that historically incentivised European states to develop fiscal capacity. External wars necessitated European states to develop tax structures that could finance standing armies. Why has then the Pakistani military not mainstreamed tax reform as an important pillar of national security even in years when it directly ruled the country?

Three historical and contemporary factors help to explain this. Firstly, from an early period, Pakistan’s military and political elites have relied on external assistance rather than domestic resource mobilisation. The country has received significantly more foreign aid during its military regimes than during its elected governments.

This aid was part of a geo-strategic bargain – a reward for Pakistan’s services in supporting anti-communist alliances in the 1950s and 1960s and supporting the Afghan war operations in the 1980s and 2000s. Even as aid flows dried up over time and the threat of a balance of payments crisis became a recurring feature, it never posed an existential threat to elites who knew well that when push came to shove, foreign support would be forthcoming if they are ready to grant a geo-political concession.

Secondly, since the late 1980s, the military’s top brass has been heavily invested in real estate development through the military-linked Defence Housing Authority (DHA). Residential and commercial properties developed under the auspices of DHA provide an important source of institutionalised rents for military officers and afford an important avenue for upward mobility for the service class. Bringing these capital gains into the tax net, however, could face stiff resistance from within the military.

Thirdly, genuine tax reform could hurt politically influential groups whose support the military routinely relies on for cobbling together loose political coalitions. Popularly described as “electables”, these are typically candidates who readily offer their political brokerage to the military and lend greater certainty to any electoral race. Undermining their economic interests can spoil the political game and impede the military’s capacity for electoral engineering.

Taken together, these are difficult trade-offs for the military’s top brass to navigate, especially when most military commanders have a short-time horizon where the individual incentive is to pass the buck rather than broach difficult reforms.

To break the stop-start cycle of growth and the recurring risk of default, the country’s strategic leadership needs some out-of-the-box thinking. It is time to recognise that Pakistan’s continuing status as a “semi-rentier state” poses a grave threat to national security. It is a security threat that is perhaps far more existential to Pakistan’s survival as an independent state than the one posed by India.

Sadly, with the Saudi support package in hand and an IMF programme on the horizon, it is more likely that the prospect for reform will be delayed by another five years until the country faces the same scenario again and readies itself to deliver another geo-political concession.

This game suits our elites and their foreign backers. Neither of them is interested in building genuine fiscal capacity. For the country’s ruling elites, foreign assistance provides another reason for delaying reform that could hurt their economic interests. For the US (and its rich clients like Saudi Arabia) it provides a valuable strategic lever that can be deployed every five years.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance. 

Yes, Apple can still keep a secret.

Certainly, there have been all sorts of leaks and rumors about the new products Apple is poised to unveil at its Oct. 30 event, which begins at 10 a.m. Eastern Time. But what took many by surprise when the invitations hit reporters’ inboxes was the choice of venue: Instead of a location at its Cupertino, California, headquarters or somewhere in the Bay Area, Apple chose the Howard Gilman Opera House at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City.

That seems apt, since what Apple will likely unveil is of great interest to creative professionals: new iPad Pros and Mac hardware. Specifically, two new iPad Pro models (small and large) with edge-to-edge displays and a new Apple Pencil. On the Mac side, the iMac line is due for a refresh, and there may also be a true successor for the MacBook Air on deck. There’s a bunch of other stuff Apple is overdue to catch us up on as well.

Apple is of course live-streaming the event at its website (you need Safari or Microsoft Edge to watch), but the absolute best way to follow the announcements is via our live blog below. Mashable Tech Editor Pete Pachal (@petepachal) and Senior Tech Correspondent Raymond Wong (@raywongy) will be in the thick of it in Brooklyn, while the rest of the team will provide color commentary and context.

It all starts — here — Tuesday morning at 10.

A top Palestinian body authorised the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to suspend recognition of Israel and stop security coordination with Tel Aviv.

The Palestinian Central Council (PCC) – a body of the PLO – said the suspensions should be in place until Israel recognises the Palestinian state based on pre-1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, Palestine’s official Wafa news agency reported.

Following a two-day meeting in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, the council said the PLO and Palestinian Authority will also end security coordination and suspend economic agreements as set out under the 1994 Paris Economic Protocol. It also decided to revoke the validity of the Oslo Accords.

The council said the decision was made “in light of Israel’s continued denial of the signed agreements”.

The decision must be approved by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the PLO Executive Council.

Speaking on Sunday, Abbas again vowed to block any peace plan led by US President Donald Trump.

Abbas compared the expected Trump peace plan to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which saw the British government commit to the creation of a state for Jews in historic Palestine.

“If the Balfour Declaration is passed, this deal will not pass,” he said.

In December, Trump decided to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Breaking with decades of US policy that favoured a two-state solution, Trump’s declaration dealt a blow to the Palestinian leadership, which for more than two decades has unsuccessfully attempted to establish a state on the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.

A very sombre Stephen Colbert responded to Pittsburgh’s synagogue shooting on The Late Show Monday. 

After declaring that “hate is not what America stands for,” and praising the Muslim group which raised more than $140,000 for the shooting’s victims, Colbert turned his attention to Trump’s indefensible response to the tragic event.

“Naturally, in times like these our nation looks to its president for comfort and guidance. That’s our first mistake,” he said.

Of particular annoyance to the late show host was Trump continuing with a rally hours after the attack, where he claimed that he did so because the New York Stock Exchange opened the day after 9/11. That claim was in fact, false.

“Trump’s instinct when addressing a tragedy was to lie about another tragedy,” Colbert retorted. “I think lying about anything associated with 9/11 is a disqualifier for the presidency, or really, having any job.”

On a lighter note, Colbert showed Trump’s weird handling of an umbrella while boarding Air Force One, which we’re all sure you’ve seen a number of times already.

“You can’t just drop an umbrella when you’re done with it. It’s not a wife,” Colbert joked.

More than 150 years ago, its creators surely intended for it to awe. Down the wide avenue, Robert E Lee sits on a horse; a powerful stallion carved into stone as he rides into battle.

I marvel at its power and stare at Lee’s uniform, Confederate insignia moulded in bronze on his lapel, in defence of slavery. 

Then I look at his face – and it looks like mine.

My cousin, General Robert E Lee led the southern Confederate States Army in a campaign against the northern Union during the American Civil War in the 1860s. The North fought to free all enslaved African Americans. They won, my cousin lost.

The inheritance of guilt

Today, the US is gripped by a debate over what Confederate monuments like my cousin’s, which stands in Richmond’s Monument Avenue, stand for. I carry that debate in my blood.

General Robert E Lee is part of my family. Five generations on, we still share a physical resemblance, and I wonder – and fear – what else my genes have predisposed me to be. Were there emotional or psychological traits that inclined him towards the choices that he made, towards his moral failings? Is that part of him in me?

I wonder what traditions or cultural habits might have been passed down from his generation to mine and whether the good inherent in the family I see around me could have saved him.

My parents weren’t as wealthy as Lee was, with his sprawling plantation estates. I grew up in a farmhouse in a working-class neighbourhood. I went to a public school.

But I’m still acutely aware of how our ancestral wealth, gained from enslavement, may have trickled down, contributing to my comfort or education. Even the school I attended was funded primarily by the property taxes paid by a majority white community, enriched from the misdeeds of previous generations.

When it comes to the inheritance of guilt, where do you draw the line? Is there a debt owed to black Americans for the centuries of oppression by my white ancestors?

A symbol for modern-day racism

In the middle of a summer night last year, I watched the Charlottesville violence roil from the Al Jazeera newsroom in Doha on multiple screens and I felt enraged. People were using a member of my family as a reverent symbol for modern-day racism, for hate.

White supremacists had organised a rally to protest the planned removal of a statue of Robert E Lee. They came armed and planned for violence.

In the aftermath, one of their supporters crashed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring dozens.

My rage intermingled with shame – that people in the US were still capable of this hatred, this vitriol, and they were using my family name to justify it. And beyond that – I felt profoundly sad – for my country because it’s unable to shake its short-sighted past; and for my family, because we had to bear this relation.

There have been many Lees since him, who definitely weren’t racist, and yet his perceived legacy continues to haunt our history.

The [Confederate] statues were an attempt to reshape a narrative, to emphasise the noble qualities of its ‘heroes’ and diminish their atrocities.

James Gannon

Rewriting history

Eight months later, I was standing at the foot of my cousin’s statue in Richmond, an hour’s drive from Charlottesville.

Lee’s statue wasn’t put up during the Civil War or his lifetime, but after the conflict, in 1890 following the so-called Reconstruction Era.

No other country erects statues to the losing side of a civil war.

The North won the war, but put old southern leaders into place to “rehabilitate” the Union with political compromise. They, in turn, attempted to reassert notions of white supremacy.

The monuments to Confederate “heroes” were paid for by groups that sought to sanitise the Civil War and American history of the horrors of slavery. The statues were an attempt to reshape a narrative, to emphasise the noble qualities of these leaders and diminish their atrocities.

This wasn’t “never again” historical evidence, like plantation slave dwellings. This was the rewriting of history.

At the dedication of my cousin’s monument in Richmond, the flag of the defeated Confederate Army was flown, a military-style band played battle songs. At its unveiling, white supremacists called abolitionists “fanatical and unconstitutional”.

Then local and state governments established laws to restrict the civil rights of African Americans, violence against them was rampant. In rebuilding the south that was obliterated by the war, blacks were to be given “40 acres and a mule” – a military order never fulfilled.

This was a chance for true equality – or at least the pursuit of it. For a moment, almost possible, this dream of freedom was dashed by broken promises.

‘White wealth has flourished through unearned racial advantage’

The statues erected in the place of that dream were – and are – a physical manifestation of a culture unrepentant of its racism, a belief system carved in stone.

From childhood, I knew I was a Lee. Growing up in Virginia, all the kids I grew up with thought that was really cool. Later in life, I realised it wasn’t quite so. Throughout my life, I’ve had to resolve this past sense of admiration with the reality of history.

After the violence in Charlottesville, I realised my voice as a Lee descendant could add legitimacy to the movement to remove the statues and monuments. But I knew I first had to try and understand the true legacy of slavery.

When I began this journey, I thought it would end with an understanding of how removing my cousin’s statue would help right racial injustice in America.

Instead, through making the film A Moral Debt, I met individuals of all different shades – scholars, activists, artists, mothers, sons – who helped me understand that although doing so might provide a superficial manifestation of change, it would do little to address the underlying causes or right the wrongs of the past.

Not being a racist is not enough … I’ve lived a life of privilege that is a result of our nation’s racist past.

 James Gannon

The US is meant to be a place where each person has an equal chance at a life of dignity and opportunity.

Though the enslaved were freed after the Civil War, little was done to equalise their position, and for decades after, through the Black Codes to Jim Crow to redlining, the law was used to institutionalise their oppression – a codified basis for ongoing widespread violence and personal racism.

Through all of this, one fact is undeniable: white wealth has flourished through unearned racial advantage, while the wealth of black people in the US has failed to grow.

Duke University’s Professor Sandy Darity told me that in the aftermath of the Civil War, blacks owned less than one percent of American wealth; the comparable measure today is two percent.

So the question remains: What debt is owed? Like all white Americans today, I played no role in pre-Civil War institutionalised slavery, nor the other explicit institutions of oppression that followed.

But not being a racist is not enough.

I acknowledge that, separate from any wealth passed on through my family, I’ve lived a life of privilege that is a result of our nation’s racist past.

I’ve been treated with less suspicion by authorities, I’ve lived in neighbourhoods that benefited from preferential development and investment for whites. Blacks face discrimination in job opportunities, harsher treatment in the criminal justice system and underservice in healthcare.

To acknowledge that the US built its economy and stature with the uncompensated labour of African Americans is to acknowledge a debt.

Taking down a racist statue is a step in the right direction, but to truly make inroads towards equality, much greater action is required.

America would not be the wealthiest country on earth without the toil of enslaved African Americans.

 James Gannon

As European nations look to recognise the misdeeds of their colonial past, so too should the US issue an apology for the centuries of institutionalised enslavement and oppression.

Beyond this, we must look to making amends for the wrongs of the past and levelling the playing field. America would not be the wealthiest country on earth without the toil of enslaved African Americans. Reparations for these contributions and the oppression suffered since are the only moral way to repay that debt.

‘Confederate monuments are an obstacle to moving forward’

My cousin Robert E Lee didn’t want statues like the ones in Richmond or Charlottesville to be put up in the first place.

Before his death in 1870, in deriding efforts to create a Gettysburg memorial to the war’s bloodiest battle, he wrote, “I think it wiser, not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”

He didn’t want to dwell on the horrors of the war and the past; he didn’t want all of that blood to have been spilled for nothing. Even though he was on the losing side, he wanted to make something of the sacrifice, even if it was just to move on.

Here, my cousin and I have perhaps found some common ground.

More than 150 years later, I agree with Lee. These kinds of monuments are an obstacle to moving forward and addressing the roots of racial oppression and inequality in our country.

It’s exceedingly difficult to judge the past and our family members who inhabited it. We have to acknowledge we’re viewing them through the lens of our own experience. But that also doesn’t preclude our moral judgement, for which we bear a personal responsibility.

In 2015, as the killer of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina draped himself in a Confederate flag, it was, for me, a reminder of how much the image of my ancestor had been used as a crutch to keep racial hatred alive today.

In 2017, as I watched as statues in his image were torn down around the country, I felt a kinship with those tugging the ropes.

Now, I know that’s what he too would have wanted.

It took a while for Huawei to get here. 

Nothing about the company’s boring smartphone lineup in, say, 2013, indicated that Huawei might one day produce phones that can hold their own against the best flagships around. 

But Huawei kept refining its approach with each launch. Its phones got good. Then really good. In April this year, Huawei was the first major smartphone manufacturer to launch a phone with a triple rear camera, an all-around great device called the . And it’s been selling well. Despite being effectively banned from selling its phones in the U.S., Huawei has overtaken Apple to become the second largest smartphone maker in the world.

Now, with the launch of Mate 20 Pro, Huawei — perhaps for the first time — is a legitimate contender for the position of the best smartphone around, period. 

SEE ALSO: How iPhone XS compares to Pixel 2, Galaxy S9, and Huawei P20 Pro

The Mate 20 Pro is a big upgrade to the P20 Pro. It, too, has three rear cameras (with major differences, though; more on that later), but it has a bigger, better screen, a faster processor, better water resistance, a bigger battery, and wireless charging. 

Huawei went beyond a spec bump, though. The Mate 20 Pro also has an under-the-display fingerprint scanner and reverse wireless charging (meaning you can charge other gadgets simply by placing them onto the phone’s back). You won’t find either technology on flagships from Apple or Samsung. 

A phone is more than a list of specs, certainly. But I’ve used the Mate 20 Pro as my primary phone for a week, and it’s lived up to the promise. It’s fast and powerful, and it has every bit of tech I ever wanted from a smartphone — not to mention it took stunning photos and its battery lasted forever. 

A little bit of everything

Image: Stan Schroeder/Mashable

The Mate 20 Pro’s display is excellent. It makes the phone look like the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 had a baby with the iPhone XS. It has a notch on top, rounded edges on the sides, and a small but noticeable chin on the bottom. I like the look, but it’s essentially an imitation of not one but two famous phones, which may be a good or bad thing, depending on your perspective. Original it is not. 

On the back, the phone’s three cameras and flash are organized in a rectangle that’s unique. The phone can be had in the “Twilight” color, which is a beautiful purple-to-blue gradient, first seen on the P20 Pro. You can also get it in “Emerald Green” or, like my review unit, “Midnight Blue.” Both have a subtle line pattern on the back that glitters when moved under a light source. I liked the color, but when you’re in a dark room, it doesn’t really shine as it does in Huawei’s promotional materials. Finally, you can get the phone in black; I haven’t seen that one, but it appears to be the least exciting of the four colors. 

Details like the red power button, tapered edges, or a (very) subtly textured back that should improve grippiness (it does, but ever so slightly) give the phone a premium feel. And just like most Huawei flagships of late, the Mate 20 Pro oozes quality and precision. 

The phone’s size hits a perfect spot for me. It sounds big — a few years ago, 6.4-inch phones were enormous beasts — but due to its tiny bezels and display that’s curved on the sides, the Mate is actually slightly smaller than the 6.5-inch iPhone XS Max. 

Overall, the Mate is unique in some ways and yet derivative in others, but even then, it’s unique on the market, as no one else has copied both the iPhone and a Samsung Galaxy phone at the same time. Bottom line: It looks and feels very nice, and this, I assume, is what most users will care about. 

Incredibly sharp display

Image: STAN SCHROEDER/MASHABLE

Huawei Mate 20 Pro’s display is a crisp 6.39-inch OLED with a 3,120 x 1,440 pixel resolution and HDR10 support. I’ve compared it directly to the iPhone X (unfortunately, I didn’t have an iPhone XS for a direct comparison), and it’s noticeably brighter, with better contrast and more vivid colors.

Not everything’s perfect, though. The Mate 20 Pro’s colors pop more, but somewhat unnaturally so. The display’s color mode is “Vivid” by default, which makes this worse, but even after you change it to normal, the colors were still a bit too much to me. Check out the example below; on the iPhone X’s screen the color of the guitar appears natural. On the Mate 20 Pro, it’s nearly orange. Sure, the Mate’s display looks flashier at first, but some will prefer the iPhone X’s more natural colors. 

Furthermore, there’s quite a lot of color shifting to blue when you tilt the phone forwards, backwards or to the sides; far less so than on the iPhone X. 

Huawei has an interesting (and, to my knowledge, unique) feature that automatically reduces screen resolution when it’s not needed. Furthermore, the phone has a lower, 2,340 x 1,080 pixel resolution enabled by default; you need to manually switch to 3,120 x 1,440 pixels if you want the highest resolution. In regular use, you’ll have to look closely to notice any difference, so leaving this setting on default is probably the way to go, as it saves battery. 

The display has all the bells and whistles you’d expect from a modern flagship. A feature called “Natural tone” adjusts color temperature based on ambient lighting, similar to the iPhone’s “True Tone” setting. Additionally, you can reduce the screen’s blue light emission for a better nighttime reading experience, although the iPhone still does a better job at this. You can also hide the notch with a black bar, if you want to. And, just like on LG’s recent flagships, there’s also an “Always on display” setting, which displays time and date even when the screen is (mostly) off. 

One minor drawback: The screen’s curved edges look gorgeous, but they don’t serve a particular purpose. And since the screen is quite reflective, you’ll often see distorted reflections along the edges, which can be distracting. It’s not a deal-breaker, but it is something to consider. 

Excellent performance and a battery that refuses to die

Image: Stan Schroeder/Mashable

Huawei claims its Kirin 980 chipset — which is built with a 7-nanometer manufacturing process, just like Apple’s A12 — offers a 75% CPU performance upgrade and a 46% GPU performance upgrade over Kirin 970, while consuming significantly less power. It’s hard to test these numbers in real-life usage, but the Mate 20 Pro is definitely very, very fast. 

These days, most smartphone flagships perform excellently, but the Mate 20 Pro had that little extra oomph, occasionally surprising me with how fast it was. Touch anything on the phone, and it’ll launch immediately. This especially goes for the camera, which launches roughly as fast as the camera on the iPhone X. Thanks to Huawei’s new Kirin 980 chipset and 6GB of RAM, the Mate 20 Pro never stuttered, no matter how many apps I had open.

In the Geekbench performance testing software, the Mate beat every other Android phone except the Galaxy S9+ in the single-core test with a score of 3,264, and every other Android phone in the multi-core test with a score of 9,684. And when I manually put the phone in “Performance” mode, which optimizes the phone’s settings for maximum performance, the numbers climbed to 3,334 and 10,096. 

Image: Stan Schroeder/Mashable

Apple’s iPhone XS is still far ahead of everyone with scores of 4,796 and 11,222, respectively. Note that several manufacturers, including Huawei, have been caught cheating at these tests, so I wouldn’t put too much faith in them, but the numbers do confirm that this is one of the fastest phones around in terms of performance. 

Huawei managed to stuff a 4,200mAh battery into the Mate 20 Pro. That’s better than the iPhone XS Max, better than the Samsung Note 9, better than the company’s own P20 Pro. And battery life was certainly excellent. The phone lasted a day and a half of heavy use, which is in line with the best phones I’ve tested. In normal use, I could see it comfortably lasting two days or more. 

The phone supports quick charging, and, unlike the P20 Pro, it also has wireless charging on board. But Huawei took it a step further with reverse wireless charging, which turns the phone into a wireless charging pad. Place a device that supports wireless charging on top of its back, and the Mate will charge it. 

The feature wouldn’t make sense on most phones, but the Mate has a battery so juicy that I could easily imagine a situation in which lending some of its battery life to a pair of earphones or even another phone could be a good idea. In any case, you won’t mind having the option, and you can turn the feature off if it bothers you for any reason. 

A new take on the best smartphone camera

Image: STAN SCHROEDER/MASHABLE

This is going to be a long section — there’s just so much to cover that I can’t make it any shorter. But the TL;DR is this: The Huawei Mate 20 Pro’s camera is the best smartphone camera I’ve ever used. 

Now, for the details. 

While the Mate 20 Pro’s camera setup sounds similar to the one on the P20 Pro, it’s actually different with one key regard. On the Mate, Huawei ditched the monochrome sensor and replaced it with an ultra-wide sensor. So the cameras are now, in order: a 40-megapixel f/1.8 sensor, a 20-megapixel f/2.2 ultra-wide sensor, and an 8-megapixel f/2.4 telephoto sensor. 

This versatile sensor array enables Huawei to do a ton of cool tricks. By default, the camera takes 10-megapixel photos, and Huawei combines input from all three sensors to get more features than you’ll find on any other phone. The best thing about these is how seamless it all is for the user. Fire up the camera, and in normal mode you’ll be able to choose between 3x zoom, 5x zoom and 0.6x zoom (which is ultra-wide mode). Sure, that 5x zoom isn’t really optical zoom; rather, the software is combining the image coming from the telephoto sensor with the information gathered by the 40-megapixel sensor to create a hybrid optical/software zoom effect. But here’s the thing: It just works, and you’ll be taking 5x zoom photos that actually look decent in no time. 

Image: Stan Schroeder/Mashable

Here’s another example, just to show what that hybrid zoom can do. The photo on the left was taken at 1x zoom, while the photo on the right was taken from the same position at 5x zoom. 

Switching to 40-megapixel resolution shuts down most of these extra features, but sometimes, when the conditions were good, I was able to take some stunningly detailed photos in this mode. 

Image: Stan Schroeder/Mashable

Inexplicably, Huawei has HDR stashed away as a separate photo-taking mode, accessible only through the camera’s “More” menu. As you can see in the comparison below, HDR is pretty useful and it would’ve been nice if I were able to enable it with a single tap from the main camera’s screen. 

Then there’s the AI. I don’t care much for the scene selection feature (which is enabled by turning on the “Master AI” option in the settings; it’s clever to see the camera recognize various scenes and adjust accordingly, but I’ve often found that these adjustments go a bit too far. 

Unfortunately, you won’t be able to just turn the Master AI off and be done with it. Without it, the phone won’t fire up certain important features as the super-cool Super Macro mode, which lets you go really close to the subject and take a macro photo. 

The phone’s AI capabilities also enable features like the Night Mode, which lets you take gorgeous photos in low-light scenarios. Sure, most of it is software wizardry and it takes a few seconds to take a photo, but the results are stunning. I wasn’t able to replicate this with any other phone I had on hand. 

Image: Stan Schroeder/Mashable

And, if you were wondering, you can combine Night Mode with the ultra-wide screen mode or the 3x/5x zoom mode. 

Unfortunately, Night Mode sometimes generated ugly artifacts on my photos. The photo below would’ve been great given the conditions — if it weren’t for that horizontal line in the upper half of the image. Worse, the line was persistent; I took several photos from the same position, in both vertical and horizontal mode, and I couldn’t get rid of it. I hope this is either an anomaly on the unit I’ve had, or something Huawei can fix via a software update, as it renders Night Mode nearly unusable. 

Image: Stan Schroeder/Mashable

Obviously, you’re not always going to take photos in Night Mode; it’s just too slow. But the Mate 20 Pro does a decent job of snapping low-light photos from its default camera mode. In the comparison below, the Mate took a sharper photo with more realistic colors than the iPhone X — though, in fairness, the iPhone snapped that photo in a fraction of a second, while the Mate instructed me to hold my hand steady for a second or so.

Portrait mode takes photos that are oddly soft, and while not everyone will be a fan of the look, I was overall happy with the photos I’ve gotten. You can choose between 1x and 3x zoom in this mode — something you can’t do on the iPhone. 

Image: Stan schroeder/Mashable

And while Portrait mode is only for taking photos of people, Aperture mode will let you take photos of any object with various degrees of bokeh. It’s a hit or miss, as you can see in the photo below (left) which is blurred in all kinds of weird ways. But guess what: If the photo’s not perfect, you can go in afterwards and change both the focal point and the amount of bokeh applied. 

The 24-megapixel selfie camera takes excellent, extremely detailed selfies. In portrait mode, the resulting photos are, again, way too soft to my liking, but are generally pleasing to the eye. In low-light scenarios, the phone will do the familiar trick of turning its big, bright screen white and thus lighting up your face, which won’t result in beautiful selfies but it’s better than nothing. 

Image: STAN SCHROEDER/MASHABLE

The Mate 20 Pro can, at best, take 4K video at 30fps — this is one area where even the iPhone X, which is a year old, is nominally better, as it can take 4K video at 60fps. And, overall, the Mate’s video capabilities are a mixed bag. I took an evening video while walking, and the video was very bright but also unbearably twitchy as the device apparently tried and failed to stabilize the image. 

The iPhone X’s video (below) was the opposite: Better (though still far from perfect) when it comes to image stabilization, but not nearly bright enough. 

Daylight videos with the Mate were gorgeous, but basically every flagship these days will produce something similarly good. Bonus points for Mate: Even in 4K mode, you can use some of its multi-camera tricks to take a wide-screen or a zoomed-in video. 

Overall, the Mate’s camera isn’t perfect. You’ll get photos that blow everything else away, yes, but the overall experience won’t be as straightforward as it is on an Apple phone or even a Samsung. Still, the Mate matches every other phone out there on features and does OK even in areas where it’s just copying others, like the bokeh mode. And none of the other new flagships — even the myriad ones that came out this fall — can take 40-megapixel photos or photos with 3x optical zoom. 

Can we please just stick with Google?

Huawei’s EMUI software, which comes in version 9.0 on the Mate 20 Pro, is better than most Android skins, but it’s not perfect. There’s a zillion options on offer; a dark version of the entire UI, iOS-like task switching, granular battery optimization and a built-in password manager are among the highlights. There’s also a wide choice of wallpapers and themes, though downloading new themes requires signing up for a Huawei ID (more on that later). And it’s all based on Android 9 Pie, so you’ll find the latest bells and whistles from Google under the hood as well. 

There are also bugs, most of which have to do with the notch, which will sometimes obscure parts of content, and which definitely doesn’t leave enough space for icons. Huawei sort-of addresses the latter issue: When you swipe down from the top of the screen, the shortcut menu will show up and the status icons will drop below the notch, which means you’ll finally be able to see all of them. Mercifully, zoomed YouTube videos extend over the entire surface of the display, which isn’t the case on many of Mate’s Android competitors. 

Image: Stan Schroeder/Mashable

Sometimes the UI’s look was inconsistent. I’ve paired a dark grayish theme I liked with a blue wallpaper, and yet as I swiped from the middle of the screen to get the search field, the phone’s blurred background would go purple, as if the device is confused on which theme it’s using. 

None of these quirks bother me much; perhaps I’ve gotten used to user interfaces by Chinese smartphone manufacturers, all of which are similar, all of which slap some iOS features onto Android, and all of which are slightly buggy. But Huawei’s software is definitely a class below Samsung’s or Apple’s. 

The biggest issue I have with Huawei’s phones (not just the Mate) is the company’s insistence of drawing users into its services ecosystem. While accessing various features and pre-installed apps on the phone, Huawei offered me to create a Huawei ID and sign up for Huawei Cloud or HiCare. I’m already way too invested in Google’s ecosystem of services to bother with any of these, and I suspect most users outside of China are, too. And while you can certainly ignore all of these and use 99% of the phone’s features, frequent prompts to sign up for Huawei this or that will surely alienate some users. 

So many extras

Image: STAN SCHROEDER/MASHABLE

I’ve already mentioned the reverse wireless charging, which is a nice, albeit minor, feature. But this phone has plenty more surprises in stock. Its face unlocking capabilities are excellent in all conditions. It didn’t matter if I had my sunglasses on, or whether I was under direct sunlight, both of which cause trouble to the iPhone X’s face unlocking system. It’s hard to judge how secure Huawei’s system is, but it sure as hell beats Apple’s on practicality. 

Should you desire it, you can also set up a fingerprint unlocking scheme, with the fingerprint scanner residing under the display. It’s the first time this actually worked well for me, and I’ve tried similar scanners on a bunch of other phones. But the feature, long-rumored to be coming to Apple and Samsung phones, feels like an afterthought. The face unlock works so well that I turned fingerprint scanning off after a day — I simply didn’t need it. 

In fact, I dare you to find a feature the Mate 20 Pro doesn’t have. AptX, hi-res Bluetooth sound is on board, as are stereo speakers (though they aren’t very loud). IP68 dust and water resistance, dual SIM, memory card support (Huawei’s proprietary nano memory cards are used instead of the ubiquitous microSD standard), NFC, dual-band GPS, a fast LTE Cat.21 chip, an infrared sensor — the Mate 20 Pro has them all. The only thing I found lacking — and for me, it’s a serious offense — is the headphone jack; mercifully, Huawei includes a 3.5-mm-to-USB-C adapter in the box. 

The Mate 20 Pro is, without a doubt, the most feature-packed phone ever. 

Finally going Pro

Image: Stan Schoeder/Mashable

The Huawei Mate 20 Pro is the best smartphone you can currently buy. But choosing a smartphone is not just about how feature-packed it is, or how nice it looks. Huawei doesn’t have the brand power of Apple or Samsung. And there’s the elephant in the room:  the Mate 20 Pro won’t even launch in the U.S. For many users, this is more than a logistical problem — this is a problem of trust. Not to mention that finding a decent price and warranty might be an issue, too. 

Finally, the price. The Mate 20 Pro costs €1,049 ($1,193) in Europe, which is less than the iPhone XS Max or even the XS (in Europe, not the U.S.), but it’s still a lot. All things considered, I can’t say the price is unfair, but it wouldn’t hurt it to be a little cheaper. 

If you’re running a horror streaming service, in your wildest dreams John Carpenter would record your theme song.

That’s exactly what the legendary Halloween director and composer has done for streaming platform Shudder, the AMC-owned service that purely streams horror, thriller and supernatural titles.

According to EW, the theme comes in two versions: a five-second clip that’ll appear before the service’s content as the network’s official “moniker,” and the two-minute version above.

Of course, it launches on Oct. 31, making its debut in conjunction with a 24-hour streaming marathon of Carpenter’s films including the 1978 original Halloween.

It’s no secret Ariana Grande is wickedly talented, just like Idina Menzel.

The pop star swung by NBC’s A Very Wicked Halloween Monday night, celebrating 15 years of Wicked on Broadway (which doubled as drumming up some excitement for the long-in-the-works movie adaptation).

Grande — donning a green bustier and some seriously shimmery green makeup — performed “The Wizard and I,” following a sweet intro from original co-stars Kristin Chenoweth and Menzel. 

One vision almost like a prophecy? Though this tune is sung by the character Elphaba, expect Grande, with her huge fan base and professed love of the musical, to be on the shortlist for Glinda once casting for the film finally rolls around. 

Search teams scoured the sea off Indonesia on Tuesday for any signs of life and to collect evidence to determine what brought down a Lion Air flight with 189 people aboard.

Divers hunted for the main fuselage and deployed underwater beacons to trace the flight’s black box recorders in order to find out what caused one of the deadliest aviation incidents in Indonesia’s history.

The search was stopped for the night although sonar vessels and an underwater drone continued hunting for the downed airliner.

“Hopefully this morning we can find the wreckage or fuselage,” Soerjanto Tjahjono, the head of Indonesia’s transport safety panel, told Reuters news agency.

Lion Air’s plane was almost brand new though it crashed shortly after take-off from the airport in Jakarta, after the pilot reported he needed to return the aircraft to the ground.

The Boeing 737 was flown for the first time on August 15, and the airline said it had been certified as airworthy before Monday’s flight by an engineer who is a specialist in Boeing models.

Indonesia’s search-and-rescue agency said there was little hope of finding survivors. “[It] would be a miracle,” spokesman Yusuf Latif said.

The agency said on Tuesday that 10 intact bodies as well as body parts had been recovered.

‘Confused’

Lion Air Chief Executive Edward Sirait said on Monday the plane had encountered an unspecified “technical issue” on its previous flight, which was from the resort island of Bali to Jakarta, but this had been “resolved according to procedure”.

“We don’t dare to say what the facts are, or are not, yet,” he told reporters. “We are also confused about the why since it was a new plane.”

The Boeing 737 MAX 8 airliner was flying from the capital to the city of Pangkal Pinang at 1,113 metres above sea level when it lost contact with air traffic controllers.

The crash was the worst airline disaster in Indonesia since an AirAsia flight plunged into the sea in December 2014, killing all 162 on board.

One of the passengers was 22-year-old Deryl Fida Febrianto, who was married just two weeks ago and was on his way to Pangkal Pinang to work on a cruise ship.

His wife, Lutfinani Eka Putri, 23, said her husband messaged her from the aircraft at 6:12am, sending her a photo from the plane, and at 6:15am he stopped replying to her messages.

They had grown up together, she told reporters, showing a picture of the smiling couple on their wedding day.

“When I saw the news, I matched the flight number with the ticket photo Deryl had sent,” she said. “I immediately started crying.”